In search of sexy

overthinking about Sabrina Carpenter, Gillian Anderson, and my own sensuality

If you’re anything like me, your TikTok and/or Instagram reels and/or Twitter has been aflutter with all things Short and Sweet. I’m not particularly a pop girlie, and though I enjoy the catchy, talented vocal stylings of Sabrina Carpenter as much as the next girl, I wouldn’t consider myself part of the “fandom.” But still, the algorithm loves to show me clips from her current stadium tour. Probably because I am transfixed by them. 

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, for my whole life but a lot more lately, is what counts as “sexy” — what it means to be sexy, act sexy, dress sexy, feel sexy. It’s a question that’s plagued me since the onset of puberty. Is it as simple as mimicking elements of sex — limited clothing, maximum skin, heavy bedroom eyes, vaguely grinding hips and cheeky flirtation? Or is it more complicated, more internal? It often feels like everyone around me has a clear sense of it — what they desire, how to be desirable, and how to use their desirability to their advantage. Yes, even in awkward, awful high school. (I might have an oversized understanding of other people’s confidence, I’ll admit it.) Sabrina Carpenter knows how to use her desirability to her advantage, and she knows what she desires. 

What those Short and Sweet clips of Carpenter dancing and flirting with the audience in sparkly, flouncy lingerie remind me of is the spring my mother made us take a “Good Girl/Bad Girl” dance class. It was the spring after my second year of university, yet another year I’d spent more worried about making friends and getting good grades than dating, another year I’d spent resolutely awkward around guys and ignoring and/or actively shutting down advances (whether I was cognizant of that or not.) I did not feel then like a person who could claim the moniker “sexy” — I was nineteen, I felt like a child. My mother didn’t sign us up for the class to spark a fledgling sexuality in me, as far as I’m aware, although at the time I think it felt like that (is it universally humiliating to be asked about your dating life by your mother, or is it just me?) It was about exercise (I can discuss the implications another time.) She and my sister had taken a Beyoncé-themed contemporary/hip-hop class from the same studio a few months prior, and this was the only class they were running when I’d be home. I did not want to go. I didn’t have any cute athletic clothes, meaning I had to wear my mother’s less-than-stylish (or sexy) hand-me-downs, and one of the people teaching the class was one of the cool girls at my childhood ballet studio I’d never managed to befriend. And, like I said, I didn’t feel sexy. I could do the moves — after sixteen years of ballet training, I knew what I was doing. I just couldn’t make it work energetically. I don’t think my mother or (then) fifteen-year-old sister were making it work energetically either, but they weren’t trying to. They were just trying to have some fun dancing and getting exercise. But I felt, deeply, like I was failing each time I didn’t manage to feel sexy doing the choreography to Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic (it was 2018.) I felt the same way on the rare occasions I could be persuaded to go to the club, but this was a dance studio, a place I usually had a decent amount of comfort in. If I did feel something — exercise endorphins, the rush of getting a step right, being technically better than a lot of the class, even, maybe, a sense of my own hotness — I’d be ashamed and too stubborn to give in to the good feeling. Every week after class, we’d go back to my mother’s Dodge Journey and I’d sob in the backseat. I was a failure. “Sexy” seemed impossibly far away.

Something I didn’t understand about the class was the name — Good Girl/Bad Girl. The music was typical pop radio R&B, and the moves, though often body roll focused, were actually pretty tame. That dichotomy, Good Girl vs. Bad Girl, didn’t really come into play. We weren’t engaging with BDSM imagery. We were being neither Madonna nor Whore, chaste nor naughty, good nor bad. We were just dancing. Are “good girl” and “bad girl” the only sexy archetypes that women can fit into, essentially? The overt, leather-and-cigarettes brat or the hyper-feminine Lolita? I don’t think so. The BDSM from which those terms come is more nuanced than that, for one. In order to be good, you have to sometimes be bad. What does it really mean to be “sexy”? During the first week of the class, a woman giving an introduction and testimony said the class had made her feel sexier than she had in years. Maybe it was just getting moving, an excuse to look at herself in the mirror for an hour. Maybe Bruno Mars really turned her on, I don’t know. I didn’t totally understand what the steps we were learning really had to do with the actualities of sex or what men found attractive. Maybe this was just an essentially vanilla dance class for middle-class suburban women to “get their groove back” or, you know, have fun, and I took it too seriously, as is my way.

The imagery of the Short and Sweet tour is just that — sweet. We see Carpenter in cute, sparkly teddies, playing spin the bottle with her backup dancers, and leaning into her doe-eyed tinyness. Her lyrics are clever but deeply and unapologetically horny. She is also notably confident. I saw a tweet early on in the press cycle comparing Sabrina Carpenter’s recent discography to Olivia Roderigo’s — where Roderigo is expressive about her heartbreaks and missteps, and notably her jealousy, Carpenter is confident and unflappable. As she says in her hit single Espresso, she “can’t relate to desperation.” Other tweets have also praised Carpenter for managing to do a whole tour in lingiere while still being “for the girls” and “uninterested in the male gaze.” Her aesthetics — pink, glittery, fun, silly — certainly appeal to her female audience and has been praised for raging against the way things that are popular with young women get bashed in the media. But her bombshell looks and the presentation of her sexuality fall well within the bounds of Western beauty standards and what appeals to the male gaze. This argument, that she isn’t performing for the male gaze, seems to me to misunderstand the concept. It isn’t just “what boys like.” In its origins, it’s about the way women are presented on screen by traditionally male directors and cinematographers. As the definition has evolved via the pop culture machine, it has come to mean something closer to the way women are expected to look and perform femininity and sexuality.

Carpenter’s image as the “horniest girl alive” is sanitized through her pastel-and-sequins sweetness. Compared to other pop girls like Charlie XCX, queen of Brat Summer, Carpenter more closely aligns with the (still sexy, obviously) “good girl” archetype. Even her “surprise sex positions” during her Juno performances (“Have you ever tried this one?”) are pretty vanilla — the clips I’ve seen have been limited to what appears to be missionary, cowgirl, and doggie…not exactly kinky or experimental. But I watch these clips and they are sexy, unapologetically, and it seems to come not from a desperation to be viewed as sexy, but from deep-rooted knowledge that she already is. It’s about energy, which is the thing I’ve become fixated on.

I was discussing this with a friend, and she said, “Well, she’s a professional actress.” And that’s true — Sabrina Carpenter is a talented performer. She is, to a certain degree, putting this on. The dance moves, the cheeky facial expressions, winks and pouts aren’t happening without Carpenter’s knowledge. This somehow didn’t make me feel any better, though. It seems to come naturally to her, it doesn’t seem, to me, like a performance, a word I would associate, at least in this context, with effort, something distant from her actual personality. And this assessment doesn’t actually answer any of my real questions — how is she so good at that performance, and how can I capture that energy, too?

Maybe the answer is obvious — she has a crack marketing team and has had years to develop her current persona. She has explored numerous relationships and has a whole pantheon of pop stars to draw inspiration from. She’s probably had work done to accentuate her bombshell looks. She also really is playing into a male fantasy. The aesthetics may be flouncy, glittery and pink, but the coquettish,  tiny, flirtatious energy plays into notable, and long-noted archetypes of patriarchal desire. If she weren’t such a clever wordsmith and didn’t have that I’m-hot-so-don’t-embarrass-me-or-else edge, it might even verge on Born Sexy Yesterday. Fellow Substacker jade hurley points this out in her own cultural critique of Carpenter — she reminds us that while Carpenter’s content might be maturing, the packaging is regressing to girlish “Sexy Baby” territory. As I reach my mid-twenties (the same age as Carpenter, mind you,) I am increasingly noticing that our beauty standards, especially in a post-BBL-removal, Ozempic-fuelled beauty era, are pedophilic. Women are expected to have the bodies of teenagers (certain teenagers) forever, and are rewarded for leaning into the soft fragility of the “coquette.” Tale as old as time, I know. I’m not particularly interested in investing in this type of sensuality, but I am searching within myself for something like Carpenter’s unabashed sexual confidence and ability to perform (without seeming to Perform) her sensuality.

One of my favourite beauty Instagram accounts, Zoey Kim Kanealy, recently posted a reel about the “becoming principle” — aka, faking it until you make it. Creating a character of the person you want to be and acting like that character until you absorb those traits yourself. Going method, if you will. I feel torn about this technique. It’s probably worth a try, but when it comes to confidence and sexuality, especially as a woman already expected to perform a certain role and behaviour, intentionally adding “performance” into my daily routine feels like a slippery slope. I already view my life in large part through the third person, even when I’m alone. We all know that Margaret Atwood quote about being a woman with a man inside, watching herself through the keyhole. We’re already in a social panopticon, whether the eyes we’re worried are watching us are men consuming us as sexual capital or other women deeming us cool. If I started acting like a person who’s super in touch with how hot she is, who feels as sexy as Sabrina Carpenter acts, or at least marginally so, would I eventually stop faking it and start making it? Or would I be trapped in the hell of performance forever? Would any particular archetype or narrative ever actually fully encompass me, or any of us? 

I guess part of my problem is I don’t have a clear understanding of what “sexy” means, or is. I know it when I see it, but I struggle to define it, especially for myself. When the dress code for a party is “Slutty and Sultry,” or I’ve been told to wear “jeans and a sexy top” to a weekend outing, I am sincerely at a loss for what I should be wearing, what I can pull off. What works with my body, my energy? What won’t feel like a costume, and will instead feel natural, like I didn’t put any effort into it?

In my investigations, it seems that what sexy is, is literally anything. Fan videos of other pop stars and celebrities come across my feed on occasion, and people will lust over anything if they like the celebrity enough. Twitter arguments start cyclically between “Swifites” and…everyone else about whether Taylor Swift’s performances are inherently sexually charged or sexless. The iconic chair sequence from the Eras Tour pops up every so often, especially comparisons of Swift’s early, rather stiff chair-humping choreography and her more recent, practiced and well-performed moves. Still, though, Swift’s performance of her sensuality feels more like that — a performance — to me than Carpenter’s, maybe because Carpenter’s entire brand is more overtly sexual. 

I’ve been watching The X Files for the first time, which means my Twitter algorithm is riddled with Mulder and Scully fancams and people lusting after both actors. Gillian Anderson is widely regarded nowadays by pretty much everyone as a deeply sexy lady and is regarded by the fandom as having always been hot. She is a beautiful woman, but I’m sometimes surprised by what GIFS and images are used to demonstrate her sexiness. Clips from the early baby-faced seasons, clips of Scully just…being Scully are heralded as deeply attractive and sexy. Especially compared to Sabrina Carpenter, compared to Anderson now, even, Anderson’s 90’s good looks feel totally different. Sure, she’s a pouty-lipped bombshell, and a certain contingent of people really likes a Woman In Charge. But it’s not something she’s putting on or performing. She’s acting, creating a character, and she’s beautiful, and yeah, the chemistry between Anderson and Duchovny is intoxicating, but it isn’t the same as Carpenter’s overt performance of sexuality. 

So maybe the answer isn’t performing until I feel the way I want to. Maybe it’s just, you know…being myself. I’m a Scorpio sun and Venus, so it should come naturally, right? Sensuality is written in my stars. Someone will find whatever I am already doing super fucking hot. Maybe someone already does! But I don’t actually want it to be about someone else. The few sexual experiences I have had were exciting and empowering, and I left feeling exactly the way I’m describing — like I didn’t need to worry about it, because I turned someone, this someone, on without even trying. But that empowerment only lasted a few months before it started to fade. If your ability to feel into your sensuality requires an audience, requires a constant drip of validation, is it real? You’ve got to know it and show it. But then it’s still for someone else, isn’t it? You brag about how hot you are, how men fall at your feet, because being desirable is a status symbol. Other people wanting you, at least in our society as it is, gives you value. 

In high school, my friends (sexually active) encouraged me to buy and wear lacy lingerie “for myself.” On nights out now, I spend hours agonizing over what I’m going to wear to meet the “whatever makes you feel hot” dress code. What does make me feel hot? Often my friends will wear short, tiny slip dresses or low-cut tops. These play into narratives I am aware of but don’t always feel suit me. When you’re mid-to-plus size, or have any kind of ass, those short dresses can feel a little too ostentatious, not just casually flirty/sexy like they do on skinnier girls. So I’m left feeling more comfortable in something slightly more modest, which leaves me feeling left out and dowdy, like my friend’s chaperone. Am I being too stubborn? Should I wear the ostentatious thing, suck it up and…fake it until I make it? Or should I soul-search a bit more, and learn to see my go-to options as just as sexy? A lot of this is less about how men perceive me, and more about feeling like I fit in with the other people I’m with and feeling an internal sense of confidence.

In a recent episode of the New York Times’ Modern Love podcast where she was promoting her new book, “Want,” a curated collection of women’s most secret sexual desires and fantasies, Gillian Anderson spoke about getting really into a certain intense kind of yoga, and feeling more in touch with her body and sexuality than ever before. People were all over her, she said. When the podcast host questioned if maybe people were all over her because she’s…Gillian Anderson, Anderson laughed it off. It surprised me, given the lustful content I’ve been seeing of 90’s Gillian Anderson, and the theme of her recent projects, that Anderson didn’t always feel like the sex icon she is, that it was a process of discovering her body. She even said she saw her character Scully as being very “vanilla” (apparently a negative in the 2020s, not that Anderson meant it that way.) So maybe the answer lies there. Not in performing a fantasy for someone else, but leaning into my own sense of desire.

Gillian Anderson’s recent projects like Sex Education and the aforementioned “Want” deal directly and openly with sexuality and desire of all kinds. As sex therapist Dr. Jean Milburn, Anderson instructs teenagers and adults alike on the honest realities of sex and the essential necessity of open communication. In a scene with an asexual teen, she affirms that sex and desire don’t make or break us as people (even if the cultural currency suggests otherwise.) In “Want” the curated sexual fantasies range from the intense and taboo (getting kidnapped, etc) to the honest and simple (just being desired.) 

The “Want” project is incredibly moving and has helped me, as I flip through it, to begin to answer some of my questions. Sexuality and feeling sexy is not a one-way street. You’ll feel desirable if you feel desire. If you are unashamed of your own interests and fantasies, you’ll be more comfortable accepting and playing into the fact that you might be part of the fantasy for someone else. The one time I was actually called “good girl” in bed, I was titillated not because of the words or their connotations but because it was exciting to be participating in the script. To be called this by someone who knew me, who I cared about and was attracted to. It was exciting that he wanted to run that script with me. It was exciting when he first quietly tried out “bad girl” and then corrected himself, knowing me well enough to know which, if any, archetype I’d want to be seen as, and being endearingly imperfect and open in our intimate moments.

Despite all this, and despite knowing the sane, logical answers, I am a neurotic person. Prone to insecurities, ruminating (obviously) and perhaps a little obsessive-compulsive, so I crave a…personalized answer. It can’t be as simple as just “be yourself” and “explore your desires” and “maybe fake it until you make it a little.” I want a definition for myself, I want to know exactly what I’m faking. I want to know what’s wrong with me, so I can solve it. If you know me at all, you know there’s nothing my late-night brain loves more than a personality quiz (alarm bells are ringing in my friend’s heads…I promise I’m being chill about this one!) I am also prone to getting blinded by What’s Hot Right Now and have a genetic predisposition for pseudoscience. I have a pretty solid sense of style (I try to resist trends and especially aesthetic “cores” — my sister tries in vain to identify what ‘core’ I fall into. She had accused me of being cottagecore-meets-indie sleaze (no) and dark-academia (like I guess…)) but I can be pulled easily into feeling like I’m doing something wrong. Hence my preoccupation with Sabrina Carpenter’s specific brand of sexy. I know it’s not my particular brand, but it’s everywhere, so it’s easy to get drawn into the cute-and-fun coquettish archetype. 

Alongside “core” aesthetic trends on the internet is the pernicious rise of discussion of the “divine feminine” — it’s widely acknowledged, at least in my Twitter feed, that this is reductive, both in a gender-as-binary way (literally, femininity and masculinity are framed as separate and inherently opposite poles) but in a verging-on-tradwife-propaganda-way. The rise of hippie spirituality in the alt-right, super-conservative online circles is concerning, as typically left-leaning witchy tarot readers and astrology enthusiasts mingle with the gender essentialists. While this framework acknowledges the masculine and feminine in us, it encourages women to think less and feel more, let themselves be needy and dependent on men, thus being in their “divine feminine” and bringing out the capable, strong, deal-with-every divine masculine in their partners. This is how to get the so-called “princess treatment.” Maybe I am jaded and frigid, but this disgusts me. But on my Instagram reels, there is much less intellectual criticism, and I can easily find myself scrolling all night, deep in a divine feminine rabbit hole. 

All of which goes to say that I recently found myself taking a “feminine seduction archetype” quiz. There are, supposedly, seven feminine archetypes, which I guess have something to do with Carl Jung. I’m not putting a ton of effort into researching this because I think it’s kind of dumb. The archetypes are Lover, Huntress, Maiden, Mother, Queen, Mystic, and Sage. According to this specific website, the “seduction archetypes” are made up of the “Lover” archetype and your other most dominant type. These are the Siren, Sophisticate, Boss, Bohemian, Coquette, Goddess, Enigma, Diva, Empress, Sensualist, Lady, Ingenue, and Gamine. Overwhelmed? So was I. I took the quiz, curious to know if dressing and acting in line with my archetype would do anything. I guess it’s nice that this system acknowledges that there are various types of women and that various types of personalities can be sexy or seductive. Even though this system acknowledges there is a little bit of each in every woman, I still find this reductive. For those curious, I am, apparently, “The Boss” because my primary archetype is the Sage. Other such characters include Cleopatra, Amal Clooney, and TV’s Olivia Pope. Of course, the results of this quiz exist to sell me a course or a workbook, which I won’t buy. I don’t know why, but these results don’t please me, even though they do feel accurate. Why would I rather be the Ingenue (dominant trait Maiden — what Sabrina is going for, clearly) or the Siren? Both are more clearly seductive and sexual, and maybe both are just more clearly what the average man likes, or has been told he should like. Dana Scully herself might fall along the lines of the Boss. Out of curiosity, I took the archetypes quiz again, this time answering the way I thought was “good” or “right,” changing answers I’d felt embarrassed or guilty about the first time. This time, the dominant archetype came up as the “Lover” — telling about what society suspects of women, at the very least!

Notably, this framework, and none of what I’ve been talking about, meaningfully engages with sexual orientation or race. I know there is intersectional feminist theory I could be reading. Sabrina String’s Fearing the Black Body is in my living room, waiting for me. I’m choosing not to engage with these here a) because there isn’t space, and b) more significantly, because my overthinking and anxieties pertain specifically to me, a white, straight woman. I know there is overlap in the patriarchy, and that I would probably benefit from studying experiences different than mine, but that’s for a later day. Today is about my ruminations. This “energy” I’m talking about is different than just knowing you objectively fit the bill of Western beauty standards or the media’s depiction of desirability. I’ve witnessed it in people of all body shapes and sizes, a range of ethnicities and ages. So why, then, do I feel unsatisfied with the options I’ve presented — to fake it/perform it, therefore to rely on being desired, or to focus on what/who I desire, or to lean into being “The Boss,” which seems to exist on a totally different planet than the sex icons I’ve been comparing myself to.

In my two as-yet-unpublished novels, written during my BFA and MFA respectively, I explore this theme a lot. Characters struggle to lean into or articulate their desires. They are often distanced from their desires or struggle to realize them. In my first, the protagonist goes out of her way to force herself to have sex, to disastrous results. In my most recent, which served as my MFA thesis, one of the protagonists spends almost the whole novel denying her desires and, like me, struggles to see herself as a sexual being, or believe that other people could see her that way. This is not a theme I think I will ever stop exploring, but I’d like to get to a place myself where I can write from the other side of this exploration someday.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot. One notable thing I keep reminding myself is that I am not a pop star. I’m a writer, and while lately there’s been increasing pressure to be a hot-girl writer (Literary It Girl versus the dreaded “literary non-hottie) there isn’t actually any requirement that I be visually attractive or tap into any particular sexual energy. While I hope one day my work is so widely read that I am pseudo-famous, I shouldn’t be as worried about if I’d be good on Hot Ones or if I’m hot enough to be on a magazine cover or if people will lust after me on Twitter as I am, because none of that is likely to happen and I don’t even know if I’d want it to. And actually, for a sexy literary novelist, the Boss, or its more Lover-driven counterpart the Sophisticate, might be what I want to be. Maybe I literally should explore my sexual persona through this lens. I also need to remind myself that men aren’t (or maybe no one is) paying attention to my specific type of “sexual energy” — there’s chemistry, yeah, but if a dude is going to look at my ass, it’s not because of the permission I am giving through leaning into my seduction archetype. It’s because of my ass.

So, obviously, I don’t have any answers. I have options, I guess all of which I could give a try and report back. I don’t think women need to exude explicit sexuality to have value, but I do think there is value in exploring your sensuality. It’s a valuable tool of power, to get to the point that the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Gillian Anderson are at, that comfort and strength in their own sexual energies. Hopefully, I’ll get there, I’m just still searching.

Thanks for listening,

Hana