No, I Don’t Need Some Scold’s Permission to Love [Insert Female Anatomy Part]

When was the last time you saw an ad for an automobile featuring a dirty, dinged up car parked in some equally trash strewn and crowded garage, even though that’s what happens to the great majority of cars in the real world?

Last week, I noted that the recent controversy over Sydney Sweeney’s appearance in ads for American Eagle was really about control.  When various critics noted that the ads themselves were only created in the first place because people of color weren’t in the room or the executive team wasn’t sufficiently diverse, they were claiming that, were it up to them, the entire series would have been censored from the start.  The reality, however, is actually far worse than that.  As the non-controversy continued to unfold in the following days, it became clear that at least some progressives believe they can or at least should control the content of other people’s minds.  According to The Atlantic, conservatives began latching on to Ms. Sweeney long before the advertisements because she gives men (and presumably lesbians?) permission to “love boobs.”  As they put it in a newsletter last week, “her image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars).  Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs.”  In support of this notion, the newsletter linked to an article from March 6, 2024, posted by The Spectator, “Sydney Sweeney and the return of real body positivity” where Bridget Phetasy claimed that “Our fascination with the female figure never went away.”  At the time, Ms. Phetasy was reacting to Ms. Sweeney’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, noting “Yay! Boobs are back! Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles and bounces in familiar ways I haven’t seen in decades. For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime – as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.”  While we might debate whether Ms. Phetasy’s column was strictly true, false, or some combination of the two, how The Atlantic takes this as a right wing issue where conservatives have been clamoring to someone, anyone for the freedom to love boobs remains a mystery, as does how any rational person could arrive at that construction to begin with.  How could they possibly believe that I need their permission, that they have to allow me to be free to love boobs, and then write exactly that in a supposed mainstream publication?  As Ms. Phetasy noted herself, our fascination with the “female figure,” as evidenced from Ancient Greek and Roman statues of fully naked or partially clothed woman through today, “never went away,” but somehow this has been construed a year later as something only the left, in their munificence can grant.