00:07:15.880It's interesting to me in context with the male loneliness epidemic and all of our concern about men. She's very unafraid of making fun of men. Someone described her on Subsec as hetero fatalist, which is just this idea of basically being resigned to the norms of heteronormativity. It's like a very specific bit that she does to very successful effect.
00:07:36.300So, I've wanted to have this conversation about what we kind of expect of pop stars, and I actually thought that we were going to do it this year around Chapel Rhone.0.92
00:07:45.400But I've become more interested in the Sabrina Carpenter discourse, and I find it interesting because Chapel Rhone in many ways is traditional drag, but Sabrina is white lady drag.
00:07:54.600And you and I have discussed this in the past, right? We talked about this with the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. This idea of this like campy, maybe satirical, but like hyperbolic performance of heterosexuality. And there is this question that is constant. Is it a celebration? Is it satire? Are you fetishizing it? Are you benefiting from it? Are you really skewering it if it is exactly what you're doing? How do you skewer the norm?
00:08:21.160It reminds me a little bit of when Barbie came out and Greta Gerwig was like, I'm doing the thing, but I'm subverting the thing. And then the conversation around that kind of became like, well, are you subverting it if you are just doing it? How much can you really subvert or critique something that you are ultimately also doing?
00:08:43.740What I want to do today is go through some of the controversies that we have seen revolving around Sabrina Carpenter, and then we're going to go back in time and look at a few different pop stars and kind of get a more contextualized understanding of what we expect of pop stars and how that kind of sets in contrast to what they can understandably give us.
00:09:01.520So the first, like, big kind of tussle I saw around Sabrina Carpenter was this W Magazine spread she did.
00:09:10.960September 5th, 2024, this was right as she was really rising up.
00:09:14.560And there was a specific photo that was taken in this photo shoot.
00:09:26.860One of the requirements of being a global pop star is that you have, to quote the youth,
00:09:30.160a face card that never gets declined yeah she's pretty stunning oh all right yep i uh i've seen
00:09:37.960this one before so this is one where she's laying in the grass and she appears to be in kind of like
00:09:43.320a baby doll style like set of lingerie or pajamas she's laying on her stomach in the yard and the
00:09:49.420sprinkler she's like soaking wet from the sprinkler i know that like this has been compared to like a
00:09:55.040shot from Lolita which I've never seen but to my knowledge is a movie about like a man who is
00:10:02.000quote-unquote seduced by like a young girl the shot of the water also kind of feels like they
00:10:08.200could have been going for like an ejaculation joke so Lolita is one of the most famous books
00:10:14.800of all time well I've never seen that movie but I know it's about pedophilia Kara's like all right0.98
00:10:21.780So for the non-idiots in the audience, we're talking about classic literature?0.91
00:10:28.180The controversy erupted because of this one picture, in essence, which was, I would say, a very close remake of Lolita, which is written from the perspective of a pedophile who basically falls in love, quote-unquote, with a 13-year-old.0.98
00:10:42.080It's a work of literature just to be inside the interiority of this man.
00:15:24.220I'm 17 years old and I'm afraid of Sabrina Carpenter.1.00
00:15:26.800and everyone was like, the fuck? I think that a lot of this speculation and conversation around0.99
00:15:33.220is her sexuality empowering? Is this performance of 60s beauty camp? Is it satire? Is she just
00:15:40.000tapping into the male gaze? It was kind of swirling around without anything to ground it.
00:15:44.440And then when she released the cover image of her seventh studio album, which is coming out in
00:15:49.780August, titled Man's Best Friend, it feels like all of that kind of swirling around angst found
00:15:55.740a place to land. So I want us to look at this album cover and I want you to tell me kind of
00:16:00.380what you think about it. So she's kneeling on the ground, kind of on all fours, but one of her hands
00:16:06.540is like reaching toward the guy. Then there's just this like faceless body. It's like a guy in a suit.
00:16:12.960You can really only see like the bottom half, like elbows and below. And he's got like a fistful
00:16:18.940of her hair. And in the original post where this was announced, the second photo was of a dog,
00:16:27.560again, just neck down, like a fluffy blonde, almost like a Pomeranian type dog with a collar
00:16:33.200on that said man's best friend. She's playing into the objectification of women or like treating1.00
00:16:42.560women like an object, treating women like they're literally an animal. Therefore, sexual pleasure,1.00
00:16:48.400I think is kind of the joke. So it's interesting that she's been accused of
00:16:52.560pedophilic aesthetic, that level of societal perversion, because this is almost playing
00:17:00.620into like bestiality, which is another really interesting like sexual taboo in society.
00:17:07.340I think what I would say before we get into it is that there are quite a number,
00:17:11.420and I'll share them in the show notes, quite a number of advertisements from the 50s and 60s
00:17:16.200from this era of time where she is channeling that actually leaned into the idea of women
00:17:22.160getting playfully or literally abused for not doing their job. There are advertisements of
00:17:27.260women with bruises on their faces. They're kind of like, I'll show her. Don't get in trouble. Buy1.00
00:17:32.580this soap kind of thing. And so there is an element of submission and obedience that goes
00:17:39.800into this. And it can be dog-like or it can be the housewife who has to do what her husband tells0.69
00:17:44.440her. So when I was looking at this album cover, I had a lot of different opinions around it. I
00:17:51.740posted and then deleted multiple TikToks. For what it's worth, if anyone has a TikTok,
00:17:56.140feel free to delete things. I don't feel weird about that at all. Like TikTok is a fucking
00:18:00.300sandbox, do what you want. But it indicates that I really didn't know how I felt about it.0.99
00:18:04.240Because there was a part of me that felt like, I don't think it's satire, because I think that
00:18:08.860satire has to differ enough from the original content in order for the joke to be clear. If
00:18:14.420you don't understand what the joke is, then the satire isn't working. But I also didn't really
00:18:19.720trust my own instincts of not liking it. It felt kind of like there was something about it that was
00:18:24.880itching at me. And so I wanted to spend more time just looking at what pop stars have done and how
00:18:30.040they have engaged with sexuality because there hasn't been as much contextualization of what
00:18:35.520she is doing as a pop star. So a few questions I want people to consider as we're talking about
00:18:40.820this today. To what extent do all pop stars sell hetero-fatalist fantasies? What about
00:18:46.620pedophilic ones? What do we want from pop stars? Has that changed over time? Can a pop star sell
00:18:53.860empowerment? And can a pop star actually be empowered? Can they ever be in control? Does0.54
00:18:59.600a pop star ever actually have agency over what they're doing? So is free will real part two.
00:19:05.520Part like 50. I feel like that's most of our episodes. So worth noting that pop music is short for popular music. Pop music is commercial music, okay? So there are certain elements of pop. Pop music is danceable. It has lyrics that are easy to remember. There are simple notations, repeated choruses and hooks.
00:19:24.060Pop music is interesting in that it borrows from every other genre.
00:19:36.300You're not like boy genius with a cult fan group.
00:19:40.040You are appealing to tens of millions of people around the world.
00:19:43.100And so as a result, this means that the politics of a pop star and the criticism they receive
00:19:48.600is always going to reflect the mainstream culture at the time.
00:19:53.340Pop stars are also remarkably consistent.
00:19:55.320They are almost always white and thin with, like I said, face cards that don't decline.
00:20:00.220There's like a certain element of populism in it that you have to form a sort of appeal that reaches, again, tens of millions of people at all times in order to maintain your standing in the ground.
00:20:10.900And if you can't maintain that, then you usually end up falling back into a niche genre.
00:20:15.560There's something that is occurring to me now of how people like Sabrina Carpenter become very famous. And I think there are some interesting parallels between Sabrina, Chappell, and Charlie, where all of them have been producing music for a very long time, but all kind of broke out into mainstream popularity kind of simultaneously, became household names kind of simultaneously, but in very different ways and for very different reasons.
00:20:45.560Well, and also, each one of them underwent a branding change.
00:20:50.160Chapel Rhone became a drag performer.1.00
00:21:14.280Another example I would give would be Taylor Swift during her fearless red era, Speak Now, was always in like a sparkly dress with cowboy boots. That was like a 10-year period for her, having that big curly hair, that shiny short dress and cowboy boots. So the conversation that I have seen lately around Sabrina Carpenter, Chapel Rhone, is the idea of what type of gaze they are operating on. Is it male gaze or female gaze? Do you know what those terms are?1.00
00:21:42.500Yeah. Male gaze is kind of your classic heteronormative woman-esque sex object. Almost like a very simplistic vampy version of what's hot. Like if you asked a fifth grade boy, you know, what is a hot? It's like Jessica Rabbit incarnate.0.70
00:21:59.580Honestly, female gaze, though, is harder for me to describe because that one feels more subjective and slippery and to me should be able to encompass the vampy Jessica Rabbit thing.0.95
00:22:11.980But I feel like we treat them as though they're mutually exclusive.
00:22:14.980So how would you describe female gaze?1.00
00:22:16.980Yeah, so the female gaze is generally seen as the inverse.0.99
00:22:20.580It has to, by definition, subvert the male gaze.
00:22:22.920And I think that you can understand the male gaze.
00:22:25.260it was originally coined just as the gaze, which I almost find to be more satisfying because I
00:22:30.620think male and female can confuse people. The male gaze is the dominant gaze. It is the status quo
00:22:37.720gaze. It is the gaze. And so the inverse of that has to subvert the status quo. It has to not just
00:22:43.740prioritize women's stories and experiences, but basically invert our understanding of them. So0.97
00:22:49.520one example I have seen that I find satisfying is that the male gaze, the dominant gaze is
00:22:54.860sexuality. The female gaze, the subverted gaze, is sensuality. So instead of turning the body0.56
00:23:00.640into an object, we are embodying the object. I think that you will see people reference a lot
00:23:06.540of material that has been made by women as inherently female gaze, and I think that that is
00:23:11.400wrong. I want you to read this Margaret Atwood quote on the male gaze that I think is a really
00:23:18.440great way to complicate our understanding of these two gazes. Male fantasies, male fantasies
00:23:25.820is everything run by male fantasies. Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male
00:23:31.640fantasy. That you're strong enough to take what they dish out or else too weak to do anything
00:23:36.080about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy. Oh, pretending
00:23:43.520you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your
00:23:49.040hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, ooh, peering through
00:23:55.680the keyhole in your own head if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.
00:24:03.140You are your own voyeur. Wow. Are you a woman performing for other women, and does that make0.98
00:24:09.280at the female gaze, or are you a woman with a man inside watching a woman? That is going to come up
00:24:13.560again and again today. I'm just getting this overwhelming sense of like, holy shit, we can't0.99
00:24:18.800win. Even if you are claiming to not care about these things or to be living your life outside0.98
00:24:24.900of that ideal or concept, that there is still an easy button to rope you back in, which is,
00:24:33.180oh no, you're just performing being outside of it. You think you're doing female gaze,
00:24:38.160but what you're actually doing is still male fantasy,
00:24:41.000it almost makes it feel futile to engage with it at all.
00:24:43.940Yeah, and I think, too, again, when you hearken back to what a pop star is,
00:24:47.920a pop star is, by definition, a commercial product.0.68
00:24:51.600And so the idea that a pop star could embody the female gaze
00:24:54.540feels in a certain way contradictory to me
00:24:57.580because the status quo is not the female gaze.0.98
00:25:00.980And you are a pop star, you are constantly appealing1.00