Why Is Everyone Mad at One of Our Biggest Pop Stars? It's Complicated.
I wonder what ever happened to the Twitter user who niche-famously posted last fall about being '17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter.' Are they now head of DOGE or some other important government agency? Whatever the case (the user seems to have deactivated for the time being, at least), their worldview has been ascendant over the past year, because Carpenter has found herself at the center of controversy again, this one about her yet-to-be-released new album. And this time, being afraid of the pint-sized pop star seems less and less like a fringe position.
Sabrina Carpenter shared the news on Thursday that she will release her next album, Man's Best Friend, later this summer. Two photos accompanied the announcement, but most people haven't said much about the one of a dog wearing a collar with Man's Best Friend engraved on it, focusing instead on the artwork that features Carpenter herself wearing a short dress and heels and kneeling in front of a figure in a dark suit whose head is out of frame. She's not quite on all fours—sorry, Miranda July!—but she's got one arm on the floor and one reaching, like a dog doing its best handshake trick, toward what is presumably a man, who is meanwhile grabbing and holding up some strands of her blond hair.
At the risk of outing myself as a prude, I'm going to admit that my first reaction to the image wasn't to chuckle to myself and marvel at another clever move from my girl Sabrina. No, I was kind of put off by it, to be honest. In contrast to Carpenter's past year of perfectly pitched visuals marrying bubblegum and bawdy, this photo is undeniably darker and more suggestive. I even thought of that HBO series from a couple years ago, The Idol, which I may be cursed to be one of the only people who remembers: There's a moment in one episode when a music-industry character suggests making lemonade of a public relations fiasco that the pop musician at the center of the show has become embroiled in due to a fairly explicit leaked picture of her. 'I would take that photo with the fucking cum on her face and I'd make it her album cover,' proposes the creative director, winkingly played by Troye Sivan, who is himself a pop artist. Carpenter's album cover isn't going nearly that far, as it's blessedly free of body fluids, but at the same time I don't think it would be a stretch to call the image softcore, or at least softcore-adjacent.
I wasn't alone in my visceral reaction, and the photo has quickly proved to be a veritable discourse magnet. In comments under Carpenter's Instagram post and elsewhere online, some fans immediately bristled at the singer's subservient pose. Even after my own response, I was surprised by how overwhelmingly negative much of it was. The main problem, as fans and detractors saw it, was that Carpenter was catering to what they called 'the male gaze'—attempting to appeal to men and generally objectifying and debasing herself. Many made a point of gesturing to our current political climate in their critiques, talking about how it was particularly offensive to roll out an image like this at a time when women's rights are being rolled back and messages like 'Her Body, My Choice' are on the rise.
Despite my qualms, I don't actually want to be on the side of a bunch of puriteens, so I'm glad some fans and observers stepped in to defend Carpenter, arguing that she's being playful and satirizing the public's view of her and men's treatment of women. Like many of them, I worry that we're at risk of bullying women so hard for the sin of 'being male-centered' that we loop back around to shaming them for being at all sexual. It's not fair for us to expect female pop stars to embody some corny notion of empowerment, and I'm also glad Carpenter isn't giving us an album cover as nonsensically boring as the one Gracie Abrams put out last year, which I'm still mad about.
I think it's possible, conveniently enough for me, that both factions may have it a little wrong here. I certainly think it would behoove the people hating on the cover image to learn more about the origins of the phrase 'the male gaze,' for one thing. But I also think some of the defenses of Carpenter have been a little too quick to champion an image that isn't landing successfully for a reason. I generally find Carpenter's 'horned-up gal' persona charming: I thought it was hilarious, for instance, and not at all inappropriate, when she made an Eiffel Tower visual joke at her recent tour stop in Paris. A lot of what Carpenter is doing with the character she's playing when she's performing is subtle and strangely difficult to articulate—what for another person might look like an elaborate play for male attention plays differently when it's something that tiny, silly-mannered Carpenter is enacting for an audience of primarily women.
I guess those of us, like me, who enjoy this act of Carpenter's are susceptible to feeling worried that she's going to drop it in favor of something more overtly sexual, because that's what this new kind of imagery has frequently signaled in the past. Thinking about it more, the photography style, evocative of an era with some pretty regrettable sexual politics, is a big part of why. As others have pointed out, the aesthetic is pure Terry Richardson and American Apparel—Carpenter may be dressed like a 2020s office siren, but I know indie sleaze when I see it. It's impossible to see the hair grab outside of the context of our overly pornified culture. But I would also argue that the album cover is just flat-out less funny than Carpenter's usual antics. I like how goofy and exaggerated the Carpenter I've gotten to know is; that doesn't mean she shouldn't evolve, but it's understandable that Carpenter going from carrying herself like a sexy cartoon bunny to channeling Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary is going to inspire a little whiplash.
It's totally OK that this specific image isn't landing for some of us, and I find the impulse of some people to basically start a crusade against Carpenter as an enemy of women over this troubling. Messy rollouts are one of the dangers of being a pop star and a woman in the public eye, something Carpenter knows all too well. Ironically, just as she revealed this album cover this week, Rolling Stone published a new cover story about her, and in it she spoke about how much emphasis the public puts on the sexier aspects of her persona. 'It's always so funny to me when people complain,' she said in the Rolling Stone piece. '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's in my show. There's so many more moments than the 'Juno' positions, but those are the ones you post every night and comment on. I can't control that. If you come to the show, you'll [also] hear the ballads, you'll hear the more introspective numbers.' She has a point—it's true that we could all just choose not to talk about this. (Like that's ever stopped anyone on the internet.)
In the same interview, Carpenter spoke of now feeling pressure to be funny. Maybe the most generous interpretation of this cover, then, is just that it was a misfire, an attempt at satire that only sticks out because of how weirdly perfectly Carpenter has managed to pull off a very hard-to-pull-off tone for the better part of the past year. We'll never know, at least until she comes out with a vetted public statement, or her new album reveals precisely where she's taking her image next.
I know it's easy to be paranoid, and I'm paranoid too that Carpenter's reign of being a subversive bimbo genius is going to give way to something flatter and defanged of its bite. But she deserves more credit than that for all the genuinely tricky feats she's accomplished so far. That's that her espresso, and it hasn't truly failed us yet.
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