In defence of Sabrina Carpenter

Everything about Sabrina Carpenter exudes horniness. She’s worn a uniform of glittering bustiers and matching suspenders for the Short n’ Sweet tour, gambolling on stage each night clutching a rhinestone-lined bath towel before revealing the lingerie underneath, like a coquettish 1950s pin-up. A cropped soccer jersey for sale on her online merch store has a massive “69” emblazoned on its back. She sings, unashamedly, about “doing bad things” with Barry Keoghan (“Bed Chem”), romping around a canopied bed during live performances of the song. The Nonsense outros performed during the Emails I Can’t Send tour were even more explicit: “he’s so big, I felt it in my kidney,” she sang in Sydney.

She markets herself as a 21st-century sex symbol, a “Gen Z Betty Boop”. It’s an inextricable part of her brand; which is why it’s so baffling to see people act surprised and appalled when the 25-year-old artist does something sexy.

While she’s ceased to do any X-rated Nonsense outros since wrapping up the Emails I Can’t Send tour, Carpenter has found a new way of adding a personal (and porny) touch to each show during her ongoing Short n’ Sweet tour. During performances of “Juno” –  a song about being “so fucking horny” for someone that you want them to make you pregnant – she’ll totter to the middle of the heart-shaped platform at the front of the stage and simulate a sex position, a different one each night, crooning “have you ever tried this one?” into the mic.

Some have been lambasting the schtick from the get-go (one criticism, shared on X in October, went viral for being unwittingly hilarious: “Im 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter”). But earlier this week, swathes of people on the internet felt that Carpenter had crossed the line by miming performing oral sex during a show in Inglewood, California. “This is disgusting. Why do 12-year-old girls at a concert need to see this?”, read one post on X, replying to a video clip of Carpenter pretending to give her mic a blowjob. “Can she stop sexualizing herself for one minute? Literal children are watching this,” reads another.

Carpenter has been dogged by criticisms which argue that she’s ‘too sexual’, especially given her supposedly young fanbase, ever since she matured from a Disney Channel kid into an adult pop star. She addressed the issue in an interview with Rolling Stone published this summer, explaining that she only writes about sex because it feels “authentic” to her: “Those real moments where I’m just a 25-year-old girl who’s super horny are as real as when I’m going through a heartbreak and I’m miserable and I don’t feel like a person.” 

Unfortunately, the uproar surrounding Carpenter’s refusal to play down her sexual appetite was entirely predictable. A lot of the outrage seems to stem from people being uncomfortable about the fact that Carpenter is a former child star and subsequently assuming that her fans must be children too (the vast majority are actually aged 18 to 24). But Carpenter has grown up; the last time she appeared in a Disney show was seven years ago. It’s difficult not to see parallels with other Disney alums like Miley Cyrus: “Would you take kids to see Miley?” asked a CNN article published in the wake of Cyrus’ infamous MTV Video Music Awards performance, where she briefly twerked on Robin Thicke.

While you’d have hoped that things might have changed in the decade since Cyrus’ VMAs performance, there are clues everywhere that culture is still just as sanitised and sex-phobic as it was ten years ago (see: perpetual, boring discourse about how ‘unethical’ age-gap relationships are, the backlash against sex scenes in films, etc, etc). But this is precisely why it’s so vital to see young, female stars like Carpenter embrace their sexuality so wholeheartedly. It’s important for young women to know – especially when they’re coming of age in such a conservative, puritanical culture – that it’s OK to be horny, that you can be sexy on your own terms, that sex can be enjoyable, light-hearted and fun. And, anyway, the songs are funny (are any other pop stars giving us lyrics as wild as “I like the way you fit / God bless your dad’s genetics”?).

Cheeringly, Carpenter doesn’t appear to be letting the critics grind her down. She recently spoke about the issue again in an October interview with TIME: “you’ll still get the occasional mother that has a strong opinion on how you should be dressing. And to that I just say, don’t come to the show and that’s OK.” And she’s right: nobody in their right mind is suggesting that it’s good, actually, for 12-year-olds to see a singer fellate a microphone. But the responsibility for making sure that children don’t see that has to lie with their parents; the onus shouldn’t be on Carpenter to self-censor when she’s blossoming, with huge success, from a child actor into an adult performer. The Wiggles are going on tour next year. If you need something PG, get tickets for that instead.