By Anna Zhila
There is a long-standing parlour game we play with the past, filtering old films to see how they imagined our present. Blade Runner promised us flying cars and replicants by 2019. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men gave us a fertility crisis by 2027. But perhaps the most chillingly accurate prophecy came from Tim Burton. According to his vision, by 2029, we would have a planet of apes. Looking at the state of our cultural discourse, one has to admit he might have been onto something.
The latest exhibit in this de-evolutionary saga is the scandal engulfing the actress Sydney Sweeney and the clothing brand American Eagle. The story, for those who have been blissfully offline, is this: the brand launched a new ad campaign for their jeans starring Sweeney, one of Hollywood’s most bankable young stars. The headline was a rather groan-worthy pun: “Good Genes.” The intended meaning was obvious - a play on the homophones “jeans” and “genes,” suggesting that both the denim and Sweeney’s hereditary gifts were of high quality. What happened next was a master-class in the insanity of our age.
Almost immediately, a section of the internet decried the slogan as a dog-whistle for eugenics, the discredited pseudo-science advocating for the improvement of the human species through selective breeding. From there, it was a short, sharp descent into full-blown moral panic. Eugenics was linked to the Third Reich, and thus, a fairly innocuous ad for denim was rebranded as Nazi propaganda. The digital witch hunt then turned its attention to the ad’s star. It was quickly “discovered” that Sweeney might hold Republican sympathies, a fact that, in the logic of the online mob, automatically made her a proxy for Donald Trump. The final act of this absurd drama came when Trump himself weighed in, declaring, with characteristic subtlety, “Oh, now I like her ad. If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her advertisement is fantastic.”
Just pause to consider the spectacle. The President of the United States, amidst the myriad crises of 2025, is publicly commenting on a jeans advertisement. It is a moment of such profound, hall-of-mirrors stupidity that it feels almost epochal. This isn’t just another online squabble. It is a symptom of a much deeper cultural malaise, a sign that our public discourse has become so poisoned, so devoid of nuance, and so addicted to the sugar rush of performative outrage that it has lost all contact with reality.
The Death of Nuance
What does this absurd episode tell us about the state of pop culture? First, it signals the final, agonising implosion of a certain kind of performative online activism. A once-vital social movement, which fought for genuine inclusivity and exposure of systemic injustice, has been hijacked by its most extreme and least serious practitioners. The desire to find offense has become more important than the act of doing good. It has become a game, a competitive sport of virtue-signalling where the prize is not social change, but online clout.
On the other hand, this hyperbolic reaction to a deeply conventional image - a beautiful, blonde woman in jeans is, after all, the alpha and omega of American advertising - can be read as a signal of despair. The so-called “woke culture,” which for the last decade fought so hard to expand the boundaries of representation, now finds itself on the defensive. In the face of a resurgent wave of “traditional values” (see the majority of recent American blockbusters for evidence), this feels like the last, desperate gasp of a drowning movement, lashing out at anything that even remotely resembles the old guard.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this whole affair is the depressingly predictable choice of target. Once again, it is a woman who finds herself in the cross-hairs of public wrath. The Sweeney case is not an isolated incident. It echoes the recent attempts to “cancel” the singer Sabrina Carpenter for being “too” sexual, for allegedly “normalising violence against women” with an album cover that would barely raise an eyebrow in the context of Madonna’s Sex book.
There is a staggering hypocrisy at play here. While figures like Kanye West can engage in overt acts of hate speech with relatively minor career consequences, it is women, particularly conventionally attractive ones, who are subjected to this intense, puritanical scrutiny. The irony of so-called progressives, who claim to be concerned about censorship and threats to free expression, leading the charge against a woman for her presumed political affiliations is apparently lost on them.
The Double Standard in Denim
Where is this same energy for the male stars who embody the very same traditional ideals? Last year, the actor Jeremy Allen White appeared in a Calvin Klein campaign that was a master-piece of objectification and sexualisation. Where were the think pieces debating whether he had too many abs? Where was the discussion about why underwear is being advertised to us by yet another conventionally attractive, blue-eyed white man?
The answer, of course, is that a double standard is at work, as crude and obvious as the pun that started this whole mess. We have arrived at a bizarre cultural moment where the most revolutionary thing a woman can do, it seems, is to be both beautiful and silent. To express an opinion, or even to be suspected of harbouring one that deviates from the approved orthodoxy, is to invite the wrath of a mob that claims to speak for the enlightened.
Ultimately, the American Eagle scandal is a depressing snapshot of a culture that has lost its mind. It is a world where words have lost their meaning, where a harmless pun can be tortured until it confesses to being Nazi propaganda, and where the most urgent political battle of the day is apparently being fought in the denim aisle. American Eagle, of course, will walk away from this with sky-rocketing sales. The only real casualties are nuance, good faith, and the faint, flickering hope that we might one day learn to talk to each other like adults. Maybe those apes aren’t so far off after all.
