Sabrina Carpenter's shows are highly sexualised... but kids have seen it all before anyway
The pop star is under fire for her raunchy live shows, but why shouldn’t she teach young people about the birds and the bees? By Claudia Cockerell /Evening Standard
For the uninitiated, the story goes like this: the 25-year-old Espresso singer may look like butter wouldn’t melt, but most of her songs are about sex and her lyrics are thick with innuendo.
It’s become something of a tradition, you see, and as she gets down on all fours or kicks her legs back and bares her sparkly knickers, you can hear how young the crowd is by the pitch of their screams.
sabrina carpenter had the chance to do the funniest thing in paris and of course… she DID IT pic.twitter.com/GhZU6uurAw
— charleigh (@oneslaststime) March 17, 2025
In one particular song called Juno, (about fancying a man so much you want him to get you pregnant, naturally) there’s a lyric that goes: “Wanna try out some freaky positions?” Carpenter is on a world tour at the moment for her album, Short ‘n’ Sweet, and has taken to acting out a different sex position at each show as she sings the next line, “Have you ever tried this one?”
Critics decided that Carpenter crossed a line performing Juno at her show in Paris. With the help of her two back-up dancers, she did the Eiffel Tower, a three-way sex position inspired by France’s greatest monument. Some have not taken kindly to her ode to the City of Love. “Pop or just Porn?” reads a headline in The Sun. On X, users are complaining about little kids being in the audience, and that Carpenter has “oversexualised” herself.
Sabrina has an infectious charm, it’s hard not to get swept up in her theatrics almost immediately as she kicked off the show with her humour on full display.
Every gig starts off with a camp unwrapping of a bath towel to reveal a different bodysuit underneath, however, Sunday, March 9 came with a bedazzled Union Jack on the inside too.
The Please Please Please singer won her first Grammy Awards for best pop vocal album for Short N’ Sweet and best pop solo performance for Espresso earlier this month.
Elsewhere in the show, Carpenter “arrested” Spice Girls’ Emma Bunton with fluffy pink handcuffs for the crime of “being too hot”.
