By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
I recently watched a network television series filmed in 2005. It doesn’t matter which one (OK, Star Trek), but I came upon an episode whose plot revolved around drooling over attractive, scantily clad women. Two weeks ago, I’d have told you a television episode like that can’t be made now. Today, I’m here to tell you that not only could it be, but we’re going to get a lot of them.
Being beautiful is back.
You’re probably thinking it’s thanks to Sydney Sweeney and her now-infamous (but really quite tame) American Eagle ads. That ad was only the tipping point. It’s something that’s been building for a couple of years now, a counterforce to what I’ve been calling the slopism movement.
That said, Sydney Sweeney probably does deserve most of the credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for this sudden cultural shift back towards an attitude that was always considered normal, outside of a weird ten-year gap from 2015 to 2025 in which the world decided aesthetically pleasing things were evil.
The True Origins Of Culture’s Move Back Towards Beauty
If you really want to trace it back, you probably need to look at Sweeney’s March 2024 appearance on Saturday Night Live. In it, she dressed as a Hooters waitress and wiggled a lot. People who like that sort of thing (men) went wild.
Perhaps even more noteworthy is that, unlike with the American Eagle ad, there was no significant pushback over her early 2024 SNL display. People felt like they had permission to enjoy things that looked good again, and that got the snowball rolling downhill. Now, it’s far too late to slow down, and there is no stopping it.
Sweeney has made it her mission to embrace being sexy for a few years and has ignored any detractors. In 2023, she made a pretty good Netflix romcom called Anyone But You, in which she shamelessly ran around in a bikini and made edgy jokes (something that’s also been forbidden).
Being sexy was framed as politically incorrect for at least a decade. Actresses were refusing to be traditionally beautiful and sneering at those who dared display themselves. Jennifer Lawrence did a nude scene in the fairly funny and also edgy comedy No Hard Feelings that same year Sydney Sweeney released her rom-com, and was savagely attacked for it. We haven’t heard much from Lawrence since.
Sweeney refused to give any air to criticism and went right on being happy and beautiful. It paid off not just for her, but for all of us. Looking at nice things is objectively better than looking at ugly ones.
It’s the cleanest example I’ve ever seen of a celebrity changing culture. Anyone who studies entertainment for as long as I have knows culture doesn’t just happen, it’s created. For over a decade, it’s been created by teachers’ union scolds and unemployable college professors. Now it’s being created by Sydney Sweeney, and it’s something she achieved by bucking the prevailing trend and ignoring the cost of doing so.
How Sydney Sweeney’s Body Could Make Your Life Better
This move towards embracing beauty is likely to have bigger benefits than the selling of many jeans. Aesthetics matter. When you drive by a filthy homeless camp on your commute, you let the trash you see into your mind. It has a real psychic impact; it’s a tiny drag on your life. It’s also far worse for the people living there in the trash, obviously, but that’s a different topic for a different time.
If you’re Gen Z, you probably don’t know that once the highways were homeless-free and instead of seeing tents, many billboards along the route featured attractive bikini girls holding beer. It made men want to buy alcohol. It also made the commute more pleasant for both men and women. Those are women’s jeans Sydney Sweeney is advertising, and American Eagle just sold a lot of them.
Both Beer companies and highway trash cleanup crews were shamed by activists. They may have had good points, I don’t know. What I do know is that without the bikinis, the billboards became pointless.
So now our highways are festooned with depressing healthcare billboards featuring dour-looking doctors selling pills, hovering above mentally ill drug addicts who aren’t getting medical care, sleeping in piles of trash.
I’d rather have Sydney Sweeney’s world. We’ll know things are truly getting better when the beer ads come back. Is Spuds Mackenzie dead?
