What Makes Sabrina Based

I am a Sabrina Carpenter nationalist.

In April, Samuel Goldman articulated the principles of “Ralph Lauren nationalism” on the pages of Compact. Today, I am here to say I am a Sabrina Carpenter nationalist. And yes, I still really dislike Hillary Clinton (uncanny resemblance aside).

Here’s the gist: Sabrina is 5 feet tall. Sabrina dyes her hair blonde. She advertises her submissiveness, incessantly so, and always has women commenting on her Instagram posts that she’s demeaning to their empowerment.

Case in point on the submissive aspect, courtesy of Sabrina’s Instagram:

Sabrina’s Counter-Revolution/Revolution

Now, I’m certain that you know of the traditional gender roles: men are dominant, women are submissive. These gender norms have only been reaffirmed in the aftermath of the 2024 election. That is what makes the Trump Revolution so fascinating: it is not only a counter-revolutionary restoration of America in the image of the 80s (itself in the image of the 50s)—see one of my favorite DHS shitposts—but with millennial liberalism and National Review conservatism as the pre-2016 status quo, also a true revolution in its own right. Toward what precisely, we are yet to fully discover. Yet this much I know: in coastal elite circles, there is indeed something revolutionary about affirming women’s ontologically submissive nature. “That’s sexist,” “I would never let my son say something like that,” etc., screeches the wine-drunk Brentwood mom whilst berating the low-wage illegal immigrant maid (imagery I have, admittedly, borrowed from Tim Dillion and Tucker Carlson).

Alas, Sabrina is, like Trump, at once both counter-revolutionary and revolutionary. Certainly not on a political level, in which she told concert-goers on November 6th, 2024, that she was “sorry about our country” for the president’s win, but on an aesthetic/cultural level.

Sabrina’s image—her new album cover showing a man pulling her hair, her performance of sex positions during live performances of Juno, the way she boasts about being a “heel-lover” and “hav[ing] to be flexible”—all affirms our traditional conception of women. Sure, women just love having their hair pulled and bending uncomfortably, thinks any porn-addicted man.

And perhaps society would not be so tolerant of Sabrina’s self-sexualization were it not for Trump’s corrosion of many “tolerant” mores and norms. These include: sleeping with a pornstar while his wife was pregnant, saying that “stars” like himself can “do anything…grab ‘em by the pussy,” and implying that a ballerina freed from Russian prison was only able to return to the U.S. because of her good looks. No wonder Kat Rosenfeld believes that “The Raunchy Right Has Triumphed.” If the almost octogenarian president can sexualize women in this way, then certainly Sabrina can self-objectify.

Ehem: “BBC said I should keep it PG/ BBC I wish I had it in me/ There’s a double meaning if you dig deep.”

But Sabrina’s lyrics and cheeky comments often actually serve to relentlessly belittle and ridicule men; and in this way they serve not for restorative, but revolutionary ends. She uses her own girliness and submissiveness to cheekily mock men’s horny and pathetic weaknesses. In her latest album, Man’s Best Friend, she asks of men, “Stupid/ Or is it slow?/ Maybe it’s useless?” (Manchild) and says of men, “I get wet at the thought of you/ Being a responsible guy” (Tears). That can only mean one thing: if she’s getting wet at the thought of a man being responsible, that is for her a rare occurrence (and is she even wrong?).

In Please Please Please (2024 album Short n’ Sweet), she got her then-real-life boyfriend Barry Keoghan (the creep from Saltburn) to play the part of a man she was utterly embarrassed by. “I have a fun idea babe/ Maybe just stay inside,” and “We could live so happily/ If no one knows you’re with me,” she tells Keoghan. The video finishes with Sabrina handcuffing her boyfriend to a chair, taping his mouth, and giving a mob-boss-wife rosy red kiss. The couple broke up later that year.

On Feather

Take Sabrina’s most famous—and controversial—insult to men. In the song Feather from her 2023 album Emails I Can’t Send, we begin by seeing her in a miniskirt and tall heels. She passes by two performative males reading a book titled “Tampons Should Be Free,” who like all men, just end up checking her ass. They follow her, are joined by another man, and are then all abruptly crushed by a tractor-trailer, as Sabrina smirks indifferently, almost happily. “I feel so much lighter like a feather with you off my mind,” she sings.

In the next scene, we see Sabrina in a gym dressed like a “cheerleader” out of a porno—knee-high socks, athletic shorts, cleavage and stomach-revealing pink one-piece, and of course pigtails—taking cute selfies, surrounded by men. They end up banally fighting each other, but ultimately, none of them “gets” her. Instead, these men all kill each other, as blood in bukkake-esque fashion spatters across Sabrina’s face and chest.

The song-video continues, and now we see Sabrina in a tightly-fitted, bright-blue corset in an elevator. A man in a suit takes photos of her behind, she catches him, and laughs in a deep voice, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Sabrina takes him by the tie so as to lead him on, exits, and pins his tie in between the elevator doors—“you’re a waste of time”—and kills him, blood oozing down. And she “feels like a feather” with these men “out of [her] life.”

It ends with Sabrina dancing around, jubilating, in a promiscuous black widow’s outfit and Louboutin heels in a church. This was actually the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Williamsburg. Insofar as belittling men, her deeply sacrilegious performance got the priest who allowed it to happen, Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello, tangled up in a scandal and demoted. Not even men of God are spared the wrath of Sabrina, evidently.

Sabrina >>> Sydney

In her SNL debut this month, Sabrina parodied a “girlboss” named Queen Leesha who was, in her “girlboss seminar,” cringingly “empowering” her female followers. The two men (probably gay) she was dancing with kept on catapulting her against the wall and window. But she neglected to stop. She continued dancing, despite being clearly concussed. It was at once both incredibly demeaning to “empowered” women, but also somewhat congratulatory of their resilience. I guess? I really don’t know.

She also played the role of a dumb “boy podcaster,” with curly hair and a backward baseball cap, and jokingly remarked that “girls are fire,” à la 18-year-old dumb Los Angeles teenager. Like all “boy podcasts,” Sabrina and her crew were joined by Trump midway through (see Joe Rogan, Theo Von, etc., etc.).

In her musical performance of Manchild, Sabrina set herself in a brightly-colored room, beginning by pedicuring her toes and brushing her hair. She then started singing into her hairbrush, dancing around in her yellow shirt and pink underwear, and jumping on the bed. In other words, what men imagine girls do in their spare time. But you just know she likes doing that as well, that she adores so dearly conforming to the stereotype (and presenting herself as younger than she actually is, another male turn-on).

If her SNL appearance was any indication, Sabrina has the unique ability to thread the needle on being funny and sexy, submissive and assertive, setting women “back” and propelling them forward. It is bimbo power, and it is incredibly based. Unlike Sydney Sweeney, the other important blonde these days—who, as I’ve written about, is a simple sex symbol with not much going for her. Sydney is any California girl (the partner of the dumb LA teenage boy), and her SNL debut in March 2024 was literally just about her showing her breasts and being an average performer, at best.

Sabrina is something different, something better, something that has in many ways truly changed the culture. Something much more interesting, and I admit—at least in my opinion—a much sexier woman. Moreover, Sabrina’s style has had a real impact on young women as well. She’s made, with some other co-conspirators, the skimpy Guizio style omnipresent amongst girls. And I’m certainly not one to hate on the cute-sexy-Anime (with American adaptations) style. I mean: this is something girls actually wear, like out in public. Unlike Sydney’s braless see-through dress.

Sabrina’s Guizio/Erewhon campaign

And, finally, whereas Sydney has a fanbase of seemingly exclusively disturbed young men to whom she sells her bathwater soap, Sabrina has female fans, gay fans, and the incel creeps. See below:

The kitsch of Sabrina Carpenter nationalism? Considering purchasing.

Perhaps most simply, the time has come for us to accept a horny girl—not one who mainly seeks sex and her sexualization for male validation (Sydney)—but who is just insanely libidinous (Sabirna). What can be more authentic than that? Than a woman actually wanting sex?

And I chuckle writing this, because many things can be more authentic. Maybe Sabrina is not based at all, then. Maybe I’m just insanely attracted to her. Whatever. Time to hop back on Tinder and find a girl who looks conspicuously similar to her.