Selling Sex, Losing Touch: How Gen Z Performs Sexuality Instead of Feeling It

“Don't come to the show and that’s OK”

—Sabrina Carpenter’s response to parents unhappy with her revealing performance outfits.

Carpenter confirms that without sequined, sweetheart babydoll bodysuits, there’s no Sabrina Carpenter show. But it’s the lack of sexuality, underlying her public brand image that is the subject of my fascination. Despite an inundation of objectively suggestive attire, lyrics, themes and on-stage sex simulation, she retains her “Short ‘n Sweet” wholesome image in the larger ambiance. Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo specifically, are interesting case studies for analyzing how Gen Z culture’s relationship to sexuality and others has changed for better or for worse.

We expect pop stars to be soft porn stars.

As norms surrounding sexual expression in art continue their 21st century shift towards liberal attitudes, the threshold for what is considered “scandalizing” rises indefinitely. The Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus style VMA scandals would hardly break a headline in 2025. Why would they, when the attention-economy pop playbook has become a race to pioneer uncharted shock territory? Even the new reactionary, trad-conservative women’s movement has not produced any popular, modest attitudes towards sex. The behaviors of a bad-girl persona in years prior are now inverted to an image of a wholesome, sweet, 50's-inspired pin-up darling. No matter how much she associates herself with sexuality, Sabrina can’t achieve “sexy”. She is the embodiment of “cute”. Of course sexuality in pop culture is not new, but the ability to distinguish between “suggestive” and “soft porn” seems to have disappeared. Has the internet created a sort of arousal dysfunction induced by overstimulation? I think yes. Not to sound like a puritan, but when Sabrina hoists and strokes an invisible penis in the air to a sold-out stadium, I can’t help but think, “is nothing sacred anymore?”

The lost, subtle art of being a sex icon.

On each of her “Short & Sweet Tour” performances, Sabrina Carpenter uses her song “Juno”, a song about wanting to be impregnated (referencing indie darling film Juno 2009) to simulate the “freaky positions” she sings in her song. Compilations on Youtube can bring up every simulated blowjob, reverse cowgirl, doggystyle, woman-on-top and other creative acrobatics Sabrina performs to her majority 12-18yr old audiences nightly. She’s also known for her creative “Nonsense” innuendo rhymes which she personalizes to each city she performs in.

Her cultural counterpart Olivia Rodrigo also relies on vaguely referential sexual imagery. Before 2010, her musical moans, breathes, screams and frustrated “cum faces” would be obvious elications of sexuality. In Rodrigo’s videos and commercial partnerships, she emotes pleasure, make “innocent-girl-wanting-to-be-fucked” faces, and always has some kind of oral fixation happening. Faces that, coming from a petite young woman constantly dressed in schoolgirl outfits, appeal to a “barely legal”, “baby-girl” age kink. Despite all this, she enjoys a similar reputation to that of the actually wholesome brand of Taylor Swift of the late 2000s. I don’t reserve the advancement of sexuality in media to the efforts of women artists alone. I’m sure there is plenty of male “slut” music out there working overtime on fyp’s more cursed than mine. My observations do not stem from any kind of sensationalist personal judgement and are not meant as critiques of them as individuals. But as I type the peach and water droplet emoji at my job as brand social media manager to post about these artists, I do start to wonder where the commercial music plot has gone.

Are these two women self-aware thought leaders piecing through the glass ceiling of patriarchy? I’m sure that would be their alibi. Though giving patriarchy the imagery it asks for hardly seems subversive. It appears these artists are mirroring back a culture they find themselves already fully immersed in, unaware and uncaring of their roles in stoking such culture. Abandoning the top-down cultural tendency of the past, they navigate culture from the inside out. This makes them all the more relatable to the wider population, whose lives have been reduced to TikTok shop orders and scrolling in their SUV’s. The artists and their fan bases don’t seem to even detect the explicitly of their content, save for a few angry moms from lapsed middle-American towns. This deluge of sexual imagery has become divorced from sexuality, rendering what used to be private performances of seduction utterly numb. In the economics of sexual theater, the supply curve shifted right. What’s left is an arousal recession and a population of young people unable to impress each other in comparison to what is readily accessible to them online.

Their bid for sex icon status fails because it’s not real.

When Carpenter gracefully tells mom jeans to fuck off earlier, she’s holding on tight to the dream of being the mascot of Sex. Despite a cultural plethora of sexuality in pop culture, no singular figure seems to achieve the sex-icon Marilyn status like they used to. Pop-culture writer Chuck Klosterman, author of “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” explains this post-post-modern phenomenon.

“Madonna is an unsuccessful sexual icon because she desperately wants to be a sexual icon. Pamela Anderson is the perfect sexual icon because she wants to have sex.”

Klosterman also notes how Madonna’s biggest songs “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer” are both similes, so Madonna is only like a sex icon. She is sex only figuratively. Carpenter’s device of choice is the metaphor. “Juno” representing being impregnated, “Espresso” on some level representing addictive pussy. “Taste” and “Bed Chem” being more on-the-nose euphemisms but still using their 5th amendment omission. For Carpenter, sex isn’t mentioned as a personal, sensual or spiritual experience, only a framework for storytelling about power dynamics in relationships. Rodrigo’s mentions are even more vague alluding to hooking up with an ex as a “bad idea right?” and perhaps some distant association to sucking with “vampire”. Basically they beat around the bush. Incidentally, “beat around the bush” is probably a rejected Sabrina Carpenter song.

Both of these stars continue the storytelling by engaging in highly publicized romantic relationships that play into the lore and franchise of their albums. Carpenter’s famous relationship with Barry Keoghan culminated in a meta, self-aware music video where she begs him to not humiliate her publicly. And Rodrigo’s relationship with High School Musical: The Musical — The Series’ co-star Joshua Bassett set off her career with songs that publicly commented on the happenings of that public relationship. Ironically the two pop girls are intertwined through their relationships and possible overlaps with Bassett. The public nature of these relationships becomes a part of their rise and ultimately their “brand” but also the “unrealness” of them, casting them all as characters in a performance rather than people in relationships. It gives us a kind of uncanny valley—something here isn’t real, but we can’t tell what.

It’s not real because in their world, it’s never bad.

One of the most revealing aspects of these stars’ relationships to sexuality is the inherent goodness to which sex is afforded. The overall glamorization of sex as an empowering fantasy and overwhelmingly positive experience for the female grates on a larger truth known by sex-havers everywhere: sex is not always good. It can be messy, painful, humiliating, non-consensual, confusing, heart-breaking and not even necessarily pleasurable. But in the Gen Z pop star world, we get a PG-13 version of sex as pleasant and innocent as Ken and Barbie dolls rubbed together: plastic, mess-free and squeaky clean! While the adult woman can experience a wide range of emotions surrounding sex—including shame, guilt, worthlessness, and yearning—the sex of the “Short & Sweet” tour is always empowering, the woman is always in control and she can always buy cute products to experience this fantastical sex in. When Female Popstar™ centers this fake sexuality in her art, she loses credibility as a sex symbol.

The sexual references made ad nauseam by Female Popstar™ are meant to empower her and her oddly young fanbase into feeling like mature adult women and valuable sex objects in a currency quickly losing relative value. But in truth, this openness and simplistic view of female sexuality reveals naivety and inexperience. In a circular way, this eagerness and callowness can be re-fetishized as a trope of teen porn. It conveniently ignores the inherent humiliation of sex for the female socialized in a society which creates unfair rules, norms and lack of protections for the woman as a sexual being. It asks the adult woman to suspend what she knows from experience: that no matter how much she enjoys any given sex act, she is in the compromised role, unable to dictate the terms of society. These complexities are lost in favor of meme culture that encourages us to “get our guts rearranged” and “bounce on it crazy style”. Their music seems to have all the answers about sexual behavior without asking any of the tough questions that the philosopher-musicians of the past have attempted.

Courtney Love shares a different relationship to sex with men in Hole’s “Violet”:

When they get what they want, they never want it again. Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to.

Lana Del Rey surrenders to defeat in “A&W”:

No this is the experience of being an American whore. I mean, look at me, look at the length of my hair, my face, the shape of my body. If I told you I was raped do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it? I won’t testify, I already fucked up my story.

Here, these artists speak their unsexy truth. They share something more real than the inorganic sexual desire that comes through in the biggest commercial pop music projects of 2022-2025. They show a familiarity with intimacy, of which sex is just a byproduct. Of course the way they deliver their raw, personal sexuality without appealing to the male gaze does not warrant them quite sex icon status. Instead, it invites punishment.

What it says about Gen Z.

The brand-friendly, desensitized relationship to sexuality trickles down. This cultural reaganomics has resulted in a generation of young people that are statistically having less sex but are surrounded by its monuments. Culture is hypersexed and pervert-friendly and yet lacking in seduction, sensuality or intimacy. Vintage Playboy magazines are traded as tasteful erotica at flea markets, comparatively tame and actually containing high-concept art direction. The context has collapsed. In Gen Z art, sex is now treated the way “making out” might have been in earlier generations (naughty, harmless, nostalgic and therefore less meaningful). Gen Z’s record-setting abstinence coexisting with an artistic obsession with nudity and sex is the cultural equivalent of “I have a girlfriend but she goes to another school”. While pop culture continues to drift to the desperation of endless shock culture, how can we protect our personal sexuality from being numbed or corrupted? How can we make it real?