Sabrina Carpenter is so horny, she’s can't hide it.
The former Disney starlet has splashed onto the pop music scene with a zeal for catchy hooks with her song "Nonsense" and the flirty summer jam with unserious rhymes “Espresso.” “That’s that me espresso” anyone?
But before her arrival as one of the emerging pop girls this summer alongside Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, the 25-year-old singer has been in the Disney machine for most of her life. Starring in the “Boy Meets World” spinoff “Girl Meets World,” Carpenter straddled the actor/singer line, releasing four albums under Disney’s label Hollywood Records.
It wasn’t until her fifth studio album, “Emails I Can’t Send,” released through Island Records, that Carpenter shed her child star persona and began to lean into a more mature, sex-positive one instead. This version of Carpenter’s music is apparent in the viral song “Nonsense.” Carpenter sings about her paramour’s love making her talk nonsense, leading to a sexy play on words with haiku-type outros.
As the singer bopped around city to city on her own tour and eventually Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, she would tailor each outro to a new city. I was at Carpenter’s New York City show at the Terminal 5 venue last year when she mouthed conspiratorially to the crowd, "New York, tomorrow is my birthday. I want d**k, please."
Carpenter’s new album, “Short N’ Sweet,” which is tracking to secure the singer’s first No. 1 album on the Billboard charts, shows us that similar tongue-in-cheek wit with its raunchy, sexed-up lyrics. Carpenter has completely traded her Disney image for a sexually liberated and empowered persona.
Here’s how Carpenter has managed to bite a reportedly sexless Gen-Z with the horny bug through her blissful, comical summer jams:
Carpenter winks at the Bard
Sampling the late ‘90s R&B song “Into You” by Tamia and with hints of “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson, Carpenter hits all the simmering, nostalgic sweet spots in “Bed Chem.” With pop producers like Ian Kirkpatrick, John Smith and songwriters like Julia Michaels and Amy Allen assisting on the track, Carpenter glides through “Bed Chem” like it's suggestive spoken word.
Breaking down the lyrics, Carpenter pulls no punches when she’s singing about her lover – possibly referencing her current boyfriend, Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan. She sets the raunchy tone from the start, not so subtly singing, “manifest[ing] that you're oversized.”
She goes into detail about the various positions, singing “I bеt we'd have really good bеd chem/How you pick me up, pull 'em down, turn me 'round.”
And she continues to voice her sexual appetite: “Are you free next week?/I bet we'd have really good.”
But her suggestiveness hits its heights when she sings:
Come right on me,
I mean camaraderie,
Said you're not in my timezone, but you wanna be
Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?
She has fun with shock value at first, ditching the double entendre to straight up say “come right on me,” but jokingly corrects herself as if becoming shy, replacing it with the similar word “camaraderie.”
Carpenter then purposefully make fun of the outrageousness of her desire for her partner, when she busts out a line from what feels like a Shakespearean sonnet, “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” But far bolder than anything the Bard would pen.
Carpenter takes it even further, literally, when she sings: “And I bet we'd both arrive at the same time (Bed chem)/And I bet the thermostat's set at six-nine (Bed-bed ch-chem).”
The song feels like her listeners are tuning into one long voice memo sent to friends after a date. There is a lightness to even her most lewd references – maybe because she knows her Gen-Z audience needs a non-threatening, witty approach to sex and relationships.
Similarly, in her opening track, “Taste” the singer says her ex-boyfriend “makes paintings with his tongue,” using a euphemism to explain his skills in the bedroom. But the singer never has to explain her figurative language to listeners because she’s taking us along the ride, assuming we know what she’s singing about. There’s no doubt in Carpenter’s expressive lyrics even if there may be doubt in her relationships. This just makes her unseriousness all the more effortless and actually sexy.
Carpenter's pregnant passion
But Carpenter hits her wordplay climax in “Juno” where she uses the movie name as a reference to pregnancy. The song's title is based on the 2007 romantic comedy starring Elliot Page as a 16-year-old girl who accidentally becomes pregnant but is determined to give the baby up for adoption.
Carpenter sings, “I know you want my touch for life/If you love me right, then who knows?/I might let you make me Juno.” It's here where Carpenter uses "Juno" as a metaphor to describe how fulfilled her partner makes her feel emotionally and physically. If he continues to love her right — she may just let him make her a mom.
The singer lets her freak flag fly as she begs, “Let you lock me down tonight/One of me is cute, but two though?/Give it to me, baby.” She really stresses the baby fever, leaning into the metaphor when she sings she wants a mini-me as a child.
In the bridge, the music builds and builds, and Carpenter, again, drops all pretenses. She basically yells, “I’m so f**king horny!” Against the ‘80s synth pop throughline, Carpenter's lyrics are jarringly hilarious even if she's serious about being horny. It's almost like we're listening to a parody song like "I Just Had Sex" by the Andy Samberg-led group The Lonely Island.
Carpenter herself is neither a teenager nor pregnant which makes the comparison to "Juno" and her directness about sex all the more outrageous. She knows it is ridiculous but love is absurd and sometimes so is your unexplainable desire for your partner.
The reality is a stark, almost sexless contrast to Carpenter's lyrics, which may offer a clue to why she's so popular. There’s nothing really glamorous about teen pregnancy and its difficulties, which may be one of the reasons why teens aren't having children so young anymore. According to NPR, teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have gone down 77% in the last 30 years.
Additionally Carpenter may be getting some, but her Gen-Z age mates are actually struggling in the sex and relationship department. One in four Gen-Z adults in the U.S. say they’ve never had partnered sex.
Gen-Z can relate to the honesty and vulnerability
While Gen-Z may have different expectations of sex, romance and relationships, they are still engaging in ways that make them comfortable like through the internet. Approximately 31% of people who have not had sex with a partner say they’ve engaged in virtual sex or sexting, The Huffington Post reported. It's not a surprise Carpenter gained virality through her double entendre "Nonsense" outros on social media like TikTok where young people dominate the platform.
As we are in a sex recession, sparked by pandemic loneliness and people’s turn to celibacy in a Post-Roe world, it seems like the younger generation is more horny than ever . . . or just more OK with playfully expressing their sexuality. Carpenter is a prime example. The star has said, “I’m actually a very normal amount of horny, and also, a lot of it is because I’m able to kind of have fun and play.”
Sabrina Carpenter reveals to @VanityFair something people assume about her that may not be true:
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) June 21, 2024
“Sometimes in my songs I say some crazy things on stage, but I’m actually a very normal amount of horny.” pic.twitter.com/vHyJ95xXyI
Ultimately, Carpenter’s long rise to fame has allowed her to develop an astute sense of humor. But in the parasocial relationship, she also understands how to give back to fans who are thirsty for a candid glimpse of her life. While her fans may not be as freaky as she is, she’s telling us that we can be empowered through our sense of humor about something that can be intimate for some people. And if it's too intimate, they can at least vicariously live through the highs and lows of her own relationship. No matter what, she expresses joy about the whole process, which translates as empowering to her fans.
We can all be in on the joke, and sometimes the joke is sex.
