In the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes controversy, who’s zooming who?

I felt sheepish walking into the American Eagle store at Lenox Square.

The brand, popular among young women for its jeans and casual wear, is in the midst of a controversy sparked by the latest ad campaign.

“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” was displayed in blue letters across the store’s windows and on a giant screen, where a commercial — a calculated throwback to denim ads from the 1980s — ran on a loop.

In the ad, Sweeney, known for her roles in HBO’s “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus,” appeared in scenes designed to tap into our idealized recollection of life in the mid-20th century.

Here’s Sweeney checking the engine of her Mustang.

There she is filming an audition tape in Hollywood.

Finally, we see her in a reclining position, explaining genetics while zipping her blue jeans.

She gazes at the camera and states, “My jeans are blue.”

Honestly, I didn’t care much about the content of the advertisement, but when it sparked some discussion among people who thought the ad was a tone-deaf nod to eugenics, I figured they were making a fair point.

At a time when the president of the United States has made repeated references to people with “bad genes,” pretending that a play on the word in a massive ad campaign doesn’t have social impact is deliberate.

American Eagle issued a statement saying the ads are only about the jeans. “Great jeans look good on everyone,” said the statement. Whatever.

What left me with that old icky feeling wasn’t the commercial itself, it was the moment on Monday when the 79-year-old president of the United States wrote on social media that 27-year-old Sweeney’s recent ad for the company was “the HOTTEST ad out there.” Emphasis his.

Yuck. Where are those Epstein files when you need them?

I didn’t want my $5 purchase from American Eagle to be supportive of those kinds of statements or sentiments, but I was standing at the register surrounded by Sweeney’s jeans/genes and thinking about how she has been reduced to a caricature.

In the past few years, fellow members of Sweeney’s presumed political party — she is “a registered Republican,” exclaimed Donald Trump — have talked about her breasts, her blonde hair, and her blue eyes, wielding these qualities as a talisman that will deliver America from the clutches of woke culture.

Sweeney has spoken publicly about how she dislikes being hypersexualized based on her appearance, but when MAGA is on a mission, personal agency always takes a back seat.

“People feel connected and free to be able to speak about me in whatever way they want, because they believe that I’ve signed my life away. That I’m not on a human level anymore, because I’m an actor,” Sweeney said in a 2024 interview with Variety Magazine. “It’s this weird relationship that people have with me that I have no control or say over.”

This is where the debate starts to get muddied. Are we to believe that Sweeney can’t dictate the terms of her contracts or walk away if those terms are not to her liking?

Sweeney has also asked the public to keep her politics out of their mouths. When images of her mother’s birthday party featuring MAGA-style hats made rounds online, Sweeney said people shouldn’t turn the celebration into a “political statement.”

That goes for everybody, not just the political party that isn’t on her voter registration card.

So maybe someone should share Sweeney’s thoughts and feelings on these matters with the president, the vice president, and numerous other conservative commentators who are using her beauty as their weapon.

Pop culture pundits have compared this to the moment in 1980 when then-15-year-old actor Brooke Shields starred in an advertisement for Calvin Klein Jeans.

I was a preteen at the time, and I remember the subsequent controversy.

My friends and I were in awe of Shields, who had just filmed the movie “Endless Love” at our school. We also loved Calvin Klein Jeans. But watching Shields contort her body into a range of positions, including one in which she touched the side of her face with her foot, was weird. She did all of this while squeezing into her jeans and rambling about genetics and survival of the fittest.

It wasn’t the lesson on genetics that got everyone riled up back then; it was the sexual overtones of the commercial.

Shields was 15. Sweeney is 27.

It’s a different provocation when a minor is involved, but Sweeney also wants to appear powerless even as she tries to capitalize on an image she professes not to control.

So who’s using who?

A certain segment of the population can’t resist casting Sweeney in the role of an American flag-waving, buxom blonde bombshell. It doesn’t even matter that Sweeney isn’t a natural blonde.

What her fellow party members miss is that in their haste to elevate Sweeney to team mascot, they have relegated her to the same status as the immigrants our president has consistently referred to as “not human,” while he banishes them from the country.

As Sweeney has said in her own words, when people speak about her in whatever way they want to, it makes her feel less than human.

Still, she is no victim. Unlike the teenage Shields, she isn’t naive. She seems to know how she is perceived and has enough self-awareness to say she doesn’t like it.