Woke Activist Social Media Proxification and outrage at white jeans
American Eagle’s ‘good jeans’ ads with Sydney Sweeney spark a debate on race and beauty standards
U.S. fashion retailer American Eagle Outfitters wanted to make a splash with its new advertising campaign starring 27-year-old actor Sydney Sweeney. The ad blitz included “clever, even provocative language” and was “definitely going to push buttons,” the company’s chief marketing officer told trade media outlets.
It has. The question now is whether some of the public reaction the fall denim campaign produced is what American Eagle intended.
Titled “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” the campaign sparked a debate about race, Western beauty standards, and the backlash to “woke” American politics and culture. Most of the negative reception focused on videos that used the word “genes” instead of “jeans” when discussing the blonde-haired, blue-eyed actor known for the HBO series“Euphoria” and “White Lotus.”
Some critics saw the wordplay as a nod, either unintentional or deliberate, to eugenics, a discredited theory that held humanity could be improved through selective breeding for certain traits.
Marcus Collins, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said the criticism for the American Eagle ad could have been avoided if the ads showed models of various races making the “genes” pun.
“You can either say this was ignorance, or this was laziness, or say that this is intentional,” Collins said. “Either one of the three aren’t good.”
Other commenters accused detractors of reading too much into the campaign’s message.
“I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her ‘good genes,’” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote Tuesday on X.
Kaleidoscope of Hate
The unique universal experience of lockdown is causing internal ructions and currents through the political, social, economic and cultural landscape of NZ.
The algorithms of social media Hate has amplified polarization of debate in ways we are barely comprehending.
Into this vortex fault lines are rupturing.
A chunk of white society being asked to curtail their financial agency & freedom to protect Maori & Pacifica who they feel resentment from.
Vulnerable communities angry that their well being is collateral damage for the rich.
A distrust of Authority while being utterly dependent upon them.
Social isolation and a growing sense of dislocation.
Qanon lunatics who are impossible to be reasoned with alongside Woke lynch mobs on never ending cancellation purges.
The poor whose poverty has become survival level subsistence.
Renters locked into debt servitude.
Micro aggression policing trigger thresholds where the quickest to take offence wins in a never ending grim roulette of intersectionist grievance where a cacophony of wounds jockey for social hierarchy.
All have become building blocks towards barriers that divide while cocooning us all into echo chambers.
We have run out of patience with one another.
Who cares what jeans Sydney Sweeney is selling?
Social media proxification – hell is other people’s social media feed – Sartre
Social media algorithms have allowed for a toxicity of debate that is easily manipulated. A symphony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening. Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.
Millennial woke culture sees macro violence coming from micro aggressions and piously police those micro aggressions with virtue signalling purity mantras.
Alt Right Incel Nazis see white persecution and create some bullshit replacement narrative to justify their powerlessness and feed that resentment online.
Most people are on social media and most people have a woke activist or Qanon fanatic in their social media feed screaming their feverish truths. While these activists certainly think they are speaking truth to power by endlessly calling people out for breaches of woke mantra or fake news anti Trump lies, to everyone else they are simply toxic.
People stop seeing the political party and only see the activist and in the end proxification means the activist becomes the proxy representation of the Party, and seeing as people have negative feelings towards the proxy, they turn from the Party.
Voters aren’t voting on policy, they are voting on who made them feel resentful on social media!
The political is the personal now means what hurts me personally becomes political.
Before social media activists could only face each other off at protests or through letters to the editor or talkback radio. There were constraints of interaction but with social media there are none and it turns out the freedom to insult and dehumanise others is more addictive than nicotine, alcohol and meth combined.
Wokeness has become a puritanical religion with none of the beauty – it’s not so much the personal virtue signal, we are all dicks at times, it’s the weaponization by algorithms that make it so dangerous and damaging.
The danger of identity politics is that it locks people intellectually into only defining the world through their skin colour, genitalia or sexual orientation – it also becomes toxically subjective and tribal where the only solidarity is with other people who share the skin colour or genitalia or sexual orientation- without shared truths and values, the 1% and their 9% enablers continue to divide the rest of us 90%.
The Left has lurched into woke ‘Social Justice’ territory which alienates more than it attracts.
Beneficiaries and working class people care less about pronouns and the correct pronunciation of te Reo than they do about how to pay next weeks rent and power bill!
Pure temple doctrine divides & alienates. Broadchurch universals build solidarity.
I’m not interested in social justice wokedom any more, it is a minefield of competing schisms throwing vitriol at one another.
Twitter outrage is woke righteousness porn for the middle classes. A puritanical razoring where the self elected morality police publicly shame and cancel anyone for not using the language protocols of the conclave.
Who cares what jeans Sydney Sweeney is selling?
In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And now in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.
This isn’t democracy, this is a feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
We are but meat bags secreting hormones addicted to dopamine rewards for fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism uber alles where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves to make sense of a world around us that is frightening and in constant entropy.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
Media proxification is leading to a fascist kaleidoscope of climate crisis entropy triggered by Covid, woke supremacy & ok Karen QAnon echo chambers.
Who cares what jeans Sydney Sweeney is selling?
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‘Who cares what jeans Sydney Sweeney is selling?’ I suppose Sydney Sweeney does because she is getting paid to do it.
‘I was just hired as an actress in it, so I was just along for the ride for whatever was going to happen.’ is what she is quoted as saying about her role in a film(Madame Web).
I had never even heard of American Eagle before anu of this.
I somehow don’t feel any the wiser now.
‘I had never even heard of American Eagle before anu of this.
I somehow don’t feel any the wiser now.’
Yes m’lord but you are better informed.
When our unskilled immigration rate is five times that which triggered Brexit in the UK, you want to step away from the fantasy that replacement is not the firm preference of the majority of NZ’s worst employers.