Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad garnered quite the reaction last week. In the ad, which boasts the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” the Euphoria actor says, “Genes are passed down from parent to offspring, often determining traits like eye color, personality, and even hair color. My jeans are blue.”
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As well as being accused of pushing eugenicist thinking, Sydney was called out for seemingly pandering towards the male gaze, with the AE ads focused on her body in a hypersexualized way even though its target consumers were likely women.
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This isn’t the first time Sydney has been accused of marketing heavily towards men. Just a few months ago, in May, she collaborated with Dr. Squatch to release soap bars containing drops of her bathwater; in a press release, she stated, “When your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it, or turn it into a bar of Dr. Squatch soap. It’s weird in the best way, and I love that we created something that’s not just unforgettable, it actually smells incredible and delivers like every other Dr. Squatch product I love. Hopefully, this helps guys wake up to the realities of conventional personal care products and pushes them towards natural.”
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Amid all the discourse around Sydney, a viral tweet from @TheTitanBaddie drew attention towards other women who famously pandered towards men and later regretted it. “Very few women were able to start in that position and pivot to serious actress successfully and it had a lot to do with changing their roles completely AND their celebrity personas,” they wrote.
In turn, this ended up prompting a heap of discourse around famous women who have been accused of pandering towards men early in their careers, and how (if at all) they managed to rebrand — including Pamela Anderson, Marilyn Monroe, Jessica Lange, Jane Fonda, and Emily Ratajkowski, with Emily even walking back her take on “choice” feminism in recent years.
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While Emily previously defended her decision to appear topless in the music video of Robin Thicke’s controversial song “Blurred Lines,” she said in 2021, “At the time I thought it was really empowering to capitalize on your sexuality, but ultimately you’re trying to appeal to men.”
And “rebranding” in Hollywood has historically hardly been easy for women. Jayne Mansfield, for example, famously struggled to switch up her image after becoming known as a sex symbol and “glamor girl”; the 2025 documentary My Mom Jayne explores how she sadly wasn’t taken seriously at all when she attempted to “prove herself” and formulate a “new image” as a professional actor.
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The viral tweet also mentioned stars like Megan Fox and Brooke Shields, which prompted backlash from many users given how young they were when they started gaining recognition in Hollywood.
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Megan, for example, has talked openly about being sexualized in Hollywood and how film director Michael Bay got her to “dance underneath a waterfall” in a bikini in a movie when she was just 15. When Megan recounted this story on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2009, the talk show host — and the audience — just laughed it off.
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Meanwhile, Brooke — who was managed by her mom as a child — starred in highly controversial films like Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon when she was just a teenager.
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So, it needs to be acknowledged that many women who shot to fame when they were super young were, sadly, exploited. In fact, the viral post later pointed out that we have largely moved away from a culture of having conventionally attractive young women exclusively play “sexy” roles; now, we have numerous beautiful celebrities, or “bombshells,” who aren’t necessarily recognized for just their sex appeal.
Which is why, in part, so many people are disappointed in Sydney Sweeney’s image. Amid the discourse, one user tweeted, “women catering their career towards men is never a good idea because they don’t take us seriously.” Someone else said, “unfortunately for sydney she isn’t just pandering to men but a specific type of ‘man’ and for that, i can not feel bad for her.”
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