Sabrina Carpenter, currently one of the biggest popstars on the planet, is gearing up to release her new album. Hopes are high for this one, following the mega-success of Short and Sweet, which elevated her from former child-star (and the Other Woman in an Olivia Rodrigo song) to headliner. The title is Man’s Best Friend and the cover art shows Carpenter on her hands and knees with an unseen man yanking at her hair.
It’s a potent image, one of unabashed kink and submission that is rare to see in such a stark manner in the mainstream. As you can imagine, reactions were strong. Some accused her of romanticising abuse while others felt she was misusing ideas of BDSM in ways that would confuse or hurt her young fanbase. The responses are certainly understandable. It’s a powerful image, and it’s meant to make you uncomfortable. It plays into a lot of discourse that’s been swirling around Carpenter since she broke out with her most recent album and revamped herself as a cheeky sex symbol with vintage styling and an allergy to subtlety.
I must admit that my first reaction was, ‘Is this a Spinal Tap reference?’ It has real ‘Smell the Glove’ energy, right? This might also have been a response to how I view Carpenter in general: as a savvy businesswoman with a carefully crafted image that is equal parts coquettish, camp, and proudly dumb. You don’t write a lyric like ‘that’s that me, espresso’ and keep it in the final song without knowing how it’ll be perceived. If there’s a fine line between smart and stupid, Carpenter is proudly riding it as one of those freaky positions she sings about in ‘Juno.’ For her, sex is fun and daft and therein lies the appeal. The word ‘horny’ is funny. So are the lengths people will go to in order to sate their horniness. Her songs are extremely horny, yes, but also full of men who don’t know how to behave and women who are in control. Why sing about desiring a nice boy when you could chastise him with ‘don’t embarrass me, mother*cker’?
A lot of the discourse around Carpenter is old hat, cut from the same cloth of conversations that plague every adult woman who used to be a child star and exhibits evidence of sensuality in their work. It’s Miley licking the hammer, Millie Bobby Brown’s mob wife make-up, Selena in Spring Breakers, and so on. We could be here all day listing the precedents. A lot of the anger around this quickly descends into slut-shaming, and it is depressingly easy to find grown-ass women online calling Carpenter a ‘whore.’ Not that a woman has to do much of anything for someone to label them a slut.
I don’t think Carpenter or her team were ignorant to how this album art would be received. It’s a good way to get tongues wagging about her new album and to keep all eyes on her as she gears up for a new release. She’s got hype to validate. It’s the attention economy, stupid. You get 24 hours of focus before someone else is milkshake ducked or Trump does something dumb. Is any publicity really good publicity, though? Maybe so in a world where there’s too much going on but even the biggest power players can stumble. Many a popstar has stumbled from the pressure of a wonky rebrand. Then again, I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a rebrand for Carpenter. It’s very much part of the Short and Sweet era, albeit less sparkly. This is sex and humour and that jolt of being confronted with a hot young woman who really wants to f*ck. She doesn’t do subtext (which is why I was kind of surprised by parents being so shocked that her concerts were horny. Did you listen to her music?)
If there’s any difference here, it’s that the text has become supertext. This isn’t playful or a wink and a nod. This is kink. And that is tough for a lot of people. Even in a post-50 Shades culture, we see kink and shirk in fear (not that those books were ever great representation, but I digress.) Mostly, we don’t do kink well because nuanced expressions of sexuality become quickly gobbled up by the duel forces of capitalism and patriarchy. It takes very little for an expression of female submissive desire to be repackaged as tradwife propaganda or a product to be sold to creepy men.
That’s long been the argument against Carpenter: that her ‘for the girls’ image is a cover for yet another cycle of male gaze bait. She has repeatedly been accused of fetishizing herself for the sake of men’s attention, including through Lolita-esque cosplay. Certainly, some of her photoshoots have echoed some of the more well-known imagery from the movie adaptations of Nabokov’s book. Jade Hurley wrote a piece accusing Carpenter of selling a pedophilic fantasy that quickly inspired controversy and a number of responses. It’s a loaded accusation to make, to accuse anyone, much less a woman in her late 20s, of making something to satisfy child abusers.
Carpenter’s style is ’50s and ’60s inspired, pulling from the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Bettie Page, and Dolly Parton. All of these women played around with hyper-femininity like Carpenter, and all of their contemporary aesthetics shared a lot of ground with stylistic choices that have frequently been conflated with those of Lolita-esque fetishism. Carpenter wears baby doll dresses and ribbons, and fashion with hyper-feminine trappings is often labelled as being only for the attraction of men. She’s very short and, frankly, some people are weird about it. But is she deliberately using images of childhood and girldom to sell herself as a sexy baby? No. I don’t think so. I think there’s an obvious difference between that album art and Britney on the cover of Rolling Stone with a Teletubby doll. That album cover is of an adult doing an adult thing.
Other people have been blunter in their use of Carpenter’s image for their own purposes. There’s that Skims campaign she did where the backdrop is an adolescent girl’s bedroom. Fetish fuel for creeps or just ’90s/early 2000s nostalgia bait, which Gen-Z loves? This is more a Kim Kardashian problem than a Carpenter one, in my opinion, given that it’s her brand on sale. I imagine Carpenter does have some input on what she uses her image for, of course, which muddies the waters.
For all of this furore, it’s easy to overlook that a ton of women love Sabrina Carpenter. They like her aesthetic, her sexiness, the girls’ night out vibes she gives in her concerts, and that overwhelming sense of fun that radiates through her music. She’s a Woman with a capital-W, much like Susan Sontag’s definition of camp. Personally, speaking as someone who likes some of her songs but isn’t necessarily a fan of Carpenter, I don’t see her as an artist who is infantilizing herself or positioning herself as creep bait. She feels, to me, like a short woman who dresses like many 26-year-olds and is part of an industry where few options are truly accepted as uncontroversial. How that is presented, of course, can wildly differ. That album art isn’t cutesy or retro, unless the retro you’re thinking about is old American Apparel ads or, dare I say it, Terry Richardson. Some people compared it to vintage ads from the ’50s where the degradation of women was a key way of selling products. The parallels are striking, one must admit. Does it feel like it’s still ‘for the girls’ in that aspect? I’m less sure, even if the image is still undeniably Carpenter-esque to me in its bluntness.
Micro-managing femininity and forever redefining its acceptability is a trap that nobody gets out of in one piece, even if our intentions are noble. We’re in an era of tradwives, the manosphere, and gender policing at a terrifying rate. Hyper-vigilance over the images offered to us of womanhood and feminine desire by the entertainment industry is bound to happen. We’ve been here before so many times, after all. To quote the writer Cricket Guest, whose excellent essay on the complexities of the performance of femininity is a must-read, ‘I don’t think Sabrina is actively or intentionally infantilizing herself nor do I think Sabrina is attempting to shield herself under the guise of girlhood, because as we can see she is being criticized and chastised all the same.’
