Last month, my social media was flooded with content about the twenty-eight-year-old Republican actress Sydney Sweeney. “Sweeney is having the worst week in recorded history” one Instagram reel blares at me, listing off her woes of the week; her three newest movies vastly underperforming in the box office, getting into a messy public fight with her ex whilst seen kissing majorly hated music producer Scooter Braun amid rumours that Zendaya won’t be seen anywhere near her at upcoming Euphoria press events.
Yet all this gossip pales in comparison to Sweeney’s biggest misdemeanour yet. Let me recap in case you have been living under a rock the size of California. Last July, Sweeney appeared in an ad campaign for American Eagle. The white, blonde, American actress with a known MAGA fanbase paraded around a set, playfully zipping up jeans whilst her seductively husky tones voiced over with the tag line “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. The ad played on the pun of genes and jeans, “genes are passed down from parents to offspring” Sweeney whispers as the camera pans up her body.
To simplify the ad, the tagline is basically that this blonde, blue-eyed, white girl has great genes, echoing rhetoric associated with eugenics. With the approval of Donald Trump and the ad generating 10 to 20 times what was spent on its production it has been labelled by marketing bosses as a knockout success. In an interview published by GQ Sweeney was given ample opportunities to speak out, apologise or contextualise her mistake, instead she sat perfectly poised in the Chateau Marmont replying to questions unflustered with responses such as “the ad spoke for itself.” When asked about the fact the ad has raised concern about her affiliations with its meanings she coyly responded “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about people will hear.”
One can only hope she is following in the footsteps of Charlie XCX and will be shortly debuting a satire film about her life? No doubt with admirable brand sponsorship. But Sweeney’s abominable ad is not the point of my article, what has erupted from the ad is a violent American left vs right debate, the battleground: Sweeney’s body, or should I say, her genes. The Durham professor Nayanika Mookherjee puts it well when she says, “a woman’s body becomes the territory on which men inscribe their political programs”.
Bodies today are politicised more than ever and it’s terrifying that whilst the far-right grows so does a suppressed female figure, or in popular culture vocabulary ‘the heroin chic’. At the end of the day Trump, Musk, Altman and so many more will have to grapple with the fact that it is not their ideas and technologies that reproduce but wombs themselves, and therefore controlling reproduction through movements of eugenics becomes the goal.
This issue isn’t bound to America, with low fertility rates in Italy, procreation propaganda posters push against the great replacement conspiracy and in Japan Scholar Sujin Lee testifies to how women’s wombs are being reimagined as controllable entities.
Times journalist Katie Glass defends Sweeney saying she knows that she is going to be the centre of those discussions, women’s bodies are always used in this way, “she can’t seem to win” she says, even expressing glee at Sweeney’s apparently admirable joining in capacities. This is a take I don’t agree with. Glass’ central point that Sweeney is just a woman with boobs who went on telly and has been dramatically labelled the “harbinger of the death of woke”. But is it really too dramatic, in a time where Trump is clamping down on immigration, to say that a eugenics ad is going a tad further than just joining in the debate about her body.
Awful as it may be, I wait with bated breath to see Sweeney’s next move (after the Skims campaign, since that seems like the obvious next step).
“Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, and Ron Howard at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival 01” by Jay Dixit is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.