By Jacob Stowers | Digital Content Producer
Sydney Sweeney has been capturing our hearts and minds since the Novig “Just Sports” ad campaign dropped on September 9. What has followed has been nothing short of a cultural tornado across both sides of the aisle.
Columnist Sydney J. Harris once said, “Politics is a circle, not a spectrum; if you go far enough to the ‘left’ you meet yourself coming from the right; and, contrariwise, if you go far enough to the ‘right’ you meet yourself coming from the left.”
While I don’t necessarily agree that the political spectrum is a circle, I do agree that we have seen certain cultural and policy-based priorities change sides over the last century.
The media coverage of the Novig campaign has been immense, with people criticizing the ad for nudity, marginalizing women and its effect on women in sports. I am going to leave it to you, the reader, to interpret those concerns; however, the reaction from the right wing as a whole has stood out to me.
Republicans and Reagan-era conservatives have been historically anti-pornography, anti-nudity, and anti-gambling; however, Trump-era conservatives appear to have flipped some of those “old school” morals on their head.
For instance, a 1995 Calvin Klein Jeans ad featured almost naked women and an off-camera voice. That campaign resulted in widespread outrage from multiple famously conservative groups, including the Catholic League and American Family Association.
Even famously moderate democratic president Bill Clinton spoke out, calling the Calvin Klein ad “outrageous” in a statement.
We aren’t seeing this outrage from conservatives when it comes to Sweeney, however. It took left-wing Democrats’ and liberals’ misguided discussion on how the campaign affects women in sports to get conservatives talking about it.
In my opinion, the campaign isn’t a matter of whether the left or right agrees; it is indicative of the fact that the Republican Party has moved away from those good, down-home, upstanding values that President Reagan stood for.
That’s not to say that everyone in the Republican Party or even Trump supporters are awful, terrible people. Rather, our priorities appear to have been skewed.
The cultural resolution isn’t easy; it isn’t as simple as an opinion piece or people flinging platitudes at one another. The real fix will come when people focus on the right things. Family values and the church are how we, as a society, can start seeing campaigns like this end and see the true values that reflect the American people emerge.
Everyone can be outraged online, but it takes a unique kind of person to put in the work and create meaningful, positive cultural change.
