Is Sabrina Carpenter Selling Out or Trolling the Culture War?
Let’s talk about the album cover that made the internet implode.
“It’s always so funny to me when people complain. They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly, you love sex. You’re obsessed with it.”
It started with an image.
Sabrina Carpenter, satin-wrapped and platform-heeled, is on her hands and knees on a carpeted floor. Her mouth is slightly parted and doll-like. Her eyes wide and pinked at the rims. Her hair pulled taut by a man whose face we cannot see. Is she waiting for something? Instructions, perhaps? Did we catch her at a bad time?
The title of the album is Man’s Best Friend.
There’s no gore. No violence. No nudity. No cleavage or navels. No curses. Just a grip and a pose. That was enough to set off a digital firestorm. Instagram flooded with comments like, “Sabrina, what the actual hell?” Reddit threads ballooned with page-long arguments about misogyny, satire, and whether or not it’s regressive for a 26-year-old pop star to depict herself as a dog.
Was it degrading or empowering? Feminists disagreed loudly with each other. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise was Sabrina. I imagine her smirking behind a platinum bang, letting the conversation spin.¹
Beyoncé already to us: You know you that bitch when you cause all that conversation.²
Beyoncé: The Last Great American Institution
As the fantasy of American Exceptionalism continues to unravel, Beyoncé remains the nation’s most dependable institution.
That is the real story here, not what the cover depicts, but what it produces. Discourse. But not just any discourse. The career-defining kind.
I say that with a mix of cynicism and admiration. Commanding attention in today's oversaturated visual economy is no small feat.³
You don’t have to love the image (I do) to get the joke.⁴ And you don’t have to think it’s a feminist image (I don’t, really) to understand its intent.⁵ At this point, after a solid 96 hours of talking, you do have to acknowledge that it worked.
The fracas delights the pop culture historian in me.
But before we start handing out medals, let’s be honest: every pop star has to walk a tightrope between agency and coercion. Any representation of sexual liberation we see in mass media should be met with skepticism.⁶ Carpenter is a beautiful, careful student of pop music. She knows what the market wants from her. That’s why I cringe when these kinds of displays get described as “liberatory.”⁷
What Sabrina Carpenter is doing right now is ripped from the Madonna playbook. In 1984, as Ronald Reagan tightened the screws of the “traditional values” vice on the nation, Madonna jumped feet first into the Unruly Woman Business.⁸
Picture it: New York City. MTV taps the 26-year-old Madonna to open the inaugural Video Music Awards, where she emerges on stage in a wedding dress—white lace, fingerless gloves, and a veil.
She descends from a giant wedding cake and starts to sing “Like a Virgin.” But she doesn’t sing it sweet. She doesn’t do cutesy. Instead, she rolls around on the floor and humps the stage. And just in case anyone missed the point, her belt says “Boy Toy.”
The backlash was immediate. Moralists called it sacrilegious. Journalists were scandalized. Madonna, they said, was mocking the sanctity of marriage. Mocking the Virgin Mary. Encouraging promiscuity.
She accomplished what only the great cultural provocateurs can: piss off reactionaries and progressives at the same time. Annie Lennox, front woman of the Eurythmics, called the display, “very, very whorish.”⁹
But then, like now, ultraconservatives were culturally ascendant. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was half a decade into feeding the Republican base a steady diet of apocalyptic panic over feminism, gay rights, and premarital sex. Months later, that coalition would lead the charge in cementing a 49/50 state victory for the Gipper.
Though Like A Virgin was Madonna’s second album, this moment started her decades spent ducking slings and arrows. This is how Madonna became Madonna.¹⁰
This set the blueprint for the music video era. Becoming a pop girl du jour requires diligence and, yes, obedience (Man’s Best Friend. Get it?). However, if you’re a woman artist who wants to be more than a flashpoint, you must pick a fight. Not with your fans. Not with fellow pop girls. With power.
You cannot become an icon without becoming a lightning rod.
Surely, Sabrina knows that. This isn’t a clumsy grab for attention. It’s not even shocking, really. Sabrina, our fun-sized pop duchess (not a princess, not yet a queen), isn’t trying to escape the culture war. She’s firing straight at it.
But instead of challenging the Church, Carpenter is challenging the algorithm. In these times, you have to be unignorable. And a tiny blonde woman dressed like a mid-rate courtesan performing submission with deadpan irony, that is unignorable.
Madonna used Catholic guilt as her foil. Carpenter plays off young people's self-seriousness, offering a glittering alternative to a generation’s carefully filtered restrain
Like Madonna, Sabrina is also doing it during a conservative turn in American culture. The GOP is back in control. Overt racism is cool again. Books are being banned. Gay and trans rights are on the chopping block. Children are being orphaned.
Misogyny has rebranded itself as lifestyle content. And women are under intense pressure to either align with “respectable femininity” or disappear.
Sabrina’s answer to all of this? Crawl on the floor in a minidress and stare straight down the lens because the revival of cartoonish sexism deserves a saucy sendup.
Yes, this is clearly satire, but it's not exactly a “fun” image. Notice how this album cover is muted compared to anything we saw during the Short N Sweet era. There’s no shimmer or gloss. The neutral color palette adds to its lo-fi banality.
There's another change. This image constructs Sabrina as more womanly versus the coquetteish appeal of her breakout era.
The vibe is like one of those Polaroids you find rummaging around a lonely shoebox at the back of your parents’ closet. Awkward. But this one isn’t hidden away. It’s distributed to audiences far and wide for global consumption. Have you no shame?
Which is why it hit a nerve.
Let me pause here and say something that might upset some of my under-29 friends. I loathe seeing a 21-year-old looking like she’s headed to the COGIC Women’s Convention in a Talbots two-piece and a kitten heel. Why are you in a beige A-line sheath dress with a bun slicked back so tight it’s giving FaceTime facelift on a random Tuesday.
It pains me to hear 22-year-olds discuss their preoccupation with appearing “timeless” and “classy.” ¹¹ Young adulthood is made for exploration, adventure, and error. Live a little.
Feminists should be scared shitless that the rightward tug can lure a generation of young women who are, according to polling data, the most liberal in history, to embrace symbols of conservatism.
Instagram-polished femininity is soft, demure even, curated, and appropriate. It wears the right shade of lipstick, drinks lavender lattes, and wears an Alo set to pilates (Lululemon? Gross). And maybe most importantly, it is clean. Clean in aesthetics, clean in moral orientation, clean in diet, and clean in political optics.
I bring this up because part of the outrage around Sabrina’s cover centers on its tackiness. People don’t just think she’s objectifying herself; they think she’s doing it in a tasteless way. I mean...yeah. Tackiness is great for discussion.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about any "male gaze" debates. BOR-ING. Self-objectification is not real.
I do, however, want to know why we are still so susceptible to provocation? ¹²
One comment said: “This just set us back 50 years.” No, baby—the ballot box, wealth inequality, and algorithmically mediated content did that. I’ll say it until they put me in the grave: We cannot expect art to solve problems only public policy can fix.¹³
Sabrina Carpenter is a hyper-optimized corporate character built to record pop hits and sell out arenas. I don’t expect women at the top of pop to be revolutionaries. Not Beyoncé. Not Taylor. Not Rihanna. Not Chappell. I only expect them to turn public scorn into legacy fuel, to understand reactionary waves, ride them with precision, and emerge glittering and defiant atop Outrage Mountain.¹⁴
And goshdarnit, it looks like Ms. Carpenter will pull it off. The album’s first single, “Manchild,” just debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
The album cover isn’t a masterwork, and it certainly isn't a grand statement on female desire. It’s a way for a career-driven young woman to drive her stake into the ground.
And in this moment, that might be more than enough to put her in conversation with pop music's most talked about performers.
Endnotes:
Think of the scene in Mean Girls where Regina George revels in the chaos.
In my Beyoncé piece from December, I wanted to talk about how Beyoncé uses discourse as a kind of choreography, but I cut it at the last minute.
United Nations Economist Network. "Attention Economy: New Economics for Sustainable Development." United Nations, February 2023.
She named her album Man’s Best Friend while most of her lyrics call men dumb, slow, and unevolved. Y’all don’t think that’s hilarious?
What even is a feminist image? Curator Emma Lewis’ exploration of feminist photography was one of the best overviews I’ve read.
How can you be sexually free in a patriarchal culture? I talked about this way back when re: Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP. If women performers want to find mainstream success, they have to become expert jugglers of personal desires and market demands. They’re not “objectifying themselves.” Objectification is what
Reject the “liberatory"/”degrading” binary. It’s too easy to get stuck on the behavior of individuals. Then we have to go round and round about personal tastes and preferences.
Why do people’s personal distaste for Madonna lead them to downplay how adeptly she changed culture? Something has happened in discourse for years where people think principled critique requires total negation. Stop that.
For decades, the so-called “Sex Wars” have produced some strange bedfellows. Staunch feminists and modern-day puritans often find themselves snarling on the same side of the picket line. For a quick catch, read "Who Actually Lost the Sex Wars?" or watch this.
''I like challenge and controversy - I like to tick people off.” I love this write-up from the New York Times in 1986.
Not only is it ok for things to be of a time, but even the looks put forth as “timeless” aren’t that. A lot of these styles are from the 40s and 50s i.e. things that happened to be popular at the advent of the modern advertising era.
This is the 100th anniversary of Josephine Baker in Paris. Black women entertainers have a distinct history in negotiating sexuality and public performance.
I dragged Katy Perry and the Blue Origin girls because they believed that women projecting “strength” in space suits marked progress for all women; the other side of the coin blames individual women’s expressions for women’s systemic oppression.
Good art can have bad politics. I’m begging progressives not to become so consumed with deconstruction that our side becomes the joyless and tasteless side. The idea that women can't even participate in self-parody because they must think of the children is puritanical.
Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure offers a critical lens for understanding how cinema and, by extension, other visual media construct pleasure by objectifying women. Theory is not gospel. It’s a useful starting point, but it’s not gravity.
Great break down! A take that makes the most sense to me. Would love to read more on why you believe self-objectification is not a thing. Have you written about that before?
You are BRILLIANT. It makes me emotional!