The previous week or two has been filled with the shrieking of Leftist harpies. Granted this isn’t an unusual occurrence in the Age of Trump 2.0, but this time it had nothing to do with the President.
This week it was all about blue jeans.
Or, more specifically who was wearing them. I’m talking about the current it-girl, Sydney Sweeney, and her ads for American Eagle jeans. The tagline is “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans,” which is a clever play on words. Well, apparently if you think that way, you’ve heard a dog whistle about racism, Nazis, another Nickelback album…you know, all the horrible things wrapped into one denim-covered box.
Since I’ve heard the phrase “dog whistle” more times than Michael Moore goes back for more food at an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet paid for by Bernie Sanders, I figured it might be a good time to update the Lexicon with a new entry.
dog whistle
What the Left thinks it means – subtle coding for extremist views
What it really means – a well-worn phrase that doesn’t mean what the Left thinks it means
When there’s a new term I need to get the details on, I go to where all the hip kids go for definitions, Urban Dictionary. Although there are numerous definitions of the term, they tend to have a common theme: it’s secret code. You know, like the secret codes you would find on the back of the fun cereal boxes, only edgier? I mean, that is unless you were eating Sugar Frosted Fascists cereal.
Anyway, the suggestion is once a certain segment of the population hears these secret messages it encourages the ones in the know to take certain actions to further whatever cause the dog whistle is geared towards. A racist dog whistle might cause some people to burn a cross, scrawl graffiti in certain neighborhoods, or, horror of horrors, vote Republican. A fascist dog whistle might cause some people to hate Jewish people, scrawl graffiti on synagogues, or…
No, wait. That last one tends to lean more Left these days. Never mind.
The key here is the message only gets to certain people. Others won’t be affected by it because they’re not in the target group, not unlike an actual dog whistle. Time to put on my lab coat and pretend to be more of a scientist than Bill Nye.
When you blow into a dog whistle, it emits a high-pitched sound that humans can’t hear, but your pupper Spot can. Or whatever your dog’s name is. Dog whistles don’t discriminate, which is more than I can say for the Democratic National Committee, who seems to discriminate against competent and sane people.
In other words, in order for your dog to respond to a dog whistle, he or she has to hear it in the first place. Which means if Leftists keep calling out all of these dog whistles they hear but no one else can…
The Party of Science, kids!
Seriously, though, the use of metaphorical dog whistles is a tactic of the Left to get you to think of something in certain terms. With the American Eagle jeans ads, the Left wants you to conflate jeans with genes since they sound the same. From there, the Left extrapolates having good jeans is akin to wanting good genes, which leads right into white supremacy and Nazis because, well, those seem to be the only words Leftists know these days.
Meanwhile in the not-bat-shit-insane portion of the world, it’s neither. As with many things Leftists get upset about, you have to read a lot of context and sub-context and sub-sub-context and Voyage-To-the-Bottom-of-the-Sea- context to get anywhere close to what the Left wants us to think/feel about a matter.
And it’s never a positive thing. No matter what, the dog whistles only go in a negative direction. Leftists never talk about a dog whistle that inspires people to buy ice cream when it’s hot. That’s because a) they can’t frame ice cream in racial terms (no, not even vanilla), b) they are joyless fucks, and c) they’re too busy bitching about climate change to enjoy ice cream.
When you look at the world through the Leftist perspective, you’re going to be sad and/or pissed. That means even the most innocuous thing will have evil intent in the Leftist hivemind, even if it’s more imaginary than actual. That’s how George W. Bush and Mitt Romney became Nazis in spite of exhibiting zero fascist tendencies, only to have them become the elder statesmen of the anti-Trump right that even Leftists can stomach. Which makes them Nazi sympathizers when you really think about it.
Sorry, Leftists. You made the rules. I’m just here to apply them evenly.
There’s an old saying: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Not only does that make shop class a lot more interesting, but it definitely applies to the Left calling everything from Tesla to American Eagle jeans “Nazi.” And that goes double for the “dog whistles” the Left keeps hearing. The more you have to explain how something is racist, sexist, homophobic, Nazi, etc., the less likely it is to be that.
The audience at my last stand up show can tell you that. That’s the last time I do a gig in a coma ward.
Even if you allow the current sociopolitical climate is ripe for Nazi rhetoric (which I do to an extent), you’d still have a pretty rough task ahead of you trying to explain how the tagline and Sydney Sweeney herself is even close to being literal Nazis. Mainly because they’re not. It’s a clever slogan, and as the advertising and prostitution industries know all too well, sex sells. Sure, I’m sure there is a jean market for pansexual paraplegic albino Alaskan amputees, but if that’s your entire focus, you’re going to lose money faster than Hunter Biden loses his crack. You have to appeal to the larger market, and for now Sydney Sweeney is what brings boys (or at least their mothers and sisters) to the yard.
So, if you’re a Leftist reading this, just drop the dog whistle rhetoric on this one. You’re making yourselves look like fucking idiots, and I say that as one. All this complaining is drawing more attention to the ads and the product and has already caused American Eagle’s stock prices to rise. In other words, the same thing that happened to albums and CDs with the content warning labels from the 1980s. You could have just learned the lesson Tipper Gore did, but nooooooo. You just had to turn an innocuous tagline into a giant rake you keep stepping on and getting smacked in the head. Brilliant fucking work, kids.
I paraphrase Sigmund Freud: sometimes a hot woman in jeans is just a hot woman in jeans.
