We put them on a pedestal, obsess over their innocence then tear them down when they dare to grow into their sexuality. Purity culture has trapped female child stars in an impossible cycle, and it’s one that reveals more about society’s treatment of women than we’d like to admit.
Sabrina Carpenter is the It Girl of 2025, but her success has sparked some familiar controversy and discomfort. She’s not the first former child star to embrace her sexuality and come under fire for it. From Britney Spears to Miley Cyrus, history shows us that the scrutiny of these young women reveals some deep-rooted societal and cultural anxieties.
Lucy Robinson, a historian specialising in gender and youth culture, suggests purity culture is at the heart of the contradictory, messy cycle. It’s a belief system that equates a woman’s worth with innocence, rooted in conservative Christian values: “It’s the idea that women shouldn’t have control over their bodies except to say no, our power is to not have sex.” Insisting that girls must remain virgins, their bodies act as symbols of morality.
Of course, this ideology doesn’t just affect religious communities; it seeps into mainstream culture and shapes how people see young female celebrities. She says, “Mainstream society struggles with young women point blank. So it’s not surprising that it therefore struggles with them when they are visible, when they’re a commodity and when the blurring between their sense of self and celebrity image is at moments of juncture.” In other words, society can’t handle girls growing up in the public eye.
Purity Culture reached its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s. Think abstinence-only education, purity rings and the Bush administration blocking access to emergency contraception. This widespread ideology meant that girls should remain symbols of chastity and was even more intense for those living under the spotlight. Jen Otter Bickerdike, cultural historian and author, says, “It was part of a reaction to HIV and AIDS, there was the idea that sex could kill you. The thing that then comes into popular culture is this model of a woman that has a Lolita vibe, which has never really gone out. The most interesting thing about it is that it comes right on the tail end of this really strong female movement with people like Alanis Morisette and Courtney Love. Then the very next generation after that is this childlike woman on the brink of adolescence that is titillating with their sexuality, but then offering this innocence and saying ‘I’m a virgin, I’m not doing anything’.”
Britney Spears was America’s sweetheart during this time, until she wasn’t. She grew up in the height of this culture, and under the public eye she was subjected to intense scrutiny. Interviewers obsessed over her virginity whilst the media fixated over her relationships. She was seen as either a perfect role model or used as an example if she stepped out of line. Bickerdike says, “Britney Spears was chastised and demonised. They’d say, ‘How dare she be sexual?’ but that is something very normal at that stage of life. Why can’t a woman be sexual? That double standard is very much alive and well. The whole purity movement is just another way to try to keep women down.”
But Britney wasn’t alone; the cycle of sexualisation and demonisation for child pop stars has been happening for decades upon decades. Miley Cyrus was shamed for a Vanity Fair photoshoot, aged 15. In England, people spread a countdown for Charlotte Church’s 16th birthday because that’s the legal age of consent to have sex. The world sexualises these women, but if they choose to reclaim their sexuality as they age? Outrage. Robinson explains, “They’ve been sexualized as children but obsessed over their purity and their bodies and then that just carries on and that gets doubled down on. It’s like the patriarchy gets one free, right? It gets to obsess about their purity, virginity and their bodies as children. Then when they become women, they get to do it all over again and blame the girls for the disparity between those two fetishized versions of a body in the first place.”
Fast forward to 2025 and we see the cycle happening yet again. Despite purity culture being less prevalent, it still seems to linger. Sabrina Carpenter is the new version of all the women who came before. Her recent songs, music videos and performances have all undoubtedly been more sexual and she’s been met with some unease at the blatant embrace of her sexuality. Robinson says, “It’s a set narrative that’s written into Hollywood. No single woman can possibly uphold and maintain the countless versions of her that people imagine. It’s an impossible thing to expect someone to be all of those imagined versions of Monroe or Britney.” The industry and the public place impossible expectations on these women. They must remain frozen in time, desired but not desiring, innocent but available for consumption.
But why are we comfortable keeping our child stars in these virgin and whore binaries? Bickerdike suggests it’s because it’s what we’ve always known, “That is the framework that goes back hundreds of years, that’s the biblical framework, that’s what we’re comfortable with. There’s not really anything else we know or understand. People want what’s familiar, what’s easy to digest and lock on to, especially now it’s more than ever before because the attention span is non-existent.”
If you thought things were getting better, think again. The language around purity culture might have changed but its influence lingers in areas of digital spaces. Robinson points out how internet subcultures, like the manosphere, have fueled these harmful narratives against women. “Incels and Twitter hatred have at least forced us to acknowledge that the stories we tell ourselves about the world becoming a better place, ‘look how well we treat women’, we can’t get away with telling ourselves that story or taking credit for it anymore.”
Bickerdike puts it more bluntly, “I think social media is the f*cking devil because it has helped erase the past and create a history that never existed. Whether that be for dissecting women and making it normalised on Reddit groups, whether it be just the kind of hate and vitriol connecting people around the world and making them think it’s normal to feel this way, to have these kinds of emotions, when it’s not.”
And it’s not just men policing women, Robinson argues that in terms of progress, we’ve not moved forward as much as we like to think we have, “I would say things are going the other way. At the moment, lots of groups, including young women, are being policed in really vigorous and new ways. We can do it to ourselves now, I think we need to acknowledge that women in the audiences can be secret agencies of the patriarchy in their discussions, how unsisterly they are about someone being the wrong sort of woman and I think that the story we’ve been telling ourselves that this is a nice teleological progress to a better future might be true for some women structurally, but it’s patently untrue culturally.”
Sabrina Carpenter might not be working in the exact same world as Britney, but she’s caught in a disturbingly familiar pattern. Robinson attributes this partly to the current American political climate, “In terms of the open discussion about Britney’s virginity, it tied in with purity culture and we see this in part of the Trump story. This moralizing is based on certain Christian values, it’s tied to certain sorts of productivity and business, and Sabrina’s stuck in the contradictions of those. She’s daring to respond to the impossibility of her life and they’re blaming her for it.”
Whilst purity culture punishes female celebrities for stepping out of line, it also reinforces real-world policies and ideology that restrict women’s choices. It’s not just about Sabrina still facing this kind of backlash, it’s also why society is still determined to put women in their place. This culture isn’t fading quietly away, it’s gaining ground in scary new ways. As Bickerdike warns, the rollback of reproductive rights in the US is a chilling reminder of how these ideals are deeply ingrained within our culture.“We’re heading into The Handmaid’s Tale,” she says. “When Roe versus Wade, which was the right to access abortion, got overturned in the US, some people in the UK were like, ‘Why do you care, it’s happening in the US?’ And that, to me, is terrifying because it’s a worldwide thing. For better or for worse, people look to the US for what’s going to happen next. The message the United States is sending out is that you don’t have the right to what’s happening with your own body.”
And so the cycle goes on. Female former child stars are scrutinised and condemned by the same industry and society that once exploited their innocence. We’re comfortable watching a young woman be objectified but uncomfortable when she owns that objectification. Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Charlotte Church and many others have all experienced it before Sabrina Carpenter, and there will undoubtedly be more to come. Until we challenge these well-established structures, young women in the public eye will continue to be punished for growing up, while the policing of women’s bodies will remain a tool for control in both the entertainment world and real life.
