The real discomfort with Carpenter’s controversial cover isn’t about sexual provocation. It’s about normalizing images of violence against women.
After her Instagram comments section became the topic of many headlines, Sabrina Carpenter has chimed in on the discourse surrounding her Man’s Best Friend album cover. The original cover—which featured Carpenter on her hands and knees in front of a faceless man, pulling at her hair—now comes in an alternate design of Carpenter in a Marilyn Monroe-esque dress surrounded by more faceless men, none of whom touch her hair. She captioned the new cover as “approved by God,” clarifying that her accommodation is more of an eye roll than a concession.
Much of the heated conversation sparked by Carpenter’s original cover pointed at her responsibility for the cover’s message and its impact on young women. Some commentators expressed extreme disappointment and shame at what they perceived as Carpenter conceding to the “male gaze.” Others quickly scrambled to her defense, scoffing at how viewers could not possibly see the image as ironic, consistent with Carpenter’s brand of subverting traditional female sexuality.
I feel an aversion towards making a judgment as to whether Carpenter made the “right decision” with her cover. It’s undeniable that as a female artist, she has faced heaps more criticism than a man would for this frankly more muted stunt. Comb through any lauded Tarantino film and I’m certain you’d find the same thing, if not worse. Now, Tarantino is not purported to be a feminist icon, but Carpenter has never promised to be that either. While her artistry often sends a message of sexual liberation, not every decision she makes needs to be a part of the pillar of radical feminism people want her to kneel for.
Still, I appreciate the debate surrounding her decision for reasons beyond Carpenter herself. It’s an interesting case study on how we define feminism in the context of sex and what we expect from female artists as a result. But in observing the online discourse about the cover, I fear we’re hesitant to face the source of our discomfort.
Some of the articles covering the controversy quickly centered the cover as another instance of people protesting Carpenter’s hypersexuality. “What people take an issue with when it comes to Carpenter is the hypersexualization that exists around her musical universe,” Fran Hoepfner writes in her article titled “Sabrina Carpenter Innocent?” “While much of Carpenter’s music has gestured toward sexuality through euphemism, there’s a more obvious sentiment on display here [the album cover].” Olivia Craighead more directly scoffs at this perceived aversion to female sexuality in her article, “Why Are People Mad at Sabrina Carpenter This Time?” “Maybe she’s just 26 years old and wanted to take a provocative photo — God forbid!”, she suggests.
Both Hoepfner and Craighead’s assessments suggest that the cover is just more overtly sexual and that’s why people feel uncomfortable. But I would actually consider the Man’s Best Friend cover as less overtly sexual than some of her other stunts— say, her “Juno” sex positions. In a conversation for The New York Times, Stella Bugbee and Marie Solis ponder how this image could feel so “pornographic,” likening it to notorious fashion-sex photographers of the early 2000s (Terry Richardson and Helmut Newton), and yet, per Solis, “this one feels curiously sexless.”
Indeed, some commenters sensed that the tension within this image has less to do with the “amount of sex” and rather with its audience. “How is this not just appealing to the male gaze?? insanely misogynistic imagery,” one X commenter protested.
Carpenter has often been credited with expressing sexuality for the “female gaze.” This term is attributed to artists that subvert the male gaze, ie. the sexualized objectification of female subjects to no substantial end other than the pleasure of male viewers. In a Substack piece titled, “Yes, there’s such a thing as a ‘female gaze.’ But it’s not what you think,” Stefani Forster suggests that the female gaze does imply male objectification, but rather, centers the female experience, instead of reducing women to an image of sexuality. “If the male gaze is about seeing, the female gaze is about experiencing,” Forster writes.
But the binary of those two gazes can become complicated. Craighead specifically questions why a woman cannot aim to appeal to men, even position themselves as submissive, and still feel sexy. “If a slightly submissive photo is sending them reeling, who knows what would happen if they laid their eyes on the Sex book,” she jokes in reference to Madonna’s similarly provocative 1992 coffee table book.
The debate about whether women should police their sexual expression vis-à-vis the male gaze is a much greater and easily futile one. However, I think if we’re going to feel uncomfortable about this image, it should not simply be because the woman is submissive; it should be because that woman is experiencing elements of violence. Of the entire image, I’m more concerned with the way the man is pulling her hair than the act of Carpenter kneeling in front of him.
Submission is not inherently degrading or dehumanizing; but playing with sexual submission or, more broadly, appealing to the male gaze does not necessitate violence. And the continuum of sexual expression should not place violence as the pinnacle of liberation. It would be, if anything, regressive to reduce discomfort with violent sex to prudish tendencies. Women do not have to claim some higher level of liberation in order to feel comfortable with this image.
Of course, many commenters taking Carpenter’s side, including Craighead, point out that the image must have a deeper meaning and that people should not jump to conclusions. Perhaps the album or a music video may create a broader story around the cover that reveals its empowering irony. But we can never truly know whether or not Carpenter had “reason” for creating the cover. I generally assume that she made that decision out of her own desire, and for that, I have no interest in policing her.
Many women’s experiences with sex, whether in the art they make and consume or in their personal lives, will involve appealing to the male gaze. Solis and Bugbee reference an artist that immediately came to my mind: Addison Rae, and her music video for “Diet Pepsi,” in which they claim she appeals to older tropes of female sexuality, once viewed as entirely degrading to women. Rae doesn’t necessarily pitch her sexuality as feminist. In the video, she’s grinding, fondling, ass-shaking and licking all over the male subject, who remains a stoic observer in the driver’s seat of a car. She portrays a pin-up, burlesque kind of sexuality—one that Carpenter has often been compared to—that some may deem as very “male gaze-y.” And yet, I don’t recall any internet debate following Rae’s video because, as Bugbee says, it’s “simple-syrup” sexuality: It’s devoid of violence.
Sadly, the male gaze often insinuates violence towards women; as I’ve written about before, porn—which has a significantly male-dominated viewership—overwhelmingly portrays women in violent contexts. But just because violence represents a part of our culture’s male-dominated understanding of sex does not mean that we should treat it with the broad-sweeping goal of feminist reclamation.
I have no right to dictate what people do in their personal sex lives. In her New York Times opinion essay titled “The Troubling Trend of Teen Sex,” Peggy Orenstein cites a study from an anonymized Midwestern university, in which two-thirds of women in a survey of 5,000 said a partner had choked them during sex. And despite many of the women whom Orenstein spoke to recalling experiences of non-consensual choking, a sizable number reported that they were “enthusiastic,” that they had “requested it.”
It is true that many people have had consensual and even enjoyable sexual experiences that involve elements of power play and tendencies toward violence. Maybe Carpenter’s cover is just an artistic reflection of those controversial desires. However, violence, even in a consensual sexual space or an artistic photoshoot, is still violence. The lines of consent become trickier and more sensitive once the stakes of sex increase, even if we believe we completely understand what we are entering into.
As I’ve said, policing women’s sexual choices should never be the goal of this discourse. Our personal sex lives are rich with context, and I hope that most people who enthusiastically interact with violent sexual acts, such as choking or hair-pulling, have felt comfortable enough with their partner to talk them through and have a truly consensual experience.
But we can monitor the way we speak about sex—especially expressions that lack that personal context, like album covers—and our tendencies as feminists to defend them in any light, no matter how troubling, for fear of restricting women as opposed to liberating them.
We do not need to be OK with violence. Each of us has the personal autonomy to consider it, be conscious of it, oppose it, or even play with it. But when we look at an image of a woman having her hair pulled like the leash of a dog, it is only human—and important—that we feel uncomfortable.
