By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 18, 2026
Please forgive me for beginning with such a long excerpt.
But I think it’s worth it.
Faye Curran, writing in The New Statesman, begins her essay on Sydney Sweeney’s “deal with the devil” thus:
How did Sydney Sweeney, the
29-year-old American actress of fluctuating talent, accumulate an estimated
fortune of $40m? By knowing a bargain when she sees one. Bargains, that is, of
the patriarchal kind – the sort the Turkish feminist Deniz Kandiyoti theorised
in 1988. Her argument was that women can negotiate with patriarchal structures,
rather than simply submit to or resist them. They extract what advantages they
can: protection, status, money. You do not have to believe in the system,
Kandiyoti writes, to make it work for you. And Sweeney has figured this out,
and is flapping her $100 bills directly in our scrunched-up, reddening faces.
She first flexed her bargaining
skills in July 2025, following her dalliance with eugenics-inflected
advertising. This was the American Eagle denim campaign that bore the tagline,
“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” (ie, genes), which flirted too brazenly with
the aesthetics of white supremacy for a large portion of the internet’s liking.
…
I’d keep going except that’s where the paywall kicked in:
“Click here to subscribe.” Actually, I probably wouldn’t have quoted all that,
but for the paywall thing. Why? Because I think it’s really funny that writers
and magazines are cashing in on Sydney Sweeney’s cashing in.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am in no position to scold
anybody about paywalls or pandering to the demands of the market. Not long ago
I did a nearly two-hour podcast on Napoleon
III (and don’t miss next week’s episode on Frank Meyer and Fusionism).
But I like the market. I don’t think making money
is anything to be ashamed of absent some other considerations. Robbing people
is bad. Using your public office to get even richer is bad (I’m gesturing
toward the White House, in case you didn’t know). Heck, I even think hawking sports betting apps is not great, regardless of how
tantalizing or prurient the pitch. And while I cannot deny that my eyes have
lingered on Sydney Sweeney far longer than they have on Ruth Bader Ginsburg or
Yuval Levin, I am even willing to grant that posing (nearly) naked is not the
most admirable way to make money.
I’m old enough to remember when William F. Buckley Jr.
was complaining about the pervasiveness of porn as evidenced by the Abercrombie
& Fitch catalog. I think he made many good points, which have since boiled
away in the frog-boiling soup that is our thoroughly smuttified popular
culture. But I’m a conservative, and I feel like we’re supposed to complain
about such things, even if I’ve never been at the vanguard of smut-policing.
But, good Lord, has that ship sailed. Anyone remember
Paris Hilton on all fours eating a Carl’s Jr. cheeseburger? For you sickos,
here’s a reminder.
Or all of those ads of Marky Mark and Kate Moss in their underwear? (No links
for you! Google it. But first sign up for Express VPN! Use promo code
“Remnant”!).
I just gave a talk to some Fund for American Studies
students. The assigned reading was the introduction to The Myth of Left and
Right by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis. One of the very effective techniques the
authors use is to show how the positions held by the left and right move back
and forth over time. I don’t think they talk about porn in the book, but it
fits. When I was in college, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were
leading a crusade against porn as dehumanizing to women. It commodified women,
turned them into objects, reinforced sexual stereotypes, etc. I think they
sometimes overstated their case, but the case was pretty solid. There were
definitely feminists who disagreed, but in the early 1990s, the anti-porn side
of second-wave feminists had the whip hand, so to speak.
By the middle part of the decade, the pro-porn side
grabbed the whip, sometimes kinda literally. Camille Paglia is a special case,
but there was also Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy (author of XXX: A Woman’s
Right to Pornography), and all the feminists who embraced sex work, sex
“positivity”, etc. Suddenly, selling sex—literally and figuratively—was
empowering and cool.
I think there were wrong and right opinions all along the
continuum. But we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that. My only
point is that these arguments are often weaponized for essentially partisan
purposes. I don’t necessarily mean Republican vs. Democrat—though that
certainly happens. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat—not at all improbable
given that he was one for quite a long time—I’m sure his appearances in
softcore porn Playboy movies would have offended a lot of Republicans who now
couldn’t care less about his cameo in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins
(sorry pervs, no links to the actual movie). Heck, they don’t care that he
cheated on his (third) wife with Stormy Daniels, award-winning star of Sexbots:
Programmed for Pleasure. Heck, given all the AI chatter these days, I’m
surprised she hasn’t been interviewed on MS Now about that one. And, let us not
forget that many of the people who don’t care about Stormy D now cared a great
deal about Monica Lewinsky back then.
No, I simply mean partisan in terms of the culture wars
more generally. I think it’s preposterous to claim that Sweeney dallied “with
eugenics-inflected advertising” or “flirted” with the “aesthetics of white
supremacy.” The same ads could have been made with Beyoncé, and the people who
read “great jeans” as an offshoot of The Boys from Brazil would probably
be shouting “you go, girl!” at Beyoncé’s ownership of patriarchal white male
space or some such.
The obsession with Sweeney’s very familiar self-marketing
strategy is a great example of how media bias isn’t just about left versus
right. Sex sells. Ask any TV producer to choose between two hot controversies
(well, at least one of them is hot). The first is about water safety and the other is about
Sydney Sweeney using footballs to barely conceal her boobs. When the choice is
between a story with B-roll of people in lab coats testing water samples and
footage of Sweeney frolicking, guess which one they’ll pick? When the B in
B-roll stands for boobs—very nice ones, at least—your notes from that seminar
at the Columbia Journalism School achieve their highest utility as a coaster
for your coffee. I don’t make the rules.
This morning, in response to The New Statesman
piece, I tweeted that “People are just trying way, way, too hard on
this topic.” My friend Kyle Smith replied,
“When you’re writing about bazongas, you have to try extra hard to convince
yourself you’re writing an intellectual think piece.”
I agree, of course. But that made me wonder: Why don’t
more intellectual think pieces incorporate the modalities and vernacular of
bazonga discourse? Why do we have to wait for the news peg of commodified
ta-tas and tushes?
I want to see, say, Francis Fukuyama opine on the precarious state
of the Westphalian nation-state in the era of globalization while
unapologetically … uh… tapping Sydney Sweeney discourse and related imagery.
Something like:
For nearly four centuries, scholars
have treated the Peace of Westphalia as the moment the modern state acquired
its mature form, akin to that of Sydney Sweeney in White Lotus. Yet
generations of theorists have approached this development from an oddly
anterior perspective, like when Sweeney sits on the weight bench in the “Just
Sports” Novig ads. Viewed from the rear, the achievement of 1648 looks
considerably fuller. This posterior view of the Westphalian settlement gave
political order not only shape, but an appreciation of the tactile smoothness
of categories. The well-endowed state’s curves and contours not only gave
theorists a firm sense of where one jurisdiction ended and another began, it
gave them a sense of the firm. Sovereignty gathered peoples to the bosoms of
civilization, where the Overton window of the politically possible was
constrained by a kind of middle way or via media, where political
leaders were free to navigate, motorboating, as it were, between the Scylla of
retreating universalism and the Charybdis of autarky. Viewed from behind, this
framing was a false choice, though a tantalizingly voluptuous one. But until the
development of new international trading systems, most leaders were left in a
hard place, in what Samuel Huntington might have described as a tautology of
ta-tas.
Still, state sovereignty did not
free small states from the corset of big power domination, size still mattered.
Hard power elicits lip-biting desire to violate virgin territories, while soft
power invites the destabilizing threat of inadequate performance. What is
required for the post-Westphalian age is a more well-rounded approach.
Okay, that was stupid. But then again, so is the rest of
the Sweeney discourse.
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