Sabrina Carpenter — The “Bad Role Model” We Probably Deserve

Sabrina Carpenter Short n’ Sweet tour photo (Billboard)

Sabrina Carpenter has officially waved goodbye to her Disney ingénue era. Three MTV VMA wins in her pocket, one album cover that broke the internet, and a playlist we (at least I) can never play out loud at home – all of these have crowned her 2025’s most controversial pop princess. Depending on which corner of social media you land on, she is either a liberal queen redefining “feminist icon” or a moral baddie corrupting daughters around the world.

But doesn’t this all feel familiar? We’ve already lived through the moral panics of Madonna writhing in lace, Britney Spears in her knickers, and Miley Cyrus swinging from a wrecking ball. Every generation finds its new “bad girl,” and every generation recycles the same set of questions, with answers we’ve heard before.

What’s funnier is that we're still clinging to the outdated expectation that pop stars should be moral compasses, as if streaming them is electing them. Yet at the same time, we reward them for being messy, mischievous, and marketable. The point is: they were never meant to be role models in the first place, and they don’t want to (Carpenter has said as much). There’s nothing wrong when Carpenter’s brand of irreverence does not fit neatly into the kind of positive examples in a guidance counsellor’s PowerPoint slides.

Carpenter’s “badness” is upfront – it’s right there on her album cover, in her lyrics and her improvisations on stage. Her music sells honesty – or at least the kind of honesty that fits a 26-year-old navigating hookup culture in a society that demands both virtue and vice. Doesn’t that sound better than the hollow performance of moral-perfection women in pop were forced to uphold for decades?

Carpenter’s controversial new album cover

It would be naive to think Carpenter’s critics are really concerned about morality or music quality. This is about female sexuality, plain and simple. Male artists have been vulgar and raunchy forever without having their worth as role models questioned in the same way: Justin Timberlake literally built a career on provocative choreography and innuendo; Drake can rap endlessly about his sexual exploits – yet when Carpenter drops A Nonsense Christmas, Bed Chem, or Juno, suddenly all parents are on the verge of fainting. And this is not new – what Carpenter is facing now is just part of a long lineage of suspicion directed at women who make physical intimacy part of their artistic self-expression.

Maybe she’s indeed a terrible role model – if you define it as a sanitised paragon of moral virtue. But what if role models don’t need to be perfect? What if they can be messy, contradictory, and just a lil bit (or more) bad? Maybe Carpenter doesn’t need to be either saint or scandal. Maybe she is offering a version of role modelling just right for this messy age – one that doesn’t pretend to be universal: reflecting your own reality and making people laugh while doing it.

The real issue isn’t Carpenter’s lyrics at all, but our habit of expecting pop stars to double as moral babysitters. If parents start talking about what their kids listen to, we might realise the real scandal is our silence. After all, shielding kids from Carpenter’s songs doesn’t prepare them for the world, but explaining to them the self-awareness tucked between the lines, and the difference between art and life, might.

Short n’ Sweet tour photo (Billboard)

So yes, call her a bad role model. Laugh at or critique her dirty jokes. But she’s the honest role model we need, who lives out what we’ve been too embarrassed to admit: that virtue and vice often dance to the same beat.