Sydney Sweeney, Gwyneth Paltrow and the misogynists

Dear God, please help me. The winged monkeys of incel outrage have mobilized in their millions. Basement warriors have exerted more sputum and energy than the average American would find imaginable. And all because of a 27-year-old actress, best known for starring in a romcom with Glen Powell, who, when I last checked, was spared such opprobrium. But we are in a different age, and if you are a woman, you’re fair game.

In the Fifties, there might have been an outraged headline. “Pretty young blonde woman wears denim jeans to promote a product!” But in 2025, Sydney Sweeney is less a thespian and more a product in her own right. In the great carnival of modern celebrity, where every gesture is dissected and every utterance weaponized, she’s a moving target. For the uninitiated, Ms. Sweeney is the doe-eyed, large-breasted darling of Euphoria and The White Lotus who has been taken to pieces because of an American Eagle jeans campaign that dared to employ the tagline “has great jeans/genes.” A harmless pun, one might think, a bit of cheeky wordplay to sell denim to the TikTok generation. But no.

Those who wanted to be outraged have been. There have been accusations of “Nazi propaganda” and “eugenics endorsement.” Their logic, such as it is, hinges on the word “genes” evoking some sinister nod to genetic purity. Sweeney, admittedly, shares the blame as a producer and star of the campaign, but I doubt she had any hand in crafting the copy. American Eagle’s chief marketing officer described it as “potentially one of the biggest gets in American Eagle history.” The backlash was swift, with none other than the Juicy hitmaker Doja Cat lampooning the ad on TikTok and commentators decrying Sweeney’s silence as complicity.

Alas, this is not the first time that such outrage has been brought out into the open. Sweeney has long been a lightning rod for conservative fetishization and progressive scorn because she has large breasts and dares to be unashamed of exhibiting them in low-cut tops. Her appearance on Saturday Night Live last year even prompted a Spectator piece hailing her as a return to “real body positivity.” The right venerates her as someone whom their bedroom-dwelling representatives can pin their hopes and dreams upon; the left merely detests her as a symbol of all that is rotten about their country today. The American Eagle debacle is merely the latest chapter in this ongoing culture war, where a young woman wearing a pair of denim jeans is less a reflection of her talent than a Rorschach test for society’s obsessions.

If it’s any consolation to her, a senior figure in the industry has recently found themselves at the epicenter of peculiar controversies. Compared to the opprobrium exhibited towards Gwyneth Paltrow, who has been ritually humiliated by the publication of Amy Odell’s Gwyneth: The Biography, Sweeney has it easy. When Paltrow was Sweeney’s age, she was subjected to a similar degree of prurient fascination. She was the most-talked-about actress of her generation, a muse for Harvey Weinstein, an Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love (over Cate Blanchett, who deserved it more for Elizabeth), and an object of ridicule for her tears on that night and for her famous boyfriends. Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, anyone else who was there and available – Paltrow was sneered at for her naked lust for fame. Even in the pre–social media age, she went viral.

Two and a half decades later, her successors have come for Sydney Sweeney. It has become acceptable to sneer at a beautiful woman of a certain age because, in some sense, she deserves it, and we have to be aware that in this sharp, cold Instagram age, daring to use your looks to advertise a product will lead to your being ridiculed and belittled. Gwyneth had it before her, and someone else will have it after her. The millions that she will make from the company are cold company when all that Sweeney sees on social media the misogyny leveled at her. But that, alas, is the game, and it has been like that since the inception of the industry, even if things seem only to be getting worse. Dear God, please help us.