Olivia Rodrigo Responds to Dress Controversy: 'You Shouldn't Be Responsible for Some Guy Sexualizing You'
Olivia Rodrigo has addressed the wave of online criticism that erupted over her recent fashion choices, pushing back firmly against the idea that women bear any responsibility for how men choose to interpret what they wear. Speaking Wednesday on The New York Times' Popcast, the 23-year-old singer-songwriter took on the backlash directly and used it as a springboard for a broader conversation about the way society normalizes the sexualization of women and then turns around and blames them for it.
The controversy took shape as Rodrigo rolled out promotional material for her forthcoming third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love. She wore a pink flouncy dress for the album's cover art, a similar blue one for the "Drop Dead" music video, and a floral babydoll dress with matching bloomers while performing at Barcelona's Teatro Greco during Spotify's Billions Club Live event. The outfits, all of them modest by virtually any reasonable measure, drew a torrent of criticism from internet commenters who accused her of sexualizing herself and promoting what some online corners have taken to calling "pedo core." The accusations spread quickly across social media and generated the kind of performative outrage that has become a familiar fixture of the online discourse surrounding female pop stars.
Rodrigo's response, delivered on Popcast, was measured but pointed. "You shouldn't be responsible for some guy sexualizing you in a way that was never your intention," she said. She then laid out the specific contradiction at the heart of the backlash with a clarity that made the double standard difficult to argue with. She noted that she has performed in far more revealing clothing, a sparkly bra and shorts, without generating anything close to the same level of criticism. It was only when she appeared fully covered in a dress that some people deemed childlike that the accusations of impropriety came flooding in. "That wasn't 'inappropriate,'" she said of the more revealing outfits, "but me, fully covered up in a dress that people deem to be childlike was 'inappropriate.' And it just shows how we really normalize pedophilia in our culture."
That observation cuts to the core of what made the controversy so revealing about the culture that produced it. The logic being applied to Rodrigo, that a fully covered young woman in a babydoll dress is somehow more sexually provocative than one performing in a bra and shorts, does not hold up under even minimal scrutiny. What it does expose is the degree to which certain corners of internet culture have become so saturated in a particular framework for viewing female bodies that they can no longer distinguish between a woman being sexualized and a woman being sexual on her own terms. Rodrigo made that distinction explicit. "I didn't think I looked sexy in that at all," she said. "I was like, 'This is so cool. I feel like I look like Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love, all these people who are my heroes, and I felt cool and comfortable in it."
That reference to Hanna and Love is not incidental. Rodrigo has been open about the degree to which her current aesthetic is rooted in the riot grrrl and alternative rock lineages of the early 1990s, a tradition in which artists like Hanna, Love, and Kat Bjelland deliberately adopted babydoll dresses and girlish aesthetics as a form of confrontation, a way of inhabiting and subverting the cultural expectations placed on women rather than simply meeting or fleeing them. To wear a babydoll dress in that tradition is not to invite sexualization; it is to reclaim a visual language that has been used to diminish women and turn it into something defiant. The critics who accused Rodrigo of promoting "pedo core" appear to have arrived at roughly the opposite interpretation, locating the problem in Rodrigo's clothing rather than in the impulse to sexualize it.
Rodrigo addressed the broader implications of that kind of thinking with some directness. "It's just this rhetoric that we're fed as girls since we're so little, which is, 'Don't wear that because then a man is going to sexualize your body and it's your fault,'" she said. She described the suggestion that women should dress in anticipation of how a man might misinterpret them as losing the plot entirely. "I just think if we start dressing in a way that's like, 'Oh, I don't want some fucking freak to think that I am sexy like a baby,' or some crazy thing like that… I just think it's like losing the plot a little bit." She also made clear that her concern extends beyond her own situation. "I'm just very protective of younger women and girls," she said, "and I just don't ever want them to be fed that rhetoric."
