So there is something stuck in my craw about this Sabrina Carpenter thing. I thankfully keep my distance from most poptimism discourse these days, and I know the album art HAS attracted negative responses, but I’ve actually seen much more defenses than handwringing. What’s bothering me about the latter is that I haven’t seen a single one of these defenses make a solid argument for why the art is good. Those on the “this cover art is bad” side are making some very strong points: that it IS regressive and objectifying and makes uncomfortable visual references to a time when women were treated like property and didn’t have much agency. I've actually not seen any of the photo's defenders say why it's good, or even that it IS good— the defense, from what I’ve seen, has mostly been “grow up and let the pop star be horny.” But you’re the first defender I’ve seen point to how she looks visibly uncomfortable in the photo, and to wonder if Carpenter is actually a very skilled satirist. This is the beginning of an interesting argument, and I would’ve liked to hear more. But the pivot from almost talking about the art in question to, first, lambasting negative responses to it (that are, in many cases, rooted in negative experiences that can and often do come with existing in a gendered body that is different from yours) and then having the audacity to compare opinions about a pop star's aesthetic choices to bad takes about a massive threat to collective civil rights (in a country you don’t live in) is wild ad hominem at best and genuinely offensive at worst.
It's fair to say some of the responses to Carpenter are slut-shamy, reductive, and unfair, and sometimes they lack nuance. Sure! But pop culture and its representatives don’t exist in a vacuum, and Carpenter is, on paper, doing pretty much exactly what has been expected of conventionally attractive (thin, white) women in the public eye for many decades. It is fair to say it isn’t as simple as just a pop star being horny because she’s very visible and presented as aspirational, and we do take cues from each other on what messages these images are communicating.
For example, you mention “Ozempic and body hacking,” a phenomenon that is popular because people are watching each other do it, and eating disorders are social diseases triggered by repeated exposure to and normalization of unnaturally thin bodies and the increasing pressure to obtain one at any cost. While this pressure is becoming less gendered, it has, for a long time, been a predominantly feminine pressure, and millennial women’s strong reaction to the return of low-rise hemlines comes from how many of them developed eating disorders to fit into the insane standards of the fashion that was sold to them as teenagers. And these bodies may be sold as a sexual ideal, but many women who have recovered from eating disorders describe the embodied experience of that self-denial as completely antithetical to the desire for sex. On a similar note, heterosexual dating is a famously horrible experience for women that can be dehumanizing on a number of levels, from essentially having to commoditize ourselves on apps or—if participation in that marketplace goes where you’re suggesting it’d be healthy for it to go—really porny, uncomfortable, and often at least semi-violent sex. And it doesn’t feel good to participate in, but there’s a pressure to do it anyway because dominant messages from pop culture repeatedly argue that things like being conventionally attractive, sexually available, and appealing to men are what make women valuable.
So what makes the responses to Carpenter’s album art conservative, as opposed to the art itself being conservative? Is there not a palpable trad wifeyness to Carpenter’s Vargas girl image? Because a hellish alternative to the threat of “dying alone as an old maid” could be to buy into the regressive idea of what a woman is “supposed” to be in order to attract a husband, only to end up as a prisoner in the golden cage of a toxic marriage. And to your point, if I think about this and remember the look on Carpenter’s face in that photo, the one you call attention to for a second, NOW I’m interested. Is she doing this on purpose? No one seems to want to investigate this.
I, for one, don’t really care about Carpenter being horny on main, and I think her cover art is a shitty picture that looks like an outtake from a shoot for a liquor ad. But the discourse reducing reactions to this art to moral panic handwringing instead of talking about it on the basis of its creative merits concerns me a lot more than the art itself. When did criticism just become discourse? I read your stuff every week, appreciate your opinions, and often wonder what you’re going to say about whatever topics have come up in the past week. But I find it interesting to notice that while you argue for informed cultural criticism, the need for media literacy and pushing against anti-intellectualism on some topics, others are loudly “not that deep,” and there doesn’t necessarily seem to be a ton of consistency on what subject garners which response. Why is one thing worth further discussion and analysis, but wanting to think about the deeper context of an image that understandably pisses some people off signals “a respectability sickness”? You’ve mentioned concerns about the memory-holing of the pandemic, and keeping tabs on your worries about similar threats to our collective welfare, and yet there’s no consideration for why significant numbers of people might be “having less fun and taking less risks” after we all watched over 25 million people around the world die completely unnecessary deaths for literally just sharing air. It's just not as simple as “lighten up and live a little,” because the choices we make affect each other, and they're often informed by the very purposeful agendas of people in power who are involved in creating the images we absorb, especially when we absorb them without thought. “It’s not that deep” is a very slippery slope that’s absolutely played a role in the rise of a lot of conservative phenomena like Ozempic and tradwives and redpilling. You seem to know and be interested in this!
But to go back to my main point, if this Sabrina Carpenter album cover is worth defending, is it because it’s actually good art, or are its defenders more interested in clarifying their stance on “the right side” of an ongoing moral panic discourse than actually engaging with the art? And why are the art’s detractors not worth hearing out? Is saying it’s bad to think a piece of art is bad without saying why the art is good not its own form of baseless reactionary thinking? And if the defenses are coming from a place of seeing Carpenter as an artist with an interesting point of view, would the take of “just let her be horny” not do something of a disservice to her creative vision? And in what world is a negative response to her output even remotely comparable to bad faith takes on a terrifying, building civil rights crisis? As a regular reader who respects your work, this essay was a real bummer.
the Sabrina Carpenter discourse that accuses her of pandering to the male gaze has always been strange to me because ALL of Short N' Sweet is obviously satire. It's about the tension many women feel, between giving into the routines you've been conditioned to participate in and doing the "right" thing by criticizing the women who do.
Carpenter's work is written to create space for women to express their "unfeminist" impulses with an eyeroll back at themselves. Nearly every song articulates a feeling many women have, but know they should be "strong" enough to stop having. The Man's Best Friend cover release is coming less than a year off her 32 year old boyfriend publicly cheating on her with a 21 year old influencer.
We can uncharitably assume that she'd literally portray herself in a dog-like role next to man because she thinks that's good. Or we can think about it a touch deeper and understand that, especially in cases of toxicity and abuse, a lot of women choose being "man's best friend" because they've been taught not to expect love any deeper than that.
The text, to me, doesn't look like "I serve a man hehe serving a man is so cute and fun, right ladies?" it looks like "People base my value on my proximity to men, trying to make it cute, erotic, or seem natural when it isn't feels like all I have." A position women have been finding themselves in forever.
As a Black woman, I look at the Tory Lanez and DDG discourse and see so many women trying to grow their followings by defending these abusers. Because they've unfortunately discovered that for them being "man's best friend" sometimes feels better than being nothing.
EDIT: And I forgot to add: It's also strange people are purely suggesting the cover is an expression of kink we shouldn't criticize. Anybody who knows about that, can see Sabrina's hair is being held wrong. Holding someones hair from the ends like that (instead of the root) signals incompetence. Ironically, what the single off the album 'Manchild' is all about; a self destructive impulse to go back to incompetent men over and over.
This is SO GREAT: thank you, Tiana! I definitely see her work more in the satire camp even if, you know, there are critiques to be made of said satire. It's interesting that, regardless of which camp one falls in, this imagery has inspired conversations about how women, femmes, etc. feel in the world right now and how "this long after" suffragism and myriad waves of feminism this conversation is still so alive: clearly the subject of equality is deeply unsettled.
To the point of cuteness: you're definitely on to something about cuteness (or "trying to make it cute") as a tool being wielded here, that one has to bundle up such big subjects with a pretty baby blue bow in order for the package to be delivered. Cuteness can be a political tool in many ways and, if anything, Sabrina (her team,e tc.) knows how to wield that — which is very interesting, given the larger landscape of femininity now (a la: tradwifery, from the aesthetics to the ideology).
To the point of Tory and DDG: yes. I kept seeing the conversation around Sabrina run into the Partynextdoor album cover, which didn't get nearly as much conversation or discourse. Clearly this highlights disparities in such a debate, that a cute little white woman is permitted this debate so widely while the Black woman does not. It also ties into just how different such optics are when a male artist presents the subject (perhaps to a more male audience) versus when a woman presents herself as such (perhaps to a more woman-first audience). That tension says a lot — and I'd love to hear more from you on this!
Which is also say: thank you again! Please build out this comment into your own piece as this is great, Tiana!!!
This is the kind of read I’ve been hoping to see, and actually the best defense I’ve seen of her work in general. Carpenter’s relationship with Barry Keoghan is one of the only things I know about her, and I think I’ve avoided her output because (outing myself!) its loud and overt sexuality makes me feel a million years old, and I wish it didn’t! But of course it’s a performance, and I haven’t seen anyone really talk about how in a way that gives her credit for being very smart.
It is extremely hard to navigate the space between wanting to express an expansive sexuality that feels good AND how impossible that can feel to actually achieve because the heterosexual marketplace of the past decade or so has made it essentially expected for men to be able to get sex work level sex for free, and in part because of the pressure culture puts on women to keep up sexually: not only to have enough sex, but to have the right kind of sex, and to show up for all of it enthusiastically. And when I think about this alongside what Carpenter is doing, it does make her work more interesting, and it makes me feel more compelled to look past the surface of a gorgeous woman in her 20s making me feel insecure!
I just see the shape of this cover art and it reminds me of being a teenager in the 2000s, the images I internalized about who I was expected to be, and through that lens, it’s easy to see a photo like this and worry, especially with the defenses I’ve seen just being “lighten up.” But what you’re saying adds nuance to what she’s doing, takes her seriously in a way it sounds like she deserves to be, and makes her work legible as a compelling statement about the difficult and painful contradictions women are expected to navigate. (Which I know gets way, way more complicated when you factor in race— I'm not familiar with what's going on with Tory Lanez right now, but you're definitely making me want to investigate it. Gonna second Kyle on the point of "would love to read more of your thoughts on that if you happened to feel like getting into it.") There are so many ways to fail or not be seen as “enough,” and I’m continually blown away by the amount of men out there who cheat on aspirationally gorgeous women, which is all the more insane if the woman in question is world famous (and somehow it happens to them all the time!!). I think Carpenter is arguably cooler and more interesting than Keoghan, who, like, I guess I get him being a heartthrob and stuff, but he’s kind of weird looking if I’m being real. And men get to have “interesting” faces and be considered hot (because our standards are much, much more strict to the point of there being years-old discourse about women all having variations of the same face now), and they’re given full license to pursue (sometimes much, to your point) younger women, AND of course, they can age and still be considered valuable and desirable. And men like Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux and Orlando Bloom can be spotted with women my age and have it be totally fine, despite having been full grown adults when we were years away from being legal. Keoghan isn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, but in the eyes of Hollywood, a 32-year-old man is just getting started— whole world of opportunity available at that age, and there's no reason to believe the opportunities will decrease. But Carpenter is definitively very young, and I guess that’s not enough! And pop stars are a lot like models, with there being kind of a target demographic that it feels like it’s easier and easier to age out of, and I’m sure she’s already nervous about that. Gen Z girls clearly feel a pressure to maintain extreme youth to a level I thankfully didn’t as a millennial, and the way I hear very young women talk about their age (25! 23!!!!) like they’re over the hill is so depressing. So many ways to fail!!
“Is this all I am to you?” is an extremely potent statement for her to make, not just in the context of her relationship, but to people watching her on the world stage. Because she IS often reduced to Sexy Baby, to the point that I’ve seen her criticized for sexualizing extreme youth, not considering that that might be something she's doing on purpose: being sexy in a barely legal way, but also kind of having a housewife aesthetic, trying to find a perfect balance between the “best” of both worlds. (If auteur directors can easily earn credit for making intentional work with near-obsessive attention to detail, why shouldn't pop stars?) Which is what women are expected to do!! And if the successful performer of a (clearly satirical) Sexy Baby persona isn’t enough to keep a man who looks like a thumb cheating on her, what’s the point of all that work? Where does it go and who benefits? Again, so many ways to fail!! So I can see how a surface level read of this is unfair. Thank you for telling me why it’s good! Now I can agree!
First off, sorry for the delay as I wanted to take the proper time to read and respond. Which is also to say: THANK YOU for such a thoughtful and lengthy response. It's so fabulous! And I hope that this will go beyond a comments section and into a post of its own. It’s so fab to get any response ever — and such writing should definitely be shared wider.
I agree with all of what you’re saying! And, obviously, I may not always synthesize my ideas in full but we’re generally agreeing and in the same camp of ideas — but it also proves the point a bit. To me, what was frustrating was more that commenting to comment on the situation, that the image — while not-great and I wouldn’t defend — wasn’t really the matter but that the talk talk talk machine was the matter, as it plays into how Rage Bait™ is the expression of our time, that Carpenter and her team gave people something to yell about at a time when things are so very bad. Does the image or idea contribute to larger badness? Yes, but I can’t say I’m surprised about this from an artist who includes Eiffel Towering as a part of “the bit” (which is also a bit to question, but was why things were unsurprising given her context and performance). That to me is what was really the pang, that it contributes to larger policing and general feelings that were percolating this week from our constant need to think piece (Which gets to Imani’s “I don’t care” feeling, which is exactly it: https://www.tiktok.com/@crutches_and_spice/video/7516236560996814126) which then plays into the policing of how (Younger.) people protested this past weekend (a la: https://www.tiktok.com/@dewwwdropzzz/video/7516281998328024350). That to me is / was interesting! And was the conversation to have! Hence the essay haha And, again, as someone who writes about and shares the threads of culture, that was what I was seeing — and I hope to get others to see those items as well.
It’s true that there are so many factors shaping the context and need for the conversation around Sabrina and body pressures and all those items too: that’s real. But we all contain multitudes, no? How does this shape, say, an American who doesn’t live in America who is queer who also has body issues who also exists in this globalized space, facing the same pressures both inside and outside of the machine, to your points? It does. Most of these essays I’m writing are to myself, to work through my own problems and feelings, issues and ideas. Much of this was a message to myself to not be as conservative, that I find myself pointing these fingers and then find myself becoming more and more puritanical — and I hate that! I was having a chat with a friend a few weeks ago about how so many AIDS activists died just so that people like me could have less sex and that is something I actively want to push myself to work on, to — say — honor their legacy by living a fuller, gayer, and a bit bolder of a life. That wasn’t in the essay, obviously, but that’s what I was getting at — and hoping others could see that too, in case they are struggling with conservatism possessing their bodies too despite their being not-that. Given how dire these times are, that was what I was hoping to get out. (Which matters no matter where one is, as I always try to stress: what happens in America affects everywhere given it defines the discourse in most of the world. And, as someone who lived there for almost forty years, I can see both sides quite clearly).
Thank you for reading and for this thoughtful comment and for pushing me! I’m going to share this wider and I hope this can turn into something bigger as well. Hope you’re off to a great week!!
Thank you for the kind words, Kyle! I appreciate you engaging with my points on their terms and wouldn’t expect less from you. Tiana did a great KO to my Carpenter argument, but my larger point is definitely more about what you’re zeroing in on, which is The Take Machine and the way it seems to want to instruct us on how to live. Very obviously the real enemy to fight!! And there’s so much to say about this, so this response is going to be the result of me taking my time too, because where the fuck do you begin and how do you stop. (I heard the amount of information we all absorb these days on average adds up to SIXTEEN MOVIES A DAY. No wonder we’re losing our minds!!)
WARNING: THIS IS SO LONG. (I'm sorry. You got me started!!)
There are the people making the art that creates the takes (which is, I think, important to say is never just one person, because these things have to be approved by a team to get out there), and then there are the responses to the takes, which often just explode into usually two warring camps instead of landing in a more nuanced place, when Imani is right. Who cares?? Sometimes, even with intentionally crafted art that inspires ~discourse~, it’s hard to not see it as a bit of a trap when there are so obviously much much bigger things going on, and that attracts its own nightmare discourse. But it gets under our skin, I think, BECAUSE the stakes keep getting higher and most of us are miserable and need somewhere to put that, and things like this can just feel like reminders of how and why we aren’t adding up to some invisible standard that it feels like shit to not meet, even when the goalpost is designed to keep moving so we don’t.
I want to make sure I address my critiques about where you’re coming from, gender and location-wise, and how they’re totally fair to read as cruel, and I almost didn’t put them in there, but I envied your more explicit distance from both. But my first friend to tell me they couldn’t wait to get Botox was a gay man when we were both about to turn 30, and I used to work for an attractive gay man in his 40s who used his insecurity about aging out of centerfold hotness as an excuse to be cruelly misogynistic. I know the standards you’re subjected to aren’t terribly different from mine, and that the threats we face aren’t all that different either. And I could say that as a man, you’re more likely to be taken seriously from the jump than I am, which I imagine is only partially true! We do contain multitudes, and for years I’ve been fascinated by how queer men and at least straight-coded women (as a not straight woman who, regretfully, veers closer to the het end of the Kinsey scale) can be awful to each other, likely because of the pressure we’re both under, like we’re competing for resources that are always dangled just out of reach by the people who actually deserve the ire we sometimes direct at each other (the “twink” discourse you bring up sometimes is rich!!). And to a larger, I think more important point, I envy your physical distance from this. I’ve spent years quietly wishing I were in Europe and not here! But fascism is a growing Hydra with more and more heads sprouting everywhere, and as you regularly point out, it sounds like the places they’re sprouting the most are right around where you are. (To quote you, America IS, somehow, still that girl, and the rest of the world is deliberately following her footsteps.) We don’t know where things are going and where is going to be safe to be moving forward, and running to Europe to try and escape what feels like it’s coming could just be narrowly avoiding one trap to end up in another! (And this is another subject I could spend forever on because I’ve been increasingly drawn to arguments that tourism is actually pretty evil, and I’ve loved your writing about this.) We don’t know where this fucked up train is going, and this is where I struggle to work with this end of the world feeling that’s been percolating so loudly for too many years now in a way that is very very similar to what you’re saying.
I relate deeply to the worry of internal policing you mention so much, of that worry of not living enough, and it’s another thing I could talk about forever, but will try (and fail!) to keep short. But I wonder if it’s another way we’re encouraged to compete for resources, and if it’s a scarcity mentality masquerading as abundance, because underneath it all is the pressure to seize (read: compete for) what’s “left” of a world that’s de facto written off as ending instead of figuring out how to protect and sustain the rich resources we’re not supposed to believe we still have.
I don't want to be weird about Carpenter! I hate that impulse too. But under my reaction to something like her album art is this nagging, gnawing insecurity that sometimes literally keeps me up at night, of not being or doing or living enough, of not capitalizing (clown emoji!!!) on my youth and conventional beauty while I still have it, and that time-related fear you and I can both understand as people who are not straight men. We don’t get to move through the world as easily as they do, but theoretically things are easier for us now than they were, which is, on one hand, great. But that’s its own form of pressure!! It’s a reason I feel shitty for not doing more with the cards I’ve been dealt, and I think why the trad wives are a growing demographic, because the image of what we’re told to want seems so close but is still so far away, so why embrace an illusion of freedom if it feels so hard to embody in a way that feels as good as it looks like it does? Everything is expensive, and I unfortunately know the trap of media work too, which is impossible to make a living off of, and I’m sure you’ve also seen that a lot of the people who are actually able to make that work are people who quietly have rich parents or partners. And I can know this intrinsically and still feel like shit seeing pictures of their success and wonder why that doesn’t feel attainable. I want their aspirational, glamorous, well photographed lives! I want to travel the world and enjoy an abundance of great sex and go to raves in slutty outfits and do drugs in sweaty bathrooms. But the last time I did that last one (at a Pride rave!! Specifically because I was so worried my chances to do this were running out, and the pressure of #bratsummer CLOWN EMOJI), I got my first case of COVID after years of being extremely careful, and in a cruel twist of fate, I’ve spent most of the past year wrestling with the kind of chronic illness that has eluded my friends who haven’t cared about COVID since 2020. And that adds horrible layers to my ouroboros, where I’m not only not doing or living enough, but that I don’t even have the “right” immune system to do that successfully, that maybe my friends (who, as good as I know they are, and as much as I love them, never once offered accommodations to help me feel safer when they invited me out, even when they saw that I was so sick that just a ten minute walk could leave me winded for days) were just doing it better than I am, all the worse because that comparison was based on what so few people will acknowledge is pure dumb luck on their parts.
And in a couple of months I’ll be 35, which adds to that fear of running out of time, especially when I hear that younger women are increasingly dating men closer to my age because of the political gender gap you often mention between them and their peers. So I now see someone like Carpenter through the lens of competition, what I feel like I should be and can’t amount to, not understanding, to Tiana’s point, how even someone as young as Carpenter (26!!!) can relate to that. In the words of a great woman, there’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs behind you! And what if everyone on that staircase is fucking miserable and we’re not super encouraged to talk about why, and maybe find common ground in it, and look at what we are encouraged to care about, and wonder what’s actually worthy of our investment? Was the world we were encouraged to return to when Biden took office worth the pain it clearly causes us when we could have and still can choose something totally different that won’t make us feel like shit for being conflicted about it, that will validate that conflict? What if reservations about a pure “fuck it, we ball” lifestyle are based on that conflict and worth exploring at least a little, not because pleasure is bad or shameful or not worth pursuing, but actually because of the belief underneath it that everyone deserves to feel like it’s accessible, and can we imagine pleasure in a way that doesn’t feel so… colonial? Is “lighten up and get over it” actually quietly restrictive, not giving its critics the benefit of the doubt for actually really wanting that kind of joy too, and interested in approaching it with a bit more imagination than writing them off lets us? (And I feel like you could apply all of this to the protest critiques, and that I see how it's fair to argue they're related topics! But I think it's because of that failure of imagination, and the desire to shut down people who are trying to make cases and fight for a world that looks and feels better in a way we're told we can't have because of how nihilism poisoned everyone is now.)
(I have juuuust a bit more to say but was told to make this shorter. CLOWN EMOJI!!)
BUT on the note of the AIDS bit you mention, that’s been a subject I’ve been a little obsessed with for years now because I fell in love with David Wojnarowicz in 2020, and I’ve spent so many days of the past handful of years wishing he were alive because I want so badly to know what he’d have to say about right now. (This is another subject that could take forever to get into, and I’ll restrain myself.) He is, I think, such a potent role model for what we’re talking about, someone who pursued freedom through pleasure, but was also so righteously angry about how it’s punished and gatekept and how readily people will write off mass death when the people dying aren’t seen as valuable to the dominant culture. I see people use his work as arguments for that pursuit of pleasure while conveniently overlooking his grief and fury at the death machine that keeps showing up with a different face. (I got that awful case of COVID because someone, or multiple someones, went to a rave sick, and maybe they didn't know, but maybe some of them did and just didn't care, and I think there's a deep tragedy to that. Was that the future Act Up was fighting for?) The game doesn’t play by the same rules it did when we were kids, and people are dying for different reasons now. So it’s not as simple as “where is this policing coming from, why am I not living more,” and I think most people know this, but it’s been so rough out there that it’s understandably so hard to look at directly. And I just wonder if maybe, when discourse about pleasure explodes or goes uncomfortable places, it’s ultimately more about wanting it badly, and wondering why the pursuit of it can hurt so much, and why it never feels like enough because of our ideas of how it should look and feel, or if other people are doing it better. I wonder if picking at the threads of that instead of dismissing critiques of a more YOLO philosophy as uptight is actually directing us away from potent opportunities to think about what it would look like for the effort of feeling good to actually feel good, instead of— like Carpenter’s art!!— look sexy and carefree on the surface, but conceal a maybe not so quiet misery lingering just beneath it.
And I could just! Keep going!! Oops!!! But I hear the award show music and I’ll cap it there for both our sakes. Genuinely exciting to be able to talk in earnest about this sort of thing with someone whose work I respect! Again, I appreciate you hearing me out and engaging with me thoughtfully when it would be very easy not to, and this has helped me put words into some of my own schisms I’ve literally been chewing on for years. I think this stuff is so important to talk about because I think everyone is quietly struggling with this. Thank you for the food for thought, and I’m looking forward to seeing where you’ll take this!
"Like all of us, Anna and Tom are endlessly empty tummies constantly craving tummy time." worries the hell out of me. FWIW 'tummy time' is *actually* about getting an infant to exert strength and discover agency.
The implication in the sentence is that we're all hoping to wallow as our main activity. That's concerning. It's opposite of why we seek 'tummy time' for kids, actually, IMO - but acquiescing to its cutest impulse means we're prone to wallow first, ask for catechisms later.
ding ding ding 🤭 i mean...as i saw a tiktok say not that long ago, maybe the cure to male depression is a little tummy time? food for thought!!!!
anyway, yes, it's that push and pull, the achieving your dream yet wanting to just sleep and not work. i guess we're reaching the My Lifetime of Rest and Relaxation™ era for Millennials @____@
So there is something stuck in my craw about this Sabrina Carpenter thing. I thankfully keep my distance from most poptimism discourse these days, and I know the album art HAS attracted negative responses, but I’ve actually seen much more defenses than handwringing. What’s bothering me about the latter is that I haven’t seen a single one of these defenses make a solid argument for why the art is good. Those on the “this cover art is bad” side are making some very strong points: that it IS regressive and objectifying and makes uncomfortable visual references to a time when women were treated like property and didn’t have much agency. I've actually not seen any of the photo's defenders say why it's good, or even that it IS good— the defense, from what I’ve seen, has mostly been “grow up and let the pop star be horny.” But you’re the first defender I’ve seen point to how she looks visibly uncomfortable in the photo, and to wonder if Carpenter is actually a very skilled satirist. This is the beginning of an interesting argument, and I would’ve liked to hear more. But the pivot from almost talking about the art in question to, first, lambasting negative responses to it (that are, in many cases, rooted in negative experiences that can and often do come with existing in a gendered body that is different from yours) and then having the audacity to compare opinions about a pop star's aesthetic choices to bad takes about a massive threat to collective civil rights (in a country you don’t live in) is wild ad hominem at best and genuinely offensive at worst.
It's fair to say some of the responses to Carpenter are slut-shamy, reductive, and unfair, and sometimes they lack nuance. Sure! But pop culture and its representatives don’t exist in a vacuum, and Carpenter is, on paper, doing pretty much exactly what has been expected of conventionally attractive (thin, white) women in the public eye for many decades. It is fair to say it isn’t as simple as just a pop star being horny because she’s very visible and presented as aspirational, and we do take cues from each other on what messages these images are communicating.
For example, you mention “Ozempic and body hacking,” a phenomenon that is popular because people are watching each other do it, and eating disorders are social diseases triggered by repeated exposure to and normalization of unnaturally thin bodies and the increasing pressure to obtain one at any cost. While this pressure is becoming less gendered, it has, for a long time, been a predominantly feminine pressure, and millennial women’s strong reaction to the return of low-rise hemlines comes from how many of them developed eating disorders to fit into the insane standards of the fashion that was sold to them as teenagers. And these bodies may be sold as a sexual ideal, but many women who have recovered from eating disorders describe the embodied experience of that self-denial as completely antithetical to the desire for sex. On a similar note, heterosexual dating is a famously horrible experience for women that can be dehumanizing on a number of levels, from essentially having to commoditize ourselves on apps or—if participation in that marketplace goes where you’re suggesting it’d be healthy for it to go—really porny, uncomfortable, and often at least semi-violent sex. And it doesn’t feel good to participate in, but there’s a pressure to do it anyway because dominant messages from pop culture repeatedly argue that things like being conventionally attractive, sexually available, and appealing to men are what make women valuable.
So what makes the responses to Carpenter’s album art conservative, as opposed to the art itself being conservative? Is there not a palpable trad wifeyness to Carpenter’s Vargas girl image? Because a hellish alternative to the threat of “dying alone as an old maid” could be to buy into the regressive idea of what a woman is “supposed” to be in order to attract a husband, only to end up as a prisoner in the golden cage of a toxic marriage. And to your point, if I think about this and remember the look on Carpenter’s face in that photo, the one you call attention to for a second, NOW I’m interested. Is she doing this on purpose? No one seems to want to investigate this.
I, for one, don’t really care about Carpenter being horny on main, and I think her cover art is a shitty picture that looks like an outtake from a shoot for a liquor ad. But the discourse reducing reactions to this art to moral panic handwringing instead of talking about it on the basis of its creative merits concerns me a lot more than the art itself. When did criticism just become discourse? I read your stuff every week, appreciate your opinions, and often wonder what you’re going to say about whatever topics have come up in the past week. But I find it interesting to notice that while you argue for informed cultural criticism, the need for media literacy and pushing against anti-intellectualism on some topics, others are loudly “not that deep,” and there doesn’t necessarily seem to be a ton of consistency on what subject garners which response. Why is one thing worth further discussion and analysis, but wanting to think about the deeper context of an image that understandably pisses some people off signals “a respectability sickness”? You’ve mentioned concerns about the memory-holing of the pandemic, and keeping tabs on your worries about similar threats to our collective welfare, and yet there’s no consideration for why significant numbers of people might be “having less fun and taking less risks” after we all watched over 25 million people around the world die completely unnecessary deaths for literally just sharing air. It's just not as simple as “lighten up and live a little,” because the choices we make affect each other, and they're often informed by the very purposeful agendas of people in power who are involved in creating the images we absorb, especially when we absorb them without thought. “It’s not that deep” is a very slippery slope that’s absolutely played a role in the rise of a lot of conservative phenomena like Ozempic and tradwives and redpilling. You seem to know and be interested in this!
But to go back to my main point, if this Sabrina Carpenter album cover is worth defending, is it because it’s actually good art, or are its defenders more interested in clarifying their stance on “the right side” of an ongoing moral panic discourse than actually engaging with the art? And why are the art’s detractors not worth hearing out? Is saying it’s bad to think a piece of art is bad without saying why the art is good not its own form of baseless reactionary thinking? And if the defenses are coming from a place of seeing Carpenter as an artist with an interesting point of view, would the take of “just let her be horny” not do something of a disservice to her creative vision? And in what world is a negative response to her output even remotely comparable to bad faith takes on a terrifying, building civil rights crisis? As a regular reader who respects your work, this essay was a real bummer.
the Sabrina Carpenter discourse that accuses her of pandering to the male gaze has always been strange to me because ALL of Short N' Sweet is obviously satire. It's about the tension many women feel, between giving into the routines you've been conditioned to participate in and doing the "right" thing by criticizing the women who do.
Carpenter's work is written to create space for women to express their "unfeminist" impulses with an eyeroll back at themselves. Nearly every song articulates a feeling many women have, but know they should be "strong" enough to stop having. The Man's Best Friend cover release is coming less than a year off her 32 year old boyfriend publicly cheating on her with a 21 year old influencer.
We can uncharitably assume that she'd literally portray herself in a dog-like role next to man because she thinks that's good. Or we can think about it a touch deeper and understand that, especially in cases of toxicity and abuse, a lot of women choose being "man's best friend" because they've been taught not to expect love any deeper than that.
The text, to me, doesn't look like "I serve a man hehe serving a man is so cute and fun, right ladies?" it looks like "People base my value on my proximity to men, trying to make it cute, erotic, or seem natural when it isn't feels like all I have." A position women have been finding themselves in forever.
As a Black woman, I look at the Tory Lanez and DDG discourse and see so many women trying to grow their followings by defending these abusers. Because they've unfortunately discovered that for them being "man's best friend" sometimes feels better than being nothing.
EDIT: And I forgot to add: It's also strange people are purely suggesting the cover is an expression of kink we shouldn't criticize. Anybody who knows about that, can see Sabrina's hair is being held wrong. Holding someones hair from the ends like that (instead of the root) signals incompetence. Ironically, what the single off the album 'Manchild' is all about; a self destructive impulse to go back to incompetent men over and over.
This is SO GREAT: thank you, Tiana! I definitely see her work more in the satire camp even if, you know, there are critiques to be made of said satire. It's interesting that, regardless of which camp one falls in, this imagery has inspired conversations about how women, femmes, etc. feel in the world right now and how "this long after" suffragism and myriad waves of feminism this conversation is still so alive: clearly the subject of equality is deeply unsettled.
To the point of cuteness: you're definitely on to something about cuteness (or "trying to make it cute") as a tool being wielded here, that one has to bundle up such big subjects with a pretty baby blue bow in order for the package to be delivered. Cuteness can be a political tool in many ways and, if anything, Sabrina (her team,e tc.) knows how to wield that — which is very interesting, given the larger landscape of femininity now (a la: tradwifery, from the aesthetics to the ideology).
To the point of Tory and DDG: yes. I kept seeing the conversation around Sabrina run into the Partynextdoor album cover, which didn't get nearly as much conversation or discourse. Clearly this highlights disparities in such a debate, that a cute little white woman is permitted this debate so widely while the Black woman does not. It also ties into just how different such optics are when a male artist presents the subject (perhaps to a more male audience) versus when a woman presents herself as such (perhaps to a more woman-first audience). That tension says a lot — and I'd love to hear more from you on this!
Which is also say: thank you again! Please build out this comment into your own piece as this is great, Tiana!!!
This is the kind of read I’ve been hoping to see, and actually the best defense I’ve seen of her work in general. Carpenter’s relationship with Barry Keoghan is one of the only things I know about her, and I think I’ve avoided her output because (outing myself!) its loud and overt sexuality makes me feel a million years old, and I wish it didn’t! But of course it’s a performance, and I haven’t seen anyone really talk about how in a way that gives her credit for being very smart.
It is extremely hard to navigate the space between wanting to express an expansive sexuality that feels good AND how impossible that can feel to actually achieve because the heterosexual marketplace of the past decade or so has made it essentially expected for men to be able to get sex work level sex for free, and in part because of the pressure culture puts on women to keep up sexually: not only to have enough sex, but to have the right kind of sex, and to show up for all of it enthusiastically. And when I think about this alongside what Carpenter is doing, it does make her work more interesting, and it makes me feel more compelled to look past the surface of a gorgeous woman in her 20s making me feel insecure!
I just see the shape of this cover art and it reminds me of being a teenager in the 2000s, the images I internalized about who I was expected to be, and through that lens, it’s easy to see a photo like this and worry, especially with the defenses I’ve seen just being “lighten up.” But what you’re saying adds nuance to what she’s doing, takes her seriously in a way it sounds like she deserves to be, and makes her work legible as a compelling statement about the difficult and painful contradictions women are expected to navigate. (Which I know gets way, way more complicated when you factor in race— I'm not familiar with what's going on with Tory Lanez right now, but you're definitely making me want to investigate it. Gonna second Kyle on the point of "would love to read more of your thoughts on that if you happened to feel like getting into it.") There are so many ways to fail or not be seen as “enough,” and I’m continually blown away by the amount of men out there who cheat on aspirationally gorgeous women, which is all the more insane if the woman in question is world famous (and somehow it happens to them all the time!!). I think Carpenter is arguably cooler and more interesting than Keoghan, who, like, I guess I get him being a heartthrob and stuff, but he’s kind of weird looking if I’m being real. And men get to have “interesting” faces and be considered hot (because our standards are much, much more strict to the point of there being years-old discourse about women all having variations of the same face now), and they’re given full license to pursue (sometimes much, to your point) younger women, AND of course, they can age and still be considered valuable and desirable. And men like Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux and Orlando Bloom can be spotted with women my age and have it be totally fine, despite having been full grown adults when we were years away from being legal. Keoghan isn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, but in the eyes of Hollywood, a 32-year-old man is just getting started— whole world of opportunity available at that age, and there's no reason to believe the opportunities will decrease. But Carpenter is definitively very young, and I guess that’s not enough! And pop stars are a lot like models, with there being kind of a target demographic that it feels like it’s easier and easier to age out of, and I’m sure she’s already nervous about that. Gen Z girls clearly feel a pressure to maintain extreme youth to a level I thankfully didn’t as a millennial, and the way I hear very young women talk about their age (25! 23!!!!) like they’re over the hill is so depressing. So many ways to fail!!
“Is this all I am to you?” is an extremely potent statement for her to make, not just in the context of her relationship, but to people watching her on the world stage. Because she IS often reduced to Sexy Baby, to the point that I’ve seen her criticized for sexualizing extreme youth, not considering that that might be something she's doing on purpose: being sexy in a barely legal way, but also kind of having a housewife aesthetic, trying to find a perfect balance between the “best” of both worlds. (If auteur directors can easily earn credit for making intentional work with near-obsessive attention to detail, why shouldn't pop stars?) Which is what women are expected to do!! And if the successful performer of a (clearly satirical) Sexy Baby persona isn’t enough to keep a man who looks like a thumb cheating on her, what’s the point of all that work? Where does it go and who benefits? Again, so many ways to fail!! So I can see how a surface level read of this is unfair. Thank you for telling me why it’s good! Now I can agree!
(I see you Kyle— I’ll get back to you!)
First off, sorry for the delay as I wanted to take the proper time to read and respond. Which is also to say: THANK YOU for such a thoughtful and lengthy response. It's so fabulous! And I hope that this will go beyond a comments section and into a post of its own. It’s so fab to get any response ever — and such writing should definitely be shared wider.
I agree with all of what you’re saying! And, obviously, I may not always synthesize my ideas in full but we’re generally agreeing and in the same camp of ideas — but it also proves the point a bit. To me, what was frustrating was more that commenting to comment on the situation, that the image — while not-great and I wouldn’t defend — wasn’t really the matter but that the talk talk talk machine was the matter, as it plays into how Rage Bait™ is the expression of our time, that Carpenter and her team gave people something to yell about at a time when things are so very bad. Does the image or idea contribute to larger badness? Yes, but I can’t say I’m surprised about this from an artist who includes Eiffel Towering as a part of “the bit” (which is also a bit to question, but was why things were unsurprising given her context and performance). That to me is what was really the pang, that it contributes to larger policing and general feelings that were percolating this week from our constant need to think piece (Which gets to Imani’s “I don’t care” feeling, which is exactly it: https://www.tiktok.com/@crutches_and_spice/video/7516236560996814126) which then plays into the policing of how (Younger.) people protested this past weekend (a la: https://www.tiktok.com/@dewwwdropzzz/video/7516281998328024350). That to me is / was interesting! And was the conversation to have! Hence the essay haha And, again, as someone who writes about and shares the threads of culture, that was what I was seeing — and I hope to get others to see those items as well.
It’s true that there are so many factors shaping the context and need for the conversation around Sabrina and body pressures and all those items too: that’s real. But we all contain multitudes, no? How does this shape, say, an American who doesn’t live in America who is queer who also has body issues who also exists in this globalized space, facing the same pressures both inside and outside of the machine, to your points? It does. Most of these essays I’m writing are to myself, to work through my own problems and feelings, issues and ideas. Much of this was a message to myself to not be as conservative, that I find myself pointing these fingers and then find myself becoming more and more puritanical — and I hate that! I was having a chat with a friend a few weeks ago about how so many AIDS activists died just so that people like me could have less sex and that is something I actively want to push myself to work on, to — say — honor their legacy by living a fuller, gayer, and a bit bolder of a life. That wasn’t in the essay, obviously, but that’s what I was getting at — and hoping others could see that too, in case they are struggling with conservatism possessing their bodies too despite their being not-that. Given how dire these times are, that was what I was hoping to get out. (Which matters no matter where one is, as I always try to stress: what happens in America affects everywhere given it defines the discourse in most of the world. And, as someone who lived there for almost forty years, I can see both sides quite clearly).
Thank you for reading and for this thoughtful comment and for pushing me! I’m going to share this wider and I hope this can turn into something bigger as well. Hope you’re off to a great week!!
Thank you for the kind words, Kyle! I appreciate you engaging with my points on their terms and wouldn’t expect less from you. Tiana did a great KO to my Carpenter argument, but my larger point is definitely more about what you’re zeroing in on, which is The Take Machine and the way it seems to want to instruct us on how to live. Very obviously the real enemy to fight!! And there’s so much to say about this, so this response is going to be the result of me taking my time too, because where the fuck do you begin and how do you stop. (I heard the amount of information we all absorb these days on average adds up to SIXTEEN MOVIES A DAY. No wonder we’re losing our minds!!)
WARNING: THIS IS SO LONG. (I'm sorry. You got me started!!)
There are the people making the art that creates the takes (which is, I think, important to say is never just one person, because these things have to be approved by a team to get out there), and then there are the responses to the takes, which often just explode into usually two warring camps instead of landing in a more nuanced place, when Imani is right. Who cares?? Sometimes, even with intentionally crafted art that inspires ~discourse~, it’s hard to not see it as a bit of a trap when there are so obviously much much bigger things going on, and that attracts its own nightmare discourse. But it gets under our skin, I think, BECAUSE the stakes keep getting higher and most of us are miserable and need somewhere to put that, and things like this can just feel like reminders of how and why we aren’t adding up to some invisible standard that it feels like shit to not meet, even when the goalpost is designed to keep moving so we don’t.
I want to make sure I address my critiques about where you’re coming from, gender and location-wise, and how they’re totally fair to read as cruel, and I almost didn’t put them in there, but I envied your more explicit distance from both. But my first friend to tell me they couldn’t wait to get Botox was a gay man when we were both about to turn 30, and I used to work for an attractive gay man in his 40s who used his insecurity about aging out of centerfold hotness as an excuse to be cruelly misogynistic. I know the standards you’re subjected to aren’t terribly different from mine, and that the threats we face aren’t all that different either. And I could say that as a man, you’re more likely to be taken seriously from the jump than I am, which I imagine is only partially true! We do contain multitudes, and for years I’ve been fascinated by how queer men and at least straight-coded women (as a not straight woman who, regretfully, veers closer to the het end of the Kinsey scale) can be awful to each other, likely because of the pressure we’re both under, like we’re competing for resources that are always dangled just out of reach by the people who actually deserve the ire we sometimes direct at each other (the “twink” discourse you bring up sometimes is rich!!). And to a larger, I think more important point, I envy your physical distance from this. I’ve spent years quietly wishing I were in Europe and not here! But fascism is a growing Hydra with more and more heads sprouting everywhere, and as you regularly point out, it sounds like the places they’re sprouting the most are right around where you are. (To quote you, America IS, somehow, still that girl, and the rest of the world is deliberately following her footsteps.) We don’t know where things are going and where is going to be safe to be moving forward, and running to Europe to try and escape what feels like it’s coming could just be narrowly avoiding one trap to end up in another! (And this is another subject I could spend forever on because I’ve been increasingly drawn to arguments that tourism is actually pretty evil, and I’ve loved your writing about this.) We don’t know where this fucked up train is going, and this is where I struggle to work with this end of the world feeling that’s been percolating so loudly for too many years now in a way that is very very similar to what you’re saying.
I relate deeply to the worry of internal policing you mention so much, of that worry of not living enough, and it’s another thing I could talk about forever, but will try (and fail!) to keep short. But I wonder if it’s another way we’re encouraged to compete for resources, and if it’s a scarcity mentality masquerading as abundance, because underneath it all is the pressure to seize (read: compete for) what’s “left” of a world that’s de facto written off as ending instead of figuring out how to protect and sustain the rich resources we’re not supposed to believe we still have.
I don't want to be weird about Carpenter! I hate that impulse too. But under my reaction to something like her album art is this nagging, gnawing insecurity that sometimes literally keeps me up at night, of not being or doing or living enough, of not capitalizing (clown emoji!!!) on my youth and conventional beauty while I still have it, and that time-related fear you and I can both understand as people who are not straight men. We don’t get to move through the world as easily as they do, but theoretically things are easier for us now than they were, which is, on one hand, great. But that’s its own form of pressure!! It’s a reason I feel shitty for not doing more with the cards I’ve been dealt, and I think why the trad wives are a growing demographic, because the image of what we’re told to want seems so close but is still so far away, so why embrace an illusion of freedom if it feels so hard to embody in a way that feels as good as it looks like it does? Everything is expensive, and I unfortunately know the trap of media work too, which is impossible to make a living off of, and I’m sure you’ve also seen that a lot of the people who are actually able to make that work are people who quietly have rich parents or partners. And I can know this intrinsically and still feel like shit seeing pictures of their success and wonder why that doesn’t feel attainable. I want their aspirational, glamorous, well photographed lives! I want to travel the world and enjoy an abundance of great sex and go to raves in slutty outfits and do drugs in sweaty bathrooms. But the last time I did that last one (at a Pride rave!! Specifically because I was so worried my chances to do this were running out, and the pressure of #bratsummer CLOWN EMOJI), I got my first case of COVID after years of being extremely careful, and in a cruel twist of fate, I’ve spent most of the past year wrestling with the kind of chronic illness that has eluded my friends who haven’t cared about COVID since 2020. And that adds horrible layers to my ouroboros, where I’m not only not doing or living enough, but that I don’t even have the “right” immune system to do that successfully, that maybe my friends (who, as good as I know they are, and as much as I love them, never once offered accommodations to help me feel safer when they invited me out, even when they saw that I was so sick that just a ten minute walk could leave me winded for days) were just doing it better than I am, all the worse because that comparison was based on what so few people will acknowledge is pure dumb luck on their parts.
And in a couple of months I’ll be 35, which adds to that fear of running out of time, especially when I hear that younger women are increasingly dating men closer to my age because of the political gender gap you often mention between them and their peers. So I now see someone like Carpenter through the lens of competition, what I feel like I should be and can’t amount to, not understanding, to Tiana’s point, how even someone as young as Carpenter (26!!!) can relate to that. In the words of a great woman, there’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs behind you! And what if everyone on that staircase is fucking miserable and we’re not super encouraged to talk about why, and maybe find common ground in it, and look at what we are encouraged to care about, and wonder what’s actually worthy of our investment? Was the world we were encouraged to return to when Biden took office worth the pain it clearly causes us when we could have and still can choose something totally different that won’t make us feel like shit for being conflicted about it, that will validate that conflict? What if reservations about a pure “fuck it, we ball” lifestyle are based on that conflict and worth exploring at least a little, not because pleasure is bad or shameful or not worth pursuing, but actually because of the belief underneath it that everyone deserves to feel like it’s accessible, and can we imagine pleasure in a way that doesn’t feel so… colonial? Is “lighten up and get over it” actually quietly restrictive, not giving its critics the benefit of the doubt for actually really wanting that kind of joy too, and interested in approaching it with a bit more imagination than writing them off lets us? (And I feel like you could apply all of this to the protest critiques, and that I see how it's fair to argue they're related topics! But I think it's because of that failure of imagination, and the desire to shut down people who are trying to make cases and fight for a world that looks and feels better in a way we're told we can't have because of how nihilism poisoned everyone is now.)
(I have juuuust a bit more to say but was told to make this shorter. CLOWN EMOJI!!)
PHEW okay almost done SO SORRY
BUT on the note of the AIDS bit you mention, that’s been a subject I’ve been a little obsessed with for years now because I fell in love with David Wojnarowicz in 2020, and I’ve spent so many days of the past handful of years wishing he were alive because I want so badly to know what he’d have to say about right now. (This is another subject that could take forever to get into, and I’ll restrain myself.) He is, I think, such a potent role model for what we’re talking about, someone who pursued freedom through pleasure, but was also so righteously angry about how it’s punished and gatekept and how readily people will write off mass death when the people dying aren’t seen as valuable to the dominant culture. I see people use his work as arguments for that pursuit of pleasure while conveniently overlooking his grief and fury at the death machine that keeps showing up with a different face. (I got that awful case of COVID because someone, or multiple someones, went to a rave sick, and maybe they didn't know, but maybe some of them did and just didn't care, and I think there's a deep tragedy to that. Was that the future Act Up was fighting for?) The game doesn’t play by the same rules it did when we were kids, and people are dying for different reasons now. So it’s not as simple as “where is this policing coming from, why am I not living more,” and I think most people know this, but it’s been so rough out there that it’s understandably so hard to look at directly. And I just wonder if maybe, when discourse about pleasure explodes or goes uncomfortable places, it’s ultimately more about wanting it badly, and wondering why the pursuit of it can hurt so much, and why it never feels like enough because of our ideas of how it should look and feel, or if other people are doing it better. I wonder if picking at the threads of that instead of dismissing critiques of a more YOLO philosophy as uptight is actually directing us away from potent opportunities to think about what it would look like for the effort of feeling good to actually feel good, instead of— like Carpenter’s art!!— look sexy and carefree on the surface, but conceal a maybe not so quiet misery lingering just beneath it.
And I could just! Keep going!! Oops!!! But I hear the award show music and I’ll cap it there for both our sakes. Genuinely exciting to be able to talk in earnest about this sort of thing with someone whose work I respect! Again, I appreciate you hearing me out and engaging with me thoughtfully when it would be very easy not to, and this has helped me put words into some of my own schisms I’ve literally been chewing on for years. I think this stuff is so important to talk about because I think everyone is quietly struggling with this. Thank you for the food for thought, and I’m looking forward to seeing where you’ll take this!
"Like all of us, Anna and Tom are endlessly empty tummies constantly craving tummy time." worries the hell out of me. FWIW 'tummy time' is *actually* about getting an infant to exert strength and discover agency.
The implication in the sentence is that we're all hoping to wallow as our main activity. That's concerning. It's opposite of why we seek 'tummy time' for kids, actually, IMO - but acquiescing to its cutest impulse means we're prone to wallow first, ask for catechisms later.
ding ding ding 🤭 i mean...as i saw a tiktok say not that long ago, maybe the cure to male depression is a little tummy time? food for thought!!!!
anyway, yes, it's that push and pull, the achieving your dream yet wanting to just sleep and not work. i guess we're reaching the My Lifetime of Rest and Relaxation™ era for Millennials @____@
V boys unite… the military made him even hotter!
🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭
Yeah, I got to vote in that Italian referendum, but apparently voter turnout was only like 30% in total 😞
@___@ thank you for voting even if Giorgia suppressed things!!! oy. OY!!