Olivia Rodrigo Looks Innocent. That’s The Problem.

“Kiss me and I might drop dead!”

My 12-year-old daughter has a beautiful singing voice that she absolutely did not get from her mother. It’s not uncommon for me to hear her from behind the bathroom door, belting out the lyrics of her latest obsession: Olivia Rodrigo.

It took me a while to figure out why this bothered me so much.

At first glance, Rodrigo’s lyrics aren’t particularly objectionable. There are some thinly veiled sexual references that go right over my daughter’s head, but for the most part, her songs revolve around crushes, friendship, anxiety, insecurity, and wanting to look pretty.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of music I probably would have listened to at 12. That’s also what makes Olivia Rodrigo a particularly interesting problem for parents.

Her music is everywhere; it’s incredibly accessible to young girls, and, frankly, it’s not the worst music in the world. Rodrigo is talented, and her songs are catchy. She’s emotionally vulnerable in a way that makes teenage girls feel understood.

But the music comes with a heaping side of progressive worldview.

Unlike the pop stars parents have traditionally warned their daughters about — the ones gyrating around the stage half-naked, or belting out profanity-laced lyrics — Rodrigo’s politics are much easier to miss.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have social media. Therefore, we didn’t have a front-row seat to the political leanings and activism of every celebrity we admired. I could listen to my favorite artists without knowing what causes they were funding or what political messages they were promoting in their spare time.

In fact, I was amused to discover that two of my favorite artists from my own preteen years — Garbage and Alanis Morissette — were among the performers at Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields festival last month. Of course they were.

It makes perfect sense that those artists would show up for a festival that raised $20 million for “women’s causes.” It’s just something I never would have thought about when I was 12, happily listening to “Jagged Little Pill” on my Aiwa five-disc CD sound system.

Rodrigo, 23, announced Daisy Chain Fields in June, describing it as a female-driven festival celebrating womanhood and drawing comparisons to Lilith Fair from the 1990s. The show was, by all accounts, a very successful celebration of female artists. It sold out in 30 minutes and attracted crowds of about 45,000 despite the 94-degree heat that day.

It was also something else: a highly successful vehicle for promoting Rodrigo’s rabidly pro-abortion vision of female empowerment.

Rodrigo told the crowd that she was “grateful” to the artists who performed for free and celebrated the festival’s $10 million fundraising effort.

Then she announced that Melinda French Gates — whom Rodrigo described as “one of the most inspiring” women she had ever met — would double the money raised, bringing the total donation amount to $20 million.

“I really believe that giving women the tools to decide their own futures and live healthy lives free of violence and discrimination is the most effective tool we have at changing the world for the better,” Rodrigo said.

That sounds innocuous enough — until you look at where the money went.

Daisy Chain Fields raised money for organizations including the Center for Reproductive Rights, National Institute for Reproductive Health, National Women’s Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. And abortion wasn’t the only progressive policy on the menu. Featured performer Doechii announced from the stage, “We do this for the girls, we do this for the gays, and we do this for trans women.”

Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, another artist from my youth, was a bit more explicit. “This government hates us and wants us dead,” she snarled from the stage. “You guys gotta talk to your friends [about misogyny],” Hanna added. “[Women] are not gonna stop this on our own!”

This is where the Olivia Rodrigo problem becomes more complicated.

Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Olivia Rodrigo

Rodrigo is not the kind of pop star parents necessarily think they need to worry about. She isn’t selling herself as a sexual provocateur, and her music is surface-level innocent. She doesn’t have any singles touting the benefits of abortion, but this is exactly what makes her influence more powerful to anyone not paying attention. 

The “good 4 u” singer has increasingly used the enormous cultural influence she has earned with young women to promote a very particular vision of feminism and girlhood. In that vision, abortion is not a hot-button issue, but is instead presented as an obvious part of female empowerment.

And because Rodrigo’s fans don’t encounter her solely through her music anymore, they are increasingly being exposed to that worldview alongside the music. This is what makes the whole thing different for millennial parents comparing modern fandom to their own childhood.

A girl doesn’t simply listen to her favorite singer anymore. She follows her on social media, watches her interviews, and inevitably sees what causes she supports. Fans who didn’t score a ticket to the Daisy Chain Fields show likely sought YouTube clips or just encountered them in the algorithm. Some may have Googled “Melinda Gates” to see who their favorite star considers “inspiring.” 

Think about what they saw there. And then, think about what it means to be 12.

Preteen girls are entering one of the trickiest stages of childhood. They are becoming increasingly independent, are desperate to fit in, and are at an age when they begin to look at their mothers with a healthy dose of skepticism.

That doesn’t mean a 12-year-old who listens to “drivers license” is going to become a pro-abortion feminist. But it does mean that the person singing “drivers license” may have an unusual amount of influence on her. 

When girls encounter the ideology, especially in a way that seems like nothing more than a celebration of “girl power” reminiscent of these catchy songs, they’re going to listen. Unfortunately, radical left-wing gender theory and abortion activism are all part of this sparkly pop package. 

There is nothing wrong with teaching girls to be confident. Encouraging independence, ambition, friendship, self-respect, and confidence is important. Those are exactly the qualities I want my daughter to have.

The question is who gets to define those qualities — and what else they are selling alongside them. That doesn’t mean conservative parents need to ban Olivia Rodrigo; they just need to be more cautious. 

My daughter and I have talked about Rodrigo and the messages she promotes. I’ve told her that I don’t want her to hate Rodrigo, and I don’t want to take away music she enjoys simply because I disagree with the artist’s politics.

However, I do want her to understand something that I didn’t think much about when I was 12: The people we admire are not automatically the people who get to tell us what to believe.

My daughter can listen to Olivia Rodrigo. She can belt out the songs with her beautiful voice in the bathroom. But, God willing, the woman she becomes will have little in common with the person she’s currently idolizing.

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