Sabrina Carpenter: for the Girls or the Gaze?

4 camps of discourse

• camp/ satire

  • but it's not satire lol

• "she's calling out man children"

  • the song is witterally about loving stupid men

• "she's setting back feminism"

  • respectability politics

  • who gets to be sexualized and remain safe

• Capitalism

  • Jack Antonoff packaging and selling women's emotions

embodiment of white feminism

• feminism that doesn't want revolution, but settles for individual safety

• feminism that values feelings over structure (like valuing comfort over challenging and dismantling systems of oppression)

• "because while people are writing essays about whether Sabrina's leash is empowering women are being bombed in Palestine raped in Congo sterilized in ICE detention centers black trans women are being murdered indigenous girls are vanishing working-class mothers are being evicted but this this is what makes the news this is what gets the

  clicks this is what feminism becomes when it's being gutted of solidarity and sold back to us as merch.

"what if a black woman did what Sabrina did because when black women do it it's a problem submission sex provocation it only gets called empowerment when it's packaged in the

right body black women have been doing what Sabrina Carpenter is doing for years exaggerating femininity playing with erotic power blurring the line between satire and seduction but the reaction is completely different."

Double standard-- Cupcakke, Nicki Minaj, Megan the Stallion, Cardi B

"it's not that this imagery can't be feminist it's that it only gets to be feminist when it's

filtered through whiteness thinness and safety"