Controversy sparked in July from the well-known actress of “Euphoria” and “Anyone about You”, Sydney Sweeney, regarding an advertisement for American Eagle. The blonde, blue-eyed actress posed in fitting jean pants and stated, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
The advertisement played with the words of jean and gene to creatively sell the product to the wide market of the Sydney Sweeney fanbase. They wanted to spread awareness of domestic violence with the butterfly symbol on one of the jeans in part of the collaboration. The sales revenue was going to be donated to the Crisis Text Line, and it sold out within a week.
Eugenics is so deeply ingrained in America’s history, institutions, history, and media. The American Eagle ad with Sydney Sweeney has disgusted thousands of individuals in the media with its blatant white supremacist ideals. The oversexualization of Sweeney’s body, blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin aligns with the “good genes” of eugenics. The advertisement is tone deaf in implementing white superiority and Nazi propaganda in a domestic violence awareness campaign. It is more than jeans.
The advertisement created an outrage on social media for the prominent promotion of eugenics. Eugenics was first coined by Francis Galton in 1883; however, it became a global scientific practice. It is known as a racist pseudoscience that highlights the “good genes” and rooting out “the bad genes” in society. Good genes are expressed to have the physical Nordic features of blue eyes, pale skin, and light hair. These good physical traits are seen as pure, while the “bad genes” are people of color, the LGBTQ+, individuals who have disabilities, and mental illnesses. Madison Grant, an American eugenicist, explained in his 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race” that women are the ones who maintain the purity of genes.
Eugenics is associated with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime for the death of six million Jewish people from 1933 to 1945. However, Hitler’s antisemitic writing was inspired by United States rhetoric, laws, and eugenics research.
The Eugenics movement started in the United States through marriage laws in Connecticut in 1896. It was illegal for individuals who had epilepsy and disabilities to be married. Eugenics was studied by Ivy League researchers and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. In California, there were 20,000 forced sterilizations in mental institutions from 1909 to 1979. They wanted to avoid any offspring from patients with mental illnesses and who were also minorities.
Throughout the 1900s, American white women aided the propaganda of eugenics through fairs and contests. Mary de Gamo created a contest in 1908 for “better babies” in the Louisiana State Fair, where young kids would be evaluated for their purity and healthy well-being. While Mary T. Watts and Florence B. Sherbon made Fitter Family Contests. Families sent their medical records and traits to be analyzed by medical doctors. These doctors would decide if they have the best eugenic health through these physical and mental records.
The current political climate is significantly heightened by the white supremacist ideals, ICE raids, and the current president of the United States, Donald Trump. Trump has been pushing actions to the continuous displacement of innocent families through deportations and to erase American history that includes minorities. The advertisement of Sydney Sweeney highlighted part of Trump’s goals of “Making America Great Again” for purity in race.
Despite the efforts of the Trump administration, minorities’ voices will not be silent. Many people and institutions are educating individuals about the history of the persistence of Black Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and immigrants during these times. There are cultural programs and protests for the injustices that are occurring in the U.S. The individuals who have the privilege to turn a blind eye are silent, like Sydney Sweeney. The erasure of people of color, disabilities, and LGBTQ+ individuals will continue to persist through the propaganda of eugenics and white supremacy.
Sweeney has recently commented in a GQ interview that the ad doesn’t affect her and remained unbothered. She will only comment if she really has an issue with it. Eugenics couldn’t affect a white woman in power socially and politically. Sydney Sweeney remained ignorant by not recognizing the deep history of eugenics and the problems with the advertisement. The response is tone deaf and highlights the normalization of white superiority in marketing.
However, the question remains: Will the trend of eugenics and white superiority continue to persist in marketing ads, movies, and shows? Or was it an overreaction in the media? Was it really just “jeans” or “genes?”
I remember watching this ad initially without any public commentary and automatically picking up on the “good genes” play on words with the deeper meaning behind the advertisement encouraging eugenics. I think anyone who looks at this ad and thinks Sweeney was just promoting American Eagle jeans is ignorant and uneducated. This ad was blatantly going back to Hitler’s regime and his concept of the ideal “Aryan”. Sweeney’s ad demonstrates propaganda today hidden within big corporations like American Eagle and being encouraged by politicians like Donald Trump. When corporations and politicians use coded messages like these to normalize ideas about genetic superiority, propaganda can gradually reshape social values and make harmful beliefs seem acceptable or even desirable.
This ad was such an interesting experiment as it demonstrates an almost unawareness to the history of “good genes” and eugenics when equating “good genetics” to Sydney Sweeney, a white, blonde woman. While I highly doubt that the advertiser is unaware of the history of eugenics and rather figure that the advertiser chose this plotline to spark outcry, I think that it is increasingly important that we discuss these histories in order to refute these ideas in the future. Recently Sydney Sweeney has engaged in an advertisement with a sports betting app in which she is fully nude and suggestively degrades the position of women in sports. Sweeney’s consistent adherence and participation in ads of this nature demonstrates a deeper issue and regression in the view of women in society.
I remember when this all came out and how outraged many people were. What struck me most about this campaign was that when Sydney Sweeney was interviewed and the journalist brought up the criticisms of the ad and how it related to eugenics, she simply played ignorant and said the ad was only about clothing. And regardless of whether that is true or not, and her past political statements seem to indicate otherwise, when you are a public figure, you are aware of the consequences of your actions. I would be surprised if no one around her had told her about what the consequences of this ad might be. Furthermore, since it’s been a long time since this ad, we recently saw the release of another ad with Sydney Sweeney. She appears naked “playing” various sports to advertise Novig, a sports betting platform that she is a shareholder in. This ad, like the first one, has underlying themes related to oppression. This ad, many female athletes argue, objectifies women in sports and recreates the narrative that sports is a male thing where women’s jobs are to simply be “looked at.” You did a great job at highlighting how this “basic” ad about jeans is actually about something deeper: eugenics. And now, looking at Sydney Sweeney today, there seems to be a pattern in the kind of ads she does.