Sydney Sweeney and Common-Sense Eugenics

Yes, sexy jeans ads have ideological content

The Internets have been roiling with discourse about Sydney Sweeney’s genes and/or jeans. The actor appeared in an American Eagle jeans ad which included the phrase “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” as the camera panned over her conventionally attractive body.

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Some on the left have argued that this is a eugenics dogwhistle, sexily/humorously touting Sweeney’s whiteness as part of her (conventionally) attractive attraction. The right meanwhile is split. Some far right Nazis have celebrated the ad as a victory for white supremacy; other conservatives have claimed that left criticism shows that progressives are censorious scolds who should be ignored/crushed. (Yes, I’m aware these two right responses are contradictory.)

I’m not really convinced that the ads were intended to be a white supremacist dogwhistle. Instead, I’d say that the ads are leaning into (and/or pulling on) what might be called the discourse of common-sense eugenics.

Even though eugenics is (rightly!) seen as bad and ugly, low-key eugenics assumptions and ideas continue to have a lot of cultural currency. Hollywood continues to feature ugly/disfigured villains and (conventionally) beautiful heroes because it broadly accepts the idea that good looks are linked to morality and bad looks to immorality. People believe that IQ measures some sort of real biological/genetic truth. People think the phrase “great genes” is meaningful, even though who is and is not considered attractive changes wildly in different cultural contexts, and even though the vast majority of genetic traits can be good and/or bad depending on a range of factors (being tall is great if you want to play basketball, less good if you want to travel on a plane.)

To be clear, common-sense eugenics is bad. It’s ableist; it’s racist; it’s classist. Like all eugenics, it is predicated on a belief that human diversity is a problem and that there is some single normative able white cishet body/brain that should be the standard for everyone. It’s casual and is generally not intended to be taken very seriously or to promote white supremacy…but the very casualness is itself part of why it’s insidious. It presents eugenics as…well, common sense—uncontroversial, inarguable, just something we all agree on.

A lot of the (non Nazi) right wing pushback has been framed as “It’s not about eugenics; it’s just an ad for jeans!” Or; “It’s not white supremacist; it’s just sexy.” But of course, ads, and jokes, and sexy ads and jokes, can (and always do!) have ideological content. What we think is funny and sexy is in itself ideological.

“Sydney Sweeney is hot and funny because she has great jeans/genes” is a joke. But it’s a joke in part because we’re supposed to think it’s trivially true that good genes=conventional attractiveness, and in part because it’s supposed to be a little sexy/exciting/naughty to think of Sydney Sweeney as a body designed by genetic chance/design for our visual pleasure.

Part of the attraction of eugenics is that it encourages you to see other human beings as manipulable sexual objects and bodies as things you can control/produce through knowledge and sex. Or, to put it another way, part of the power of eugenics is that it’s not just an intellectual discourse but an erotic one. The ad uses eugenics to suggest that the viewer possesses Sweeney by possessing knowledge about Sweeney—and of course further suggests that you can possess this body and this knowledge by buying jeans.

Again, none of this depends on the ads being intentionally designed as white supremacist dogwhistles. I kind of doubt they are, in part because to the extent we know anything about Sweeney’s politics, they aren’t right wing. Her passion project, Immaculate, is clearly, enthusiastically, anti-patriarchal and very anti-forced birth, as I discuss here.

In that piece I also point out that people like right-wing ghoul Richard Hanania have argued that Sweeney’s white breasts are somehow a triumph of right wing ideology. That’s not Sweeney’s fault though—and in fact I’d argue that it’s an example of virulent misogyny directed at Sweeney, since Hanania is repurposing her body for his own ends without her consent.

It is possible that someone in the writer’s room for American Eagle knows about Hanania and was riffing on him as a joke/as an act of white solidarity/as a way to generate controversy. It’s less likely, but still possible, that Sweeney herself saw this as a way to capitalize on the right-wing discourse about her.

It seems more probable, though, that the American Eagle writers were making a brainless pun fueled by common-sense eugenics and the fact that Sweeney is (again) very conventionally attractive. Given our current acceleration towards fascism, and the general institutional enthusiasm for that fascism in the media, it’s not unreasonable for people to be paranoid. And it’s certainly not unreasonable for people to find eugenic messages disturbing in our current context of official sexism, segregation, forced birth, and ableism.

Intent is hard to parse, but what our culture considers to be common sense, and who it considers to be the ideal, affects us all, even when (especially when?) those ideas are expressed in venues that seem trivial, like an ad for jeans.