Last week, mega-pop star Sabrina Carpenter debuted the cover art for her forthcoming album “Man’s Best Friend”: a photo of Carpenter on her hands and knees, wearing black stilettos and her trademark glam makeup, while an out-of-frame man grabs a handful of her blond hair in a fist. Predictably, and by design, the album cover has divided the internet.
Carpenter’s fans and defenders of the album cover hail it as subversive and satirical. They question, too, who we are to police Carpenter’s sexuality. Others argue it is degrading, even a mockery of domestic violence.
Regardless of any genuine criticism or commendation, Carpenter’s album cover is cheap rage bait, the latest rung in a wheel of feminist internet discourse looping over and over.
Carpenter is not a feminist icon. And it doesn’t appear that she wants to be.
Carpenter is not a feminist icon. And it doesn’t appear that she wants to be. Her brand is cheeky and hyperfeminine. Her aesthetic deliberately and successfully embraces the male gaze. The viral showpiece of a Carpenter concert is a choreographed sexual position in the pre-chorus of her hit song “Juno.” In a Paris show, she pantomimed a raunchy position named for the city’s best-known monument. By being in on her own joke, Carpenter’s hypersexualization comes off as campy and satirical.
There is power here — she is, of course, able to sell sex because of her appearance and, if she didn’t look objectively attractive by patriarchal conventions, this would be an entirely different conversation — but it is not empowering.
Carpenter’s fans have been quick to defend the “Man’s Best Friend” cover art as satirical. The implication is that anyone offended by the cover does not understand Carpenter’s use of humor and irony. The offended lack internet literacy. The commentary, they argue, is an astute look at how contemporary American men want a subservient woman.
Sure, maybe. “Man’s Best Friend” will not be released for another six weeks, and Carpenter has debuted just one single, “Manchild,” from the album so far. Our context is limited.
The discourse around Carpenter’s choices remind me of contentious conversations around singer Lana Del Rey. After finding massive viral success in the early 2010s, Del Rey’s 2017 album “Ultraviolence” was met with outrage for glamorizing domestic violence, particularly focused on the lyrics on the album’s title track, “he hit me and it felt like a kiss.” Del Rey defended herself three years later in a since-deleted Instagram post, writing, “I think it’s pathetic that my minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships has often made people say I’ve set women back hundreds of years. There has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me. The kind of woman who says no but men hear yes; the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves; the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women.”
I bring up Del Rey and her yearslong saga with millennial feminism to underscore just how long this conversation has been going on. Part of what is so notable about Carpenter’s album cover is how self-aware the internet was of the discourse that was about to begin. For every Instagram post and TikTok I saw reacting to the cover itself, there were two more wanting to entirely opt out of it. Del Rey, I think, was reacting to so-called girl boss feminism, or the damaging commodification of feminism we saw begin in the mid-2010s. Certainly this is better left explored in another, much longer column, but it is worth underscoring the crossroads feminism and feminist identity currently stands. If nothing else, the internet discourse around Carpenter’s album cover points to how little feminism — and the discussion around feminism — has moved in the past few decades. Regardless, it’s unlikely Carpenter was trying to spark a meaningful conversation about contemporary feminism and women’s sexual agency with “Man’s Best Friend.” She does happen to be good at bubble gum provocation. She has done it before. In October 2023, Carpenter debuted the music video for her single “Feather,” with a horror-movie inspired video directed by Mia Barned. In it we see Carpenter murder some boyfriends and then dance in front of their coffins and religious artifacts in the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York. The murder wasn’t the controversial aspect of the video, of course, it was the church. For the internet savvy and the attention-economy beneficiaries, manufacturing controversy online is easy. Desecrate a church, for example, or depict gender-based violence on your album cover, and you will get chatter. I understand the satire, I understand Carpenter’s brand, I understand the kink community’s embrace of the photo, and I understand that women’s sexuality is intrinsically linked to freedom — and still, this album cover feels so stale to me. We have had this conversation before. And amid this political landscape, where women’s agency is genuinely in danger, we don’t need it now.
Hannah Holland
Hannah Holland is a producer for MSNBC's "Velshi" and editor for the "Velshi Banned Book Club." She writes for MSNBC Daily. 
