Sydney Sweeney Finally Addresses Ad Campaign

[timdrake 1,198]

1 hour ago, StrawberryBlond said:

I think the reason she stayed quiet wasn't because she secretly believed in this stuff but simply that she hoped that if she didn't say anything or draw attention to it, it would blow over. 

I agree, I don't think she wanted to amplify it either way, and I can understand hard-line not engaging with social media feedback as a defense mechanism as a celebrity. It's a failure of her PR that they didn't work with her to understand the scope, and have her respond to the criticism sooner. 

Edited yesterday at 02:16 AM by timdrake

[ANVEEROY 61,893]

So, she said nothing? 

[Bronco 14,221]

15 hours ago, Madame Goo Goo said:

It was a pun about jeans and Sydney Sweeney being pretty. It is not racist to say a pretty person has great genes. No reason to be offended when American Eagle’s MO is clearly not to promote eugenics.

Yeah the registered in florida republican absolutely had no idea that the pun was a blatant eugenics dogwhistle that became a social media rallying cry for white supremacists. 
She was just being pretty and funny. 

[Madame Goo Goo 4,040]

2 hours ago, Bronco said:

Yeah the registered in florida republican absolutely had no idea that the pun was a blatant eugenics dogwhistle that became a social media rallying cry for white supremacists. 
She was just being pretty and funny. 

She most likely didn’t realize it or even knows what a dog whistle is, let’s not forget republican voters are uneducated and dumb. She didn’t write the ad, I’m not defending her I’m defending the ad/American Eagle. But, yes, I still don’t think Sydney Sweeney connected it to Nazism or eugenics. Rich celebrity being a republican for family and money reasons ≠ nazism. People have lost their damn minds.

Edited 11 hours ago by Madame Goo Goo

[Bronco 14,221]

10 minutes ago, Madame Goo Goo said:

She most likely didn’t realize it or even knows what a dog whistle is, let’s not forget republican voters are uneducated and dumb. She didn’t write the ad, I’m not defending her I’m defending the ad/American Eagle. But, yes, I still don’t think Sydney Sweeney connected it to Nazism or eugenics. Rich celebrity being a republican for family and money reasons ≠ nazism. People have lost their damn minds.

I'm sorry but she signed to an ad that promoted her "perfect" blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin as good genes. 
It's not just that it made a pun about her having good genes. There were multiple clips contained within the campaign in which Sweeney monologues about actual genetics highlighting her hair and eye colour. 

American Eagle have even cut that video from their campaign. 

Like I'm all for "republicans are dumb", but saying "republicans are dumb" to deflect from a registered republican highlighting her aryan characteristics and explicitly calling them good genes as a double entendre for a marketing campaign is just burying your head in the sand and singing la-la-la.

[Lumiere 5,745]

Anyway, watch the far superior ad:

 

[StrawberryBlond 15,041]

1 hour ago, Madame Goo Goo said:

She most likely didn’t realize it or even knows what a dog whistle is, let’s not forget republican voters are uneducated and dumb. She didn’t write the ad, I’m not defending her I’m defending the ad/American Eagle. But, yes, I still don’t think Sydney Sweeney connected it to Nazism or eugenics. Rich celebrity being a republican for family and money reasons ≠ nazism. People have lost their damn minds.

There are some Republicans who are good people and intelligent (which is when you can be surprised by who they vote for). People's political choices can be driven by a small selection of issues that are important to them and it doesn't mean they support everything a party believes in, but they do like the parts that suit them. There were a lot of Republicans who didn't like Trump and voted Democrat for the first time ever as the idea of Trump as president was too awful to contemplate. I'm just saying unless someone is very clearly a bad person, we shouldn't immediately make assumptions about who they are or what they believe/don't believe based on their voting choices. But yes, the focus should be on the actual writers of the ad, Sydney's just the face of it who spoke the lines, yet she's taking all the heat, which isn't fair. And absolutely, we lose sight of how many people stay loyal to the politics that they grew up with because it just feels normal and comfortable to them. I've seen many people who grew up in conservative, Christian Republican families who cite themselves as such, yet they live a life worlds away from those labels. I once saw a quote in a book talking about how the way America's love of raunch in Republican Bush's reign (it was written in 2004) might seem surprising but that "raunch culture transcends elections. The values people vote for are not necessarily the same values they live by. Claiming to be Christian or voting Republican may be a way of expressing how they wish things were in America rather than a product of the way they actually experience it."

1 hour ago, Bronco said:

I'm sorry but she signed to an ad that promoted her "perfect" blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin as good genes. 
It's not just that it made a pun about her having good genes. There were multiple clips contained within the campaign in which Sweeney monologues about actual genetics highlighting her hair and eye colour. 

American Eagle have even cut that video from their campaign. 

Terms like "you have good genes," "you're genetically blessed" and "you won the genetic lottery" have been around for a long time and are just a high faulting way of saying: "you're hot." They can be applied to any race. If you would have no problem with it if it were a person of any other race saying the line, it's only a problem when white people say it, then there's inconsistency there. The ad didn't say that white genes were superior. Neither did they say that traditionally white characteristics were superior or that Sydney's looks specifically were superior. They literally said "great," not "the best." All different kinds of genes can be great. And it's also worth pointing out that the lettering in the ad spelled JEANS not GENES. If it did spell genes, I would totally understand where the criticism was coming from. But as it stands, it's just a basic jeans/genes pun combined with sex sells marketing. It's only a dog whistle if you want to believe it is. Guaranteed if no one made a fuss about it, genuinely racist people wouldn't have commandeered the phrase un-ironically. Drawing attention to and criticising what they thought was racism brought the real racists out. Ironic. 

Also, there was more than one ad in the campaign as you said. I watched all of them. The one that talks about biology is the only ad of its kind. The rest is of her saying "I'm not asking you to buy the jeans but you can if you want," getting into a car and driving away, a 360 camera shot of her standing and her doing a read-through of a modelling interview. After each one, the narration would be "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans." That's it. There were no multiple clips of her talking about genes, it was just that one. And that was a direct rip-off of the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad from the 80's where she also talked about the biology behind genes while buttoning up jeans. The controversy should've been how much of a blatant rip-off the ad was. And of course American Eagle have cut it now because they didn't want any more criticism. Isn't that not a good thing if you didn't like it?

[Mother of Puppies 36,515]

On 12/6/2025 at 9:36 PM, Eros92 said:

 She does in fact have great genes, she’s very pretty. It literally coulda been anyone but they picked her because she was hot in the moment.

I honestly thought it was a reference to her big boobs  (cuz honestly they look good & I think she’s pretty)

Edited 7 hours ago by Mother of Puppies

[Bronco 14,221]

2 hours ago, StrawberryBlond said:

Terms like "you have good genes," "you're genetically blessed" and "you won the genetic lottery" have been around for a long time and are just a high faulting way of saying: "you're hot.

You should look at when they came around lol

 

[StrawberryBlond 15,041]

4 hours ago, Bronco said:

You should look at when they came around lol

 

Do you mean I should consider why we have those phrases? They've hardly got racist origins. It's just in our biological make-up ingrained in us as humans that we see attractive, fit and youthful looking people of our species and think "they must have had strong, healthy parents." Animals operate the same way, to choose the strongest mate to produce healthy offspring. As humans, we just have a more refined and humane take on the same thing. There's nothing racially motivated about it, these phrases are used by all races to all races, not just whites towards other whites. Probably the most common usage I hear of it is when someone's young looking for their age, like: "They're 40? I thought they were about 25. Wow, good genes." If you can find something racially sinister about that, I don't know what to tell you. 

[Ladle Ghoulash 30,444]

8 minutes ago, StrawberryBlond said:

Do you mean I should consider why we have those phrases? They've hardly got racist origins. It's just in our biological make-up ingrained in us as humans that we see attractive, fit and youthful looking people of our species and think "they must have had strong, healthy parents." Animals operate the same way, to choose the strongest mate to produce healthy offspring. As humans, we just have a more refined and humane take on the same thing. There's nothing racially motivated about it, these phrases are used by all races to all races, not just whites towards other whites. Probably the most common usage I hear of it is when someone's young looking for their age, like: "They're 40? I thought they were about 25. Wow, good genes." If you can find something racially sinister about that, I don't know what to tell you. 

Btw, the answer is that the father of eugenics developed the concept (which is an inherently racist pseudoscience). I understand what you’re saying about the colloquial use being pretty harmless, but in all fairness, you kind of stepped directly on a rake by saying the concept doesn’t have racist origins when the origins are explicitly racist lol

Edited 2 hours ago by Ladle Ghoulash

[uo111 5,266]

On 12/6/2025 at 8:14 PM, timdrake said:

I agree, I don't think she wanted to amplify it either way, and I can understand hard-line not engaging with social media feedback as a defense mechanism as a celebrity. It's a failure of her PR that they didn't work with her to understand the scope, and have her respond to the criticism sooner. 

It’s not a failure, her PR team waited until she stopped being talked about for her to “address it” so she would be talked about again.

 

The problem is, she isn’t talented enough for this. 

[StrawberryBlond 15,041]

1 hour ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

Btw, the answer is that the father of eugenics developed the concept (which is an inherently racist pseudoscience). I understand what you’re saying about the colloquial use being pretty harmless, but in all fairness, you kind of stepped directly on a rake by saying the concept doesn’t have racist origins when the origins are explicitly racist lol

I'll own up to not knowing that but even so, two things can be true at once. Perhaps the terms were founded and popularised on racist principles but over time, they were forgotten and have now been used, like you say, in a colloquial and harmless way. I'd argue that the origins got stripped away when it became a complimentary phrase used towards anyone. There's a lot of catchphrases that have unfavourable origins but most of us don't even know because that meaning is not felt in the modern usage nor has negative effects in the modern day. Many words change meaning over time. What it used to mean doesn't matter, what it means in the here and now is what matters. Of course, that's not the case for slurs but most other words hold one definition at a time. Unless someone is an actual eugenicist, complimenting someone's good genes has no harmful connotations and I've never heard anyone take issue with it until this ad.

[Domino 2]

Her PR had enough of her bullshit.. her career is over anyway. Good luck on Hallmark!