When Sabrina Carpenter revealed the cover for her upcoming album Man’s Best Friend and sparked enormous backlash, she knew exactly what she was doing.
The image, which depicts Carpenter on her knees, in a short black dress and heels, holding the leg of a suited man as he yanks her hair, is shocking fans who expect female empowerment from the star.
On Instagram, @edersoaresx wrote, ‘Lol this cover art is so disgusting. As a fan I don’t like it :(.’ Reddit user Potential-Friend-133 said, ‘The first image is very triggering for me. I hate this. A LOT.’
But the outrage might be precisely the point. Haven’t we learned over and over again that Sabrina is an expert in shaping a narrative? Isn’t the entire ‘Sabrina-verse’ built around men being little more than background noise – accessories to the real story?
Why have we stopped trusting her when she’s never led us astray before?
Carpenter, who has spent the past year redefining pop stardom with viral hits like Espresso and the biting Please Please Please, isn’t new to irony.
She has emerged as a master of blending bubblegum visuals with sharp, subversive lyrics, often making herself the punchline to highlight something more profound.
Even a quick glance at Carpenter’s hyper-feminine aesthetic reveals just how political her whole persona is. The exaggerated lashes, the glossy lips, the babydoll dresses – it’s not just pop star glam; it borders on camp. In fact, it’s practically drag.
And that matters because drag, at its core, is about performance of gender, of beauty, and of power. When Carpenter leans this hard into a cartoonishly femme persona, she’s not just embodying traditional femininity, she’s performing it to the point of parody.
It becomes a kind of satire: A knowing wink at how femininity is constructed, consumed, and commodified.
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Her latest single, Manchild, already signals that she knows exactly what she’s doing. She called it ‘the embodiment of a loving eye roll,’ a phrase that could just as easily apply to the album cover.
In this light, the Man’s Best Friend imagery doesn’t read as an endorsement of submissiveness, but a satirical exaggeration of it.
The title alone, paired with the shot of a dog tag reading ‘Man’s Best Friend,’ is too on-the-nose to be sincere. It’s a visual joke, a commentary on how women are often treated as loyal accessories in relationships, or worse, as pets.
That said, the discomfort some fans feel isn’t unfounded – even satire can sting, especially in the current political climate.
Reddit user MuchSeaworthiness167 wrote: ‘I know it’s probably going to be ironic, but right now there’s no context… And this year of rights being walked back, the comatose woman being forced to be an incubator, a huge increase in pregnant mortality rates, the rise of trad wife content, all of it. It’s just like girl. Time and place.’
But perhaps ‘time and place’ is precisely what Carpenter is reflecting on.
We are, after all, living in a cultural moment where women’s rights are being clawed back in the US, where the UK is aggressively redefining legal womanhood, where the ‘trad wife’ aesthetic is glamorised on TikTok, and where female autonomy is still under threat.
In that sense, the image feels less like cheap shock tactics and ‘sex sells’ marketing, and more like a mirror – one that reflects a society that still enjoys seeing women on their knees.
Is it kind of hard to look at? Yes, but then so is the grim reality of rising inceldom among young men, and so are the terrifying statistics about femicide in the UK.
With this album cover, Carpenter steps beyond mainstream pop’s comfort zone and into the realm of art that risks being unpalatable in order to be unignorable.
She’s trading likability for impact, aesthetics for meaning, and in doing so, she’s sending a clear message: Being a woman – especially a visible, powerful one – is inherently political. So if she’s going to make music about womanhood, she’s not going to avoid the politics that come with it. She’s going to lean in.
And Carpenter isn’t the first to use provocative imagery to make this point.
Madonna spent her career turning religious and sexual imagery into social commentary.
Fiona Apple’s Criminal video featured her looking strung out and half-naked to critique the male gaze.
More recently, Doja Cat’s demonic visuals were misread as literal Satanism when they were really satirical jabs at parasocial fan culture and celebrity commodification.
What Carpenter is doing may be closer to Lana Del Rey’s now-infamous Norman F**ing Rockwell* era, where themes of self-destruction, co-dependency, and submission weren’t endorsements but complex critiques.
Lana was also called anti-feminist, until fans began unpacking how her portrayals of messy, broken femininity were actually layered and strategic, intended to make people reflect on their own relationships to these issues.
And in Carpenter’s case, the full context of the album (lyrics, videos, and rollout imagery) hasn’t even arrived yet.
And knowing her? We bet that image will make a whole lot more sense with more context. We may even get a reveal of who, exactly, is wearing the suit.
If we assume Carpenter is in control (and there’s little evidence to suggest otherwise: She’s co-writing, co-producing, and curating this era with precision), then Man’s Best Friend is not a regression: It’s a political provocation.
It’s maybe even a trap, daring us to underestimate her.
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