In the most recent flashpoint in the culture war, American Eagle showcased actress Sydney Sweeney in an advertisement with the caption “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

The ad is overtly sexual, with the camera highlighting sexual features more than the denim itself, with suggestive poses that frame Sweeney as an erotic object of desire.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,” Sweeney says, back arched, while zipping up her pants. “My jeans are blue.”

The reaction to the ad was a Rorschach test. The Left, locked into a hermeneutic of suspicion with a reflex to read nefarious messaging into things that seem anodyne at a cursory glance, were outraged at the perceived fascist signaling of the ad (Sweeney is thin, blonde, and blue-eyed). Some on the Left interpreted it as a dog whistle for eugenics and white supremacy.

The Right, which often settles for cultural scraps, celebrated the ad as a win against “woke” culture for featuring an attractive, thin white woman after years of brands being influenced by the Left’s ideological fixations with inclusivity. One commentator claimed the ad was a sign that “the American people are done with ‘woke,” and another said it meant that “woke is dead, and beauty is back.” The X account End Wokeness, juxtaposing a picture of an American Eagle ad featuring a heavy-set black woman with a picture of Sweeney immodestly posing, commented, “woke is dead.”

For us social conservatives, much of the Right’s reaction was a bleak cultural bellwether. One can argue that the big-budget designers who created the ad knew exactly how the “great jeans” innuendo would be received, and that it was intended to create the media buzz it has. I personally don’t believe that American Eagle, which has a pride flag on its website, is engaged in Nazi dog-whistling.

The Right’s reaction, however, should alarm conservatives who are concerned with the erosion of family-friendly culture. The celebratory reaction to the ad demonstrates just how steeped in liberal paradigms and assumptions the American Right is today. The ad treats sexuality as public, performative, and consumable. It’s revealing and immodest, something I would try to shield my children from seeing at the mall. It’s not a rupture from “woke” in the slightest, rather an embrace of the liberal anthropology that detached sexuality from marriage and procreation during the 1960s sexual revolution.

Much of the contemporary Right now swims in these waters, too steeped in liberalism to even realize that by cheering the American Eagle ad as an “anti-woke” victory, they’re participating in and enabling a culture that the left created.

The ad demonstrated the triumph of liberalism and its assault on the religious right in particular, which, through different kinds of grassroots activist groups, has long campaigned against the kind of sexualized media that brands like American Eagle promote because of the harm it inflicts on families and children.

At the heart of Christianity is the belief that each person is made Imago Dei, in the image of God, and that the human body is not an object of consumption. Pope Saint John Paul II expresses this in “Theology of the Body,” a set of teachings he delivered between 1979 and 1984. He explained how sexual pathologies like pornography distort human dignity and invert the body’s purpose of self-giving love. When this fundamental truth is rejected, it comes as no surprise that the prevalence of sexualized media leads to consequences like higher levels of body dissatisfaction, a greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women, and diminished views of women’s humanity.

For social conservatives who believe moral guardrails are necessary for human flourishing, mainstream culture is still hostile terrain, and the American Eagle Sydney Sweeney ad exposes the cultural captivity of much of the Right.

Being “anti-woke” is not enough, even if the campaign against wokeness generally aligns with the objectives of any socially conservative movement. Anyone serious about making the public square welcoming to children and families must work to reclaim modesty as the standard cultural norm, and they must have the courage to oppose the liberal foundations of our sexualized marketplace itself.

Marlo Slayback is the Executive Director of the Collegiate Network for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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Sex Sells, And The Right Bought It: The Hollow ‘Victory’ Of The Sydney Sweeney Ad