If you tuned into pop radio stations last summer, you probably heard plenty of Sabrina Carpenter, the 26-year-old glam, blonde pop star who at the time was dominating playlists. Indeed, Taylor Swift herself dubbed summer 2024 the “Summer of Sabrina,” after Carpenter joined Swift as an opening act on the groundbreaking Eras tour. And even if you don’t know Carpenter by name, chances are you’ve heard her biggest solo hit from last year, the one Billboard crowned its Global Song of the Summer and that earned her a Grammy for best pop solo performance: “Espresso.”
Last week, however, many feminists online—including some within Carpenter’s own fanbase—soured on her because the album cover for her upcoming Man’s Best Friend had seemingly crossed a respectability line. A photograph by Bryce Anderson shows Carpenter kneeling in a black minidress, her blonde hair held up like a leash by a faceless man in a suit standing beside her. She wears a collar that reads: “Man’s Best Friend.” The pose is deliberately provocative and patently retro, right on brand for Carpenter and unmistakably designed to stir controversy. Marie Solis of The New York Times pointed out that the album cover “seems caught in a dichotomy of—is it oppressive or empowering?” One feminist group called it “regressive,” while others accused Carpenter of feeding “the male gaze” and embracing imagery that reinforces harmful power dynamics. “Sabrina putting us back 50 years,” wrote one fan on Carpenter’s Instagram post sharing the new cover.
Many of Carpenter’s fans quickly sprang to her defense, arguing that those accusing her of lacking social awareness might need to take a lesson in satire. As one fan wrote: “I interpret the image as deliberate satire on gender roles—a critique of the idea that women should be loyal and submissive, like ‘a man’s best friend,’ i.e., a dog. The provocative nature of the image seems to be the point: to highlight how absurd that expectation is.” The most ardent fans, then, believe that Sabrina is trolling everyone: She’s showing how galling the patriarchy is by putting it on direct display.
One could even say she’s pulling a move not unlike Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” era, leaning into the public’s caricatures of her as a serial dater or a hopeless romantic. “I go on too many dates/ But I can’t make ’em stay/ At least that’s what people say,” Swift sang in one of her most iconic songs. Carpenter, like Swift before her, seems to be playing with and subverting the criticism of her as a ditzy, buxom beauty rather than cowering before it. She’s the artist; say what you want, she is who she is. Carpenter’s 2022 song “because i liked a boy,” draws on this public scrutiny: “I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut/ I got death threats fillin’ up semi-trucks/ Tell me who I am, guess I don’t have a choice.” And it does seem telling that, like Swift before her, she’s making a deliberate choice in the face of all this scrutiny: to stay funny (a trademark of who she is), relentlessly cheerful, sexy, and a star entirely of her own making—regardless of public opinion.
As such, the feminist penning this article is going to make a slightly different argument, one that isn’t about whether Carpenter is “oppressive” or “empowering,” either personally or in the styling of her album cover. Neither am I going to malign Carpenter, as many articles and podcasts have, by insisting she isn’t as smart or introspective as Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift in how they couch their lyricism and feminist imagery. Nor do I argue, as some fangirls have (even if I sympathize with them), that Carpenter is a media-literacy genius playing 4D chess.
No. What’s great about Sabrina Carpenter is that she gets a simple truth: Both feminists and women writ large are imperfect—and she sings about that. The relationships women have in their 20s often don’t reflect some enlightened feminist ideal of what relationships should be, because they involve two still-very-much-forming people, learning what they need from themselves, from each other, and from a future not yet fully fleshed out in the imagination. A future that largely depends on what that formation of self—and self with someone else—might look like in the long term (and what it actually feels like in the short term, too). On average, relationships in this stage of life last about two to four years. Most of Carpenter’s listeners are women (approximately 75 percent), and most are between 18–34 (about 70 percent), with another 20 percent skewing even younger, between 13 and 17. And what does Sabrina Carpenter do best? She has fun musing about these relationships and all their dynamics. She’s a pop star who offers women a few minutes of pure, unadulterated enjoyment—free from anyone’s criticism of their relationship choices, good or bad. They’re invited to sing along and have fun, to laugh, to play, to forget the drama (and the judgment!) that complicate their everyday romantic and friendship lives—and to commiserate with each other.
