I finally watched the American Eagle x Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes ads and I was appalled. The fact that companies now have the audacity to make a national ad like that doesn’t bode well. I’m black so personally I found it to be triggering. It was obviously a thinly veiled promotion of eugenics.
What creeped me out even more is that in one of the ads, it seemed like the subtext was that she was offering herself to be bred with the goal of passing on her “pure white genes” to future offspring. This is reflective of the part of the conservative movement in the U.S. that resulted in the rollback of Roe v. Wade. White men want to force white women to be nothing more than breeders to increase the white population of the country in order to combat the changing ethnic demographics. It is just as damaging to white women and shows that she is even willing to hurt her own just for a buck.
The discourse surround this is also aggravating. Some are literally just gaslighting those who call it out but that’s nothing new. What annoys me more is seeing people trying to give Sydney nuance and attempt to rationalize her motivations and pretend like she has this complex duality. She’s just an opportunistic snake oil salesman who is selling her own bathwater and therefore no classier than this woman who sold her farts online to perverts. We don’t need to pretend like it’s anything deeper than that. Sydney Sweeney is a MAGA racist. Racists do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. They haven’t earned it and never will.
I don’t have enough faith in the entertainment industry to believe that she will be cancelled for this professionally. But I do think that we should boycott her wherever possible. Women have no reason to buy the jeans she endorses or anything else that they think she can get us to buy.
Edit: These are the ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ibvR0vLYd8
Edit 2: Thank you very much to whomever gave me an award.
Comments
Every industry is kissing the ring and it’s revolting. She already was getting a lot of attention from nazis because of how she looks. I never thought ill of her before, but I certainly do now.
Gwen Stefani is another one doing this too. She’s been peddling that religious app Mark Whalberg (a maga) created.
I think people are blowing it out of proportion.
It’s a pun
I’m a white person and I agree, it’s a dog whistle to rebrand what is considered desirable to the masses.
Moving it from body positivity and diversity is great to this bull crap about good genes and Trump going after Obama, Oprah and Beyoncé.
Like sure Jan, I can see what you are doing. And just because people deny it’s that deep or has a racist meaning doesn’t mean they don’t absorb the messages from our govt and media.
Super sad. In person though, I find people being very nice and even more connected to each other, wanting to grow. So maybe this will help people see how broken this whole system is, and want to participate in making something better.
Watching a corporate brand named “American Eagle” slipped into fascism is not surprising. Maybe they will go the Hugo Boss route and make the military uniforms with skulls and swastikas on them whenever this country reaches its final form.
I’m hoping this is the final gasp of a society built on genocide and slavery and nothing else. There are so many people on this planet and most of them have brown skin. As a white woman, I don’t understand how other people who look like me can discard an another human for having a darker shade of skin. This shit has to end soon or we are all screwed.
this whole thing is the fakest ourage i have ever seen in my life
They blew such an inclusion opportunity in my opinion. Could have been stellar with all body types and skin colors, all being proud of their genes/jeans.
Instead it’s this one-note blonde/blue-eyed boring mess, that’s a dumb ad at best. I saw a lineup of the people who’d’ve had to approve it, and wasn’t shocked to see all white faces. This is why DEI matters.
Christ get a grip. Don’t like the commercial, don’t buy their products. Sweeney is good at one thing and it’s sexualizing herself for personal and financial gain. People are reading way too much into this and projecting their fears from very real problems onto a completely innocuous, poorly written commercial.
I am on anti consumption path.
Less buying of all the crap is better
Fuck AE.
Fascists are too comfortable in USA right now…
I havent seen an advert in decades due to adblocks and other assorted shit, so when this first appeared in my view (via reddit) i was cautiously curious. As a progressive i feel like im constantly having to ascertain if a “thing” is real or its just the crazier left doing their usual. It took only one quick dip into r/outoftheloop (and r/peterexplainthejoke) to see it was real.
If the immediate response is attacking and gaslighting and not, you know, explaining why “lefties” are pissed i know it touched a real nerve. It reminds me immediately of the online campaigns telling me the white power hand sign aint real, or the kid fucking with the native drummer wasnt a piece of shit. Motherfucker, i have eyes (ive since watched the ad, one black woman in the writers room was all it needed).
I overheard my white coworkers discussing it- they could not for the life of them understand what the problem was with the ad. They went back and forth like “I do not get why people are so upset!!” Well yeah, Susan. You’re white, and look exactly like Sydney Sweeney.
It’s just so maddening and you can’t even have discussions about race at work anymore. All of my coworkers are white, and I’m white too. But if you even slightly suggest that something is racially biased to favor white people- they act like you’ve called someone a slur. It’s literally insane how fragile a large amount of white people are. So blind and they just surround themselves with people who look exactly like them so they don’t have to feel any discomfort or guilt for the way our country has treated POC for hundreds of years.
Btw I hate my company and am trying to find a new job but every place I interview at is whiter than the last. Anyone who says our country isn’t undergoing an extreme white washing is delusional at best.
I can’t believe this got through how many people to actually get produced
Eugenics? 😂
Anyone who thinks this is unintentional does not understand how ads get made. Multiple companies I have worked at had stat breakdowns on how models performed in ads by race and gender. Working with a celebrity, there are additional layers of approvals by her team and theirs.
It’s a pun, and a joke about her breasts, and a dogwhistle to the right that’s already been seized upon. All these things are true.
Idgaf about the bathwater. Whatever. I do care about this.
My family wasn’t disturbed by it until I told them it looked like an onlyfans ad. Now we’re ALL outraged, but for very different reasons.
There’s way more posts talking about this than any posts about the content in question. Can we get like a link or something?
[removed]
Seems like a very successful commercial
Yall should google “inside American Eagle store” and scroll through the pictures. Tell me about the models in the pictures you see on the walls. Half or more are POC. Be more alarmist tf
American eagle outfitters ushering in the third reich one jean at a time
Speak. It’s very aggravating to remind people of what eugenics is and how its history is intertwined into our media, mannerisms socially, and how we speak even if we’re all sorts of colors and backgrounds. Also non-Americans seem to think they’re exempt from needing to acknowledge eugenics, a LOT of big, influential countries (you too Italy) were participating in the “science” of eugenics and the marketing/promotion of those “good genes” through sales of products.
Someone I responded to asked what “good genes” has to do with genetics and I felt like all those years of middle school history and having Holocaust survivors speak to us was for nothing. No one listened to any of that like some others were listening/couldn’t ignore it.
If it’s such a dog whistle why are y’all hearing it?
Worst dog whistle ever.
When I was 16, I was approached by this man who I’ll describe as older, very unkissable, and likely had a collection of pointy white hats at home. In Walmart. He said I looked ‘pure and wholesome’ and would make ‘breathtaking blue eyed babies’ and if I was of ‘like mind’ his own son was looking to start the process of finding a life mate.
I straight up lied (I wasn’t dating yet, much less planning to birth the 4th Reich) and said my Indian BF wouldn’t like that at all. He cringed away like I’d slapped him.
Well, well, well. I’m married to a Native American now.
Add the Dunkin Donut’s latest commercial to this very odd marketing campaign of “genetics” being mentioned in commercials. Anybody defending these commercials are obviously the target audience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1md9ihl/another_ad_mentioning_genetics_dunkins_latest_ad/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
On a counterpoint to Dunkin and AE commercials, the Ralph Lauren Oak Bluffs campaign is beautiful. I highly recommend checking out the 20 min documentary on youtube.
She attended bezos tacky wedding. Tells you what you need to know.
Y’all know she’s a natural brunette right?
… They’re just really dumb ads all around?
The jeans are ugly.
The “jeans” they are referring to are, at the most generous, a “play” on “Sydney Sweeney has great tits”, and are also very easily interpreted as overt racism given gestures wildly. If “at best” you’re sexist, it’s a bad ad to a good proportion of the demographic who normally buy AE jeans.
The ad colour palette is very dated, very greige, very bland – who is that appealing to? It doesn’t really show the jeans off, just associates them with ‘dull’ IMO.
Anyway, yeah, definitely wouldn’t make me more likely to buy AE jeans, doesn’t even intrigue me a little bit.
quit being such a whiny loser it’s just an ad
> obviously a thinly veiled promotion of eugenics
I think this is a reach… I can promise you, the AE board was not sitting around developing this massive ad campaign to promote eugenics.
I’ve used a “Good Genes” moisturizer before and it’s a similar approach. That product plays it up like, “Oh wow look she’s so beautiful, she must have ‘Good Genes’.” They’re using the pun to sell a product, same as here.
Unfortunately, this AE ad is a wild success. Even us discussing it right now is exactly what they want. This thing BLEW up all over the internet, with people either promoting it because Sydney Sweeney, or people who would never talk about it promoting it due to criticism. They’re getting tons of publicity, and we’ll see more like it due to that.
I see this ad as far more sexist (sex sells / all she has to offer in this whole campaign is her looks) than it is about promoting eugenics. They took a “big boobs hot girl”, made a pun about jeans/genes, slapped in on TV, and people have gone wild.
To be honest I honestly feel like the ad was just a mistake made by complete morons. But enough legit mainstream promotion of eugenics exist that it could be.
Either way I agree it was monumentally terrible ad, idk how it got past the brain storming phase.
I just wanna know why she sounds like Cartman.
Personally I felt it was going for more of a breeding kink kind of thing, which is still weird and pandering to the right if you have it out in the open as opposed to a private kink, but yea I can see how it could be a dog whistle.
I doubt Sydney Sweeney wrote any of the lines in the ad, and they probably had her read like hundreds of other lines, of course she still said them though. In my opinion, it feels like someone at AE is a pro-natalist and snuck some of that messaging (which is very close to eugenics don’t get me wrong, and is all the rage with rich executives right now) into the ad.
Have you seen the Brooke Shields ad from the 1980s it was copying almost verbatim? (Which is creepy at because she was like 14,)
Anyone who is offended by this is the reason Donald Trump is president. You are so weak and annoying you pushed the independents to the right
If any beautiful black girl did the same ad would it feel any different? Whether you agree or not (I don’t) Sydney is considered to be one of the most attractive young celebrities out there. She should be able to do a pretty silly ad without be equated to a white supremacy.
Just don’t forget what they did years from now when they backtrack.
All I see is a revamp of Brooke Shield’s Calvin Klein commercial from 1980.
I was expecting it to be more subtle, this is disgustingly clear
Really disappointed in myself because I saw the ad on instagram and was just like “hmm that’s weird, don’t know if I’d go with that but whatever” and went on happily with my day. I fully agree with your post so my comment is just to show that this ad campaign whizzed right by me (a white guy) and it’s got me wondering what else I’m not thinking critically about enough. Done so much reading but not enough practice I guess. Thanks for speaking up about this disgusting campaign.
I’ve just seen people discussing it and reentacting it (but making it obvious it’s awful). I bought 1 thing from AE in the last 20 years and I’m mad now I did that. Old Navy has a clapback ad apparently, so there’s that.