Eugenics in Popular Culture | A Beginners Guide
Is American Eagle Really Using Eugenic Advertisements in 2025?
In short: yes. Dr Lucy H and PhD researcher Jay M use their academic knowledge to dissect their ‘Good Genes/Jeans’ campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney in their Podcast ‘Your Thoughtful Besties’.
Here is a brief summary of our discussion with some very important resources, recommended reading to further your own knowledge on the subject, and a hub for the videos, key figures, and events mentioned in the episode.
Firstly, what is American Eagle’s Advertisement Campaign? You can find the commercial below:
Believe it or not, this was not the first advertising campaign to feature the theme of genetic inheritance. American Eagle paid homage to Calvin Klein’s 1980s advertisement campaign featuring Brooke Shield. Both advertisements reference genetic science but not in the same way.
As you can see from the advert below:
Brooke Shield’s personal genetics are not the centre piece of discussion here, there is no ‘Brooke Shield has great genes/jeans’ aspect to this advert and the tone is very different.
The use of genetics in the dialogue is to demonstrate how Calvin Klein’s jeans are the best ‘jeans/genes’ and are therefore the ‘fittest’ for their environment within the clothing market. Shield’s acting adds to this dimension as her positions are to show the range of movement Calvin Klein’s jeans allow the wearer. Calvin Klein are claiming to have the best jeans on the market, not that a woman with ‘great genes/jeans’ is wearing their clothes.
Whilst both advertisements feature genetic science for the general populace and a savvy play on words, only the American Eagle advertisement claims that it knows what good genes/jeans really look like. Apparently, they look like Sydney Sweeney.
In the podcast, we go into more detail about what eugenics really is and why the campaign with Sydney Sweeney has a very dangerous tone. Eugenics was coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883. The publication it can be found in is Inquiries into the Faculties of Human Development (wordy title, I know). We wouldn’t recommend it as a riveting and informative read but here is the link to a copy of it if anyone is interested in reading up on the context of the term’s creation.
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For those who wish for a quick paraphrase— eugenes is the term for ‘good stock’ used in Ancient Greece. Eugenics is therefore the appropriation of this root word to describe shaping the future of ‘human stock’ in whichever way is most desirable, decided of course, by those in control of reproduction.
The conversation naturally follows the original creation of the term into how the Nazi government practiced eugenics to achieve its goals, including Hitler’s introduction of the Mother’s Cross medals in 1938. They were medals cast in bronze, silver, or gold that awarded German mothers status for having multiple children.
The National Holocaust Museum states here that these medals were only awarded to ‘women fulfilling Nazi racial ideals’ in order to receive one ‘both parents of the children had to be German blooded in line with Nazi ideas of racial purity, and mothers had to be considered worthy.’ The worthiness of those considered eligible for the medal was based on the genetic inheritance of perceived ‘good stock’ qualities, if one wanted to demonstrate the direct connection between Galton’s coinage of the term eugenics and the Nazi party application of it to population control.
As we note the difference between positive and negative eugenics, we begin to talk about steralisation campaigns in Nazi Germany and the long history of steralisation in the American context.
On July 14th 1933, the German government promulgated the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses). This law mandated the forced sterilization of certain individuals with physical and mental disabilities or mental illness. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who “suffered” from any of nine conditions: hereditary feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive (or bi-polar) disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness, deafness, severe hereditary physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.
source material | History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust
In the PBS article ‘Unwanted Steralisation and Eugenics Programs in the United States’ Lisa Ko demonstrates the long history of steralisation in the US, beginning with Hitler’s praise for the practicing of steralisation laws in the country all the way through to contemporary forced steralisations.
As discussed within the podcast, Belly of the Beast (2020) goes into detail about the effect of forced steralisation on incarcerated Black women. The conversation then shifts to how this is still prevalent in America and we talk about how Dawn Wooten acted as a whistleblower and exposed forced steralisations performed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on detained immigrant women. She has suffered many repercussions for speaking out about this practice. For further academic reading on this case, Helen Jennings has since written about it for the Georgetown Journal for Gender and the Law.
The discussion continues further into how the gene has become a cultural icon. The Human Conspiracy (1975) is cited as being one of the first large documentary programmes about genetic inheritance and it is related to current discussions of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate.
Finally, we discuss the current reaction to the American Eagle campaign on social media and the popular resistance to eugenic narratives is somewhat historicised. We note that there has always been some form of backlash against this type of thinking, comparing the backlash in the 1980s that came from organisations like Science for the People to the current response of numerous social media users American Eagle’s advertisement campaign.
Our ‘Diversify Your Entertainment’ segment for this podcast was Young Royals.
We look forward to hearing from you all in the comments on both the show and this blog!
Your thoughtful besties,
Lucy and Jay
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