Girl, What You Got in Them Jeans?

July 29, 2025

Eugenics? Yikes! ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

July 29, 2025

Hola, Meteor readers,

I never truly mastered how to ride a bike. Attempts were made, but that whole idea of you never forget? You absolutely do. Normally, I don’t feel any kind of way about it, but after reading this piece in The Gist about the feminist roots of cycling and the Tour de France Femmes, I now have a strong feminine urge to hop on a bike.

THE ONLY KIND OF CYCLING I CAN MANAGE.

In today’s newsletter, Rebecca Carroll joins us to talk about Sydney Sweeney and her jeans. Genes? Maybe both. Plus, a little happy dance to celebrate a Planned Parenthood legal victory.

Pedaling to nowhere,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

These jeans suck: Last weekend, the American Eagle clothing brand unveiled its new campaign, featuring “Euphoria” and “White Lotus” star Sydney Sweeney, with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” The ads, which go predictably hard on the whole “sex sells” mantra of marketing, are every white guy’s wet dream. But it’s one specific video (which has since been removed) that was unmistakably provocative. And not in a good way.

In this particular ad, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sweeney is lying on her back, her jeans unzipped, when she starts to speak in her signature voice of affected listlessness: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” she says, as she slowly zips up and fastens the top button at her bare waist. “My jeans are blue.” And then the voiceover (male, of course) drives it home: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

American Eagle has called the campaign “a return to essential denim dressing,” but critics have called it an idea that “shouldn’t have made it past the copywriter’s room” because of its clear nod to Trump’s view of “essentials,” and the white-supremacist pseudoscience of eugenics. And while “eugenics” may sound like an antiquated term, it’s very much still a part of our modern world. First developed in 1883 by British statistician and anthropologist Francis Galton, eugenics is the pseudoscience that argues selective reproduction between humans with “desirable traits” (read: white) can make for better and more desirable humans (also read: white) in society at large.

If this sounds familiar, it should: Ideas like these have been a recurring foghorn during Trump’s rise. At one New Hampshire rally in December 2023, Trump told his audience, “We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” and warned that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” During his first presidential term in 2020, he spoke to a rapt crowd of white Minnesotans and said, “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” More than 30 years prior, in a 1988 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when asked about his path to success, Trump answered: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have the right genes.” And he’s created a cult-like following of white men in his administration who espouse these same beliefs.

The “right genes” is the literal premise of the Sweeney campaign, and for American Eagle to push this kind of agenda, in this particular political moment—rife with tradwives, pronatalism, and exaggerated gender norms—feels like yet another corporate capitulation (hi, Paramount) to the dark, unapologetic depths of Trump’s hubristic agenda. (It speaks volumes about how compromised we’ve become that companies’ responses to Trump’s first term often went in the opposite direction.) Sure, we don’t necessarily look to ads for moral clarity, but they have always been a reflection of who we are as a culture–and what we’re willing to accept. But we shouldn’t accept this.

–Rebecca Carroll

AND:

Some good news! Medicaid patients and Planned Parenthood clinics everywhere won a key victory Monday, when a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot deny eligible Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood clinics as outlined in the Big Beautiful Bill (for now–the administration plans to appeal the decision). The judge found that “patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable.” This means that Medicaid recipients who rely on PP clinics for healthcare can still receive covered services. However, as the folks at Autonomy News pointed out, the intended damage of the right’s years-long “defund” mission has already been done: “By our count, at least 32 Planned Parenthood locations have said they’ll close in 2025,” and some of them have already closed. “Shuttering clinics is a way to ban abortion without explicitly banning it.”
Last week, the rightfully criticized Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—which has come under fire because of its lethal inefficacy—advertised a women-only aid distribution day in southern Rafah. According to witnesses who recounted their stories to the BBC, the day was chaotic and violent: “They started spraying the women with pepper spray, then they brought stun grenades and started throwing them on the women to force them backwards,” one woman, Khawla Sheikh al-Eid, told the outlet. She was at the site with her sister, she said, trying to get food for their children, but the two were separated in the madness, and eventually, Khawla’s sister, Mary, was shot in the neck and killed. The UN reported earlier this month that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to get aid from GHF sites, which were established in May.
Starting next summer, Minnesota’s new law around social media use will go into effect. It requires that social media apps and sites provide a pop-up when a Minnesotan logs on, asking them to “acknowledge that prolonged social media use can pose a hazard to their mental health,” NPR reports. Psychologists agree that warnings like this are necessary and effective, but nonetheless, tech companies are planning to push back on the law, arguing it may violate the First Amendment.
Pivoting from the phone screen to the TV screen: As a first-time parent, there are a number of things I’ve been made to feel bad about, chief among them letting my child watch television before the age of three. (If loving Ms. Rachel is wrong, I don’t want to be right.) But a recent analysis from the American Psychological Association finds that screentime is not a be-all, end-all determinant of how your child will turn out. “This comprehensive study highlights the need for a nuanced approach to managing children’s screen time,” one of the study’s authors explains. Instead of focusing purely on eliminating screens whenever possible, parents should instead focus on the 5Cs: child, content, calm, crowding out, and communication. Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk spells it all out and takes up for all of us TV-loving moms out there.

THE GOAT TV MOM. FIGHT ME. (VIA YOUTUBE)

Yesterday, Michael Lewis, a 55-year-old man, pleaded guilty to stalking and harassing WNBA star Caitlin Clark. Much has been said about Clark—she has been both a hero and a villain in her very short WNBA career—but what we often forget is that she is a 23-year-old woman thrust into the kind of blinding spotlight that has destroyed a number of young women before her. And if we don’t want to be watching a heartbreaking documentary 15 years from now about the downfall of the Caitlins and the Angel Reeses and the Cameron Brinks of today, then our parasocial relationship with celebrities needs to end.
This week is the Senior League Baseball World Series in South Carolina—an event for Little League teams comprised of 13-to-16-year-olds from around the world. But this year, a team from Venezuela was denied visas to enter the United States. “They told us that Venezuela is on a list because Trump says Venezuelans are a threat to the security of his country,” the Venezuelan league president told the AP. “What do we do with so much injustice, what do we do with the pain that was caused to our children?” This is reportedly the second time this month a Latin American sports team was barred from entering the U.S.
To everyone’s but somehow also no one’s surprise, JaNa and Kenny have broken up. Cue the Scottish narrator.