RG3: Sabrina Carpenter's album cover, SCOTUS and internet browsing, + Bezos' wedding
Welcome to the first edition of RG3, a new series where I share hot takes on 3 recent stories in culture, tech, and politics.
1. The United States of Prudes
Stay horny, Sabrina
I’m going to be brave and say the Sabrina Carpenter album cover is hot. Those alleging her appeal is for the male gaze only can stand down: she is also appealing to the sapphic gaze.
Let’s take a scroll through some of the top X replies to her “Man’s Best Friend” album announcement, which features the image of her on all fours, a man’s hand in her hair:
“Whoever came up with this disgusting slop needs legit mental help.”
“I mean seriously what is this? What are you trying to tell young women with this album cover? that you get on your knees for men so they can rag up your hair oh and also that you're a dog? No wonder the youth are in such a mess.”
An MSNBC writer argued in an op-ed that Carpenter’s cover is just “cheap rage bait” engineered to create such discourse that “we don’t need,” and which is harmful to women. Another writer made a similar point in The Guardian, calling the album art “soft porn pandering to the male gaze.”
But why should women kowtow to a culture of abject prudishness as a defense against misogyny?
Where is the line between that defensive shell and the very misogyny it claims to protect against?
The internet incentivizes the objectification of women for clicks while the culture existing therein demonizes such portrayals. Grok is granting user requests for turning images of women into porn, in what Kat Tenbarge’s Spitfire News outlined as a key method of sexual harassment on the platform. Meanwhile, on the same site, women are derided for exhibiting agency over their own sexuality.
When lewd content creator Bonnie Blue announced plans to lock herself up and invite 2,000 men to a “petting zoo” wherein they could do anything to her – all for the sake of content – the online response was swiftly disgusted with the creator, with some saying she deserved to go to jail.
Has nobody watched porn before? Because what she’s doing is really not that crazy. Gangbangs have been popular in the adult film industry dating back to the ‘90s. In the early 2000s, Lisa Sparxxx gained attention for sleeping with more than a hundred men in one day at the World Gangbang Championship in Warsaw, Poland. But as Rebecca Jennings notes in New York Magazine, stunts from Bonnie Blue and other OnlyFans creators “differ[s] from typical porn in that the headline-grabbing stunts essentially act as marketing for their subscription pages,” to help them drive profits for their own independent businesses.
These negative reactions showcase misogyny wrapped in a feminist cloak.
The lack of nuance is unsurprising. Cultural discourse, particularly concerning women’s sexuality, has been bludgeoned to flatness.
The porn industry – which has long been criticized for its documented history of endangering women – is already under fire from all sides of the ideological spectrum. Trump’s Project 2025 sought to outlaw porn, something Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian called a “red herring” largely aimed to criminalize expressions of sexuality for queer people. Republicans cyclically take up porn as a policy focal point, as Vox noted back in 2016.
But as I reported for Slate last fall, conservative cultural views have been finding their way into mainstream perspectives on gender and sex. A University of Cambridge poll ahead of the 2024 election found that 89% of Trump voters believed that “cherished traditions” were “under threat.”
The most obvious and harmful impacts here are felt by the trans and queer community, whose rights to live and love are threatened daily by the Trump administration. But the cultural obsession towards the traditional is absolutely seeping into the way we talk about women, even if we think we’re making the more feminist take.
I wonder if those who are angry over this content are equally infuriated by the many recent news stories of men victimizing women through similar acts. In this context, it’s hard not to think of the horrifying story of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband drugged her and brought in dozens of men to rape her throughout a decade. Or Diddy’s pattern of sexual abuse recounted by ex-girlfriend Cassie during his sex-trafficking trial in New York.
All of this misguided outrage could benefit from a new outlet, with less hypocritical faux-concern for how women present themselves to the world and more genuine care for victims of abuse.
2. Free Expression Hit by SCOTUS
Conservative prudishness + veiled homophobia may impact your online experience
On Friday, many of the phenomena described above came to life in the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a Texas age-verification law aimed at porn content. Texas’ H.B. 1181 seeks to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit material online. Of course, that’s a good thing. I don’t think I should’ve seen some of the Tumblr content I did in middle school. But the decision would allow states to require websites made up of a third of adult content that is “harmful to children” to seek official ID to grant access to users.
“Harmful to children” is a wildly subjective descriptor. It could even mean romance novels or R-rated movies, as NPR explains.
While the decision is in theory meant to protect children, its effects will prevent adults from full freedom of expression and access on the internet.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes that with this decision, the Court “broke a fundamental agreement between internet users and the state that has existed since its inception.”
Now, other states are likely to follow Texas’ footsteps with the new precedent set by the Court.
I love how Matt Klein outlined the law in his newsletter ZINE:
Checking an ID for beer at a store is ephemeral and incomparable to uploading an ID on the internet, which can be associated with one’s online activity and ultimately can create trackable, hackable, and commodifiable records of private desires, which futures are uncertain.
Also, buying alcohol is not a protected right in the United States Constitution, while the right to access protected speech as an adult is.
Klein also pointed to an NYU study from earlier this year that found age-verification laws don’t lessen porn usage, but rather drive users to harder-to-find, less-compliant spaces. In Louisiana, Pornhub complies with the state’s ID requirements. The platform says it saw an 80% decrease in traffic after it began complying with the law, as reported by Mashable. At the same time, there was a 48.1% increase in searches for a site that did not comply with the law, as well as a 23.6% increase in searches for VPNs, which let users use devices as though they’re in different places. So, it’s unlikely that the law will “work” as designed.
But of course, it will also help conservative lawmakers outlaw all kinds of queer media under the guise of “explicit” material.
Displays of queerness are often considered “unsafe” for children by the right-wing, with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law being just one of many current legislative examples of that bigoted belief. Several US states have recently tried (and failed) to pass laws banning drag performances.
My freshman year of college at SUNY Binghamton, I got into a fight with an asshole who lived on my friends’ floor. He was a Republican from Queens named Joe and he said that Pride parades were “dangerous” because kids “shouldn’t see two men kissing.” This was 2014, a world before Trump, and still, nobody else in the room backed me up against this loser. So, just using this moment to say:
Fuck you, Joe. Gay stuff is good for kids. Happy last day of Pride.
3. Keeping Up with the Capitalists: Venice
“OMW to Jeff’s wedding lmaooo” - Sydney Sweeney to her friends, probably
Over the weekend, Jeff Bezos got married in Venice. I didn’t care that the Kardashians or Jared Kushner were there, because of course they were, but then Sydney Sweeney was also there, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, and dozens of other celebrities. Bezos’ now-wife Lauren Sanchez appeared on the cover of Vogue, arguably one of the country’s most storied definers of cultural status.
I want to know how Sydney Sweeney explained her weekend plans to her friends. Was it a “I’m going to Jeff Bezos’ wedding LOL” kind of vibe?
That she’s even invited showcases a grotesquely American invention. It dates back to the late 19th century and early 20th century, when artists became celebrities. The nouveau riche had to stay relevant and control not just business, but culture. This way, they retained all societal power, and performers – who, in the Western world, were once a different class entirely – could rise to meet them, too.
Bezos’ wedding highlights that symbiotic strategy. Fame begets money begets fame. And in the influencer economy, public attention leads to social media fame while social media fame leads to more public attention.
It makes sense for business leaders to seek out icon status. The GW School of Business Professor James Bailey wrote in a 2018 CNN op-ed that cultural fame is usually “good branding” for an executive of a company. But this is also because it helps the executive “branch out into everything from television to politics to sports,” as “lines between sectors have been blurred.” Of course, the President of the United States is himself a former reality TV star and business leader.
Part of that shared celebrity status invites even more business opportunities, too. Hollywood is cashing in on the phenomenon. Friendships between celebrities have become increasingly integral to the business of celebrity in the 2020s, as Jason Guerrasio wrote for Business Insider last year.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that Bezos himself is not well-liked by the public. Activists in Venice protested the wedding with the “No Space for Bezos” movement, railing against one of the world’s richest men for using their city for his displays of shockingly inordinate wealth. I’m not saying that having moving stars at his wedding would make Bezos more well-liked, but it’s all certainly a clear proclamation to the general public that he’s in the pocket of culture-makers, and in America, culture is power, especially with a ceremony and performance of classism so direct as a wedding.
It’s all quite cynical and depressing. It’s a stark reminder that social politics in the US are shaped by, and for, capitalism.
On Sunday, Bezos’ guests continued to traipse around Venice. Meanwhile, in Washington, Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said on the Senate floor that Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — which aims to slash hundreds of billions in social safety nets like SNAP and Medicaid while benefiting wealthier home owners — was effectively “socialism for the rich."
This is all particularly interesting because last week, New York City rejoiced and fear-mongered in equal measure over Zohran Mamdani’s win in the Democratic primary for mayor. Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, has unbelievably good rhetorical skills, dodging questions about Israel-Palestine and anti-capitalism so expertly that he’s giving young Democrats hope for the first time in a long, long time.
“I have many critiques of capitalism,” Mamdani said in a CNN interview. “I don’t think we should have billionaires because frankly it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality.”
While we’re on the topic of celebrity, there’s a lot to say about Mamdani’s use of cultural capital to succeed. Read Spitfire News’ analysis here.
Of course, his win is being framed by the right and the left as a huge danger for the Democratic establishment.
Well, good.
The celeb fanfare at B*zos’ wedding felt soooo icky. Your explanation perfectly encapsulates why!