What Can We Expect? (Pt. 2)

A few years ago I wrote about Taylor Swift and Matty Healy and the controversy around them dating and why people were so upset about it. The core of the point I was making back then was about how Taylor Swift wants her fans to believe she is the person they want her to be. Despite no real coherent politics outside of being the victim of misogyny (which I don't dispute) and broadly being a democrat (at least at one point), her fans push her into whatever role they want her in. I called her a paper doll that you get to design a friend group for.

The Matty stuff is more complicated, but not as relevant right now.

In the time since I posted that piece, Sabrina Carpenter has exploded in popularity. I'm a big fan of her last album. I think it's fun. It's one of few things most people I know can enjoy in a real way. I think she's charming and beautiful and funny. Her whole persona is fun to me. It's also transparent what it is.

It's sexuality and it's kitsch. It's big hair. It's songs about being horny. It's songs about hoping a man doesn't disappoint you and it's songs about a man disappointing you. It's Betty Boop. It's skin-tone tights so thick you couldn't see through them if you tried. It's kind of nonsensical but still provocative lyrics. It's all pretty clear to me what her identity as an artist is, but once again there is discourse about the place sex has in her art.

This time it's about a new album cover for Man's Best Friend. It's kind of insane she's putting out another album just over a year after Short 'n Sweet, but whether she has the juice for a follow up so quickly is a question for another day – if her new single "Manchild" is any indication, I'd bet on no.

The new cover features Sabrina, in a black mini dress and tall heels, kneeling in front of a man's leg while he has a handful of her signature blonde hair in his fist. You can't see his face. She's touching his trouser clad leg lightly. It's got a sort of film grain and flash look that evokes a sort of 70s or 80s style album cover, except the girl in the photo is the musician not just some sex symbol for a rock band that sucks. If this were one of those album covers, she'd be looking up at the man. Sabrina looks at the camera.

I've seen people defend the cover by calling it "ironic" which I just don't agree with. I don't find Sabrina Carpenter's music ironic and this especially doesn't strike me as ironic. Cheeky, yes, but ironic? No. I don't think it's subversive either. Evocative, yes, but subversive? No.

I've seen the photo described as "irresponsible" and I've seen people rail against it because pulling hair is violence against women and I've seen people upset also because they think she's betraying some subversion (that word again!) of gender norms they think she does in her music. I don't find that to be true in any way.

I think both sides of the discussion are wrong. Like the album cover or don't, it doesn't matter, but both sides of this feel like people who invented an artist who doesn't exist. Sabrina Carpenter as Man Hater. Sabrina Carpenter as an icon of sexuality as rebellion. Sabrina Carpenter as beacon of the pure white (and blonde!) light of the female gaze. Surely men don't actually want to fuck her, right?

Right?

"Man Hating" As a Facsimile of Feminist Identity

Right now a very trendy way to be a straight girl is to claim misandry. Misandry is rooted in a feminist ideology, but the way it's employed here is not. Maybe you guys haven't hung out with normie straight girls in a long time. I have. Sabrina Carpenter isn't a man hater, she's just a girl whose former partners lose her favor. It's no different than any straight girl I've ever known.

You beg a man to not embarrass you up until the point he does, then he's a pig and a loser and less than human and that's that. It's like saying Carrie Underwood is a noted man hater because of "Before He Cheats." It's not inherently a feminist act to be a woman scorned. It makes for fun songs, but feminism has to be more than that.

I wouldn't even really argue that Sabrina talks about being wronged by men in a violent way. It's all the counterbalance to her other more horny songs about being in love or wanting to be in love. As a woman who often loves and even sleeps with men, her music has more in common with the way I talk about guys I've been on less than 5 dates with than anything I would call feminism.

And that's what makes it good and relatable! Obviously! You joke and tell your friends whether it was good or not and the things you think are weird about him and you get hyperbolic about how much you like him despite some less than green flags. When you break up you're honest about the less than green flags being red and you let your friends go too big celebrating the break up. Men suck! Boo!!!

It's all a little bit silly and it's just straight girl shit. It's not particularly concerned with feminism. More importantly, it doesn't have to be!

Can Sexuality Inherently Be Interpreted As Empowerment?

For a long time, Sabrina Carpenter's "Juno Position" was discussed both as something that's fun and something that is obscene then, as a reaction, something that's sort of empowering.

Hey, um, did you know girls like to have sex, too?

I don't think it's particularly concerned with being empowering. It's a song about being so devastatingly horny she's telling a guy to impregnate her. The song, one of my favorites, is effective because it is horny in a way that barely makes any sense. The position stuff isn't really about eroticism, though. It's about doing something kind of cheeky and silly for 3 seconds on stage.

I've always been pretty sympathetic to younger people's reluctance toward viewing sex as something inherently empowering because I grew up online in an era of pop feminism that preached BDSM as empowering. Of course there was more to all of that on the top, but, by the time it reached me at 15 on tumblr, it just led to trying to force myself into a hypersexuality that did end up hurting me. That's not the fault of the people who have coherent feminist ideals around sex, but it does make me more sympathetic to young people trying to figure out what their beliefs are while still trying to date and experiment with sex with other people their own age.

That all said, I just don't think Sabrina's artistic expression of sexuality is about empowerment in the intentional, feminist way people are trying to portray it as. I think it's neutral. She isn't subverting anything. She's just a girl who has sex and wants to be loved and desired. She presents it often in kind of a funny, cheeky, cartoony way, but it's normal. It's so normal! And I think that's for the better!

I don't think her perception from her life as a child star has quite the same hold as, say, Miley Cyrus's. Miley has talked recently about losing roles due to giving her boyfriend a penis cake among other thing, which is obviously absurd and horrible. Her Bangerz album cycle was overtly sexual and it was subversive because she was railing against something real and she was punished for it socially. Maybe Sabrina Carpenter is losing something from making her sex jokes, but I don't think so. She seems to be getting ads because of it.

The Icky Impure Male Gaze vs. The Morally Pure Female Gaze

My personal feeling on her new album cover is that it does move the image away from being as much of a character as she was through the Short 'n Sweet album cycle. I imagine that was intentional. It got the attention of fans in this way because it's sexual in a different way. Her previous overt sexuality wasn't really about a power dynamic. This photo depicts a power dynamic at play. These roles within power dynamics don't have anything to do with whether you feel good in them. A more dominant role doesn't mean more agency. That's what makes it consensual sex.

That said, it's impossible to ignore that depicting a more submissive position as a woman always risks being perceived as a very rigid, objectified sexual role. It evokes an era of album art and magazine photos that I do think leaned on the sexualization and objectification of women in a damaging way. Maybe there is an implication of her flipping it into something more powerful because the first song is about calling a man a "Manchild" and insulting him, but in context of her greater catalog it falls flat. I don't think it reads as ironic. I don't think the photo is successful in being a comment on the way men think of women as lesser. I think it's just evocative and erotic. It's a stunning photo. She looks incredible. I think it still reads as surface level eroticism. Maybe there's some feminist thought in sex as neutral, but that's as far as I'll go.

The argument about the intention has brought some fans to the flip side of the Sex As Empowerment argument – remember, trying too hard to appeal to men and sexualizing yourself in the wrong way is bad.

I saw her compared to Sydney Sweeney who currently has an ad campaign and product with a soap brand that is based on being "infused" with her bath water – a blatant down stream impact and ad exec approved rip off of influencer slash musician slash online sex worker Belle Delphine who sold jars of her "Gamer Girl Bath Water" back in 2019. I also saw her makeup being compared to Bonnie Blue, a porn actress with a large online following that has garnered a decent amount of headlines over the last year or so. It's not important what those headlines are. It's mostly important is that she's blonde and has sort of a heart shaped face, not unlike Sabrina with a full face of makeup on. The specifics of these comparisons – blonde women that men publicly lust after in an often degrading way – say that, in the mind of some of her fans, Sabrina crossed over from liking sex in a fun, cheeky way in favor of being for men.

The Female Gaze vs. Male Gaze thing is rooted in film criticism to describe how often men depict women as objects or only in reaction to themselves where women give female characters more complexity.

Obviously it lost its original meaning because it's popular on TikTok to create a dichotomy between dressing/doing makeup/hair for the men vs. women. It's a classic case of hearing a term and assuming you know what it means based on internal logic instead of the root of where it comes from. When people use it online, they're not talking about seeing a women having agency and an inner life through film.

I first started seeing it being applied to real people in videos related to outfits that are more adventurous that get compliments from women juxtaposed against outfits that men might pick out for their female partners – short dresses, tight skirts, that sort of thing. It was a comment on how men don't really get fashion and I think it's based in something sort of anecdotally observable. It's not true to the original terms, but that's what's being discussed.

From there, it grew into something much more sinister. Maybe Sabrina Carpenter was being seen as "for the female gaze" because she's sort of silly and cartoonish, but really I think it's because she's blonde and white and her sexuality was being seen through the lens of American standards of white and blonde = purity. There is so much racism in what people online call "for the male gaze." I've seen it particularly with Hispanic and Latina women, but there are so many posts, made by women, about how a bunch of girls' looks are "for the male gaze" when really they're just not white and not pursuing white beauty standards. It's racism full stop.

This dichotomy isn't real or valid anyway. Ascribing an intention to a person's clothing is antithetical to feminism and feeds into rape culture and victim blaming. Sabrina Carpenter is dressing for performance regardless. But when people say she's stopped being "for the girls" they mean she's crossed their line for what is acceptable as far as eroticism. Regardless of the content of Sabrina Carpenter's music, her previous looks weren't as concerned with eroticism so that meant she was "for the girls," but the sex appeal looks more real on this album cover so now she's betrayed us.

I think the whole line of thought is regressive and a way to say she looks like a whore without saying the word.

Really what I think is frustrating, and why I connected it to that Taylor Swift piece I wrote a while back, is because none of this outrage is based in reality. It's all about this fake person people made up in their head. "She likes sex in a feminist way! The way me and my friends do! Not like all the dirty sluts do, just like in a cool empowering way! Her music is an act of feminist rebellion!" But it's not. I think her music is what you see on the tin. It's more like me listening to my sisters' friends talk about returning to their shitty boyfriends who they know are shitty then going to the bar and having an alright time with them and said shitty boyfriends. It is what it is.

Maybe they should read The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, but we need not take them seriously as pillars of feminism.

Not everything you like needs to have a moral righteousness and you don't have to like everything a musician – much less a pop star! – does either aesthetically or for deeper reasons. There is no reason for a depth of disappointment when someone doesn't deliver on a moral or political viewpoint they never promised. It's fine for the photo to evoke a power dynamic you're uncomfortable with, but that's about you. It's almost always about you.

Miranda Reinert is a music adjacent writer, zine maker, podcaster and law school drop out based in Chicago. Check out PDFs of most of my zines at the link on the top of the screen. Follow me on Twitter or Bluesky to keep up on the next time I write about online discourse or whatever: @mirandareinert.  This blog does have a paid option and I would so appreciate any money you would be willing to throw me! You may also send me small bits of money at @miranda-reinert on venmo/on Paypal if you want. As always, thanks for reading!