Olivia Rodrigo Addresses Babydoll Dress Controversy: “It Shows How We Really Normalize Pedophilia”

These days, Olivia Rodrigo is wearing a lot of babydoll dresses — short and frilly outfits that call back to the '90s alt-rock aesthetic that she reveres. Rodrigo is building up to the release of her new album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, and she wore those babydoll dresses in her "Drop Dead" video and onstage at her Spotify Billions Club concert in Barcelona earlier this month. That specific stylistic choice has taken some people aback, and there's been chatter about it online.

Specifically, some people have accused Rodrigo of normalizing pedophilia. She's an adult woman who sometimes acts in sexual ways onstage, and she's dressed up in outfits that we associate with little kids. She started out as a child star, and that's probably part of this weird associative stew, as well. Now, she's responded to that controversy, saying that the response, rather than her outfits, "shows how we just really normalize pedophilia in our culture."

Rodrigo is the latest guest on the New York Times Popcast, and her full episode hasn't been published yet. In a clip shared on social media last night, Rodrigo speaks to our friends Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli about the fallout from those babydoll dresses. Here's what she said:

That's gonna make me so upset, not even for me. I don't care...

What's really disturbing is I feel like I actually wear — I have worn outfits that are maybe revealing onstage. I've been onstage in a sparkly bra and little shorts, which is my right. That's fun. I felt cool and comfortable in that. And that wasn't inappropriate, but me fully covered up in a dress that people deemed to be childlike was inappropriate? And I just think it shows how we just really normalize pedophilia in our culture. And also, it's just this rhetoric that we're fed as girls since we're so little, which is like, "Don't wear that because then a man is going to sexualize your body and it's your fault." It's so weird.

I didn't think that I looked sexy in that at all. I was like, "This is so cool." I feel like I look like Kathleen Hanna or like Courtney Love, all these people who are my heroes. And I felt cool and comfortable in it. 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 like am sexy, like a baby," or like some crazy thing like that, I just think it's losing the plot a little bit. You know, I’m just very protective of younger women and girls, and I just don't ever want them to be big fed that rhetoric…

You shouldn't be responsible for some guy sexualizing you in a way that was never your intention.

In another clip from the interview, Rodrigo talks about her new single "The Cure," describing it as her new album's "thesis statement" and "apex."

The full Popcast interview goes up later today.