Interesting to compare Carpenter to the pop stars that Millennials grew up with (Spears, Aguilera, etc) who were simply overtly sexy and titillating. They dressed and performed with straight-forward sex appeal, which attracted male attention for obvious reasons, and female attention (they want to imitate and capture the pop stars' sex appeal for themselves). It was unabashed performance for both the male gaze and for female aspiration: “I want to be her, or I want boys to want me like they want her" Now, female pop stars have to be coy, or do a "bit" about how they're toying with male desire. Carpenter is maybe the most interesting, where it seems like her aesthetic is sexy but it really isn't, it's almost a parody of what men find hot, or a young girl's idea of what a "sexy woman" is like, her makeup is this odd overdone child-beauty-pageant thing, how a 10-year-old girl would apply makeup she stole from her mom or older sister,a and of course now standard Lolita trappings. It's not so much sexuality as the performance of sexuality, but also with plausibly deniability baked in ("you can't critique what I'm doing or accuse me of pandering to men or objectifying myself because I'm already in on the bit") It's the end result of the mainstream-ification of feminist discourse about the male gaze, sexual objectification, etc, where female pop stars have to signal their understanding of this philosophy before moving on to the business at hand of titillating, and that titillation itself has to be laundered through these "bits." They have to perform a kind of feminist homework first and signal awareness of these concepts, and if they do lean into sexual aesthetics, it’s expected to be ironic, clever, or satirical This can be funny and interesting, but it's also a little exhausting, and highlights a deeper issue of the current self-consciousness of basic male/female attraction, you see this in a different way with Taylor Swift, how she launders her desire through her "awkward, relatable" persona and how her songs discuss love as a sort of manic spell that you fall into For Swift, love for her is temporarily "going crazy," a good way of speaking to her audience -white, middle-class women from good families and milieus that expect emotional composure and professionalism in young women, who tend to discuss their feelings with the language of therapy- and giving them a sort of "permission" to express the "insanity" of love in a way that allows them to avoid their feelings being pathologized ("I don't have BDP! I'm just IN LOVE") while still partaking in the Gothic romance fantasy of love that young women enjoy