A truly great pop singer, even when her subject is sex, should never take herself too seriously, and Sabrina Carpenter does not. Her single “Espresso,” fizzing with infectiously corny innuendo, was one of summer 2024’s signature bops. Two more singles quickly followed, and by October, when all three were in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, Ms. Carpenter, who starred in the Disney Channel tween sitcom “Girl Meets World” from 2014 to 2017, seemed like she was now on a mission to jolt Gen Z out of its much-discussed carnal funk and into healthy, consensual, red-blooded fun.
Ms. Carpenter, 25, was nominated in six categories at Sunday’s Grammy Awards and won best pop vocal album for “Short n’ Sweet.” Her singles “Feather” and “Nonsense” were unavoidable in 2023, and her album “Short n’ Sweet” dropped as the singer was wrapping up a year supporting Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour. Within weeks, Ms. Carpenter was back on the road, crooning “I bet we’d have really good bed chem” to a male backup dancer from a stage-set bed dressed in satin sheets. It was more sex-positive and shamelessly grown-up than her Eras Tour performance, but with the same wholesome, giddy girl’s-girl energy.
Ms. Carpenter’s self-actualized pop-princess trajectory, however, has collided with a real-world turn to regressive beliefs about who women can and cannot be. Now invested with executive power, the onetime proprietor of Miss Teen USA and the authors of Project 2025 seem quite determined to legislate women out of their agency and into a mass of dependent, eternal girl-children. This shift is not Ms. Carpenter’s fault. She did not cause it. But now the breathy persona she’s built might be read as an avatar for the very worldview that would make shameless sex positivity — already rare enough — a thing of the past.
Admittedly, you can look at her career and see a retrograde sensibility. At five feet tall, she presents as a half-pint pinup doll whose doe eyes,fef777 casino big Bardot hair and frothy, lingerie-inspired costumes evoke two iconic Hollywoods (Old, and Frederick’s of). A September W magazine cover story featured photos of Ms. Carpenter that were heavily inspired by film adaptations of “Lolita.” In one image of an ad campaign for Kim Kardashian’s lingerie and shapewear brand Skims, Ms. Carpenter poses in bubble-gum pink lace in a 1990s-era bedroom papered with rock star pinups; another, in which she holds a cordless phone, is queasily reminiscent of the 1999 Rolling Stone cover on which a 16-year-old, bra-clad, Teletubby-cuddling Britney Spears reclines beside a cover line that promises a look “inside the heart, mind and bedroom of a teen dream.”
A regular bit Ms. Carpenter originated on an early tour was continually updating the original outro of her song “Nonsense” with dirty talk pegged to that night’s city, state or country; she continued it on the Eras Tour, crafting increasingly horny shout-outs that tested the limit of slant rhymes. Following a night in Mexico that found Ms. Carpenter bragging, “I’m full-grown but I look like a niña / Come put something big in my casita / Mexico, I think you are bonita,” it landed, for some media-savvy listeners, like a party-killing record scratch — evidence that Ms. Carpenter was playing a dangerous game by exploiting her own size. In an essay, Jade Hurley laid out the problem: “The line between ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ is being blurred, and it’s women, not girls, who benefit from the exchange.”
Critiques like this rightly recognize that images like Ms. Carpenter’s for W and Skims are not neutral, especially given the frequency with which algorithm-based image-sharing platforms like Instagram give child predators a vast hunting ground. Her line-straddling curdles even further when viewed alongside a conservative movement that valorizes traditionally beautiful white girls and women whom they encourage to marry young and breed often, while openly suggesting the disenfranchisement of those who choose otherwise.
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“The promise of America, and I mean this sincerely, is big enough for everyone to succeed,” Mr. Biden said. “And there’s been no more important voice for that truth in the Black community than our H.B.C.U.s.”
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