Sabrina Carpenter is calling the shots

Summer 2024 was the Summer of Sabrina Carpenter, as she ascended to pop diva status with Short ’n Sweet and its breakout single, “Espresso”. Now, she’s coming back with a new album, Man’s Best Friend, due in August, and has already dropped the lead single, the cheeky curse-that-man anthem (man-them), “Manchild”. 

In advance of the album, she also released a couple photos, one of which is her new album cover art, which has set the internet ablaze.

She’s a woman, she exists in public, and more, Sabrina Carpenter is Horny On Main, so of course the comments are a mess. Here’s a sample right off the top:

People are deeply uncomfortable with Sabrina Carpenter presenting her brand of sassy girliness in a submissive context. It’s one thing when she’s singing about being horny and getting freaky and leaving men salivating in her wake, that’s empowering. At least, it’s the message of female sexual empowerment sold for the last fifty years—“have sex like a man”, “woman on top”, “own your sexuality”. But what if your sexuality is submissive?

I’m not making that judgment call about Carpenter personally, but she is a smart, funny artist who loves word play and loaded imagery, she has to know how the image of her on all fours, with a man clutching her hair, will be interpreted. There’s an entire Rolling Stone cover feature dedicated to how intelligent and crafty Carpenter is, how no one is working at her level combining humor and art. The Rolling Stone photos, though, are only adding to the internet’s tizzy, especially the cover photo, which features a nearly nude Carpenter:

Clearly Rolling Stone knew people would feel some kind of way about a hot blonde pop star appearing essentially naked on their cover, and they put together a whole carousel about the reactions Carpenter’s photo elicits. I’ve seen it compared to Rapunzel, and the whole photo shoot has a fairy tale feel, but this image strikes me as more Lady Godiva—a woman using her body to achieve a goal (Lady Godiva sought to lessen her husband’s crushing taxes). Sabrina Carpenter wields her music, her body, and her femininity to achieve specific goals, too.

Because we only have one song from Man’s Best Friend to judge by, what, exactly, her goal is with this imagery remains a mystery—it’s satirical but of what, specifically, is unknown. Sexual politics? Her own romantic history? Subverting power dynamics for sh-ts and giggles? But she doesn’t need a reason beyond provocation. Pop divas have a history of provoking for provocation’s sake, and no one has so closely echoed Madonna’s legendary turn as the Chief Pop Provocateur since Britney Spears, and even Spears’ turn at embracing her sexuality was firmly rooted in the “woman on top” messaging of female empowerment. Carpenter, though, chooses the other end of the power spectrum, casting herself in a submissive role, and you can practically FEEL everyone recoiling from it with discomfort, even disgust.

But what Carpenter is doing is not turning her back on female empowerment and sexual liberation, if anything, she’s exercising her fully empowered right to have whatever kind of sex she wants and express her sexuality any which way she chooses. We’re uncomfortable when women confess they like submissive sex because we’re told submission is weak and a strong, independent woman calls the shots, which must also mean calling the shots in the bedroom, right? Practitioners of submissive sex, however, insist the sub holds the real power in a power exchange because in a healthy, consensual relationship, the dominant partner is guided by the wants and limits of their submissive partner.

Carpenter is also treading into—or perhaps more accurately treading on—another taboo of female empowerment: tradwives. Again, with the flowers and the floaty dress and the baby animals, she’s leaning into a fairy tale fantasy—also playing on her past as a Disney kid—but you know what else this looks like? A tradwife’s boudoir photoshoot.

Tradwives have been drawing ire for years now, and not undeservedly, for selling an impossible fantasy of traditional gender roles in which homes are clean, all food is cooked from scratch, children are either unseen or only presented when neat and silent, and men are breadwinning and paying bills. Tradwifery is a lie, though, either selling a fantasy only wealth can maintain, or actually just plain lying. (My problem with tradwives is not choosing traditional gender roles in your relationship, it’s that tradwives have questionable financial independence at best, and what happens to you if that relationship ends?)

Tradwives’ Instagrams are rife with fields of flowers, baby farm animals, and flowy dresses, but unlike Carpenter’s Rolling Stone spread, tradwives keep it modest, their attire feminine and chaste. But make no mistake, tradwives are selling sex, too, they’re just selling it as a whisper rather than a scream. It’s the fantasy of barefoot and pregnant, the fantasy of controlling a woman’s sexuality for male pleasure, the fantasy of, as Paris Paloma puts it in her excellent song “Labour”, “a 24/7 baby machine, so he can live out his picket fence dreams”.

What Carpenter is doing is essentially f-cking the tradwife fantasy. She’s taking subtextual sex and making it text, literally stripping the lie from the gravid imagery of tradwifery and showing it for what it is—a sexual fantasy of men who don’t like women. But Sabrina Carpenter is a woman who loves women, she loves being a woman, she performs woman as her pop persona. She’s five feet of full-on femininity, like Dolly Parton before her, unapologetically girly AND sexy. HER sexual fantasy, as structured in the early phases of her Man’s Best Friend era, is to indulge in unabashed femininity, to be submissive and playful and horny and hot and indulged and indulgent, and to flex her brain as much as her abs. 

Sabrina Carpenter is, in fact, living the most empowered female fantasy—to have it all. To have success and fame and pop stardom, hit albums and Grammys and sold-out tours, Dolly Parton’s approbation and the scorn of total strangers on the internet. She wants to express herself however she feels it today, even if it makes us uncomfortable, maybe especially BECAUSE it makes us uncomfortable. She wants to provoke and evoke and joke, she wants to be sexy and funny and smart, she wants to be taken seriously and not be serious at all. And you know what? She’s getting it. 

She’s getting all of it right now, response and attention and desire and disgust, and she’s the one calling the shots on all of it. This is what Sabrina Carpenter wants, this is how she wants to be seen. Is it submissive? In appearance, sure. But really, who has the power in this exchange, because it’s not us, the audience. We’re just along for the ride. Sabrina Carpenter is the one in control.

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