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It's just a jeans ad.
It's not that deep.
It's just social media outrage.
Should physicians care about the recent American Eagle "Sydney Sweeney Has Good Genes Jeans" controversy? What, if anything, does the provocative campaign have to do with health and the profession of medicine?
Everything, as it turns out.
As media scholar Jean Kilbourne, EdD, asserts in her "Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women" video series, "Ads sell more than products -- they sell values, they sell images, they sell concepts of love and sexuality, of success, and perhaps most important, of normalcy.... To a great extent, they tell us who we are and who we should be."
And what the recent American Eagle jeans campaign is selling us, in addition to denim clothing, is a message about eugenics, race, and biological determinism.
"Genes are passed down from parents to offspring," Sweeney says in the campaign, "often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue."
As one of the founders of Columbia University's Master's of Science...