About three months ago I found myself at a party explaining what Eiffel Towering was to someone in their forties. If only they’d come of age in a time of Sabrina Carpenter, they would have known.
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.
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?”.
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
Critics decided that Carpenter crossed a line at last night’s performance of 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.
It’s a tale as old as time: Disney child star grows up and gets maligned for becoming adult woman with sexuality and a desire to express it. Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens were depicted as good girls gone bad when they donned their bikinis and sneakers for the 2012 film Spring Breakers. The following year, everyone was asking what happened to Miley Cyrus after her “raunchy” music video for Wrecking Ball, where she licked hammers and things.
Carpenter had her big break in Girl Meets World, a textbook Disney series about a spunky gal navigating teenhood. Now, she sings about being horny.
As with most in the Disney to pop star pipeline, a massive slice of Carpenter’s fanbase is tweenage girls. While Carpenter’s lyrics aren’t X-rated in the sense that she rarely swears, they are richly euphemistic. And yes, there’s something mildly unsettling about, say, 12-year-old girls belting out lines from her hit Bed Chem, like: “come right on me, I mean camaraderie!” or, “And I bet we'd both arrive at the same time, and I bet the thermostat's set at six-nine”.
But the thing to remember about children is that most of this stuff goes straight over their heads. They are not famously good with innuendo. What remains then, is someone they look up to who is completely at ease with her sexuality and willing to celebrate it.
I watched a compilation of Carpenter doing her Juno positions (it wears a little thin after a while) and thought that I would have quite liked to have had someone like her on the scene when I was a teenager. She portrays sex as something that is fun and nothing to be ashamed about.
“My message has always been clear – if you can’t handle a girl who is confident in her own sexuality, then don’t come to my shows,” Carpenter has said in the past. It’s not the first time she has ruffled feathers.
Carpenter came under fire for mimicking oral sex with a microphone in one performance of Juno in LA, while the regulator OfCom received hundreds of complaints after her Brit Awards performance, in which she dropped to her knees in front of a King’s Guard soldier.
Any parent who has been left shocked after taking their child to a Sabrina Carpenter show needn’t worry – this stuff is probably nothing new to them. In the UK, the average age a child sees pornography for the first time is around 12.
Instead of the regressive, damaging portrait of sex presented in porn, why not have a glitter-clad pop star teach them about Eiffel Towering? They probably won’t get it, but if they do, then it’s no harm, no foul.
