“Felt so good he made me hit the top note/ Eras tickets, girl you won the lotto!/ Mexico, I kinda think te amo.”
– Sabrina Carpenter’s “Nonsense” outro from the Eras Tour, Mexico City.
Sabrina Carpenter improvises the outro to her song “Nonsense” every time she plays it live, usually including a clever nod, rife with sexual innuendo, to whichever city she’s in. Rolling Stone writes, “Since starting this trend, Carpenter has essentially built an entire brand around being a short and horny pop star with an endless well of tongue-in-cheek lyrics.”
Clad in lingerie with lace garters, littering her lyrics with explicit content and mimicking sex positions at her concerts—Sabrina Carpenter is pushing the sexualized female pop star image further than most. She is also one of the most talented female vocalists making music right now, and as of this past summer, with hits like “Espresso” and “Please, Please, Please” has catapulted to the heights of pop stardom.
But with her level of artistry and talent, she probably doesn’t need all of the sexual content to sell her art. So why is she doing it?
Her sexed-up image is often shocking, but maybe in some ways (sans the vulgarity) you could argue that Sabrina Carpenter is doing exactly what she should be doing at twenty-five years old—becoming a woman and embracing everything that means, including her sexuality.
In the past, this sexualization of a young woman, though much less explicit, would have had a specific goal in mind: marriage and motherhood. In the first flush of beauty, a woman shows herself off in order to attract a mate with the intention of finding a committed relationship that would eventually lead to children, a family, a legacy.
But the Sexual Revolution has untied sex from intimacy and marriage and made it entirely about pleasure and empowerment. Sabrina Carpenter is simply a woman of her times, taking radical feminism and the sex-positive movement to its predictable extreme. And it looks like she’s having a lot of fun doing it.
But a deep dive into the lyrics on her latest album, Short n’ Sweet, reveals she’s not having as much fun as she lets on—and that she might actually want some of the same things women have been using their sexuality for for centuries.
Her song “Juno” is a half-serious request to have a baby with a man. And in “Good Graces” she gives a nod to wanting a marriage and family: “When I love you, I’m sweet like an angel / Drawin’ hearts ‘round our names / And dreamin’ of writing vows, rockin’ cradles.”
But the biggest theme across the album (besides sex) is how disappointed she is—mostly with men. In the first verse of “Slim Pickins” she sings:
Guess I’ll end this life alone
I am not dramatic
These are just the thoughts that pass right through me
All the douchebags in my phone
Play ‘em like a slot machine
If they’re winnin’, I'm just losin’
Is she just sex obsessed or a sex addict and using her art as a way to express herself? Or is she reacting to or against something and channeling that into her art and public persona?
Sabrina Carpenter grew up in a society that told her she could have it all. Casual sex, a career, and then someday, in her thirties, a committed relationship and children. But the husband and kids deal was packaged as a less-than kind of thing—something to get once you were finished sticking it to the patriarchy by getting a sparkling career and sleeping with whoever you wanted, whenever you wanted. (Even though all of this societal sexual freedom has resulted in people having less sex, not more.)
And these might be the worst lies that feminism and modern culture sold to women.
Sabrina could be the poster girl for the sex-positive feminist movement. But she’s right—she, and so many other women, are losing.
Despite gaining more sexual freedom, more workplace presence and more positions of authority, women have grown increasingly unhappy since the 1970’s. It turns out that an increase in children born out of wedlock, birth control, abortion and divorce benefit men more than women, unhooking men from responsibilities and leaving women to struggle on their own. But adolescent women are in crisis too, experiencing record high levels of sadness and suicide ideation. A survey from the CDC reports that nearly 1 in 3 high school girls in the U.S. have seriously considered taking their own lives.
And in a final blow of inconvenient truth, according to the 2022 edition of the General Social Survey (GSS), women who are married with children report being happier than childless unmarried women and childless married women.
Regardless of the complex factors affecting women’s well-being, one thing seems clear—the feminist movement of the last fifty years has failed to make women happier or more fulfilled.
At first glance, Sabrina Carpenter and I are two very different kinds of women. But I too, at the age of twenty-five, sexualized myself, albeit in a much more subtle way, and mostly through my clothing.
The impetus? A broken heart. Pent up anger and resentment. Frustration. I realized my body and my beauty could be a weapon, and I wanted to use it. For attention. And in some ways, I think, for revenge.
Because if you can’t be loved, what you can be is sexy. And, I admit, there is something that feels empowering about this. But feelings fade. My own subtle sexualization got me more attention from men and a few more dates, but it didn’t burn off my resentment or my anger. And it didn’t get me the thing I really wanted. Attention will never equal love.
So maybe Sabrina and I are both frustrated women trying to feel empowered and fulfilled. What do we want? To be loved. To feel cherished and known.
Because it’s not about what women can do. Women can lead companies and countries. Work with their hands and their minds. It’s horribly reductive to say women only want love and relationships. Of course we want other things: to excel in our work, to hold positions of leadership, to be respected for our minds. But to cast aside women’s innate gifts for nurturing, childbearing, and relationship and treat them as less than our other desires and abilities is harming us.
I find this video of Sabrina so compelling. Waking up with a teddy bear and then making tea in her yellow pajamas, she’s clever and charming and cheeky, but not in a vulgar way. She says she wants to pass down a pretty tube of lipstick to her grandchildren. She likes to sit on her fire escape, journaling or playing guitar.
Society might keep telling us that sexualizing ourselves will empower us. Instead, I think we should take a closer look at that woman who journals on her fire escape and dreams about her grandchildren. Is there any place for her in this world we’ve made? Her most deeply held desires and disappointments are bleeding out through her music. And I think they represent the longings that many women feel, even as the world tells us what we should want instead.
I’ve never seen an ugly truth that I can’t bend
To something that looks better, I’m stupid, but I’m clever
Yeah, I can make a shit show look a whole lot like forever and ever
You don’t have to lie to girls
If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves1
It’s true that girls have been lied to. But we’ve also become pretty good at lying to ourselves. And if that woman on the fire escape is ever going to have a fighting chance, we have to start being honest about what the current culture is doing to women and what we’re doing to ourselves.
Both this and the piece on instagram were very profound, encouraging, well written statements. Love to see it. Keep it up!!