My Tuppence Ha'penny's Worth on the Sydney Sweeney Controversy

Sydney Sweeney in one of several ads for jeans by 

American Eagle Outfitters Inc. (Fall 2025) 

 

I. 

 

There are some news stories that, profoundly stupid and wearisome as they are, simply refuse to go away and everyone seems eager to share an opinion on. 

 

Usually, these are the kind of stories that I resist reading and avoid writing about. 

 

However, in this instance, I'll make an exception to the rule, as the case of Sydney Sweeney and her campaign for jeans manufactured by American Eagle exposes something interesting about contemporary culture (it also affords me the opportunity to place a picture of Miss Sweeney at the top of this post).    

 

 

II. 

 

Let's begin with the first charge against the ad; one made by old-school feminists who say it has a retro-reactionary feel to it, openly inviting the (heterosexual) male gaze which, for fifty years now [1], has been conceived as a bad thing in that it sexually objectifies women and leads to their oppression. 

 

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this analysis, but it's an interesting theory; one that builds upon Sartre's concept of le regard in his essay on phenomenological ontology L'Être et le néant (1943). 

 

The problem with such a theory - positing as it does the male gaze primarily as a social construct designed to uphold certain ideologies - is that it overlooks (or downplays) the biological underpinning; i.e., the fact that men have evolved to enjoy looking at women and to find certain physical traits more desirable than others when it comes to mate selection. 

 

Thus, when looking at Miss Sweeney's cleavage, for example, this might be because of some biological imperative rather than an attempt to reinforce the patriarchy (or to render her a passive object in order to overcome my castration anxiety) [2].   

 

And besides, we know now that women have eyes too and enjoy looking at bodies just as much as men (including other female bodies if that way inclined).  

 

So, let's not spend any further time discussing the American Eagle campaign in relation to this idea of the male gaze and move on to the far more surprising claim that the ads - by word-playing on the homophones genes and jeans - are secretly advancing eugenics and white supremacy and not just making a slightly cheesy joke.       

 

 

III. 

 

Unbelievable as it is to many commentators, American Eagle is facing a backlash over the 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' campaign for the reasons set out above: that a lazy pun is coded racism and that what we're really meant to admire are not her faded blue jeans but her sparkling blue eyes and pale skin (i.e., her genetic inheritance and/or racial identity). 

 

Now, admittedly, one of the ads does feature Sweeney saying: "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue." [3]

 

And that short - and overly simplistic - lesson in genetics doesn't help matters, but, even so ... I really don't think that American Eagle are dog whistling and whilst I wouldn't describe the campaign as bold and playful, neither is it Nazi propaganda reflective of Trump's America.      

     

 

Notes

 

[1] The concept of the male gaze was first articulated by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Screen, Vol. 16, Issue 3, (OUP, Autumn 1975): pp. 6-18. 

      Well, I say that, she arguably borrowed the idea from the art critic John Berger who discussed the treatment of the female nude in European painting in his 1972 book (and BBC2 TV series) Ways of Seeing. Berger asserts that men are traditionally accorded the active role of viewer, whilst women are passive and decorative objects of desire that afford pleasure to the male spectator. 

      Thus, for Berger and Mulvey both - as well as a whole generation of critical theorists - the act of looking has been inextricably linked to power and politics.

 

[2] This is not to say men should perv on female bodies in a lewd and lecherous manner. And when it comes to sneaking a peek at a nice pair of breasts it's wrong to ogle. In fact, there's an etiquette involved as Jerry points out to George in an episode of Seinfeld: 'Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun; you don't stare at it, it's too risky! You get a sense of it, then you look away.'       

      I have discussed this episode on TTA in a post dated 19 March 2015: click here.  

 

[3] The social media ad from which I quote and which sparked all the hoo-ha, seems to have been removed by American Eagle from its official YouTube channel. However, it can still be found on YouTube having been uploaded by Alien Ads 801: click here.  

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - a kind of Nietzschean afterword - please click here.  

 

Punk's Dead Knot: Reflections on an Essay by Ian Trowell - Part 1: I Got You in My Camera ...

 

Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street 

Photo by Ray Stevenson (1976)

 

I. 

 

Ian Trowell's dead knot essay [a] provides a fascinating insight into how time and space are encoded in punk imagery and demonstrates how a photograph, for example, is not simply an objective or neutral representation of reality, but an artefact that is both constructed and constructive of the world as we know it.    

 

The essay analyses two visual artefacts: a photograph of the Sex Pistols from 1976 and a 30-second TV commercial for McDonald's from 2016. Here I shall reflect on the first of these, whilst in part two of this post I shall discuss the latter. 

 

 

II.

 

Ray Stevenson's famous photo of the Sex Pistols strolling along Carnaby Street in the spring of 1976 still makes smile almost fifty years later, due mostly to what Trowell terms the performative iconoclasm and punk theatricality that is here captured and preserved on film; a second of their lives ruined for life, as Rotten might say [b]. 

 

According to Trowell, whilst Paul Cook is perfectly content to eat his grapes purchased from Berwick Street Market and remain not only partially obscured but as anonymous as the brown paper bag containing his fruit - and whilst Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten are both happy to clown and pose for the camera - Glen Matlock looks uncomfortable and out of place:

 

"His comportment is akin to Wittgenstein's multi-stable rabbitduck illusion in that he is both relaxed and not relaxed at the same time. He has taken the relaxed pose of a pop star going through the motions of a publicity photograph but it clearly seems that he is out of step with the posed anti-comportment of the rest of the band." [183]

 

Matlock, with his buttoned-up jacket and persona, doesn't quite fit in with a band safety-pinned together or with the wider punk aesthetic and ethos; he's just a little too smart and sensible; the slightly nervous observer of the scene, always hanging back and looking on: 

 

"It is a disorienting picture since he appears to know his time is running out, but at the same time he gives the impression of lingering with admiration and anticipation, an adumbration of what is to come evidently with or without him." [184]

 

If, due to Rotten's "hogging of the frame" [185], locating the picture's true point of magic is made difficult, neverthless, for Trowell, it's not Rotten's ugly mug but the fastened button on Matlock's jacket that forms the pictures punctum - i.e., that troubling detail that disturbs and distracts from the more general field of interest (the photo's studium); that which pricks our attention and often moves us with a certain poignant delight [c]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Glen Matlock's button and Wittgenstein's duckrabbit aside, Trowell gives us many other interesting ideas to consider; about Carnaby Street as a subcultural epicentre; about the staging of photography; and about Rotten's performance for the camera.

 

He suggests, for example, that "Stevenson's photograph bears an uncanny resemblance to Roger Fenton's 1855 photograph Valley of the Shadow of Death" [184]. I don't quite see it myself, however, and might just as easily imagine the Sex Pistols "photoshopped into the immediate foreground" [184] of many an image containing a tapering path. 

 

For instance, here's Jones and Rotten following the yellow brick road:

 

 

 

I wasn't entirely convinced either by Trowell's suggestion that we might consider Stevenson's photograph as "a precisely posed document with the four punk musicians reminiscent of the generic crouched figures of Captain Kirk and his original Star Trek crew materializing on a hostile, alien planet with their phasers at the ready to deal with the subcultural detritus that might turn on them at any moment" [186], although it's certainly an original reading.  

 

These things aside, for the most part one agrees with Trowell's interpretations and marvels at his insights. Rotten's captioning of Stevenson's photo as forced fun at Malcolm's behest is pithy, but one needs Trowell's essay to provide the theoretical and cultural context without which it's just another snap. 

 

The band may never have had much clue as to what was going on or what was at stake, but Malcolm knew exactly what he wanted to do and how he wanted the band to look: "The photograph tries to set out McLaren's deliberate positioning of punk as against the process of accumulation of all music genres and stylistic connotations and manifestations that have gone before." [188]

Obviously, in due course every image loses its power and becomes just another stock photo filed away in an archive: cultural fodder, as Trowell puts it. Some truly great pictures, however, retain their abilty to shock or seduce or to scandalise for decades; others, like this one, now mostly rely on Matlock's button to provide a point of interest.

 

Ultimately, argues Trowell, even the Sex Pistols "cannot escape time and space" [188] just as punk cannot escape being co-opted and commercialised by the forces of capital, as McLaren and Reid conceded in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980).

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Ian Trowell, 'Punk's dead knot: Constructing the temporal and spatial in commercial punk imagery', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Number 2 (2016), pp. 181-199. Page references given in the post refer to the essay as published here.  

[b] Somewhat surprisingly, Trowell doesn't refer us to the following lines in the Sex Pistols' song 'I Wanna Be Me': 'I got you in my camera / a second of your life, ruined for life'.

      He does, however, refer us to John Berger who argues that the true content of a photograph is invisible as it "derves from a play not with form, but with time ... it isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum". See Understanding a Photograph (Penguin, 2013), p. 20. 

[c] Barthes's concept of the punctum raises a problem discussed by commentators such as Michael Fried and James Elkins; if it calls forth a highly idiosyncratic response on behalf of an individual viewer, then how can that experience ever be communicated and theorised? In other words, can Matlock's button ever intensely move anyone other than Trowell himself? I might understand what he says and appreciate what he writes, but is his experience of pleasure (as of pain) not uniquely his own?  

 

 

Musical bonus: Sex Pistols, 'I Wanna Be Me', b-side to 'Anarachy in the UK' (EMI, 1976): click here.  

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Seeing with the Eyes of Angels (In Praise of Cubism)

Pablo Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910)

Museum of Modern Art, New York

For Lawrence, one of the most admirable things about Cézanne was that he insisted upon the appleyness not only of the fruit itself, but of the bodies of men and women and, indeed, of all objects including inanimate ones, such as jugs or bottles of wine. That is to say, he acknowledged the thingliness of the thing and attempted to paint this (as far as possible), thereby introducing into our field of vision an ontological reality which exists independently of mind.   

This, says Lawrence, was a revolutionary move; an attempt to tear painting from its own history of idealised representation and radically differentiate it from photography which sees the world mechanically with Kodak accuracy. 

Deleuze goes further and argues that what truly great painters like Cézanne do is not simply liberate lines and colours on the canvas, but free the eye from its adherence to the organism. The eye, says Deleuze, becomes a polyvalent indeterminate organ that is capable of seeing the object-as-figure in terms of pure presence.

Having become intuitively aware of an object, an artist is able to see it all around at one and the same time and not just from a single perspective fixated on fronts and faces. Further, they allow us to effectively have eyes all over too - just like the cherubim of whom Ezekiel speaks.  

And this can't be a bad thing, surely. For as Nietzsche says, the more eyes and more various organs we have for seeing the same thing the better; for a multiple perspective enables us to form a more complete (and more objective) concept of the thing.

Clearly, Picasso and Georges Braque (inspired by Cézanne's late work) understood this and Cubism is without doubt the most significant and influential art movement of the 20th century. As John Berger says, it is almost impossible to exaggerate its importance.    

Surprisingly, Lawrence of all people failed to appreciate what was unfolding in the art world of his day and he dismissed Cubism along with other forms of avant-garde art that were moving towards abstraction as puerile and overly-intellectual. He simply couldn't grasp why it was that Cézanne would come to insist on the need to interpret the world geometrically, placing everything into perspective.

And for me, this is not only surprising, it's disappointing too ...