TLDR: The Sydney Sweeney / American Eagle backlash drives debate over eugenics-coded rhetoric, “traditional” femininity, and a wider cultural turn.
Actress Sydney Sweeney is once again embroiled in controversy. This time the debate isn’t centred around Sweeney selling soaps infused with her bathwater or posting pictures of MAGA-inspired red caps. Instead, the Euphoria star is making rounds for her role in a contentious ad campaign with American Eagle Outfitters.
While the entire campaign sparked debate online, one particular ad has drawn especially intense criticism.
In it, Sweeney lounges artfully on a chaise while fastening a pair of American Eagle jeans. In a breathy voiceover, she says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour.”
As the camera slowly pans upward and she turns her eyes toward the viewer, Sweeney concludes, “My jeans are blue.”
Commentators and social media users have argued the campaign serves as a conservative dog whistle, conveying thinly veiled support for white supremacy and eugenics.
American Eagle released a statement defending the ad on August 1, writing “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans,” on Instagram.
Innocent marketing or intentional dog whistle?
Eugenics is a discredited ideology rooted in white supremacy and scientific racism. It promotes the false belief that racial groupings are biologically determined, and that some groups are genetically superior to others and should selectively reproduce to preserve their “good genes.”
Historically, the end goal of eugenics has been to eliminate so-called “bad genes” — often associated with non-white, disabled, poor or otherwise marginalized communities — so social elites can maintain their dominance.
Fashion advertising playing on eugenic themes has a long history. Commentators have gestured to similarities between the Sweeney ad and the infamous 1980s campaign for Calvin Klein featuring a then-15-year-old Brooke Shields, who rolls around in her Calvins while talking about genetic codes, evolution and survival of the fittest — language evocative of eugenic thinking.
The American Eagle campaign appears to be a direct homage to the Calvin campaign, but is rhetoric reminiscent of eugenics really something we want to reference in marketing?
The return of ‘traditional’ femininity
The American Eagle campaign is pointedly titled “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” with “jeans” sometimes swapped out for “genes.” It’s clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
But this is not just a harmless ad. If the campaign didn’t reflect broader cultural tensions, neither U.S. President Donald Trump nor Sen. Ted Cruz would have commented on it.
“The crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,” Cruz wrote in a tweet about the controversy. A right-wing media outlet went further, claiming body positivity was bringing “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack … to the brink of extinction.”
With its celebration of Sweeney’s conventionally attractive appearance, American Eagle has reintroduced the “traditional” feminine figure loudly and proudly. In this sense, the campaign symbolizes a changing of the cultural tides: out with body positivity, in with the “amazing rack” and all it signifies.
In our present cultural moment saturated with conservative messaging, Sweeney — a young, thin, white and sexualized Hollywood star — is hardly a surprising figure to hear extolling the quality of her “genes” (sorry, jeans).
From the rise of tradwife influencers and SkinnyTokers to the ritualized feminine performance of “morning shedders,” the campaign lands squarely within a broader revival of regressive feminine ideals wrapped in aspirational, white-washed beauty.
Exorcising self-love from the corporate agenda
As a feminist media scholar interested in the intersection of pop culture and the far right, my ongoing research explores the rise of anti-feminism and right-wing politics. We are no longer in the age of popular feminism, when corporations eagerly appropriated feminist rhetoric to sell their products and services.
In its place, brands are reverting to traditional imagery: thin, white women styled for the male gaze — a term referring to the objectification and sexualization of women in popular media, from film and television to fashion ads. It’s a strategy that has long worked for them, and it’s one they’re glad is back in vogue.
The aesthetic regression encapsulated in the Sweeney American Eagle campaign reveals what many critics suspected all along: the corporate embrace of feminism was never sincere.
Campaigns touting “love your body,” “empowerment,” and “confidence” in the late 2010s and early 2020s were intentionally designed to court progressive consumers and profit from the popularity of feminism. The core business model of these corporations — sell insecurities and reap profits for shareholders — had not fundamentally changed.
If anything, as other scholars argue, self-love marketing encouraged women to not only upgrade their bodies but also their minds. It was no longer culturally acceptable that women look good; they had to also feel good about their bodies. That standard required more work and, of course, products, which brands happily supplied.
Spurred on by an increasingly conservative political climate, many brands are no longer shy about expressing their motives. Thin is back in and whiteness is re-associated with rightness.
Living through the cultural backlash
As I have argued elsewhere, we are currently living in backlash times. In her 1991 book, journalist Susan Faludi wrote that backlash is “a recurring phenomenon” that “returns every time women begin to make some headway toward equality.”
Although many news articles are describing a consumer “backlash” to the Sweeney American Eagle campaign, I’m referring to something different: the rise of a cultural backlash against progressive social movements and politics. This backlash is currently taking shape across political, legal and economic domains, and it goes beyond a single ad.
Today’s current backlash is a reaction to popular feminism, Black Lives Matter, DEI and incisive systemic analyses found in feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship and activism. The Sweeney campaign is just one expression of this larger pattern.
Faludi shrewdly observed that “images of the restrained women line the walls of the popular culture’s gallery” during periods of backlash. That insight feels newly relevant.
Just days after American Eagle dropped its campaign, Kim Kardashian’s company SKIMS released their “sculpt face wraps” — a product designed to give users a more “sculpted” jawline. On the SKIMS website, product images show women ensnared in products that resemble Hannibal Lecter’s famous mask or a surgical brace. They are disconcerting, to say the least.
If Faludi has taught us anything, it’s that a trend of images showing women restrained — physically or to rigidly defined roles — are not only harbingers of a menacing future, but are indicative of a chilling present that we must recognize to resist.
Written by Meaghan Furlano, PhD Student, Sociology, Western University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
