Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover has rekindled one of the classic debates around pop culture and sexuality: Satire or subjugation? Empowerment or degradation? Or is the debate itself the point?
The pop star, who burst into the mainstream last year, released the cover art for her upcoming album, “Man’s Best Friend,” last week. The image shows Carpenter on all fours while someone just out of frame pulls her hair.
Carpenter, 26, has courted controversy for a while with her open embrace of sex and sexuality in her music and live performances. Last year, a New York City priest was disciplined after she filmed a music video at his church. Many of Carpenter’s televised appearances have been met with backlash.
That all paled in comparison to the debate that has erupted in recent days.
“My entire timeline is either people talking about Israel and Iran or Sabrina Carpenter with the exact same level of intensity,” one user on X quipped.
Few corners of the internet have been left untouched. On Reddit, TikTok and Instagram, social media users have argued about what to make of the cover, with a range of takes including whether the cover image was a brilliant subversion of misogyny or whether it was setting women back. The conversation became so mainstream that even the hosts of “The View” weighed in Thursday, asking whether the cover is “sending the wrong message.”
To many, the image is satire, a continuation of many of the themes of Carpenter’s lyrics and music videos, which often mix humor, love, regret and a dose of resentment for the men in her life. In “Manchild,” the first single off her new album released just ahead of the cover, Carpenter jokes about liking all her men “incompetent.”
Others have called the image anti-feminist, saying it plays into misogynistic gender roles in which women must be subservient to men. Some online said the image was reminiscent of domestic abuse, while others simply called it degrading for a woman to be on all fours having her hair pulled. Still others said that Carpenter risked playing into the male gaze even if she was attempting to subvert it.
One video on TikTok with more than 2.4 million views took the conversation even deeper — and more critical.
“I feel like this Sabrina Carpenter album cover, people are like ‘She’s the exception. Can’t a girl be sexy? Can’t a girl just like sex?’ Sure. Sure, she can,” Megan Cruz, a culture commentator, said in the video. “But I’m not going to ignore the entire historical precedence that has gotten us here to this moment … we have come to accept such spineless, f------ nothing art.”
Despite the online debate over the album cover, “Manchild” debuted at No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100, a first for Carpenter.
While Carpenter herself has not weighed in on the discussions around the image, she recently told Rolling Stone that she can’t remember a time when women were dissected so seriously.
“I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I truly feel like I’ve never lived in a time where women have been picked apart more, and scrutinized in every capacity. I’m not just talking about me. I’m talking about every female artist that is making art right now,” she said.
For about as long as pop music has existed, arguments about its deleterious effects have raged, and the scrutiny hasn’t been entirely confined to female artists. Elvis Presley’s hip sways in the 1950’s — beamed into homes through the then-new technology of television — generated moral outrage. By the 1980s, Madonna was on her way to becoming a lightning rod for controversy, launching heated debates on everything from misogyny and sexuality to religious panic that set a new standard for how a pop star could drive intense and important societal discussions.
More recently, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera have been criticized for veering away from their “good girl” image.
“Musical performers in the U.S. in particular have long courted controversy, and people have been critiquing the music, music industry and sexualization of women for decades,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor in the department of communication at Cornell University.
The criticism of Carpenter follows a similar pattern to what pop stars who came before her faced and reflects a cultural swing back to more conservative ideals.
“I mean, come on, look at social media,” said Patrick Johnson, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Marquette University. “You’ve got the trad wives that are everywhere. You’ve got the ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.’ Like, you’ve got this really interesting return, much like you saw in the mid-90s, much like you saw post=Woodstock, much like you saw post mid-50s, much like you saw post roaring-20s.”
Representatives for Carpenter did not respond to a request for comment.
Perry B. Johnson, adjunct faculty at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, said that the question of what is appropriate is sometimes more harshly applied to women who were child stars, particularly those who came from children’s television networks like the Disney Channel, where Carpenter starred in “Girl Meets World.”
“There is a desire to separate oneself from that, like, super family-friendly framing,” said Johnson, who specializes in music and culture. “It’s sort of a natural progression of anyone’s maturation, but also because of the way that the industry likes to confine people into particular versions of themselves, or at least personas of themselves.”
Carpenter’s music has long been sexually charged. At her concerts, during the song “Juno” she hands out a pair of fluffy handcuffs, and later sings “Want to try out some freaky position? Have you ever tried this one?” while miming a sex act. During her song “Bed Chem,” she goes behind a curtain and mimes a sex act with a dancer while in silhouette. Older songs like “Nonsense” from “emails i can’t unsend” also heavily play with ideas of sex and sexuality.
In her Rolling Stone interview, Carpenter said that people might expect more support for women from other women, but that has not been her experience.
She also said that her most popular work is usually when she’s singing about her sex life.
“It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” Carpenter said. “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.”
