Sabrina Carpenter is firing back at critics who think her concerts are too sexual.
“It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” the pop star told Rolling Stone in a new cover story.
“They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it. It’s in my show. There’s so many more moments than the ‘Juno’ positions, but those are the ones you post every night and comment on. I can’t control that.”
Carpenter continued, “If you come to the show, you’ll [also] hear the ballads, you’ll hear the more introspective numbers. I find irony and humor in all of that, because it seems to be a recurring theme. I’m not upset about it, other than I feel mad pressure to be funny sometimes.”
According to Us Weekly, during her performances of “Juno” on her Short n’ Sweet Tour, Carpenter contorts her body in different sex positions, particularly after the line, “Have you tried this one?”
Carpenter has experimented with some raunchy configurations during her shows, including one in Stockholm in April. Calling it the “new ‘Juno’ position for the lesbians,” the move imitates oral sex.
The month before, in Paris, Carpenter also unveiled a different position that involved two other dancers: the infamous Eiffel Tower pose.
“Juno” is a reference to the 2007 film of the same name, where the main character, played by Eliot Page, becomes pregnant. In the song, Carpenter dreams about having a life like Juno’s, where she’s with someone who cares for her and wants a family.
But the song is also whimsical.
“The day I wrote this song, it kinda came from a joke,” the 26-year-old explained during her NPR Tiny Desk performance in December. “The night before, I was writing a joke song with a couple friends and I ad-libbed this line, and it was like, “Make you wanna make me Juno”. ‘Cause I was like, I just watched Juno. And I was like, that’s a funny way to be like ‘knock me up, please, now.’”
Elsewhere in the RS story, Carpenter opined on what it’s like to be the subject of so much online scrutiny. “When you get down the little rabbit hole is truly when people start commenting on you as a person or you physically,” she said. “All of those things that you’re already thinking on a day-to-day basis. You don’t need a stranger from Arkansas to remind you.”
