The Uncomfortable Realities of Sydney Sweeney’s Good Genes

A couple of months ago, when I could have been frolicking with a puppy or enjoying a sunset or watching Columbo reruns, I was on Twitter getting mad about a tweet.

A user by the name of @TheMagaHulk had earned 12,000 likes by posting a list of racial hate injustices and claiming (without any evidence, of course) that they were “complete fiction.”

Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Black Wall Street, you name it.

My first instinct was to spend the next several hours digging up evidence to prove that someone was wrong on the internet, but thankfully, a quieter, more mature part of me remembered a piece of Toni Morrison’s wisdom:

The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work […] Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up.

None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

Even if I’d posted Rosa Parks’ arrest record, which lists her crime as “sitting in the white section of the bus and [refusing to] move back,” even if I dug up the headlines from the race massacre at Black Wall Street, lamenting that the “Tulsa Dead Total 85, 9 Of Them White,” even if I showed him, as Mamie Till courageously did, the pictures of Emmett Till’s battered and bloated corpse, it wouldn’t have been enough.

There would always be one more thing.

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As I watched the latest Sydney Sweeney-inspired meltdown spread across social media, the first thing that came to mind was that Toni Morrison quote.

For everyone lucky enough to have missed it, Sweeney was recently featured in a series of ads for American Eagle jeans where she gazed demurely into the camera, smiled knowingly as it lingered on her substantial cleavage, and regaled us, in her best valley-girl drawl, about her “genes”:

Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour.

My jeans are blue.

You can probably guess what happened next.

TikTok leapt to the inevitable conclusion that a white woman talking about genes must be “Nazi propaganda,” publications like The Atlantic demeaned themselves with sentences like, “[Sweeney’s] figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs,” and in amongst the misogynistic horror fantasies about Sweeney’s death and the performative, predictably hypocritical grifting from Megyn Kelly, only one woman was courageous enough to admit what this is really about:

This campaign is poking at women’s greatest and most tender insecurity under the patriarchy, which is desirability and the beauty standard. It affects not only non-white women […] but it also adversely affects the majority of white women who do not naturally have blond hair and blue eyes.”

Sydney Sweeney herself is not even a natural blonde. And, of course, lots of white women are also insecure about having brown eyes. So that’s a whole generation of young white women who are being further propagandised to purchase blonde hair dye and contacts for the rest of all time.

Another thing about the Sydney Sweeney beauty standard […] is that big boobs are a hallmark of what conservative men are attracted to. At the end of the early 2000s and through the 2010s, we were becoming a more progressive society, and so we also naturally progressed to be a more ass-centric society.

Before I start making fun of the term “ass-centric society,” let’s get one point out of the way: Sydney Sweeney does have good genes. We know this because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about a culture wars flashpoint every time she puts on a low-cut top.

The problem is, some people, on both the “ass-centric” Left and the “Americans should be free to love boobs” Right, have bought into the idea that only people who look like Sweeney have good genes.

And this is just extremely obviously not the case.

Beyoncé, who is currently featuring in her own ample-breasted, inexplicably blonde-haired and notably uncontroversial jeans ad, has good genes.

Serena Williams, who combines being a model with being one of the greatest athletes in human history, has good genes.

Anok Yai, a Sudanese refugee who conquered the fashion industry with a single photo, has good genes.

Simone Biles, Nathalie Emmanuel, Angela Bassett, Kerry Washington, millions of women who don’t have blonde hair or blue eyes have good genes. But if any of them are hoping for an ad campaign or a MAGA conservative to reassure them of this fact, they’re going to be disappointed.

As Martin Luther King said in his aptly named “Black and Beautiful” speech, nobody else can do this for us.

So while it would be lovely if clothing brands hadn’t realised that poking at women’s most tender insecurities is a surefire way to draw eyeballs to their mediocre ad campaigns, it would be even lovelier if we could evolve beyond this cultural hellscape where even boobs have political affiliations, and into a world where nobody looked for jeans companies to validate them.

Seriously, think of the puppies you could be frolicking with.

The problem here is not Sydney Sweeney’s genes. It isn’t blonde hair, bottle-sourced or otherwise. It isn’t blue eyes or even humanity’s near-universal love of boobs.

It’s this idea, sadly common on the “TikTok left,” that the very serious purpose of society is to convince you that you’re enough when you don’t believe you are, to give you the acceptance you can’t find within yourself.

Somebody says your hair isn’t right, so you apply caustic chemicals and toxic dyes to your hair for the rest of all time (I was saddened to note that even the woman who spoke about this problem covered her hair with a wig).

Somebody says they like blue eyes, so you hide your brown eyes behind silly-looking, obviously fake contact lenses, or worse, risk blinding yourself (!!!) to surgically colour your irises.

Somebody tells you that the “Maga Hulks” of the world want a busty Barbie doll who will push out blonde-haired, blue-eyed offspring on command. And even though you don’t want these men, even though you know a relationship with someone like this would be a nightmare, you convince yourself that “society,” not you, is responsible for the standards you accept or reject.

But even after you’ve done all that, it still won’t be enough. Beauty influencers will still ask you if your nose is contoured enough or your lashes are long enough, ad companies will still imply that your boobs aren’t Sweeney enough and your ass isn’t centric enough.

None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

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