Sabrina Carpenter has been cancelled in the court of public opinion for an album cover that was deemed Too Sexy and also A Bad Influence On Young Girls. This week, she’s rocketed straight to No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with her new single Manchild.
“Stupid / Or is it slow?” is how Carpenter describes her ideal man on the (incredibly catchy) song. But it could also describe the pitiful levels of comprehension evident in pop culture literacy these days from the younger folks.
If sex used to sell, it’s capital D Discourse that’s currently peak marketing. Ideally some discourse about how using sex to sell something is very bad. Carpenter’s crime was releasing the cover art for her upcoming album Man’s Best Friend. The photo shows her on all fours in a black dress, staring at the camera, while a suited figure fists their hand in her long blonde hair.
It was a week of heated debate, with Carpenter cast as the villainous harlot dangerously teaching foolish men into thinking women would like to be subjugated. To those of us born in a decade that began with Madonna’s BDSM themed coffee table book and ended on Britney photographed in her knickers in her childhood bedroom, the backlash is startling.
But today's Gen Zs are not only not having any sex, they’re apparently terrified of it. As the popular meme (taken from a now-deleted post from a Gen Z music fan) goes: “I’m 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter”.
There was a lot of wildly incorrect interpretation of “the male gaze” around Man’s Best Friend. Film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the phrase in 1975, to better discuss how male directors frame women on screen as passive objects. It’s a nifty theory for feminist film critique, but now it’s been mis-used by women reprimanding other women they perceive as performing their attractiveness for men. Unfortunately we may have to resign it to the graveyard of theory terms that have been perverted by pop psychology, along with gaslight and emotional labour.
Luckily I mainly saw the smart rebuttals. Women owning their sexuality is actually feminist! Being sexual is not a crime against women! I particularly enjoyed the theories about how Carpenter could well be about to pull a genius bait-and-switch on us. Maybe the album will be full of her wrestling with how to reclaim her sexuality from the miserable experience of heterosexual dating in the 21st century. My only critique is that the cover demonstrates improper hair pulling technique — you gotta grab it from the roots, not the ends.
Carpenter (who is 26, so squarely Gen Z) is clearly trying to leave her Disney Channel child star past in the dust. The same week the album cover came out she also posed on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, naked apart from a Lady Godiva-style blonde wig covering her modesty. And, as she points out in the interview, she’s not the one obsessed with sex. “Those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it,” she said. It’s not the love songs that top the charts — it’s the horny anthems.
I’ll admit, I did have a moment’s pause when I saw Carpenter live at London’s O2 earlier this year. Not because her performance was anything less than completely stellar (as it was at The Brits, and at Primavera Sound — yes, I’m obsessed with her). But there were an awful lot of literal children in the audience for a multi-hour set that is mainly about boys and shagging. She — infamously — debuts a new sex position each night for her song Juno, and gets the audience to crouch down and sing “Adore me, hold me and explore me/ I'm so f******' horny”.
But this is entirely the fault of the parents for assuming that ex-Disney star equates to child-friendly viewing. I was genuinely horrified to see a dad who had dressed his two young girls in matching merchandise shirts that have ‘CARPENTER 69’ on them. Again, it’s not the artist’s responsibility to ensure parents don’t put references to sex positions on their daughters’ backs.
It’s inappropriate to put young girls in sexualised clothing. What is appropriate is having frank conversations with them about their bodies, sex and autonomy. The best way to combat sexual abuse is to give girls — and boys — the language to discuss it when they’re still children, and not make sex something scary and taboo. This moral panic from Zoomers over a pop star not publicly denouncing consenting sexual activity is precisely the wrong way to go about it.
If everyone else is too afraid of sex to discuss it normally, maybe it’s a good thing that Carpenter sings freely about pleasure. The idea that famous young women have to be role models is tired and outdated. But I’m glad the new crop of women in pop have autonomy over how they are presented. The days of weird music execs in suits hounding teen singers to be skinny and sexy is thankfully over — you know that if Carpenter, Charli xcx or Chappell Roan are in their knickers it’s because it’s in their artistic vision.
Look, it wasn’t great that at 14 I thought that being a glamour model was an aspirational career. But I think it gave me a healthier attitude to sex than today’s turbocharged purity culture. Young women are being actively encouraged, via the rise of the Evangelical Christian right and Tradwife influencers, to get out of the workforce and back into the home where they can pop out a white nationalist-approved number of children.
Carpenter is outright rejecting that creepy narrative by embracing being sexy and a bit of a pervert — and chill about it. Gen Z are clearly just as obsessed with sex as every generation, it’s just manifesting in a weirdly prudish way where they get their rocks off policing who is having it or, horror, enjoying having it.
Even if Man’s Best Friend isn’t going to be an incredibly feminist takedown of heteronormative culture, it’ll be a bop. And maybe the frightened Gen Z can stay home and polish their purity rings, leaving the tour tickets to their braver Millennial elders.
India Block is a culture and lifestyle writer
