Sabrina Carpenter at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards held at UBS Arena in New York. (Gilbert Flores/Billboard via Getty Images)People started getting mad online about Sabrina Carpenter's seventh studio album, Man's Best Friend, as soon as they saw the album cover. On it, the pint-sized pop star wears a black minidress and heels, crawling on all fours like a dog as a faceless man pulls her hair as if it's a leash.
The imagery sparked a debate about whether she effectively satirized sexist tropes or promoted them by degrading herself in the name of sexiness. But is pursuing sexiness while also signaling self-awareness so wrong?"It is not for the pearl clutchers," Carpenter said of Man's Best Friend on CBS Mornings. "But I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves."AdvertisementAdvertisementSuzannah Weiss, a sexologist and author of Subjectified: Becoming a Sexual Subject, sees how the cover art became controversial. Carpenter is not just being submissive - she looks objectified, as if her desire is to please this anonymous man. But some people find that hot, and that's their right."Even in scenarios where women are objectified, it's often due to their own agency. They're finding a way to gain money and power in an (albeit limited) world that objectifies them," Weiss tells Yahoo.
Capitalizing on her sexuality with a clever twist is kind of Carpenter's thing. She strikes a new sex position at each tour stop where she performs her baby-making proposal song "Juno." She used to sing a bespoke double entendre for each new city at the end of her crush confessional track "Nonsense" and regularly maneuvers through lyrical gymnastics to wink toward her love of sex in verse. She's like a classic vaudeville star and a Looney Tunes character wrapped into one and rated R for language and adult themes.
Great sexpectationsThe 26-year-old former Disney Channel star became famous as a child, but her persona has changed as she's grown up, evolving into both a wildly witty songwriter and a blonde bombshell.
AdvertisementAdvertisementSome condemn her hyperfemininity, saying that paired with the fact she's 5'0", it means she's promoting a perverted male fantasy. She faced backlash for doing a photo shoot that referenced a scene from Lolita and claims it was not intentional, but critics seem to have overlooked the fact that Carpenter was a young TV star ogled by the masses, and 12-year-old Lolita was not the villain of Vladimir Nabokov's story.
Sabrina Carpenter performs onstage during the Short n' Sweet tour. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for AEG)When people say she sings too much about sex, she feels like it's a sign that listeners are obsessed with it too. "Those are the songs that you've made popular. Clearly you love sex," she tells Rolling Stone in response. Sexuality is a very personal thing, and each person who interacts with her art has a different comfort level."What one person sees as empowerment, another may view as indecency, depending on their moral framework," therapist Veronica Anderson tells Yahoo. "An individual's comfort with their own sexuality often reflects internalized beliefs about control, self-worth and social expectations."AdvertisementAdvertisementCarpenter is a member of Gen Z, a generation having less sex than those before them and often the subject of a moral panic about sexlessness. Millennials before them faced their own moral panic about how hookup culture degraded relationships and romance, which then impacted how the younger generation sees the world.
Young people might be avoiding sex not because of the fear of the thing itself, as Sarah Jones writes for New York magazine, but as a response to how abstinence has been promoted as a safer alternative. Lawmakers are working to ban porn, abortion rights have been restricted and sex education is facing a free speech crisis. It's possible that the people Carpenter's own age are unsettled by her sexuality, and the people older than her are caught off guard by her subversion of expectations.'That's real to them'What Carpenter does as one of the most popular singers in the world right now says a lot about what culture values from its powerful women, so it makes sense that her album cover is being sharply critiqued. At the same time, how audiences respond to her sexuality reveals a lot about what we think about women and sex.
All of the songs on Man's Best Friend are about Carpenter's interactions with men - calling them stupid, being aroused by their responsible behavior, marveling about how hot they've become, killing them in her music videos and so on. Since men are her focus, does this mean she's anti-feminist, or that that's just where she is in her life right now?Sabrina Carpenter performs onstage. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for AEG)It's the seventh album she's released over the course of her lifetime, and the second in just over a year. It was c