A few weeks back, I got a late-night text from a friend that read, “Please tell me you’re going to write about this,” and linked to an Instagram post about Olivia Rodrigo, who caused a social-media kerfuffle last month in Barcelona when she performed at a Spotify event wearing a gauzy, flowered babydoll dress and matching bloomers. To anyone familiar with Rodrigo’s heavily 1990s influences, the dress made immediate sense. To everyone else, it was pandering, tasteless “pedo bait.”
True, this particular moment in the United States of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Elon Musk probably isn’t the best time for fond callbacks to an era when a rock journalist could flippantly coin the term “Kinderwhore” to describe an interviewee’s aesthetic and not raise an eyebrow. But when Rodrigo was asked to respond to the controversy on The New York Times’ Popcast, she didn’t mince words, pointing out that she’s worn more revealing outfits on stage with less pushback. The outcry, she said, “shows how we just, like, really normalize pedophilia,” adding, “You shouldn’t be responsible for some guy sexualizing you when that was never your intention.”
