She knows sex sells. That doesn’t make her a feminist – or make her music any more interesting
When Sabrina Carpenter unveiled the cover for her new album, Man’s Best Friend, in June this year, it almost broke the internet. Since becoming a megastar in 2024, Carpenter has been known for her overt sexuality – unavoidable when one of your lyrics is “I’m so f***ing horny” and your photo shoots are unnervingly similar to scenes from Lolita – but this, an image of her on all fours, having her hair pulled by a man in a suit as though she were a dog on a lead, was, for many, a step too far. The debate went on for weeks: Carpenter is setting a bad example. Get over it, it’s satire. She’s pandering to the male gaze. She’s owning her sexuality. Everyone had something to say about it.
You might think that an artist capable of generating this much controversy would be doing something musically interesting, too. Look at the likes of Madonna and Prince – sex and pop have gone hand in hand for decades, and the exploration of taboos has been the pathway to revolutionary and era-defining music. Alas, Man’s Best Friend – released in full today – proves an album does not become interesting just because it’s had thousands of Substacks written about its cover.
It’s not that it’s particularly bad – it’s just unmemorable TikTok slop. It makes sense, really: TikTok is a visual platform, and Man’s Best Friend needs a strong visual to sell itself. Using winking or subversive imagery to reclaim your sexuality isn’t unfeminist per se – but it can start to feel that way when it becomes clear that the image is really all you’re selling. This album – mostly co-written with pop titans Amy Allen and Jack Antonoff – is slickly made, glossy and fun, easy on the ears, but ultimately incoherent and unfeeling, fuelled almost exclusively by aesthetic.
In among the sparkling synths, twanging banjos, lounge beats and 80s basslines there is sex, and plenty of it – but it’s surface level. It’s sex as an idea, sex as a joke, sex as an image, rather than anything that tells us what it means to her or even how it feels. The main takeaway is something we already know: sex sells.
On “Tears”, Carpenter sings the pearl-clutching line, “I get wet at the thought of you…” – which soon reveals itself to be sarcastic, or at least ironic, as the chorus continues: “Being a responsible guy / Treating me like you’re supposed to do / Tears run down my thighs.” It will feel as thrillingly naughty to sing along to as it is to hear for the first time. It’s empowering. It’s a good joke. But so are plenty of memes – the song, and the album, struggle to push beyond this dimension of quippy images (“My slutty pyjamas”, she sings on “My Man on Willpower”) and lip-syncable soundbites (“A girl who knows her liquor is a girl who’s been dumped,” so goes “Go Go Juice”).
That said, sex can only be a joke when it’s a given – and it has become so much a part of what Carpenter does that there is barely a recognition of the fact that it’s there. There is, undeniably, power in this lack of embarrassment and apologism: it’s difficult to imagine even 10 years ago a woman – or, in fact, a man – singing so openly about sex. Yet it’s also the case that, just like on her last album, Short ‘n’ Sweet, Carpenter dedicates all 12 tracks of Man’s Best Friend to talking about, thinking about, complaining about, pining after, lamenting, and taking the piss out of men.
It is funny to use a country ballad to call a man “stupid”, “slow” and “useless”, as she does on “Manchild”, the album’s opener and best song – yet it’s also difficult to justify why, given this incompetence, these men are still permanently at the front and centre of every song. Does Carpenter even exist on her own terms? She’s smarter, sexier and funnier than them, sure – but whether she’s lamenting their idiocy or craving their attention (“He’s busy, he’s working / He doesn’t have time for me”), she appears unrenderable without them.
This is a shame, not only because it makes for a dull 40 minutes, but because Carpenter is an extremely gifted performer. “Espresso” was catchy, yes, but it was a smash largely because of the funny, fun, charismatic way in which Carpenter delivered it. She has risen to great heights because of her personality and magnetism, and her songs – save for one or two – simply do not live up to it.
Her Disney-channel training comes through in everything she does: she can slip on a character, perform a lyric with theatre-kid expressiveness, command a stadium crowd, draw an eye even as a tiny speck on a faraway stage. Her vocals are consistently fantastic (showcased here on “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night”). But when Man’s Best Friend lurches from smooth R&B to 90s trip-hop to calypso all the way back to modern country, it’s difficult not to feel like we are being upsold a bad product in gorgeous packaging – initial delight never giving way to euphoria, striking images never translating to meaning.
In one of the many opinion pieces on the album cover earlier in the summer, Vogue described the video for “Manchild” – an entertaining few minutes of ridiculous road-movie pastiche in which a Daisy-Duke-clad Carpenter hitchhikes across the desert with varyingly terrible men – as “a masterclass in satire”. I admit that “Manchild” is a good, perhaps even great, pop song. It’s catchy and zeitgeisty; Carpenter is brilliant in its video because she is a brilliant actress and performer, her movement and facial expressions telling the story. But satire? I don’t think so. Aside from proclamations of feminist revolution, it’s this kind of sycophantic exaggeration that worries me.
If anything, Carpenter is giving us a masterclass in advertising. Because by cooking up a storm about her image, we have collectively managed to say a whole lot about an artist that is not herself saying very much at all.
