Sabrina Carpenter is our favorite man-hating feminist. But is that a good thing?
How 'Man's Best Friend' could be feminism's worst.
It started off as a joke.
I was finally giving Sabrina Carpenter’s new album, Man’s Best Friend, a try, listening through its short-and-sweet 38 minutes on a car ride thrice as long.
I wanted to make an Instagram post, joking that all I hear when I listen to songs like “Tears” and “Nobody’s Son” is [insert the cover of Dr. Jane Ward’s book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality]. Har har.
But then it occurred to me: Wait. This album is actually a perfect example of the theories covered in that book.
Dr. Ward, a professor of Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Barbara, published The Tragedy of Heterosexuality in 2020 to explore the profound and disturbing ways that heterosexuality is in crisis.
She, too, starts off with a bit of a joke: If we’re going to pity and support any gendered sexuality experience, it should be straight women.
Indeed, I’m sure you’ve come across the meme-ified joke that straight women are effectively f*cked over by their gender and sexual identity: because they’re forced to date their only natural predator. (The lack of race analysis here does not escape me.)
They got the short end of the stick – not queers.
As a society, we are hyperfocused on the struggle of queerness. And in a lot of ways (hello, current administration), that makes sense. It still isn’t safe, sociopolitically, to be queer – let alone trans.
But this idea – that queers feel a sense of lack for not being straight – comes from queer men, specifically. Queer men are the ones who tend to share that life is hard on them in a world where their masculinity in constantly questioned.
Queer women? Research shows that we tend to be the happiest and most satisfied in our social worlds, including in our romantic and sexual connections. We are more satisfied – emotionally, domestically, and sexually – than any other combination of people.
So we’re doing okay over here!
But, like, are y’all?
Are women who date men, like, okay?
Because while so many of you are laughing off the lyrics on Man’s Best Friend, feeling like you finally got an album you can relate to, I am… worried.
Because as I’ve seen many queer people, and especially lesbians, name: One of my favorite things about being gay is that there isn’t an entire genre of humor centered on the idea that we hate our partners.
And yet, this is the norm in straight (that is to say, mainstream) culture.
In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Dr. Ward writes:
Straight culture seems to rely on a blind acceptance that women and men do not need to hold the other gender in high esteem, as much as they need to need each other and to learn how to compromise and suppress their disappointment in service of this need.
Whether it’s the cutesy Facebook group you joined for bisexual women called “My Attraction to Men Proves That Sexuality Isn’t a Choice” (girl, what?) or the cultural phenomenon of 1992’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, we have normalized the idea that men and women cannot understand one another, do not have the same interests and desires, and have to be tolerated, rather than celebrated, in service of maintaining cisheteropatriarchy.
Think about it: Even couples therapy, as an industry, survives and thrives on this supposed difference. Indeed, ask any therapist, and they’ll tell you, anecdotally, that most hetero-paired couples who come to couples therapy are there because the woman (who, by the way, is usually already working on herself in individual therapy, with coaches, and/or through the self-help industry) forced the man (who is usually doing… nothing) to show up, often to save the relationship.
We have been socialized to believe that men and women simply cannot make one another happy. And a lot of this comes out in humor: a social tool that we use to connect around shared cultural experiences.
Of course, the function of sexist humor (men making fun of women) and so-named “misandrist” humor (women making fun of men) are completely different.
Men make fun of women as a tool of domination and control. If you think of patriarchal oppression as a spectrum, jokes about women not being able to handle their emotions while menstruating is on the less offensive side than women not being chosen as leaders because of a fear of their inability to make logical decisions. But they’re on the same spectrum. Men make fun of women to put them in their place. And God forbid you challenge this kind of humor, lest you’re hit with the accusation that you’re too serious, are a killjoy, can’t take a joke – yet another tool of control.
Women, on the other hand, make fun of men as a way to cope with patriarchal oppression. Because women and other marginalized genders do not hold social power within patriarchy, their jokes about men simply cannot operate as “reverse sexism.” There is no real consequence to this kind of humor. It’s used, simply, for women to bond over their shared experiences. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, after all.
So when a song like “Tears,” the second track on Man’s Best Friend, following its first single, “Manchild,” comes on, it’s easy to laugh at Carpenter’s references to weaponized incompetence:
A little initiative can go a very long, long way
Baby, just do the dishes, I’ll give you what you want
A little communication, yes, that’s my ideal foreplay
Assemble a chair from IKEA, I’m like [moaning sounds]
I get wet at the thought of you
Being a responsible guy
Treating me like you’re supposed to do
Tears run down my thighs
Yes, it is annoying that, on the whole, straight, cis men lack skills like initiative and communication.
But how funny is it, actually?
Because Sabrina Carpenter did not invent this, neither the issue or the humor. It’s a wider cultural problem that she’s able to distill into a bop – and quite cleverly, I might add.
The only way these jokes work are within the cultural context in which they exist. And is that cultural context – ultimately, that men hate women and feel next to no responsibility to better partners – worth laughing at, or challenging in more meaningful ways?
As Dr. Ward discusses in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, women (especially within our socialization to be nurturers) expend an enormous amount of energy educating and training their male partners to be the kind of people that they want to be in relationship with.
And is this funny – or is it actually disturbing?
Because especially juxtaposed against queer (and namely, sapphic) connection, it comes to light that this level of effort is an unbalanced way in which men benefit from their connections with women, and yet women are left empty-handed.
Unsurprisingly, research shows that while (straight) marriage deeply benefits men, it is almost always detrimental to women. Is it any wonder?
And at the core of this kind of humor is the unexamined assumption that cis men and cis women end up together. Indeed, that that fate is inevitable. Isn’t that assumption, in and of itself, exactly what cisheteronormativity is?
Because this is not actually a women’s issue. Yes, of course patriarchy plays a role – and a big one. But the bigger issue here – the one that goes unexamined – is cisheteronormativity.
Part of white feminism (a term used to describe feminism that focuses only on issues that pertain to white, cis, straight women, to the detriment of other, more marginalized people) is hyperfocusing on patriarchy without examining other axes of oppression.
And white feminism is attractive to—well—white feminists for a reason: It allows them to complain about their experience of (patriarchal) oppression while ignoring the ways in which they oppress others – in this example, through their (real or perceived) straightness.
And the prioritization of challenging patriarchy over cisheteronormativity is, plainly, homophobic.
At what point do we look at the role that cisheteronormativity plays in the normalization of dissatisfying relationships between men and women? At what point do women realize that their jokes about men’s incompetence actually malign and overshadow queer women and our experiences? At what point do they start to unpack not just systems in a micro, interpersonal way, but also the systems (like marriage and the nuclear family) that uphold cisheteropatriarchy?
At what point do we realize that women who primarily or solely date men having to use humor to survive that experience is actually really sad, and shouldn’t be normalized as relatable? At what point do we recognize the relatability of an album like Man’s Best Friend as social commentary in and of itself – social commentary that points to the fragility and instability of hetero-paired relationships?
At what point do we stop accepting cisheteropatriarchy as inevitable? No, you do not have to date men if you find it (validly) exhausting. No, you don’t have to accept and tolerate an unhappy relationship. No, you do not need to take on the role of therapist-educator in your relationships. Yes, you do have some choice outside of laughing it off.
At what point will cisheteropatriarchy be so destabilized that the fantasy of a “good man” stops being compelling because women are able to center that which brings them reciprocated safety and joy? Hint hint: Research shows that women get their emotional needs met, by and large, through their female friendships, not within their romantic relationships with men.
At what point do we all listen to Man’s Best Friend and think that it is deeply unrelatable? That no, it should not be normalized as a common experience that we all have to accept?
That is to say: If you find Man’s Best Friend relatable, you might have some things to think through, to unlearn, to uproot around your understanding of relationships.
And that – unlearning your commitment to cisheteronormativity – is a radical act. Much more radical, and ultimately impactful, than bopping around to “Manchild,” feeling related to.
Writer Ocean Vuong has said the following about his experience of queerness:
Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes. It made me curious. It made me ask, “Is this enough for me?”
And this is the question that I want women who primarily or solely date men, who find Carpenter’s new songs relatable, to ask themselves: Is this enough for me?
Is this way of relating enough for me? Is joking about it with my friends enough to help me survive it?
Because here’s the thing: It shouldn’t be.