Honestly the less I learn about classic fiction authors the better it seems. Except for this guy, I hated having to read All the Pretty Horses in high school and now I feel better about myself.
I think people’s problem with Sabrina Carpenter’s lewd dances is moreso her aesthetic than it being particularly sexual. Like it’s not even Britney and Christina level, but what gives people the heebie jeebies about it is the fact she’s like 4”11 and thus looks like a child doing it
That’s tru she cant help it but i guess a lot of her women fans feels she’s leaning into a hypersexualized image not for them but for a contingent of male fans or execs who find her hot because she looks like a child, i also think i read either a substack or got a YT vid recommended to me that said there’s other aspects to her image like the fashion and way she talks that seem like pedobait, Idk for sure tho because i dont listen to her music or pay attention to discourse for identical pop idols so all this could just be lies
I mean . .she's 25 years old. She likely has a lot of sex and enjoys it.
Now where I will be slightly prudish is, now having a tween daughter, pop songs in 2024 have WAY too much profanity, which is something that seems to have happened in the last decade or so and was unheard of when I was a kid (I'm talking about Billboard top 20 POP songs, not rock or hip hop). Adult musicians can sing what lyrics they want, but a this includes a fair deal of singers/songs marketed to kids going down to elementary school level.
I actually don't care too much about my tween hearing the profanity, but she plays the songs with her little sibling around, who has no qualms repeating curse words.
My issue with Sabrina isn’t that she’s short but that she intentionally uses juvenile imagery to sell her sexiness, like posing in lingerie in a bedroom made up like a pre-teen’s or doing photo shoots recreating images from Lolita. Scary? Nah. But kind of ew.
There's another one that's a recreation of the cover of the Lolita movie (Sabrina in a wet dress lying on a lawn under a sprinkler). It's obviously intentional, as is stuff like the plastic toy phone in the retro pinup Skims photoshoot. She also has lyrics about not having hair "down there" and being sexy because she looks like a little niña.
Like I said, not scary, but obviously linking being a child with being sexually attractive, and it's just offputting that that's how she's decided to market herself. It's just a modern version of Britney's Catholic schoolgirl outfit.
Honestly art/fashion photography is so far up its own ass with weirdness and layers of irony that I have no idea what they were trying to say with that, but “intentional pedo bait” is only one of many options. And probably not the most likely? I don’t know.
It’s not even a sexy baby aesthetic though? If you didn’t know that the setup for that image was a reference to a scene in the 1997 Lolita film, there’s nothing about it that makes her not look like a grown woman.
Your contention is that artsy fashion mag “W” is intentionally publishing unironic “sexy baby” photos (well, one photo of a whole spread of her looking old Hollywood glam)?
And I feel like it’s very “if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog” to insist she’s intentionally cultivating a pedo audience.
Seriously I’m a couple pages into a Sabrina Carpenter image search (I am in my “too old to be following pop” phase) and I have yet to see a photo where she looks like a child, other than the ones where she is actually a child. Like she wears pink and other bright colors and likes to have a heart shape motif on her outfits? That’s it? Otherwise she looks like a grown ass woman (a young woman, but clearly an adult) who is doing the same sexy pop aesthetic that prudes have been getting the vapors over since at least Madonna.
God help me I’m probably getting put on a list but I even put in “Sabrina Carpenter sexy baby vibe” and literally the worst image there is… her in lingerie talking on a phone in a room that has posters on the wall. Which apparently is some super secret dog whistle to assume she’s trying to look 17 for old creepy dudes (as opposed to appealing to her teen/young adult core audience for whom 90s stuff is cool and retro now (damn my back hurts typing that)).
If I was going to be bothered by anything, it’s more the “selling sexy to teen girls”. But a) she’s hardly the worst or most novel offender in that and b) it makes you sound like a prude if you make a big deal about it. Maybe that’s what’s going on, elder millennials like me are starting to get the ick vibes about stuff that tries to make teen girls feel sexy about themselves, but since we *were* those teens 20 years ago that makes us feel old, so instead we try to make it about pedophilia.
Yea thats exactly what i was trying to say but couldnt because i dont really know much about her so i wasnt able to articulate it well in my other comments. Thank you
What about her aesthetic looks “childish” to you? She’s 25 and looks 25. Her stage outfits look like pop star stage outfits - yeah it’s more of a feminine girlie sexy than Chappell Roan’s drag look (Roan is only a year older and 3” taller, btw). But it’s not any more “little girlie” than Katy Perry, or even early Britney/Christina before they leaned hard into the “slightly scary slutty” aesthetic phase of their career.
She’s short and she used to be a Disney girl so we’ve got lots of pictures of her from when she was a child. That seems to be it, but that’s an argument we’ve been having for 30 plus years at this point.
I dont have that much of an opinion on her because im above the age of 20 so im not THAT invested in my argument. If you think her aesthetic is fine im not trying to convince you. Like i said i knew most of this via osmosis and just found her weird looking
I’m in the same boat though and am not getting the “weird look” from it so I’m genuinely curious where you are, and it sounds like it had nothing to do with the Lolita referencing image.
She’s 5”2 which is short but for women that’s not that short, the average height in the US for women is apparently 5”3.5. Tho arguing about height is a bit silly for me to do, when really the main counterargument is she doesnt look like a child to me but Sabrina does and it weirds me out
I mean it is a LITTLE weird for someone whose primary audience is women to be sexualizing herself in that way all the time, in a way that her own fanbase finds strange
Yes ive heard of it, i dont listen to shitty pop music so im not defending it or Cardi as great art but i knew enough about the discourse that Cardi’s female fanbase (if it exists) is fine with that kind of ho’ing since thats her image. She started as a stripper after all. With Sabrina it’s a fanbase of mostly women and women taking umbrage with it, whereas Cardi B was more of a gender divide
She’s literally a woman with a primarily female audience being even more explicitly sexual than Sabrina, and women loved her for it. So no, it’s not weird (at least in pop culture circa 2024) for “someone whose primary audience is women to be sexualizing herself in that way all the time”. For some reason you’re okay when a “stripper” is “ho’ing it” (also in her mid 20s when she got popular) but not when a former Disney girl does.
If that puts off part of her audience, so be it. Clearly, Cardi B is not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine. Maybe Sexy Sabrina won’t be everyone’s cup of tea either. I’m sure they are both crying all the way to the bank (and good for them, they are talented in their way).
The issue I have is the leap from “that’s not my taste” to “that’s morally wrong, she must be doing something evil (baiting pedos)”. And THAT is the same tired moralizing I grew up on, except back then it was Britney Spears.
Yea but Sabrina’s women audience dont like it, but Cardi’s does. That’s my point. Cardi is calculating her image to make sure her audience is happy in order to make money. Sabrina is doing the opposite, where she’s alienating her audience by doing this stuff and that’s where the “this is kinda fucky” alarm bells go off. It’s like seeing a vegan advertise a big mac, it feels inauthentic
Feels like the interviewer was trying to get them to talk about the music of Wicked like "people really seem to be engaging with the music", possibly expecting an answer like "yeah the music meant a lot to us growing up" or "it was hard to get it just right but it's worth it" and instead she got this. She tried to walk it back to get them back on track, but that only made it funnier.
I think that is a (badly drawn) running blade, probably because Jaco Pastorius was in the news and Tumblr artists don’t understand what the blades are for and how they’re supposed to work (they’re supposed to be super flexible, not rigid iron hooks as portrayed here). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics_of_Oscar_Pistorius%27s_running_blades
A canonical pirate (eg Long John Silver) would have had a peg leg, hooks are for hands.
Previously I was unsympathetic to "bluesky isn't going to be as insane as twitter" - I'm a "those moments of insane discourse aren't worth Twitter's effect on society" scold.
Sorry but the poly amputee black hijabi queen made me LOL so hard I almost woke up my baby that is napping in my arms as I type this 😂
She’s living her best life, we love that for her
'Former disney star does something moderately lewd' is just how that goes, tbh
Extremely here for “Vincenzo” Barney as Rachel Dolezal of the Italianx community discourse
I’m crying at the pirate meme. 😂
Might return to Bluesky now. I’m so hyped to help make it a hub for collective liberal-ation.
Bluesky is for YIMBY LIBS ONLY
Working on creating a labeler so you can preemptively block any Jones Act supporters.
17yo X users wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me (Miley Cyrus Bangerz Era)
My main thought is that it's weird to see Ariana Grande without the brownface
Honestly the less I learn about classic fiction authors the better it seems. Except for this guy, I hated having to read All the Pretty Horses in high school and now I feel better about myself.
I think the hijabi amputee has a blade prosthetic like this: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0824/6797/files/do-blade-prostheses-give-adaptive-athletes-an-advantage-blog_grande.jpg?v=1568046489
Oh yeah, it was for sure meant to be like Gazelle in Kingsman but the cartoon for sure still gave Hook vibes.
Sick ass ong
Perfect takes, no notes. Also why I remain on Twitter/X!
It can be very fun if you know what to look for! Thank you!
I think people’s problem with Sabrina Carpenter’s lewd dances is moreso her aesthetic than it being particularly sexual. Like it’s not even Britney and Christina level, but what gives people the heebie jeebies about it is the fact she’s like 4”11 and thus looks like a child doing it
I guess but she can’t help being 4’11”! She’s at least wearing platforms lol
Little People MUST remain celibate, you know
That’s tru she cant help it but i guess a lot of her women fans feels she’s leaning into a hypersexualized image not for them but for a contingent of male fans or execs who find her hot because she looks like a child, i also think i read either a substack or got a YT vid recommended to me that said there’s other aspects to her image like the fashion and way she talks that seem like pedobait, Idk for sure tho because i dont listen to her music or pay attention to discourse for identical pop idols so all this could just be lies
I mean . .she's 25 years old. She likely has a lot of sex and enjoys it.
Now where I will be slightly prudish is, now having a tween daughter, pop songs in 2024 have WAY too much profanity, which is something that seems to have happened in the last decade or so and was unheard of when I was a kid (I'm talking about Billboard top 20 POP songs, not rock or hip hop). Adult musicians can sing what lyrics they want, but a this includes a fair deal of singers/songs marketed to kids going down to elementary school level.
Yea im sure she enjoys sex im just sure the guys who have it with her are creeps lol jk
I actually don't care too much about my tween hearing the profanity, but she plays the songs with her little sibling around, who has no qualms repeating curse words.
My issue with Sabrina isn’t that she’s short but that she intentionally uses juvenile imagery to sell her sexiness, like posing in lingerie in a bedroom made up like a pre-teen’s or doing photo shoots recreating images from Lolita. Scary? Nah. But kind of ew.
I always saw it as more retro pin-up than Lolita!
There's another one that's a recreation of the cover of the Lolita movie (Sabrina in a wet dress lying on a lawn under a sprinkler). It's obviously intentional, as is stuff like the plastic toy phone in the retro pinup Skims photoshoot. She also has lyrics about not having hair "down there" and being sexy because she looks like a little niña.
Like I said, not scary, but obviously linking being a child with being sexually attractive, and it's just offputting that that's how she's decided to market herself. It's just a modern version of Britney's Catholic schoolgirl outfit.
She recreated one image from Lolita. The rest of the shoot doesn’t look childish at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1f9pap3/sabrina_carpenter_photographed_by_zoë_ghertner/
Honestly art/fashion photography is so far up its own ass with weirdness and layers of irony that I have no idea what they were trying to say with that, but “intentional pedo bait” is only one of many options. And probably not the most likely? I don’t know.
Sometimes a spoon is just a spoon and a sexy baby aesthetic is just about being a sexy baby!
It’s not even a sexy baby aesthetic though? If you didn’t know that the setup for that image was a reference to a scene in the 1997 Lolita film, there’s nothing about it that makes her not look like a grown woman.
Your contention is that artsy fashion mag “W” is intentionally publishing unironic “sexy baby” photos (well, one photo of a whole spread of her looking old Hollywood glam)?
I feel Iike it’s very “who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” to say Carpenter hasn’t embraced sexy baby.
And I feel like it’s very “if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog” to insist she’s intentionally cultivating a pedo audience.
Seriously I’m a couple pages into a Sabrina Carpenter image search (I am in my “too old to be following pop” phase) and I have yet to see a photo where she looks like a child, other than the ones where she is actually a child. Like she wears pink and other bright colors and likes to have a heart shape motif on her outfits? That’s it? Otherwise she looks like a grown ass woman (a young woman, but clearly an adult) who is doing the same sexy pop aesthetic that prudes have been getting the vapors over since at least Madonna.
God help me I’m probably getting put on a list but I even put in “Sabrina Carpenter sexy baby vibe” and literally the worst image there is… her in lingerie talking on a phone in a room that has posters on the wall. Which apparently is some super secret dog whistle to assume she’s trying to look 17 for old creepy dudes (as opposed to appealing to her teen/young adult core audience for whom 90s stuff is cool and retro now (damn my back hurts typing that)).
If I was going to be bothered by anything, it’s more the “selling sexy to teen girls”. But a) she’s hardly the worst or most novel offender in that and b) it makes you sound like a prude if you make a big deal about it. Maybe that’s what’s going on, elder millennials like me are starting to get the ick vibes about stuff that tries to make teen girls feel sexy about themselves, but since we *were* those teens 20 years ago that makes us feel old, so instead we try to make it about pedophilia.
Yea thats exactly what i was trying to say but couldnt because i dont really know much about her so i wasnt able to articulate it well in my other comments. Thank you
What about her aesthetic looks “childish” to you? She’s 25 and looks 25. Her stage outfits look like pop star stage outfits - yeah it’s more of a feminine girlie sexy than Chappell Roan’s drag look (Roan is only a year older and 3” taller, btw). But it’s not any more “little girlie” than Katy Perry, or even early Britney/Christina before they leaned hard into the “slightly scary slutty” aesthetic phase of their career.
She’s short and she used to be a Disney girl so we’ve got lots of pictures of her from when she was a child. That seems to be it, but that’s an argument we’ve been having for 30 plus years at this point.
Like Lisa said in her comment, she did a photoshoot recreating the Lolita movie
Did you know about that photoshoot before you formed your opinion of her?
I dont have that much of an opinion on her because im above the age of 20 so im not THAT invested in my argument. If you think her aesthetic is fine im not trying to convince you. Like i said i knew most of this via osmosis and just found her weird looking
I’m in the same boat though and am not getting the “weird look” from it so I’m genuinely curious where you are, and it sounds like it had nothing to do with the Lolita referencing image.
Isn't Christina Aguilera also like 5 feet?
She’s 5”2 which is short but for women that’s not that short, the average height in the US for women is apparently 5”3.5. Tho arguing about height is a bit silly for me to do, when really the main counterargument is she doesnt look like a child to me but Sabrina does and it weirds me out
I mean it is a LITTLE weird for someone whose primary audience is women to be sexualizing herself in that way all the time, in a way that her own fanbase finds strange
Are you familiar with a young lady named Cardi B and her number one hit single “Wet Ass Pussy”?
Yes ive heard of it, i dont listen to shitty pop music so im not defending it or Cardi as great art but i knew enough about the discourse that Cardi’s female fanbase (if it exists) is fine with that kind of ho’ing since thats her image. She started as a stripper after all. With Sabrina it’s a fanbase of mostly women and women taking umbrage with it, whereas Cardi B was more of a gender divide
She’s literally a woman with a primarily female audience being even more explicitly sexual than Sabrina, and women loved her for it. So no, it’s not weird (at least in pop culture circa 2024) for “someone whose primary audience is women to be sexualizing herself in that way all the time”. For some reason you’re okay when a “stripper” is “ho’ing it” (also in her mid 20s when she got popular) but not when a former Disney girl does.
If that puts off part of her audience, so be it. Clearly, Cardi B is not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine. Maybe Sexy Sabrina won’t be everyone’s cup of tea either. I’m sure they are both crying all the way to the bank (and good for them, they are talented in their way).
The issue I have is the leap from “that’s not my taste” to “that’s morally wrong, she must be doing something evil (baiting pedos)”. And THAT is the same tired moralizing I grew up on, except back then it was Britney Spears.
Yea but Sabrina’s women audience dont like it, but Cardi’s does. That’s my point. Cardi is calculating her image to make sure her audience is happy in order to make money. Sabrina is doing the opposite, where she’s alienating her audience by doing this stuff and that’s where the “this is kinda fucky” alarm bells go off. It’s like seeing a vegan advertise a big mac, it feels inauthentic
You’re basing the opinion of “her audience” on a few tweets and clickbait articles. She does not seem to have any issues filling seats.
Heard you on the Axis pod. Fun and interesting! You talk kind of fast but every word was clear so thanks!
Hahaha thank you! I am a half Jew from New York after all :D
I think the hijabi girl is meant to have a running blade leg.
Feels like the interviewer was trying to get them to talk about the music of Wicked like "people really seem to be engaging with the music", possibly expecting an answer like "yeah the music meant a lot to us growing up" or "it was hard to get it just right but it's worth it" and instead she got this. She tried to walk it back to get them back on track, but that only made it funnier.
I think that is a (badly drawn) running blade, probably because Jaco Pastorius was in the news and Tumblr artists don’t understand what the blades are for and how they’re supposed to work (they’re supposed to be super flexible, not rigid iron hooks as portrayed here). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics_of_Oscar_Pistorius%27s_running_blades
A canonical pirate (eg Long John Silver) would have had a peg leg, hooks are for hands.
Oscar Pistorius is the Boer bladerunner. Jaco Pastorius was an American jazz bassist:
https://youtu.be/PE6HmArln_k
Oh wow you’re right, my brain was just free-associating there, thanks for the correction!
Previously I was unsympathetic to "bluesky isn't going to be as insane as twitter" - I'm a "those moments of insane discourse aren't worth Twitter's effect on society" scold.
But @$#@ - solo piracy - maybe it *is* worth it.