Is the new Sabrina Carpenter album cover art feminist?
This is the wrong question to ask. But let's answer it anyway.
Q:
I’ve seen so many hot takes on the cover art for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend. Some say it’s feminist. Some say it’s anti-feminist. Some people are celebrating the representation of kink. Others say it’s degrading. I’m not sure where I stand. Can you help me make sense of it?
A:
A lot of folks think that cultural criticism of pop music isn’t important during times like these, when there are so many horrifying things happening in the world. And while of course I agree that on the list of things to be worried about, Sabrina Carpenter falls near the bottom, I do think that this is a fascinating conversation – not just about pop culture, but also about sex and relationships from a feminist lens.
At the end of the day, the discourse around Man’s Best Friend is inexplicably tied to power and oppression, and that makes it worth exploring.
Ericka Hart made the following point on Threads:
The protection of Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover with assertions that it is “satire,” “feminism,” or “kink” is directly linked to everything that is happening in the world.
White people jumping to protect expressions of white femininity is why there is an ongoing genocide in Palestine, Sudan, Congo; Adriana Smith still on life support in Atlanta; transmisogyny; etc. It is why the press secretary is able to deem a Black woman journalist’s question “stupid.”
Folks who are staunchly defending the cover art tend to be white, cis women for whom the issue of choice is how feminism is understood (despite the fact that, as Feminista Jones has pointed out, we can make plenty of choices that are misaligned with feminism). And folks who are staunchly against the cover tend to be people who uphold purity culture as necessary to women’s liberation from patriarchy.
Neither of these extremes is feminist, nor sex-positive. They’re too simplified to withstand the criticality necessary to understand either in complexity.
That is to say, a hot take will never be nuanced enough to make sense of sexuality, an inherently complicated experience.
So let’s talk about it.
To start, we need to be on the same page about what feminism is.
Feminism is a theoretical framework used for understanding the sociological concepts of power and oppression: Who benefits from systems, and who is disadvantaged? How do marginalized people navigate the world differently from those who are privileged? How are power and oppression maintained on both the macro (institutions) and micro (interpersonal) levels?
Simplifying feminism as “women doing what they want, when they want, how they want to, divorced from social context” is not doing the movement any favors. While, yes, feminism has, perhaps, enabled us to have more choice, that doesn’t mean that all of our choices are inherently feminist. This misapplication of feminism is often colloquially referred to as “choice feminism” (derogatory), or within academia, it’s considered a symptom of post-feminist theory.
To ask “Is the Sabrina Carpenter album cover feminist?” is to question if it works to subvert not just patriarchy, but also white supremacy, capitalism, cisheteronormativity, and more.
Is the Sabrina Carpenter album cover feminist? No. That’s an absurd argument.
But just because something isn’t feminist doesn’t mean that it’s inherently anti-feminist (or, as the argument seems to be going, setting feminism back) either.
This black-and-white thinking creates a harmful binary: Something is either feminist (challenging oppression) or anti-feminist (oppressive). In reality, it could be… neither. And I believe that the cover art is just that: neither feminist nor anti-feminist, but rather, a controversial image to generate not simply dialogue (which I appreciate), but also viral marketing (which, as it pertains to capitalism, I do not).
What many people seem to be defending is Carpenter’s right to create art that is ironic, satirical, and/or subversive. And yes, of course she can do that if she wants to. Indeed, I would love for her to.
Sabrina Carpenter has a gimmick, and it’s one that I love. What her work, both in music and performance, represents is an exaggerated expression of femininity.
A friend of mine, Joanna Schroeder, once shared with me that a Gen Z woman she knows defined Carpenter’s schtick as “performing girl.” And another friend of mine, Raechel Anne Jolie, recently posted that she considered Carpenter “an honorary femme” (and I couldn’t agree more).
I do believe that what Carpenter is going for in all of her art is, simply, tongue-in-cheek. And once we hear the content of Man’s Best Friend, I think we’ll be better able to determine whether or not the cover art that represents it is, in fact, ironic.
But so far, we’ve only gotten one song from the album, “Manchild.” And while it’s certainly cheeky and critical of men’s weaponized incompetence (love!), it isn’t inherently subversive. Indeed, it doesn’t even add anything new to the conversation. It’s simply speaking to the sociocultural moment. One TikTok creator I saw referred to Carpenter’s work as “not timeless, but timely.” And arguably, that’s just good marketing.
Of course we want women to have sexual autonomy and to express themselves authentically, outside of what’s expected of them from cisheteropatriarchy.
This is something I’m really excited to continue to watch in the girly pop space, from Chappell Roan to Charli XCX to, yes, Sabrina Carpenter.
Despite singing about and referencing sex and relationships with men, Sabrina Carpenter manages to do so in a way that isn’t for men at all, but rather, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge to other women who engage with men in this way.
But we also have to be aware of how authenticity is complicated in the entertainment industry. Authenticity can be manufactured. It can be co-opted. It can appear to us as honest, but actually be a marketing tool.
We can’t know what is authentic to Sabrina Carpenter (person) versus what is marketable for Sabrina Carpenter (brand).
And to rush to Carpenter’s defense, claiming that that sexually submissive women should be able to express their kinks out loud and proudly, is to make an assumption that Carpenter, herself, hasn’t validated. We have no idea what Sabrina Carpenter likes to do in the bedroom. And honestly, that’s none of our business.
Regardless of if Carpenter herself is submissive or not, though, I wouldn’t call the album art inherently sex- or kink-positive either.
First of all, the album artwork is situated within a long history of women being subjugated by men in marketing imagery – a point that is explored in Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly, among many other feminist texts (like the newly released book, Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert). And that media history—indeed, art history—can’t be ignored.
But also, we run into a problem around how kink is understood, defined, and practiced.
I honor that this is an unpopular opinion, but a lot of women who consider themselves to be submissive, in my experience, actually are not. To perform submission is a very specific, negotiated dynamic, and as a sexuality scholar (and dedicated sub myself), I find that many people use this identity way too colloquially.
To be submissive is not as simple as calling your boyfriend “Daddy” or enjoying a hand at your throat during sex (and don’t get me started on engaging in breath play without proper training; this is the ultimate red flag for folks who claim to be kinky).
And, again, an unpopular opinion, but if you’re a white, cis woman submitting predominantly (or solely) to white, cis men, I have to ask: Where is the line between engaging in kink and simply engaging the sociosexual demands of cisheteropatriarchy? (Note: Submissives who have done the work won’t be offended by this question because they have practice exploring this balance.)
Feminista Jones puts it thusly:
The problem is in saying that this is a kink that most women choose. It is not.
What most women choose is adherence to patriarchy and, more specifically, religious dogma that maintains a hierarchy of men over women. Most women aren’t “kinky,” honestly.
How do I know this? Many of the women I have encountered who claim to be submissive, especially within kink, are only that way with men. I call it Gender Play, making it not different from Race Play or Age Play, and folks get prickly.
Of course, this isn’t to say that it’s impossible to sexually submit to people who hold social power over you. But it takes much more intention than most people are giving it.
Besides, if Sabrina Carpenter is referencing kink in her album cover art, she’s doing a horrible job of it, a la Fifty Shades of Gray: All you need to do is be educated in kink and look at the position of the hair pulling to know that this is unacceptable practice.
Indeed, if Carpenter is referencing kink on this cover art, it’s very clearly puppy play. And I do not believe for a second that most of the people defensively screaming that women are allowed to submit to men in bed are so deep into kink that they’re engaging in puppy play.
(And don’t get me started on the fact that kink is not inherently feminist. It is not.)
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the art “sets feminism back” either!
Most of the people making this argument are claiming that Sabrina Carpenter, either in general or specifically in regards to the cover itself, caters to the male gaze. But because this is a misapplication of the term (“male gaze” does not mean “appealing to men”), I completely disagree with the take.
The framework of “the male gaze” is a specific theory, originally applied to film, but now more broadly applied to media, that was coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975 to explain how women are often depicted in media from the male perspective: According to Mulvey, the male perspective is represented by who creates media, who media is created for, and how the camera thusly shows women.
Because Sabrina Carpenter’s audience is, by far, young women, and because her art is created for young women, she arguably escapes the “male gaze” argument.
But that doesn’t mean that Carpenter’s work can’t be oppressive in and of itself. Because what it certainly does appeal to is the white gaze.
Sabrina Carpenter, not unlike Taylor Swift, about whom plenty of brilliant essays have been penned, represents a white femininity. And while many feminists felt that they were rushing to defend expressions of femininity didn’t realize that they were also, at the same time, thus defending whiteness.
On Threads, Kaligirwa pointed out, “[White women] saw the white women takes first and ran with them, only to fumble later when they realized they’d spoken too soon, without the intersectional lens to understand why the album cover didn’t land well for many of us outside of that bubble.”
Indeed, I think that the rush to defend Carpenter was, subconsciously, a rush to defend the self: one’s own whiteness, femininity, and sexual expression.
And as far as I’m concerned, that in and of itself, isn’t feminism.
Because feminism is about collective liberation – not our own personal choices in how we, especially white women, express ourselves.
TL;DR: The album cover art for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, is neither feminist nor anti-feminist. And we would do well to apply a more complex lens to our analysis, instead of rushing to binary conclusions about media.
Love,
Melissa