Kim Petras' 'Slut Pop' is Chronically Horny Representation
Kim Petras' 'Slut Pop' is Chronically Horny Representation
Petras' latest mini-project is sixteen hedonistic minutes of sleazy debauchery where the whores can feel at home and the voyeurs are welcomed to join in on the fun.
It took two years and a couple of spooky dance EPs for Kim Petras to be crowned the queen of Halloween, but anyone paying close attention would’ve known that just one holiday wouldn’t be the stopping point for an artist whose brand of hedonistic, brazen Europop was built on giving people what they never knew they needed. From the very beginning, Kim Petras made it clear that more is more. In fact? More is never enough—at least not for her. She’s insatiable. And on Slut Pop, her new 16-minute, 7-song, pseudo-Valentine’s Day themed mixtape, she won’t let you forget it.
The opening synths of Slut Pop’s title track cascade across the eardrums, a feather tickling the foot of a bound and gagged businessman before the song’s X-Rated lyrical prose hits like a leather flog to the chest. “This is slut pop, whip your dick out/Turn your bitch out!/This is slut pop, get your tits out/Do it right now!” Immediately it’s clear that we’re working with what must’ve been transcribed from the lost pages of the diaries of Virginia Woolf. Miss Petras is so kind as to then tell us exactly what kind of shit we’ll be in for over the next fifteen incredible minutes: “Steal your man kinda shit, fuck your dad kinda shit, take your bitch kinda shit, slap my ass kinda shit, OnlyFans kinda shit, don’t need hands kinda shit.” And by the time she’s delivered an autotuned coo into your ear so many times that you think you may have finally deciphered the subtext behind this masterful work, the song is over. Foreplay can’t last forever!
Like the act of coitus itself, the mixtape’s genesis feels largely impromptu, like something she did simply because she was bored. And who hasn’t beat their meat or flicked their flaps out of sheer boredom before? While Kim Petras is certainly no stranger to anthems for hussies, Slut Pop seems as though it was ideated fairly recently, perhaps directly from the Nancy Reagan meme that closed out 2021. Back in early December, conservative Twitter user/jealous hater Abigail Shapiro (sister of B*n Shapiro) disparaged fellow sex-positive songstress Madonna Motherfucking Ciccone (her baptismal name) for posting sexy Instagram pictures. Shapiro’s tweet compared Madonna side by side to former First Lady, cowardly homophobe, and evil racist Nancy Reagan. “This is Madonna at 63. This is Nancy Reagan at 64. Trashy living vs. Classic living. Which version of yourself do you want to be?”
![adi on Twitter: "this white bitch tweeted this thinking she ate that, and in response people dug up articles saying nancy used to blow everyone in town and now nancy reagan is](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9993c705-1d0b-45d8-838d-b275e60184b6_705x671.jpeg "adi on Twitter: "this white bitch tweeted this thinking she ate that, and in response people dug up articles saying nancy used to blow everyone in town and now nancy reagan is")
Little did @ClassicallyAbby know that she entered into the Whore-nets nest of Twitter dot com, where another user would quickly let her and the whole world in on the apparently little-known rumor that Nancy Reagan was once known as the “best blowjob in town” during her days as an actress. In the 1992 biography, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, Reagan was described as “renowned in Hollywood for performing oral sex," and thus the Nancy Reagan Throat Goat meme was born.
Kim Petras may have been busy promoting “Coconuts”—a song as much about her bulbous bosoms as the nutritive benefits of tropical fruits—at the time, but she’s a pop star who’s always calculating her next move. The logical jump from “Coconuts” would be a project full of bare-breasted bangers. Enter Slut Pop and “Throat Goat,” one of the EP’s standout tracks (clocking in at a whopping two minutes and twenty seconds!). Like Lil’ Kim, Beyoncé, and Slayyyter—three artists who are constantly finding themselves in the same conversation—Kim Petras has made a song specifically about oral sex and how god damn much she loves it. And while certainly, not everyone can relate to that (present company excluded), there’s something in “Throat Goat” for everyone! Thumping $3 synths, a Lady Gaga name check, a Britney Spears-esque fake British accent, a billy goat sound effect, the hilarity of the lyric, “These bitches can’t suck like me/Walk-in, I’m the sucking queen.” You could’ve never given or received oral sex in your life and still feel a full-body confidence boost just from how fun and completely immodest this song is.
That’s a big part of why, as silly and stupid and “offensive” (grow up) as it may be, Slut Pop really just exists to be one big empowerment trip. Despite being well into 2022, sex and the desire for it still feel taboo, especially for queer people. Vocal expression of sexuality and/or horniness for queer people in any sort of public setting requires a safety check. Sites like YouTube shadow ban and demonetize queer content for the “safety” of audiences. Meanwhile, Zendaya’s out here down bad, biting her lips at Tom Holland making fingering motions and the whole internet goes fuckin’ feral over it. Queer sexuality will always be seen as other and make people uncomfortable but at a certain point, my god, we have to be able to get off! We have to be as horny as the rest of the world! And Slut Pop is the project that’s brave enough to finally showcase the absurdist, obnoxious, truly stupid theater that is queer people trying to propel themselves through all of the societal standards and body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria to the point of one damn rewarding orgasm.
But it’s not just for the chronically horny. You don’t have to be a real-life big-boobed blonde with chunky highlights wearing baby pink lipstick to enjoy these bimbolicious bangers—Slut Pop is for anyone, no matter how tight or loose their hole!
“Treat Me Like A Slut” is a beautiful ballad along the lines of something that Celine Dion would’ve put out in her heyday, only more moving. Kim breasts boobily onto the track with a gorgeous, understated rhyme scheme. “Ride it, slide it, bite it, get inside it/Come on touch my body.” Her delivery cadence is reminiscent of Daft Punk’s iconic “Technologic” while the lyrical content is something that you might find on the works of early Joni Mitchell. “Treat me like a slut/Little dirty bitch, I love to fuck,” she repeats over and over on the song’s chorus, transfixing the listener into a wondrous trance, like a hit of auditory amyl nitrate—and lasting just about as long.
“Treat Me Like A Slut” is, arguably, the centerpiece of the mixtape, with this tart track coming in at number two out of seven. It’s not only the dirtiest production on the project, but it feels like the perfect intersection between Kim Petras’ brand of thumping electropop and the mixtape’s attempts at throwing back to the endlessly exhilarating days of independent MySpace bloghouse tracks. If “Ayesha Erotica lite meets 2006-era Uffie” means anything to you, “Treat Me Like A Slut” is going to be an experience so delicious that it’ll make you moan in public if you’re not careful.
While nothing can quite match the soaring highs of “Throat Goat” and “Treat Me Like A Slut,” there’s nothing on Slut Pop that feels particularly unlistenable. One of Kim Petras’ gifts is that she never really has made any objectively bad music (though some prudes might now disagree, but don’t trust them!), just music that may not be for everyone. The uber repetitive chorus of “I wanna…XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX” on the track, you guessed it, “XXX” certainly can be grating, but haven’t all of our most prolific artists experienced peaks and valleys? Did we not give credence to Britney Spears when she brought a sentient robot with a sinus infection into the studio to record two-thirds of Britney Jean? Did we not accept Christina Aguilera back into our lives (briefly) with “Accelerate” after the royal flop of Lotus? Why must music be good? Is it not enough for it to make my brain go brrrrr and make me feel like I’ve just gotten the lobotomy I’ve been craving since 2020? I think it is! And I won’t apologize for that that.
As poignantly beautiful and endlessly harrowing as Slut Pop may be, it can never quite reach the heights of stylistically similar concubine carols, such as Slayyyter’s “Throatzillaaa” and “Daddy AF” or Doja Cat’s “Need to Know” or “Cyber Sex.” Those strumpet selections and harlot hymns feel more lived-in and ultimately far more realized, as if they were written after a long night of eroticism with a one night stand. Ultimately, that’s perfect fine. Kim Petras likes to try things on without buying, and Slut Pop finds her bringing some new styles to the dressing room of La Perla (or, really, maybe a Hot Topic) and playing dress up before leaving without buying. That doesn’t mean she’s not serious, she’s just entertaining herself. She’ll make her way back to Lake Floozy again soon enough, why can’t she dip her toe in to wade around the milky waters for a bit before then? Why should Nancy Reagan get to wear the title of Throat Goat when she’s just a box of ugly, slowly decomposing old lady bones in the ground who spent her time on Earth actively killing thousands of trans and queer people during the height of the AIDS crisis? If a trans girl wants to reclaim that for herself, who are we to stand in her way? What’s Nancy Reagan going to do, roll over in her grave a couple more times?
Like all random bursts of horniness, Slut Pop is over just as quickly as it began. But what’s so bad about that, really? No one wants these casual things to linger, the best lays don’t overstay their welcome. After the rollicking, climactic grand finale of “Your Wish Is My Command”—huge missed opportunity for a “Cummand” pun—we got what we came for and it’s time to move on to other things. After all, we aren’t ourselves when we’re horny, we’re purely id. It’s necessary to focus on something else…at least for another half hour before the cycle repeats and we start to get that craving again. We’re sluts. We love pop! We’re horny and we won’t be ashamed. And that’s exactly the purpose that Slut Pop serves: all we need is to press play to get in the mood once more.