I Attended Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short N’ Sweet” Tour, And The Unabashed Way She Embraces Her Sexuality Needs To Be Celebrated

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.

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.

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 adlibbing a different outro to this song during every live performance, which is usually customized to the city or state where she is performing.

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.”

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.

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?”

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.”

“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.