In the fourth season of Arrested Development, there’s a plotline in which Michael Cera’s nebbishy, virginal George Michael Bluth studies abroad in Spain. He hooks up with a Spanish mom named Rosalita, then comes back to campus for senior year with a libertine attitude and a pair of matador pants. He has become O.S.: “Overtly Sexual.”
These days, you could describe a certain sector of pop music as Overtly Sexual. Several new-gen pop ladies have been trying out costumes and performance styles I haven’t seen since the last time Carl’s Jr. was doing horny hamburger ads. It’s part Marilyn Monroe, part Maxim Hot 100; ambiguity is out, and cheesy lingerie is back in.
TikTok-cultivated singer Addison Rae recently commemorated the release of her debut album Addison with a performance in London, during which she wore underclothes that would have paired well with a pair of spangled angel wings. Canadian singer Tate McRae has revived the gaudy faux-burlesque choreographic style of the mid-2000s and ditched her jockish attire for leopard-print corsets. And we can’t forget Sabrina Carpenter, the reigning queen of Overt Sexuality. Fresh off a tour during which she regularly interrupted a song about being “so fucking horny” with a live demonstration of a favored sex position, she announced her follow-up album Man’s Best Friend by revealing some erotic cover art: a photo of Sabrina on her hands and knees in a little black dress and spike heels, her blonde hair clenched in the fist of a faceless dude in a suit.
Because we’re coming off a decade of relative sexual tranquility, “empowerment pop” and I’m-yr-BFF relatability, this retrograde approach to sexuality is freaking everyone out. The Sabrina album art incited a miniature moral panic amongst (presumably) very young pop stans; as X user @botticellibimbo wrote, “sabrina carpenter has looney tune sexuality and everyone’s acting like she’s bonnie blue.” (Last week, Carpenter released a PG-rated alternate cover, joking that this version was “approved by God.”) Others questioned the authenticity of Addison Rae’s hella-girly approach, and whether it speaks organically to anyone other than “gay men in the autumn of their lives.”
This gender dynamic should be as familiar and clearly delineated as the layers of a Western Bacon Cheeseburger: girls performing classic heterosexuality in a way that garners them devoted female fans and horny male admirers. But in 2025, we might be too saddled with cultural baggage and tortured by social media to make that equation work. So here are four possible answers to the questions all this raises: Why are the pop girls going so overtly sexual, and why is it going so awry?
1. Gender Chaos begets Gender Order
We first must consider the relatively diverse Smörgåsbord of gender and sexuality expression in our current landscape. As queer, trans, and nonbinary pop stars are more visible and successful than ever, borders are blurring in fascinating ways—Brat brought poppers to the straights, Lorde put out a single with the lyric “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” and Benson Boone has been singing about hetero monogamy while wearing stage clothing that answers the somewhat cursed question “What if Freddie Mercury was your high-school quarterback?” Carpenter herself gave a nod to this new paradigm on her song “Slim Pickins,” mourning her lack of “gay awakening” while also lusting after members of the opposite sex who have muscles and know how to spell.
