Grown men want to date teenagers. Sabrina Carpenter says they should be flattered.
An analysis of dating apps, "bimbo feminism," and Short n' Sweet.
Edit: Since publishing this essay and it getting lots of attention (positive and also negative), I have also written an addendum that you might want to check out. Here’s the link to Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, and Lana del Rey: Can any woman do feminism right?
It’s August of 2019. I’ve just moved to New York, and I’ve just turned 18. I’ve also just gotten my ass handed to me by my summer camp boyfriend who broke up with me because he realized I’m “not the girl [he’s] going to marry.” Earlier that month he got pissed at me when I said I wouldn’t have sex with him. Maybe that should’ve been a sign things weren’t going to work out.
In my fresh independence and fresh adulthood and fresh brokenheartedness, I did what any teenage girl desperate to feel good enough would do.
I downloaded Tinder for the first time.
I think I just had my age range set to the default, something like 18-25 years old. And I was matching with a lot of men in their mid-20’s. They were so cool and, because they thought I was pretty, I was so cool.
Surprise! Tinder did not end up being a positive environment for me, which didn’t stop me from revisiting it a few times a year for the next five. It didn’t occur to me how odd some of these men’s behavior when I was so young was until I reached the age where the question “how old am I willing to date?” became “how young am I willing to date?”
The answer was two years younger than me. I was 23, and I decided 21 is the youngest I am willing to date. Once I tried to peruse the 20 year olds, but was quickly put off by how young they all seemed. Needless to say, I never went on a date with any of them.
Why? It felt like robbing the cradle. Then again, so did dating my summer camp boyfriend when I was 17 and he was also 17 but three months less 17 than I was. When I turned 18, I felt guilty about even kissing him. I know that was irrational, but it just didn’t sit right with my obsessive compulsive disorder me.
Even so, while I do have some moral hangups about age gaps for myself rooted in OCD, I stepped out of the shower yesterday thinking about all those 24 year old men flirting with me when I was 6 years their junior. At the time, I thought I was hot shit. I mean, some of these men had (whispers) tattoos. Yuh huh.
Now, as I near being 24 myself, I am disgusted. The idea of dating anyone who is still a teenager while I am 23, let alone 24 or 25, just feels preposterous. I wouldn’t do it if you paid me a thousand bucks. Because that is a child.
Which means, as I was only able to see in hindsight, I was also a child.
Yeah, it’s legal. I know that. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with people my age who would date a 20 year old, or even a 19 year old. I don’t think those men I matched with when I was 18 should be in jail. I don’t think they’re all pedophiles.
What I do think is that there is something particularly sinister about these kinds of men, especially because it is a macrocosm of the larger cultural phenomenon of grown men dating women who are still teenagers and the world being okay with it.
Keeping Up With the Kardashians star Scott Disick was 34 when he dated 19-year-old Sofia Richie, and 37 when he dated 19-year-old Amelia Hamlin. It’s long been a punchline that Leonardo DiCaprio won’t publicly date any woman over 25 despite the fact that he is 50. He has publicly dated multiple models in their teenage years. Billie Eilish was 21 when she began dating musician Jesse Rutherford, who was 31. This one doesn’t seem too bad until you consider that the two met and became friends when Billie was 15.
Hollywood and every major city are riddled with relationships like this.
Let me acknowledge that yes, women can take advantage of young men too (see: Brigitte Macron, wife and former teacher of French president Emmanual Macron) and I don’t want to discount that, but 1) this article is not about that, and 2) the behavior is especially male-dominated and 3) every girl reading this either has direct experience with it or knows a girl who does.
Are these men unable to find anyone their own age willing to date them?
Are they so brainwashed by beauty standards and the pornography industry that they cannot find anyone other than a teenager attractive?
Are they enthralled by the fact that someone younger will find them much cooler and take their interest in them as an honor, like I did?
While predatory men will always be at fault for taking advantage of women, it’s not lost on me that plenty of women who would have no trouble finding a partner their own age play toward this childlike ideal in the hopes of being more desirable. This is a problem.
Let’s look at one example.
Pop star and “Espresso” singer Sabrina Carpenter, age 26, has gained notoriety for her catchy sexual lyrics and the illusion that she is turning the male gaze on its head (key word: illusion). Her album Short n’ Sweet, coated with references to her small frame and the things men can (and should) do with it, won a GRAMMY in 2025.
I like Sabrina Carpenter’s music, and a lot of the tongue-in-cheek lyrics are funny and endearing, and none of this is an attack on Sabrina as a person or on her artistry. She’s incredibly talented.
Another clarification I’ll make is that I am a feminist and I will say until the day I die that there there is nothing wrong with a woman talking about sex. I don’t think a criticism of her brand and some of her actions is anti-feminist, and I think the modern feminist conversation is nuanced and there is even room for opposing feelings felt by the same woman; I listen to Sabrina Carpenter and sometimes we should be allowed to enjoy things that are fun without constantly wondering if it’s good for or bad for feminism. These topics are difficult to talk about in a way that acknowledges every possible viewpoint, and there’s no way I will cover every one in this essay. I also want to add that the fact that a woman like Sabrina is able to achieve such popularity with active knowledge of and songs about her desirability can be seen in some ways as feminist progress.
On the other hand, this analysis from Jade Hurley of the “soft girl,” coquette aesthetic that Carpenter invokes is worth reading. I’ll provide a short snippet here:
“I see the character of the “soft girl”—particularly when donned by white women—as a first step on a girls-only alt-right pipeline. The originators of this term, Gen Z Nigerian women, had anti-colonial aims and radical rest in mind when creating the “soft girl” Internet persona. Then, white Americans quickly readapted the trend to align with the Christian Pastoral: home-making, Pilates arms, you know the rest. The white trend toward tradwifery—that, yes, ensured the election of a demagogue—replaced the true intention of the Nigerian movement with Puritan gender roles.3”
Anyone who has listed to “Bed Chem” will quickly deduce Carpenter is not playing into Puritan ideals, but she does play into gender roles and appeals to male fantasies in a way some find regressive. Again, not saying Sabrina is a bad person or that she’s wrong for playing into what sells.
As Hurley notes later on in this article, called Your Fave is Selling a Pedophilic Fantasy, Sabrina is particularly known for the outro for her song “Nonsense,” which she switches up and makes topical according to wherever she is currently performing:
“I’m full grown but I look like a niña / Come put something big in my casita / Mexico, I think you are bonita!” (February 2024)
“Gardens by the Bay, I wanna go there / Then, I’ll take you somewhere that has no hair / Singapore you’re so perfect, it’s no fair!” (March 2024)
… she is explicitly comparing herself to a pre-pubescent child. She looks like a young girl, her pussy is bald, and she wants you to fuck her. She isn’t sharing this only because it’s funny; for some audiences, these qualities grant her favor and capital.”
In addition to these lyrics, Carpenter did a full photoshoot for W Magazine that directly references the famous Vladimir Nabokov novel and later movie Lolita, about a grown man enamored by a 12 year old girl. He sexually abuses the little girl.
Hurley goes on to point out, “W Magazine and the Sabrina Carpenter machine cleanly folded Nabokov’s controversial story— about an adult man’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl—into a feature about an adult woman’s child stardom. This reference is political, and not for any analysis on pedophilic culture. Without reference to or condemnation of its source material, this doesn’t challenge equivocations of a small-statured, former child star to an actual child. In fact, it reads more like an invitation.”
Constant referral to being short and horny is one ultimately harmless thing, but done in tandem with repeated references to being childlike is another. I get that the whole petite and desirable thing is Sabrina’s entire brand and that she is playing a character, and I wouldn’t have issue with it if she wasn’t directly playing into and even encouraging people to see her as adjacent to a child.
The conversation of whether or not the character and brand of Sabrina Carpenter is feminist or regressive is another beast entirely which we’ll just barely touch on in a moment, but in relation to the original topic of this essay I feel it pertinent to quote this excerpt from Emma Oxnevad’s Sabrina Carpenter and the inner voyeur:
“Several of her songs are about being hotter than other women (occasionally teenagers) competing for the attention of a man, an inaugural experience for women who buy into the patriarchy. Through Carpenter’s music, female sexuality is understood as a performance meant to affirm a woman’s attractiveness through a man’s eyes; pleasure is derived not from a woman’s desire being satiated, but through being an object of male desire.”
Personally, I don’t feel like the brand of Sabrina Carpenter fully and completely caters to the male gaze and I also don’t think we should shame women for existing in a way that happens to align with what men find attractive. I myself wear makeup and like to get dressed up and while it feels like it’s done “for myself,” I don’t think it’s possible to fully divorce the beauty standard and feminine ideal from the patriarchy. I talk about that more here. That doesn’t mean women shouldn’t be allowed to dress and present themselves in a way that feels good to them even if the style can be traced back generations to male desire.
You could argue that Sabrina Carpenter is making light of men’s — and society at large’s — sexualization of young girls, turning it on its head in a sense. But without explicitly saying so, without even poking fun at men for being attracted to younger women or at the patriarchy in any sense, she is just playing right into what men want in the sense of acting younger than she is. Aside from the fact that she is getting richer by the second in doing so — which benefits only her, not her impressionable audience — there nothing progressive about that.
For Sabrina, she’s been able to benefit from the regressive tropes and stereotypes she represents by finally achieving commercial and mainstream success and making millions of dollars. For the inspired fans — almost all of them young women — who emulate Sabrina’s catering to the male gaze even via self-infantilization, how do they benefit? By winning men’s approval? Do we as a society really place that much value in what men think of us, that their validation is worth achieving even it is attained by pretending to be, in the words of Sabrina herself, a clueless little “niña” who wants you to “come right on [her]”?
On the point of feigning innocence and childishness, I think it’s necessary to define and analyze the “bimbo feminism” Sabrina Carpenter’s brand is built on. As Shanzae Zaeem describes it for Rabble, bimbo feminism is “reclaiming through embracing of patriarchal feminine stereo types — namely, being attractive, airheaded, and innocent.” This phenomenon is mirrored in popular online trends like “girl math,” “girl dinner,” and the phrase “I’m just a girl,” and therefore shouldn’t be expected to understand complicated topics or be able to perform difficult tasks, even those as simple as driving (wonderful essay on that linked here).
To drop a quote-bomb on you from the aforementioned Rabble article:
“Bimbo-feminists embody — with pride — a hyper-feminine, hyper-sexualised, and anti-intellectual strand of feminism. It is not useful to debate, “why can’t women just be feminine? Why can’t we just act like bimbos? Feminism is about women supporting women right?”, wrong. Feminism is about liberating women from oppressive structures and narratives that have historically subjugated us. It is not about blindly supporting whatever women do, just because they are women. There is no such thing as ‘just’ being feminine, and ‘just’ acting like a bimbo. Our decisions do not exist in a vacuum, they are influenced by larger social structures — like the patriarchy — and have impacts on society.”
I am very much a feminist, and as I said earlier I have no problem with women singing about sex, dressing feminine or provocative, or owning their sexuality. I think all of these can be deeply empowering things, ways of taking our power back. My issue with Sabrina Carpenter — as a brand, not necessarily a person — is that she isn’t just talking about sex, she’s talking about sex alongside repeated references to her being akin to a child. She knows people might see her as childlike because of her stature and the origins of her celebrity as a Disney star. Rather than resisting that, she plays into it. There are real consequences to that, and they’re not positive.
Yes, Sabrina Carpenter is responsible for her image and brand, but I also understand where she’s coming from on some fronts (aside from her active and voluntary engagement with the pedophilic fantasy). She has been trying to achieve mainstream success for a very long time, and she’s not a bad person for branding herself generally in a way that tends to garner attention and help her achieve that goal. Again, I am speaking not of the child comparisons or Lolita shoot, but of things like dressing feminine or wearing makeup and sexy outfits; she should be allowed to do that! The arguments against this form of self-expression — which while rooted in patriarchy can absolutely be done in a subversive way, though I don’t think Sabrina is subverting anything — feel Puritanical and conservatism coded.
What does Sabrina Carpenter have to do with the fact that when I was 18, multiple men in their mid-20’s wanted to date – or more likely, fuck me?
The conversation is complicated, but at the end of the day Sabrina Carpenter sells the fantasy that the younger you look, the more sexually desirable you are and that being compared to a child is something she is not opposed to. In fact, she doesn’t miss out on an opportunity to encourage you to do so. She didn’t create these ideas herself and the fact that they are a quick ticket to male validation and capitalist success isn’t her fault, but actively playing into the pedophilic fantasy is a deliberate choice. A choice that carries significant weight given that she is one of the most popular female musicians among young people of the current era, someone who teenagers and children alike will grow up finding aspirational, someone who will lead them to internalize the image and beliefs she’s selling. Someone who will make them find the attraction of an older man a worthy accomplishment, like I did.
Men have already been given permission to date women significantly younger them, and have been taught that they don’t need to have any moral qualms about dating a woman who was learning the alphabet the same year they themselves were starting at Goldman Sachs. The responsibility to change that shouldn’t fall on the backs of women, and those who are oppressed and taken advantage of in any way shouldn’t carry the burden of teaching the oppressor to not do that anymore. It’s not Sabrina Carpenter’s fault, and again she is just one example of this phenomenon (we could do a whole series about Lana del Rey who I also love). I still listen to her music, and I don’t think anyone has to stop doing so in the name of feminism. But I do think that women in the spotlight have an obligation not to also give millions of young women the green light to see validation from and the opportunity to sexually satisfy older men who see them as children as empowering when it is everything but.
Recommended reading:
Your Fave is Selling a Pedophilic Fantasy by Jade Hurley
Sabrina Carpenter and the inner voyeur by Emma Oxnevad
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I agree with you on the fact that she didn't create these ideas herself, but it's a choice (and what a choice) to actively play into the 'pedophilic fantasy'. In my opinion, as the mainstream artist that she is, she should be responsible for the message that she's giving. Such responsibility isn't teaching the oppressor to stop taking advantage of women and all the oppressed, but the message that she gives actually contributes to and feeds the oppressor's narrative. And I find that deeply concerning and disturbing.
As someone who has been enjoying her music since Thumbs, and has been growing increasingly uncomfortable with her current presentation, I loved the points made in your article! Also, one thing I realised while reading is how the figure of the bimbo “girl’s girl” feminist has evolved. To me that figure embodied what Elle Woods from Legally Blonde is, not what is portrayed nowadays through tiktoks like “my boyfriend at his big boy job while I am doing my useless degree”, and to watch it degrade into that has been torturous.