It seems more and more to be the case with those who call themselves conservatives in the United States and the broader West that they will vigorously support a cause only to find that, in the end, their victories bring about an increase in evil rather than less.
This is playing out for everyone to see right now with the Sydney Sweeney uproar. Many on the ‘Right’ have convinced themselves that her soft porn American Eagle blue jeans commercial is delivering people from the woke virus (One podcast went so far as to claim in its title that ‘Sydney Sweeney’s Boobs Are Saving America’). There is no shortage of commentary to this effect on conservative web sites. This one from Lauren Smith at The European Conservative is typical:
Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is the antithesis to the progressive dogma that briefly dominated the advertising industry. This is partially because Sweeney as a figure has long provoked the ire of the woke crowd. For starters, she is an unapologetically hot girl-next-door, who seemingly enjoys and plays up to male attention in a way that many actresses now shun. She’s also largely apolitical—she’s certainly no Rachel Zegler or Jennifer Lawrence, who regularly berate and lecture their own fans for having the “wrong” politics. All this makes her a target for leftists who hate beauty and fun. In 2022, they tried to cancel Sweeney for appearing to have Trump-supporting family members who she hadn’t yet publicly disavowed. And she has been turned into a sort of symbol of the Right, as men who find the conventionally attractive star beautiful are accused of being “obsessed with a toxic ideal of womanhood.”
The inescapable reality is that most of us enjoy looking at people who look like Sydney Sweeney. The numbers bear this out—polling apparently shows that around 70% of a surveyed audience liked the American Eagle ad. In fact, the collab with Sweeney saw American Eagle’s share price increase by 15%, adding around $400 million to the company’s value. By contrast, people don’t love having unnecessary diversity rammed down their throats, or having to pretend they find the objectively unattractive attractive. The week Bud Light made the disastrous decision to partner up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, the resulting boycott cost the company a 21% drop in sales. The week after that, sales were still down 11%. It cost them around $1 billion overall. Similarly, Jaguar’s weird, gender-bending ad did virtually nothing to entice consumers. Nor did its pivot towards electric vehicles. Sales are down by a whopping 97% in Europe since last year.
In many ways, the backlash against Sweeney and her jeans/genes is the last gasp of the old woke order. . . . In a post-Trump-reelection world, Sweeneygate feels weirdly old-fashioned and out-of-place. . . . Women are allowed to be blonde, busty, and beautiful again. Long may it last.
Another conservative writer, Dr Steve Turley, repeats a lot of those points and adds these thoughts:
Here’s the takeaway: the pendulum has swung, and it’s not swinging back. Corporate America has finally realized that pandering to 3% of the population while alienating the other 97% is bad business. The companies that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be the ones that return to basics—selling products to normal people who want to be inspired, not lectured. Sydney Sweeney didn’t just save American Eagle’s stock price; she proved that American consumers crave authentic, aspirational advertising that celebrates success, beauty, and traditional values.
It is the last words of both of these writers that are most curious and most disturbing. Pro-family, Christian groups like Focus on the Family waged a veritable crusade against Abercrombie and Fitch several years ago for dressing up their models in skimpy, suggestive clothing. But now, because we live in TrumpWorld, when women dress up in, forgive us, slutty-looking clothes, we are to celebrate that borderline pornography as ‘busty’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘traditional values’.
We can already hear the reactions so far: ‘Walt, you old prude, you need to relax a little and just celebrate a win over the woke Left.’ That’s fine; we can take the arrows. And there is a certain amount of truth in such criticism. A change in corporate advertisements away from transgender models, effeminate men, etc., is certainly welcome.
But to end one’s analysis at that point is to make a critical error. It assumes that a political/cultural victory over wokeism via the exaltation of a woman’s shapely breasts and buttocks is tantamount to ‘salvation’ for the US/West. It is not.
Mankind may be a political animal, but he is not solely that. He is also, and primarily, a spiritual being, and everything must be judged by spiritual criteria, not by the approval or disapproval of the latest popular influencer on X. That being so, what do the leaders of the Church have to say about women exploiting their beauty?
The Holy Apostle Peter couldn’t be more clear in his directions to women in his First Universal Letter (3:1-5): Don’t flaunt the physical beauty of the body but downplay it, and work instead to adorn yourselves with the spiritual beauty of the virtues –
. . .
The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/winning-battles-losing-wars/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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