By skyforbes 
And why you too, might enjoy reading evolutionary biology
You could have read this already on Substack where you’d get:
- How the male gaze still powers sales, even when the product is for women
- Why understanding evolutionary psychology won’t make you like the ad, but will make you smarter about it
- REVIEWER’S WANTED: Always wanted to read a book? Now you can, or at least chapters of mine as they go into review. Scroll to the bottom for more.
- Plus: our summer refer-a-thon rolls on. Top referrer gets a pack of Neuro Gum, hand-blessed by the founders on our upcoming podcast (Naz, you’re still dominating).
eople read books for all sorts of reasons.
Sometimes it’s because a professor tells you to. Sometimes the WiFi’s down and you’ve got no better option. And sometimes you read because you’re preparing to tell someone they’re flat-out wrong, while still managing to stay curious about what might be going on beneath their thinking.
Case in point, this line from a recent Wall Street Journal piece that included a comment on TikTok:
“Why is American Eagle using Sydney Sweeney to attract the male gaze when she’s wearing jeans for WOMEN?” one TikTok user said in a post reacting to the campaign. “We aren’t going to buy jeans because they zoomed in on her chest.”
The anonymous commenter is doing two things at once: raising a sharp question, and revealing a few baked-in assumptions that are worth unpacking. To do so, we’ll need a better lens than just ‘well I disagree.’ So here’s our working syllabus for the week:
- Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, Martin Lindstrom
- Moral Animal, Robert Wright
- T: The Story of Testosterone, Carole Hooven
Let’s begin with the first part of our commenter’s question.
Why might American Eagle be using Sydney Sweeney to attract the male gaze when she’s wearing jeans for women?
If that question strikes you as redundant with an obvious answer, you’re not wrong. But don’t stop there, because even if something’s obvious it doesn’t mean that we got it.
The ‘no duh’ response is because it sells. The ad drove millions in earned media for a brand most people hadn’t thought about since high school. Sure, the outrage was loud, but as research by Berger and his colleagues have shown, even negative buzz can lift sales when it boosts awareness. And American Eagle, let’s be honest, could use the added oxygen right about now.
The even more obvious answer is because the marketing team thought it would work. Sometimes they hit, sometimes they miss, a’la the Kylie Jenner’s Pepsi fiasco. But again, we’re not here to stay at surface level, are we?
The deeper, better question is the one the commenter is implicitly asking: why do marketing execs believe appealing to the male gaze helps sell women’s jeans? That decision alone is worth a PhD, but let’s begin by getting a basic grasp of how our Monkey OS operates.
Let’s start by acknowledging that sexual imagery isn’t actually as powerful a purchase trigger as most assume. Insofar as the commenter argues against sexualization in general, they have a point. As Lindstrom notes in Buyology, it often backfires through a phenomenon called vampirization, where the attention goes to the skin, not the brand. And when it does work, it’s not because of what’s shown, it’s because of what it all signals.
Think in terms of status, confidence, aspiration and identity instead of sexual attraction, and you’re getting the picture behind the picture.
Which brings us to the an implied premise behind the comment that the ad should have catered to the female gaze instead in order to sell to women. But people don’t buy things simply to be aroused. They buy things that help them become something more desirable for the gaze that matters to them. Try swapping Sydney for Timothée Chalamet and you’ll see what I mean.
And this part of our anonymous muse’s comment leaves out another variable that is inconvenient for their argument. Sexual attraction is wildly inconsistent. Plenty of women are drawn to Sydney Sweeney just like plenty of men aren’t. Sexual preference doesn’t sort cleanly across gender lines or ad demographics, and we shouldn’t make hasty verdicts on who is chasing whose gaze.
So, it seems American Eagle is making a few bets here, which we could summarize as follows:
- Sydney Sweeney will be found attractive by those who see the ad (perhaps first and foremost by men, sure)
- Most of the audience will themselves want to be considered attractive (perhaps some of them even by the men who are now gazing at Sydney)
- Her wearing the jeans will halo its way onto the brand — subtly implying that we, too, might be found attractive if only we wore the same pair.
- And so, the jeans sell.
n short, American Eagle believes they’ve found a validated sexual signal (Sydney = attractive), that their audience wants to mirror or harness that signal (me = attractive), and that putting the two together might spark some purchase magic.
You could even argue the formula doesn’t work in spite of the male gaze, but because of it.
From here, it also becomes clear why this logic doesn’t land with everyone and why we are seeing backlash that isn’t limited to the “UGH, MEN” category which is worth a post of its own. If you reject the initial signal (Sydney ≠ attractive), or you’re immune to the implied transference (wear jeans → become Sydney → become desirable) whether because you hate the patriarchy or simply don’t buy the premise, you won’t be swayed either way.
Why might have American Eagle ‘zoomed in’ on what they zoomed in on, and why should they expect it to work?
In the next part of her comment, our anonymous muse offers this:
“We aren’t going to buy jeans because they zoomed in on her chest.”
I tell my students that one of the best ways I’ve learned to stay sane on the internet, having surfed it since it was invented, like any self-respecting millennial, is by silently adding three words to statements like this: “I think that.”
Yes, I’m sure you think that. But you might be wrong.
To see why, we’ll need to borrow a bit from Robert Wright and Carole Hooven, specifically, their work on evolutionary biology and, more pointedly, male biology.
For many men, the female breast is a thing of wonder. That’s not a value judgment, mind you, it’s an evolutionary reality we can confirm by turning to the scientists. And before you accuse me of sexism pure and simple, you should know I’ve done my time time exploring how what humans find attractive shifts across contexts and can confirm that the brightest minds we’ve put to this task say that it depends on environment, health cues, reproductive fitness signals, and social status indicators.
You yourself might not have needed any scientist to work with 128 males to confirm in a 2011 study that in our current context, medium and large breast are considered most attractive. You might even know exactly how this effect trickles down every aspect of our society, with other studies showing how larger breasts increase tips received by waitresses.
What you might have missed is why this works the way it works. Simplifying grossly, the halo effect is again action where something perceived as good but ultimately unrelated, attaches a positive interpretation on other things.
Now that we’ve reached the truly shocking conclusion that, ceteris paribus, modern males tend to prefer larger breasts, we can move on to the real misconception at the heart of the comment.
If American Eagle’s ad works as sexual signalling, it’s not despite the zoom, it’s because of it. That specific close-up is the very mechanism of the signal. And judging by Sydney Sweeney’s own public reactions to this ad and to the previous Dr. Squatch campaign, I’m on the side of giving this women some much deserved agency by wagering that she’s both well aware of it and not entirely unwilling to play the game on her own terms.
You might like the game or how it shakes out for you, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with being found attractive under the male gaze, just as there’s nothing wrong with being tall under the female gaze. If anything, once you read Hitsch et al’s work on height and dating preferences, you might come away blaming females for forcing short kings to invent capitalism in the first place. But I digress.
Final verdict: C–
“Why is American Eagle using Sydney Sweeney to attract the male gaze when she’s wearing jeans for WOMEN?” one TikTok user asked. “We aren’t going to buy jeans because they zoomed in on her chest.”
I’ll give our anonymous commenter an A for effort here given how she valiantly engaged in a public critique of cultural marketing choices which is more than most do. Where the points get docked is here:
- Assuming only the male gaze finds Sydney attractive
- Misunderstanding how sexual signaling works when selling to women who want to be seen as attractive by men, or by others who think like them
- Implying that the zoom-in was gratuitous rather than deliberate and precisely the point
- Showing no curiosity about evolutionary biology or consumer psychology, leading to (potentially performative) outrage over second-order effects that are fully predictable from our Monkey OS settings with a bit of reading
Now, none of this means we have to like what we’re seeing or how commercial systems exploit our biology. Had the comment been framed as critique despite understanding, rather than instead of it, I’d have happily bumped the grade to an A.
We don’t have to accept what we understand, but we should, at the very least, try to understand what we don’t accept.
And whatever you think of the ad, good on Sydney for cashing that check.
Jump on Substack for my accompanying book rec, a thing to do, a thought to have and more stuff to read!