In the grand carnival of human folly, where the pendulum of cultural obsession swings with the predictability of a metronome, we find ourselves once again fixated on the female form—specifically, the breasts of Sydney Sweeney, which have, through the alchemy of a 2025 American Eagle ad campaign, become the improbable battleground for the soul of Western civilization. If you believe the tabloids, the culture warriors, and the frothing commentariat on X, Sweeney’s 34DDs are not merely a physical attribute but the harbingers of a seismic shift, a voluptuous repudiation of the dour pieties of “woke” culture.
One might be forgiven for thinking we’ve stumbled into a time warp, back to the 1990s, when Pamela Anderson’s surgically enhanced bosom bobbed across the Baywatch sands, dictating the aesthetic terms of an era. The parallels are uncanny, yet the differences are instructive, and as we stand at this absurd crossroads, it’s worth dissecting the matter with the weary precision of a coroner tasked with autopsying a particularly overinflated myth. Let us begin with Sweeney, who, at the tender age of 27, has found herself hoisted onto the pedestal of cultural iconography, her breasts thrust into the spotlight by American Eagle’s latest campaign. The ads, a glossy parade of low-cut tops and artfully tousled hair, are less about selling jeans than about selling a fantasy—one that, to hear The Spectator tell it, heralds the triumphant return of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.”
The campaign’s imagery, all soft lighting and suggestive décolletage, has been catnip for a certain breed of conservative pundit, who see in Sweeney’s curves a middle finger to the body-neutral, pronoun-obsessed killjoys of the 2020s. The National Post, with the restraint of a toddler in a candy store, went so far as to ask, “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” One can almost hear the ghost of Marshall McLuhan choking on his martini, marvelling at how the medium of denim ads has become the message of cultural revanche.
Rewind three decades, and we find Pamela Anderson, the ur-blonde of the 1990s, whose own augmented assets were the stuff of legend. Her Baywatch swimsuit, a red Lycra shrine to the era’s obsession with pneumatic femininity, was less a garment than a cultural manifesto. Anderson’s breasts, first upgraded to 34D in 1990 and later to a gravity-defying 34DD, were not just appendages but totems of a time when Playboy was a coffee-table staple and the Wonderbra was a feminist flashpoint. As she quipped in her 2023 Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, “My boobs had a great career, and I was just tagging along for the ride.” The line is pure Anderson—self-aware, disarming, and tinged with the melancholy of a woman whose body was both her fortune and her cage. Her breasts were the currency of an era that worshipped at the altar of “raunch culture,” where embracing one’s sexuality was sold as empowerment, even as it fed the leering appetites of a male-dominated media machine.
The similarities between Sweeney and Anderson are so blatant they practically demand a PowerPoint presentation. Both women, blonde and curvaceous, have been reduced to their décolletage by a culture that loves nothing more than to fetishize what it claims to celebrate. Anderson’s Baywatch slow-motion jogs are the spiritual ancestor of Sweeney’s American Eagle poses, each frame engineered to maximize ocular fixation. Both have been politicized, their breasts weaponized in ideological tug-of-wars. In the 1990s, Anderson’s implants were a lightning rod for third-wave feminist debates—were they a bold assertion of sexual agency or a capitulation to patriarchal fantasy? Sweeney, meanwhile, finds herself cast as the Joan of Arc of anti-wokeness, her natural 34DDs hailed as a return to a prelapsarian era when women were allowed to be, as one X user charmingly put it, “hot without a side of sanctimony.” The irony, of course, is that neither woman asked for this mantle. Anderson was a victim of her era’s limited media landscape, where her image was controlled by TV execs and tabloid editors. Sweeney, by contrast, navigates the digital maelstrom of 2025, where every Instagram post and SNL sketch (who could forget her Hooters-themed turn in 2024?) is dissected by a million armchair semioticians.
Yet the differences are as telling as the parallels. Anderson’s breasts were a product of the 1990s’ love affair with cosmetic surgery, a time when breast augmentation was as aspirational as a Beemer in the driveway. Sweeney’s, we are repeatedly assured, are the real deal—a fact that seems to matter immensely to those who equate “natural” with “authentic,” as if silicone somehow invalidates one’s cultural capital. Anderson’s era was one of monolithic media narratives, where Baywatch and Playboy could dictate beauty standards with the authority of a papal encyclical. Sweeney’s 2020s are a fractured funhouse, where TikTok trends, X rants, and Vogue think-pieces collide in a cacophony of competing dogmas. Her American Eagle campaign, for instance, was both a marketing triumph and a cultural Rorschach test: to some, a celebration of unapologetic femininity; to others, a cynical regression to the days when women were judged by their cup size rather than their character.
The American Eagle campaign crystallizes this absurdity. Unlike Anderson’s Baywatch swimsuit, which was a cultural artefact as indelible as the Rosetta Stone, Sweeney’s ads are ephemeral, swallowed up in the endless scroll of social media. Yet their impact is undeniable, if only because they’ve given the chattering classes something to chatter about. The campaign’s aesthetic—Sweeney in plunging necklines, her breasts framed like the crown jewels—plays to the same primal instincts that made Anderson a household name. But where Anderson’s image was a product of a top-down media culture, Sweeney’s is a collaborative fiction, amplified by her own social media savvy and the internet’s insatiable appetite for outrage. When she posted behind-the-scenes shots from the campaign on Instagram, captioned with a coy “#AEJeans,” the likes rolled in like votes in a rigged election, proving that the oldest marketing trick in the book—sex sells—still has legs, or rather, cleavage.
So, is Sydney Sweeney’s breast-centric impact in the 2020s a match for Pamela Anderson’s in the 1990s? The answer, like a good bra, is supportive but not definitive. Anderson’s bosom was a singular phenomenon, a cultural monolith that defined a decade’s fantasies and insecurities. Sweeney’s, while undeniably prominent, are but one thread in a tapestry of competing narratives, where body positivity, diversity, and “wokeness” jostle for supremacy. The conservative claim that her American Eagle ads signal the “death of woke” is as risible as it is predictable—a culture war fever dream that mistakes a marketing campaign for a manifesto. Yet the fervour itself is telling, a reminder that we remain as obsessed with the female form as we were 30 years ago, just with better hashtags.
In the end, both women deserve better than to be reduced to their anatomy, but the world, being what it is, keeps score in cup sizes. Anderson, now in her late 50s, has reinvented herself as a makeup-free activist and indie film star, her breasts no longer the main event. Sweeney, still in the flush of youth, may yet chart a similar course, using her wit and talent to outlast the leering headlines. For now, though, her American Eagle campaign stands as a monument to our enduring idiocy—a shiny, airbrushed reminder that, in the grand sweep of history, the breast remains mightier than the sword, or at least the tweet. And so we march on, gawking and arguing, forever doomed to worship at the altar of the obvious.