For many on the right, the enemy of their enemy is their friend. A recent example of this is the now-infamous Sydney Sweeney jeans ad.

Last week, left-wing “experts” made a serious attempt to smear the jeans brand American Eagle as fascist for daring to feature blonde bombshell Sydney Sweeney. The advertisement features Sweeney making cheeky puns about her own (very obviously) good genetics.

“It seemed clear to me that they were aligning themselves with a white nationalist, MAGA-friendly identity,” Shalini Shankar, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University, opined to CNN. “I think that this is them trying to rebrand themselves for the present moment, and language is very deliberately used here. People don’t invoke genetics casually.”

It’s no secret that the left has a weird one-sided problem with beauty – particularly beautiful white women – for a while now. Physical attributes long considered the pinnacle of female beauty, such as blue eyes or blonde hair, are designated “problematic” white beauty standards. When discussing race, the modern left sees any assertion of beauty as a necessarily exclusionary statement – if Sweeney’s blonde hair is beautiful, then dark-haired, brown-eyed Salma Hayek is obviously ugly because she is not white.

This whole conversation is so braindead and exhausting that it’s hard to believe it can become still more so in the way that the right has responded to it.

Let’s look at the facts behind this issue.

First, the left is waging an aesthetic war on the culture. From communist art meant to depress and demoralize the human creative impulse, to morbidly obese models promoted as the pinnacle of health and athleticism, the cultural left has a fanatic obsession with confusing the viewer’s natural repulsions and attractions.

Because of this fact, it is unsurprising that what we might call the “influencer right” (the parade of social media accounts that, rightly or not, ride the monetized waves of whatever salacious story is dominating the internet) promotes in this moment a dichotomy which any lasting conservative cultural movement should eschew.

The opposite of the stodgy professors reprimanding as Nazis the young men who think Sweeney is beautiful should not be conservative pin up calendars. (Yes, those are a thing.) In the short run, the conservatives promoting a scantily clad Sweeney are going to get more clicks than the liberals promoting Lizzo and Dylan Mulvaney. But none of that will last.

Beauty, especially feminine beauty, is a wonderful thing, and a healthy society would and should celebrate it. A brand will naturally look for models whose appearances best promote their products. This fact does not in itself predict degeneracy. But exposing what should be concealed cheapens beauty.

Consider what would happen if we placed the original Mona Lisa unprotected in a public library. Yes, it would mean that more people could see this magnificent work of art who could not otherwise travel to Paris, yet the viewer’s feelings of titillation would quickly fade in its easy accessibility. The metaphor is not a perfect one, but the point stands.

Thus, the conservative defense of beauty should include a robust defense of modesty and graceful femininity. Beautiful women don’t need to strip naked, they don’t need to speak crudely, and they don’t need to participate in a humiliating fetish display.

Conservatives must decide if they wish to defend the family and marriage, or hotness and cheap sex. Sweeney’s American Eagle ad itself is less of the problem than is the entire right-wing obsession with presenting as sexually promiscuous. Conservative men need to decide if the girl in the skintight “hot girl” tube top is “wife material,” and conservative women need to decide if the men who want them to wear these items are their future husbands. And both need to decide if this is how they would really raise their own daughter if their lustful politics of sex ever materialize.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Sydney Sweeney at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. (Jay Dixit, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped)