Since When Did Being Attracted to Sydney Sweeney Become a Political Football and Cultural Debate?

How The Latest Culture War Battle Makes No Damn Sense on Either Side - It's JUST a Jeans Ad

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I think if you have known me from the time I started writing in 2005 (Dear God!) was that a lot of my focus on writing has been about sex, dating, libido, and a lot of things like that.

I think when I first started writing about it, I was doing it for shock value. I was a 22 year old dude looking for love in all the right and wrong places. I wanted to be the person who was different BECAUSE he wrote, and I wanted to think out loud and I wanted to show people my flaws as I worked them out.

This personality you see online was cultivated for the purposes of meeting women. Well, seventeen years ago, I solved that puzzle and met someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. She’s amazing, and if you know me and her, we are so good together.

But as I turned 40 a couple years ago, I started noticing things about myself.

I have to pee more.

Damn it, that freaking sucks. My one strength is now a big weakness. It’s not as easy to get in shape. In fact, I can see when someone gets so out of shape, there’s a point of no return. I am not there yet, but holy crap, I am going to try to fix this. It’s crazy how you can just fall into a pit of despair.

Sex Drive? Libido? Actually, I think I am fine. Yeah, seriously. I really do think that. I am told many people my age start to feel like they are losing it around this age, and they then settle into a life of city council meetings and reruns of “Cops."

But it wasn’t until I got into sportswriting, and more so, started understanding my customer, something these dumbass people in local media DO NOT DO, that I started to learn a lot more about myself and them to a lesser extent.

Yes, I did a Bank of America style analysis on my clients and understood a lot about who they are, and in reality, I was able to write a lot better because I felt like I was learning about them.

So I wanted to use this platform to discuss these type of topics: Sex, Relationships and everything in between from the perspective of a 42-year old man still trying to figure things out, but is at least funny enough and a good enough writer to write about it.

This is one of several columns to come about this topic and the first one is about someone in the news lately that became a political battle when in reality, she’s just hot and selling jeans.

People on the left side say that if I like her and I like the ad, I am racist, and people on the right side have to defend a woman in her 20s just being a woman in her 20s, sexual, ambitious, and wanting to make as much money as America will allow. Those are the American dreams right?

Note: This is not a politics column, nor are any of them I do. This column only happens because of the debate though. I respect everyone’s opinion, even if I don’t agree. Got it? Good. I don’t want to hear otherwise….Capisce?

Since When Did Being Attracted to Sydney Sweeney Become a Political Football and Cultural Debate?

You can ask my wife. I used to say this following sentence until 2012, when I was 29.

“If you are over 30 years old and you are still wearing American Eagle shit from the mall, you are a giant loser.”

I did say it. I don’t apologize for it. I meant it. My thought is if you are 30 dressing like a “kid” you have issues beyond your style. You don’t want to grow up or evolve or “Be a Man,” if you will. The bright colors and the shameless branding of their logo on everything makes teens, and young adults walking billboards, and human nature knows that people look at those people whether they admit it or not. Again, it’s nature.

Ok, so I am 42 years old and not only do I own a pair of AE Jeans, one with a pre-cut hole in the kneecap, which I bought at age 29 mind you, and didn’t wear them for years, I can’t wait until fall to wear them again!

It is not because I have a problem growing up, but mainly because at 42, I can’t find jeans that fit right. I have big legs from weightlifting and I am 6’2” 290lbs on my best day, and more when I have Domino’s and everything made for me (Big and Tall) is 2x as expensive. If I can repurpose something from the time before I was married, cool.

But I get it, people my age could have been 24 when they wore these jeans and got a woman pregnant and now at 42, the old dad is buying AE jeans for his 18 year old daughter and he will fucking kill anyone he catches staring at her ass.

You have seen those types of dads before.

That right there is the double standard of human nature.
Rules for thee and not for me.

But fashion norms and societal norms evolve to where in the late 90s, catching a glimpse of a woman’s thong was something that would make you get the vapors like you are in Gone With The Wind times to now there are women who wear thong bikinis to the CHILDRENS SPLASH PADS IN THIS TOWN!!!!

Even for someone as progressive as me, it still freaks me out.
I’m like, WTF are you doing? You are on Solano Dr in Cruces, not Turks and Caicos.

So I DO have standards and ethics. Cool.

Which takes me to Sydney Sweeney. I like her a lot. That’s my type of girl to be honest.

Born in Spokane, WA in 1997, attending a private school there until moving to Idaho and then moving to L.A. to be an actress and star. She was still going to school where she became the valedictorian of her graduating class. Blonde, pretty, and smart, and the valedictorian. The girl I pursued for years only was a salutatorian in high school, so Sydney Sweeney even got her beat.

She’s been in a lot of things you may have seen. White Lotus (Which I haven’t seen yet) and Euphoria, which I have seen, and my goodness, it is brutal and harsh and makes me cringe at having high school age kids because I know how bad my class was and it seems these kids are 100x worse and weird. She does well in that.

Did I mention she was gorgeous? Oh yeah.. and she has breasts.

Two of them, last I checked.

Congrats.

Here’s another fun fact. She’s set to play former Women’s World Boxing Champion Christy Martin in an upcoming movie that I am dying to see, because I love boxing, and I was around it a lot when Martin was the first woman’s champ. She even fought in Albuquerque about 20 years ago.

She had a hell of a life story thought marrying some old grandpa type who was her manager who then fed her drugs, was abusive, and eventually tried to kill her.

She eventually left him, she nearly died doing it, she came out as gay and is now living that life. He went to prison for 25 years and recently died. (Spoiler alert) I want to see Sydney as Martin because Christy Martin’s looks are 180 degrees the opposite of what Sweeney is, which is perfectly fine… I mean Sweeney is FINE, and Martin looks like someone that would be dating one of my aunt’s female friends.

If that wins Sweeney an Oscar, awesome. I think it would be cool. But if not, she’s exploring more than just roles that show off her tits.

It was reported that Sweeney vetoed her character getting topless on Euphoria’s second season, which was received well by the man running the show.

She has noted that she doesn’t mind those scenes, but it didn’t feel necessary to what they were telling in the story which is why she did that.

That’s an empowering thing for her to do, and it should have been applauded by women first and others second. But, nope… no one said a damn thing when it happened.

But now that she’s a bigger star and has done a lot of new endorsements including Baskin Robbins, which I got to admit, her ice cream looks like something an ADHD kid created (Hard Pass) and now American Eagle, we have started to see this little culture war brewing about this beautiful blonde chick in our lives at the moment, and my god, I can’t get over how insufferable people are about it.

Be honest: When’s the last time you saw a Baskin-Robbins TV or Mixed Media ad? I don’t ever remember seeing one.

How about American Eagle? Last commercial you have seen of theirs? You haven’t… They have been in our lives a quarter century on just word of mouth or placement in malls, you know, those big buildings we don’t go to any more.

Both companies, though successful in different ways, threw a bunch of money at sex and beauty to sell products we know are there, but they just wanted to make a buzz to make more money.

And, my god, the way the discussion has gone about her makes me dislike people who claim that presenting this blonde chick with a pair of jeans or an ice cream cone makes them racist and me racist for looking at it.

It to a lesser extent makes me mad at those ‘Merica types only for feeling the need to defend this woman who has never really said or done anything political to be claimed by a side.

Their heart is in more of the right place though, because at the end of the day, people (including women) like looking at pretty people.

All the bombs lobbed at the companies regarding Sweeney are in reality a newfound way to slut shame this woman. As mentioned above, this woman has taken it upon herself to take agency with her career and vetoed scenes where she felt objectified, and she won against the producer that helped make her a star. She very well could get naked in the next season, but here in season 2 of Euphoria… she was the boss.

Here’s the “OFFENSIVE” AE AD.

But no, you have all these people telling us that we should feel bad that a girl in jeans, with a little cleavage is being used to send signals to evil people around us.

Let me be frank, the jeans she wears are not my favorites at all (I find them baggy and not really something that I as a heterosexual male like to see on a woman but I am cognizant enough to know those baggy-style jeans are IN right now.)

Because of this all of a sudden you get stories like American Eagle is pandering to white supremacists.

OMG, really?

Gorgeous woman with blonde hair, blue eyes and she says in the commercial she has the best Jeans and someone actually thinks they are talking about “genes”, genetics, eugenics?

But yes, some people do have better genes and some don’t. That’s why I tremble at my future as most Baca men in my family get some sort of digestive cancer in their 60s and 70s… Almost all of them. They have something genetic that may doom me. So even if genes were being talked about, Sydney Sweeney being hot is genes…is nature.

I have spent my life looking for ways to motivate me to get mad at someone like a deranged younger Mexican version of Michael Jordan, but even this stupid discourse about Sweeney is taking it too far.

Whoever said that this ad was racist was likely the same type of person who said if you play the Beatles records backwards you will hear satanic verses spoken or the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz thing.

People with too much time on their hands thinking people are speaking in cold, when in reality it’s just a hot girl endorsing a product like has been the case forever.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t like people who don’t like me for being brown. I think most sane people feel the same. However, to think that a company who rarely does commercials would spend millions of dollars to get her to hype up a company that could easily go bankrupt if shoppers breathed wrong in order to signal to a side of the aisle which even if you don’t believe political propaganda is a small enough faction that they actually would never buy clothes from there is asinine. This is TikTok conspiracy theory gone loco.

You really don’t know business, guys, do you?

Sydney Sweeney is the it girl and she knows that even the haters hating bring in more cash. Much like Howard Stern or even the person that holds office at 1600 Pennsylvania, they use your outrage to only make their base more fervently supportive which leads to more money.

The best way to “protest” her would be to not say anything about it.

But people who claim this commercial is alluding to something not good in our culture have a lot of things they need to clean up.

1. First, the need for inclusivity in the ad. That white, blonde haired, blue eyed Sydney Sweeney hocking the very clothes that were worn by the white, blonde haired, blue eyed girls I dated in college.

I also have hung out with black girls, I dated a Chinese-American girl when I was 21 and 2 German girls. These women DID NOT wear AE clothes. Now, yes, some did wear other mall clothes, but the demographic for these clothes is very narrow, and we have accepted that for the 70 years malls have existed. That’s why they are called “SPECIALTY STORES.”

That doesn’t make the clothes racist, because I wear them at times (still have a hoodie too!) it just means it is not everyone’s taste, just like every other type of clothing. (Note: I don’t like ADIDAS shoes because they run small. They aren’t racist because they are German.)

You can say, “Well how about someone a little more representative of the size a lot of Americans are?” (i.e. fat people)

Well, James here, who just weighed 299.4 lbs this morning when I gave blood, and weighed 307 last week can chime in on this.

Because they don’t sell anything over 38 waist at most stores in the mall for men, and I bet it’s the equivalent for women, at least mass-produced.

It’s not that they don’t sell them at all, which means you can get them online, but small stores and not a lot of room means “special sizes” are special ordered. Story of my life, but I am fine with it. I can’t help being football player size.

The pair I do own that is 38W fits me perfect. If you get someone my size not as well built, they would not be able to fit in anything there, ditto for women with girth up top or down below. So if you hire a model that looks like that to sell the clothes, it’s false advertising. Simple as that. She is the body type for those clothes. I used to be skinnier and I theoretically used to as well.

2. It’s saying that Sweeney “Good Jeans (genes)” comment is taking it somewhere dark.

Well, ok, I will not sit here and lie to you and say that of course, subliminal advertising doesn’t exist. I will not sit here and say I have not used social media posts of mine to get certain people to react, and I am not saying that the “provocative” language used by AE was not discussed in a meeting room in a roundtable somewhere.

But am I going to be a Nazi if I buy these jeans? No, I am Mexican. Are white supremacists going to rule in bright summery colors and charm bracelets you can buy 2 for $5? No.

Quick story: We had a marketing executive go to my high school when I was in 10th grade. I remember the small assembly in the classroom in between dazed of getting bullied and getting forced to take drug tests for my classmates.

We had a marketing executive go to my high school when I was in 10th grade. I remember the small assembly in the classroom, in between getting bullied and being forced to take drug tests for my classmates.

He showed us a 1980s commercial for gum—yes, gum—and broke it down frame by frame. In one frame, the same woman who’d been wearing a sundress the entire time suddenly had it lifted, exposing her backside.

It was fast. Too fast to consciously see—but your brain caught it.

Blew my mind.

You couldn’t do that in this digital world where kids know how to edit on TikTok. That moment turned me on to the world of decoding media. It was one of the few genuinely cool things I learned in high school.

Aspercreme, the pain reliever us middle-aged men and up use when we are sore had to change their slogan from “You bet your sweet ASPERCREME” in 2005 to “You bet if its ASPERCREME” because a handful of people decided not to here the “PERCREME” in the slogan and thought all they heard was “YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS” that was coming through their TV speakers.

“You bet your sweet ASSpercreme...” give me a break. Can’t we all have a little fun?

Things like that are tired and boring and people just look for a fight and they poo-poo anything the least bit clever. So, there always were going to be haters for the Sweeney commercial, no matter the context, because whether its women just looking for a “you objectify us” fight or the whole ‘genes’ thing we are talking about here, the internet just breeds us fighting about everything, which is why I am here.

Now, on the other side of the thing, people on the right side of the aisle are defending Sweeney, calling this cancel culture run amok. I agree with that part of their argument. It’s people just looking for something to shit on.

The whole commercial argument just reminds me of a fight a couple has that started over nothing, and because the people egging this fight on are making ridiculous claims, Sweeney has become a person that the right are defending.

But the only thing I have to say about that side defending her, at least the red-blooded American type of men who are using Sydney Sweeney as a topic to lob grenades at their political adversaries, let’s not pretend a couple things.

Let’s not pretend that a huge sub-section of you “guns, family, and the US of A” guys, mostly middle-aged or older men, would not dropkick your wives 1930s NFL style over a goalpost to go have a one-night fling with someone like her.

Of course you would, and again…human nature. I get it. Doesn’t make it right, but we are flawed humans.

Let’s also not pretend there are not these incels who align themselves with that side of the aisle who roam the internet and call slender women “Fat” and “Mid” and are just the most toxic type of guys that will never have a normal relationship with a woman. Those types of people follow Andrew Tate and the like and are not in tune with reality.

Although I try to keep an open mind and respect people’s opinions, there are some people on either side that are just not worth talking to, because they take shit to the extreme, and that’s what has gotten me out of politics.

But for those on the right who defend Sweeney from these attacks on the other side, I get it, how gentlemanly, but… you want to sleep with her too.

Admit it. I’m a guy. I know you.

Would I?

I mean, I am not in a place in my head where I ponder shit like that. I know some people would point out that I am 42 and she is 27, so I am technically old enough to be her dad… Yeah, if my name was Villi Fualaau-Baca (bonus points if you get that reference.)

Um, while I won’t answer that, I will say she’s really pretty, and much like many actresses, she has a great body. In another existence, she would be my type.

But now as I get older, I can’t think in those simple sexual terms anymore. I think people who front about being like that all the times are the ones with the sexual problems. I really feel that, and I will dive into that more in a future post.

I see men my age act like that on Twitter and I know it is a lie. Middle-Aged men become old perverts because they stopped listening to their bodies years ago or hid what was natural and it perverts (pun intended) their brain into this gross type of man you see today.

I have been in a committed relationship for 17 years. If Sydney Sweeney were even on my radar, she’d have to handle going to the clearance section of Walmart with me looking for dented drinkware, because I do shit like that in my 40s, and hell, I did that in my 20s too. It’s beyond “I THINK YOU’RE PURDY” with me.

To be on my radar, we have to find common ground. “You are hot” is no longer all it takes. Been there done that. I am more complex that you think, which is why this hubbub over a stupid-ass commercial is ridiculous, and I feel dumber for writing 4,000 words, not because I didn’t want to talk about Sydney Sweeney, but just that someone can find something toxic and bad to talk about with a jeans commercial.

The cool thing about AI is it makes you visually realize your rung on the societal ladder. She’s out of my league. I look ridiculous. If she wants to go clearance shopping at Target, she could DM me.

My final point is Sydney Sweeney is the IT girl. The dream girl. The dude all the men drool over, and all the women who don’t call her a “bitch” just for being hot would like to emulate.

She’s a small town type of girl done well, and when you look at her impressive bio on Wikipedia, she’s an everywoman type beyond that superstar status…at least she still is.

I saw a tweet from someone who claims she is a feminist who called her trashy for doing American Eagle and Baskin Robbins ads instead of Gucci and Prada and Mercedes-Benz.

So, it’s really just about optics with class, isn’t it? It’s not about “girl power,” it is about looking the most opulent and best version of you rather than rocking a pair of $30 jeans and a $5 ice cream cone.

Girls I have dated, hell, the girl I married would buy shit from AE, eat at 31 Flavors as I call it, and prefer a country road in the mountains in an old pickup than a fully-loaded Benz.

The people that talk like that “in defense of her and all women” are just finding ways to hate her on another level.

While men who wouldn’t know how to act around a woman like that all decide what is in her best interest.

Let her cook! Isn’t America about flaunting your looks, making a ton of money and living your best life? Leave her alone!

Signed,
Creepy 42 year old man with American Eagle Jeans purchased when Sydney Sweeney was 13 years old

James

Oh, man… that felt great. If you liked that, please come aboard. I am coming with more good stuff!