I'm Just A Girl

Words Philippa Snow
AI-Generated Illustration Francesco Petroni

In October last year, the diminutive pop star Sabrina Carpenter performed her new song 'Nobody's Son' on Saturday Night Live, under circumstances that caused controversy for two distinct reasons. Firstly, the show failed to censor the word "fucked", which appears on the track twice: if the subtext of Carpenter's music has almost always been about fucking, the text is usually either playfully allusive or judiciously edited enough that she successfully skirts the obscene in favour of something sillier and wryer. The second catalyst for online opprobrium was the use of a dojo as a set, and karate gi suits as costumes: such a scene, with a blonde, white, blue-eyed babe at the centre, felt tasteless to some.

"If we are clearly referencing a culture, please can you do so with the research, respect, and care it deserves," the British-Japanese actress and singer Rina Sawayama posted on Ins ta gram. It is easy to see why Sawayama took offense, given the long and un-illustrious history of western celebrities appropriating, spoofing, and clumsily exoticising Eastern culture. In this instance, however, I can think of a different rationale: I believe that the culture to which Carpenter meant to pay homage when mounting her performance on this set was her own, by which I mean the proud, cen­turies-old culture of yearning to kick a cruel man in the balls. Near the end of the song is the refrain wherein she uses the word "fucked", at which point the men on the stage line up beside her.

"That boy is corrupt!" she chirps, cheerfully turning to hit the first squarely in the gut, her movements timed to the track's percussive smash. ''He sure fucked me up!" she nods enthusiastically, throwing out one tiny leg until her foot makes contact with a second dancer's groin.

The literal one-two punch of these choreo­graphed blows with the sound effect used in the song-a noise that is almost certainly a whip­crack, but which also suggests a sharp slap meet­ing flesh-evokes a Lichtenstein-like comic-book panel, replete with a POW! or a BAM! Carpenter is thus positioned as a kind of cartoon heroine: one whose power is being superhumanly pissed off with her ex-boyfriends. This staging, com­bined with the censorship failure, draws attention to the song's gleeful misandry, while removing some of the protective scrim of cuteness that has made such anti-male sentiment saleable for Carpenter. (It's notable, I think, that these incriminating uses of"fucked" do not actually refer to getting railed, but to being emotionally destroyed.) If in the planning stages, somebody had thrown out another example of a theme that would facilitate the beating up of men onstage­a police training academy, say, with Sabrina in a sexy-cop outfit-I have no doubt she'd have jumped at the prospect. Truthfully, I had written Carpenter off as a fun, featherbrained artist meant for other, younger people until I first heard 'Nobody's Son', which finally did the work of convincing me that she was not in fact a mere high-charting trifle, but a bona fide screw­ball genius. Mea culpa! Her eccentric and often unexpected line deliveries on the track are not simply the mark of an interesting pop star, but the work of a great comic actor.

The deadpan, almost comatose shrug of 'Me? No, yeah, I'm good''. The fatalistic sarcasm of "he discovered se{fcontrol this week" and the shrill, urgent underscoring of that line through repetition in the backing track:

"He discovered it! This week!"The way she lets her nascent Dolly Parton twang emerge to the maximum as she rhymes "feelin"' with "third-wheelin"' lets you know she knows how good the line is, and when she performs it her face moves like that of a silent-movie actress: rubbery, kinetic, all eyebrows and saucer-sized eyes.

How had I not really noticed that in her previous single 'Manchild', which charted at number one in the United Kingdom and in America, she referred to a certain man as being "stupid", "dumb", and "slow"? Perhaps because I had also been fooled by her sexy-baby sweetness, which successfully deflects from the more savage aspects of her music. Once you clock just how much of this stuff she sneaks in, the effect of this contrast-between Sabrina Carpenter the eyelash-batting poppet, and Sabrina Carpenter the feminist ball-kicking menace-is ultra-amusing and delightfully subversive, like seeing a Disneyfied bluebird reading a copy of the SCUM Manfesto in its nest. The song 'House Tour' has become a fan favourite for its innuendo about back doors and waxed hardwood floors, but for my money its best lines are those about the date that precedes the actual sex. "The pine­apple air.freshener is my_fovourite kind," she reassures the presumable Tesla-bro in whose vehicle she is sitting. "I really loved the conversation and that your car se{fdrives." She fucks him not because she likes him particularly, but because she feels like fuck­ing someone, and also because she is high on her own fuckability. "I'm just so proud," she breathes, "of my design." Carpenter sometimes hates men, but she also adores them, and adores having sex with them, and her broader position on these contradictory facts is to think of her heterosexuality as somehow both a giant bummer and a great big lark. Misogynists love to say women can't be funny, but they also love to suggest women use their sex appeal to get away with things. The truth is, you can get away with almost anything if, like Carpenter, you are both hot and hilarious.

Carpenter's dark mirror-both in pop and in the field of lusting after awful men­is arguably the patron saint of bad-boy­loving and pill-popping, Lana Del Rey. Just as gorgeous, just as talented, and just as high-femme, Del Rey differs most radically from Carpenter in her philosophy vis-a.-vis ill-fated romance; where Carpenter treats her attraction to unsuitable suitors as a laugh-or-I'll-cry dilemma, Del Rey eroticises her own mistreatment. She tops from the bottom by suggesting that, actually, she wants the kind of man who will (as Sabrina puts it) give her "PTSD on the daily". "Throw me 'round like a hot potato," she purrs on the track 'Bad Boy'. on 2017's 'White Mustang', "but I couldn't stop the way I wasfeelin'. .. You're gonna hit me like lightnin'. "Her sultry, anaesthe-tised odes to bikers, Daddies, and cartoon hoodlums so often contain lines that, when read without music, might conceivably appear to be jokes, yet Del Rey plays it all absolutely straight, her apparent seriousness adding, ironically, a dimension of camp to her work. It's this element which comes closest to approximating the satirical brand of girliness found in Carpenter's music. Still, we tend to take Del Ray at face value when she says her pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola or solemnly pledges allegiance to her dad, maybe because her commitment to being Lana Del Rey is so total, so immersive, that we have no choice but to buy into the conceit. She is a genius of a different kind from the playful, puckish Carpenter: one of subjugation, reflecting a notion of the feminine as something intrinsically tied to abjection. Neither mode of grappling with the uneven relationship between men and women is more or less feminist than the other, although it must be said that Carpenter's lubricating dash of wicked humour helps the message go down easier for a mainstream audience. (Del Rey, as far as I'm aware, does not have a great number of preteen fans; perhaps for this group, "Daddy" is still something that you call your actual father.)

The crucial difference between both women's sensibilities was most apparent last June, when Carpenter released the cover art for her most recent album, Man's Best Friend: a photograph, lit like an American Apparel ad from the naugh­ties, of the singer on all fours in what appeared to be a sordid motel, her hair pulled by a faceless, suited man. For days, the internet raged, seeing the shot as a betrayal of contemporary feminist mores.

I remember thinking that if Del Rey had released such an image, the debate would have been nowhere near as fierce. I also remember thinking the photograph was not really worth the trouble: there is nothing inherently unfeminist about enjoying S&M dynamics, and this kind of marketing is not new or titillating, either. Only once I started to actually listen to Carpenter's music did I realise why the image had failed to hit its mark. What Carpenter meant to suggest was that she really does love men, but she also hates the way some of them treat women like pets; that she sometimes makes a barking, drooling fool of herself over a boy, but still has sharp teeth with which to bite him.

What robbed her of the ability to get her point across was a lack of access to her usual wordplay, those zingy little jokes she typically uses to shore up her complex position on objectification, and so, wearily, she called on the biggest, baddest, most Lana Del Rey-coded Daddy of them all for support. Instagramming a bland new design, which featured her leaning against a man's chest, she slyly added a foolproof endorsement in the caption: "Here is a new alternate cover," she wrote, with an implied wink, "approved by God."

THIS STORY IS TAKEN FROM LOVE S/S 26 ISSUE, NOW AVAILABLE AT KD PRESSE.