When I found out that I would coincidentally be in the same damn city on the same damn night as Sabrina Carpenter, it felt like fate, to say the least.

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For context, I have been following Sabrina’s career ever since she was cast as sassy Maya Hart in the Disney Channel sitcom Girl Meets World back in 2014, and her ascent to superstardom over the past 12 months has been pretty mind-boggling.

In August, Sabrina released her latest album, Short n’ Sweet, and while it is the sixth studio album of her career, it has been received with all of the fanfare of a breakout star. 



Similarly, just last year, Sabrina was supporting Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour, and now she has sold out arenas across the globe — with demand far outweighing the capacity of the venues. 

So, after more than a decade in the spotlight, how did Sabrina finally achieve the global superstardom she has been working so tirelessly for? Well, to me, the answer is entirely in her rebrand — and the clever decision to let her authentic personality take the wheel. 

Glimmers of the real Sabrina finally started to shine through on her 2022 album, Emails I Can’t Send, where her sassiness was mixed in with moments of deep emotional turmoil and self-reflection.

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The album’s opening track is Sabrina’s incredibly personal open letter to her father after she learned that he’d cheated on her mom. In the song, Sabrina muses: “God, I love you, but you're such a dipshit,” before ending the track with an apparent justification for airing her family’s dirty laundry. 

She coyly giggles before dismissively saying: “I mean, as they say in Chicago: 'He had it coming.’”

Then, in her breakup song “Feather,” Sabrina nonchalantly quips to her ex: “I'm so sorry for your loss.”

Meanwhile, the album’s breakout song “Nonsense” had the star repeating: “I can't help myself / When you get close to me / Baby, my tongue goes numb / Sounds like blah, blah, bleh, blee.”

And it was “Nonsense” that arguably paved the way for Sabrina to share another side of herself with the world after the singer famously started a tradition of ad-libbing a different outro to this song during every live performance, which is usually customized to the city or state where she is performing.

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The outros started innocently enough, with Sabrina singing on the first night of her Emails tour in September 2022: “Come over tonight, my room is spotless / I’m sorry this outro is so chaotic / Atlanta, it's official, you're the hottest.”

But they gradually became more and more risqué, with Sabrina eventually earning a reputation for just how NSFW these lyrics could be — and the star herself admitting to being “vulgar” and coming across as “obnoxiously horny."

For example, during her March 2024 performance in Singapore, Sabrina sang to the crowd: “I told that boy to sit me down on all fours / I told that boy ‘go faster,’ now I'm all sore / You hit a little different here in Singapore.”

Sabrina opted to lean into her sense of humor ahead of her latest album, with its lead single “Espresso” taking the world by storm when it was released in April with its catchy chorus and grammatically-incorrect-but-endlessly-endearing hook of: “That’s that me, espresso.”

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She went viral again in June when she hard-launched her relationship with Irish actor Barry Keoghan through her song “Please Please Please,” where she candidly repeats: “Heartbreak is one thing / My ego’s another / I beg you don't embarrass me, motherfucker."

While both of these songs include hints of Sabrina’s sexuality elsewhere in the lyrics, this aspect of her public image rebrand was mostly reiterated on other tracks on her album, with “Bed Chem” and “Juno” being her two most provocative songs.

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“I bet we’d have really good bed chem,” she sings in the former. “How you pick me up, pull ‘em down, turn me ‘round / Oh, it just makes sense / How you talk so sweet when you’re doing bad things.”

Sabrina then opens the song’s second verse with the flirtatious gag: “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie.”

Meanwhile, in “Juno,” Sabrina sings: “Adore me / Hold me and explore me / I’m so fucking horny.”

And when she kicked off her Short n’ Sweet tour last month, fans soon learned that “Juno” is arguably the new “Nonsense,” with the crowd being treated to Sabrina showing off different sex positions each night while seductively singing the line: “Wanna try out some freaky positions? / Have you ever tried this one?”

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In fact, the entire show is incredibly sexually charged, with Sabrina’s costumes including custom Victoria’s Secret lingerie and vintage-style babydoll nightgowns. She even starts the show with a video of herself enjoying a bubble bath before running onto the stage wearing a towel and whipping it off to reveal a diamanté-adorned bodysuit. 

During “Bed Chem,” Sabrina writhes around on a huge round bed covered in silky sheets before one of her dancers joins her with a video camera, with the stage going dark amid the suggestion that they are about to film a sex tape. 

Some have questioned how appropriate this all is for Sabrina’s show, pointing out that young fans could be in attendance. Sabrina herself acknowledged this conversation in a recent interview with Time, where she simply said: “You'll still get the occasional mother that has a strong opinion on how you should be dressing. And to that I just say, don't come to the show and that’s OK.”

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“It's unfortunate that it's ever been something to criticize, because truthfully, the scariest thing in the world is getting up on a stage in front of that many people and having to perform as if it's nothing,” she added. “If the one thing that helps you do that is the way you feel comfortable dressing, then that's what you’ve got to do."

And when I went to her sold-out concert in Nashville, Tennessee, on Oct. 16, I couldn’t help but think of a tweet that went viral a couple of weeks earlier.

Sabrina Carpenter is genius for how she embraces her sexuality but still keeps women as her target audience. Like how is she performing in lingerie and I still feel like it's not for men at all? I can't comprehend it, but I love it

— ✨️Paige✨️ (@bejeweledpaige) September 24, 2024

X @bejeweledpaige / Via x.com

“Sabrina Carpenter is genius for how she embraces her sexuality but still keeps women as her target audience,” it read. “Like how is she performing in lingerie and I still feel like it's not for men at all? I can't comprehend it, but I love it."

And it’s true. At the 20,000-capacity Bridgestone Arena, all I saw was thousands of women of all ages being given a safe space to both celebrate and enjoy feminine sexuality — and this is arguably the crux of Sabrina’s appeal.

Kevin Mazur / Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for AEG

As the hugely popular tweet explains, Sabrina has expertly managed to embrace promiscuity while avoiding the male gaze; the way she dresses and the lyrics she writes are nothing more salacious than her personal preferences, and that is something that she should be applauded for. 

A woman shouldn’t have to stifle or be ashamed of her sexuality in order to be successful, and Sabrina highlighting this to her young fans can only be a positive thing.

Of course, she isn’t the first artist to do so, with Sabrina herself crediting just some of the women who came before her who helped pave the way for female stars to embrace their sexuality in this way, including Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Madonna, and Rihanna. 

At Sabrina's show, I saw everybody from the teen high schooler sitting next to me, with her parents on her other side, to groups of women in their 30s all having the time of their lives, which undoubtedly debunks unwarranted criticism that the Short n’ Sweet tour is anything other than a wholly pure celebration of girlhood.

Sabrina has proudly and authentically curated an image of female empowerment without sacrificing her unabashed sex appeal and, at the end of the day, why on earth should she?

More on this

After Fans Were Shocked That Sabrina Carpenter’s Grandparents Attended Her Seriously Sexy Concert, Sabrina Herself Has Responded Stephanie Soteriou · Oct. 3, 2024

Sabrina Carpenter Has Officially Kicked Off Her “Short N’ Sweet” Tour, And There’s One Major Surprise Stephanie Soteriou · Sept. 24, 2024

Barry Keoghan Left A Pretty Eyebrow-Raising Comment On A Photo Of Sabrina Carpenter, And People Have Thoughts Stephanie Soteriou · Sept. 30, 2024

Sabrina Carpenter Has Hit Back At Speculation That She Is “Obnoxiously Horny” As She Explained The Deeper Meaning Behind Her NSFW “Nonsense” Outros Stephanie Soteriou · March 28, 2024