Gen-Z is afraid of porn, and Sabrina Carpenter

New Statesman​

17-06-2025

'There's no hope for women,' goes a common online mantra. The newest public figure to inspire this mode of feminist desperation is the pop star Sabrina Carpenter, who has just unveiled the cover of her new album, Man's Best Friend. On the last one she was smiling at the camera with a lipstick mark on her bare back; now she's on all fours, looking gormless in lingerie and getting her hair pulled by a man in a suit.
This venture might have worked for a singer with an edgier reputation. It doesn't work for Carpenter, an ex-Disney star who shares a large portion of her mostly female fanbase with Taylor Swift. And these fans seems to hate it. 'It made me deeply uncomfortable, angry, even,' went one commentator for the iPaper. Elsewhere she is '[profiting] off images of abuse;' 'degrading [herself] just to appeal to their male audience' and 'leaning into the rise of conservatism.' 'Not empowering at all,' goes one X post with over a thousand likes.
Others online accuse these naysayers of perpetuating 'purity culture,' and 'expecting women to be modest.' But purity and modesty don't seem to be the issue. For her whole tenure as an A-lister, her public persona has been deliberately raunchy. There is a distinction to be made here – the 2024 rebrand that sent her into the stratosphere was not just about sex. It was about sex before the Sexual Revolution. Her screwball comedy persona was seemingly inspired by actresses who got big in the age of restrictive Hollywood censorship codes. When she mimed fellatio and missionary at her live shows, she was operating under the pretence that the visuals of sex were still a secret language, only accessible with age and experience, rather than the basis of a multibillion dollar industry. Almost every photoshoot has had more in common with the era of the pin-up than the dawn of Playboy; her stage outfits were revealing, but they were done in a mid-century burlesque style more popular among 2010s feminist types than hardcore pornographers.
No, none of that was the problem. It's porn Gen Z are afraid of. We get to it so early and in such overwhelming excess that it's hard to entertain the question that it might be empowering to women. To remain a girl's girl, you must excommunicate yourself from the entire adult sphere. A new Zoomerite women's culture reviles Onlyfans, sex scenes in films, one-night-stands, Instagram bikini models, and most men. In 2023, half of UK 16-21 year-olds reported they had first been exposed to pornography by 13; nearly 70% of American adolescents say they have seen it. The subreddit r/loveafterporn is crowded by young women who have caught their boyfriends talking to OnlyFans influencers.
Onlyfans stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips keep coming into the spotlight for sex stunts that rival 120 Days of Sodom. They run a cottage industry that locates and breaks taboos. They have colonised porno-land in the public imagination; and so stars like Sabrina who venture into it are more likely to provoke fatigue and anger than subversive titillation.
Carpenter's new album cover places us in this much-loathed world. The colours, clothes, lighting are distinctly 1970s. We've bypassed the age of the pin-up and Scopitone and gone full speed into the Hugh Hefner era, from which rise thousands of pornographic VHS tapes and hundreds of sordid stories about abuse and exploitation.
Carpenter has retained her sense of humour; her album has a tongue-in-cheek name; her music is still mostly anti-man. ('Why so sexy if so dumb/ And how survive the earth so long?' go the lyrics to the lead single, 'Manchild'). But her fans instinctively feel she is at risk in this world of flash photography and physical encounters with headless men. Since the release of 'Espresso' she has been their friendly sexual avatar; any transgression puts them at risk by proxy.
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Carpenter should forgive them for what might seem like a sudden descent into prudery. They are not attempting to relive the travails of Mary Whitehouse. It is more likely that they have already seen too much, too early. They will probably feel jaded and used for the rest of their lives; while provocation has been a mainstay of pop for all of living memory, provoking Gen-Z on purpose is like setting off a firecracker next to a war veteran. Carpenter's job was to curate a safe world in which the age of VHS porn had never arrived and sex was a joking matter, free from sleaze and exploitation. The illusion has been destroyed.
[See more: The rise of the West]
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