Is Sabrina Carpenter Subverting The Male Gaze—Or Submitting To It?

Is Sabrina Carpenter changing or is she just being misunderstood?

The 26-year-old built her pop persona on irony, retro glamour, and pink-coated flirtation. Thanks to her creativity, she's become a chart-topping, Grammy-winning star who’s drawn in crowds of girls screaming every lyric back at her – including the ones where she mocks men for being emotionally inept and chronically dependent. “Man-child / Why you always come a-running to me? / F*ck my life / Won’t you let an innocent woman be?” she sings on her latest single.

However, with Sabrina's new album Man’s Best Friend, the act of clowning men while pretending not to cater to them starts to fall apart, mainly because the visuals send a more confusing message. Maybe she’s not actually performing for the male gaze, but mimicking it – delivering sexiness in a way that’s meant to look like it’s for men, when it’s actually a wink to women. That could be the point. However, many argue that the execution feels so straight-faced, so visually faithful to submissive aesthetics, that the message gets muddled. The backlash has been swift because no one can tell if the visuals are meant to be ironic, sincere, or just another version of the hypersexualized pop star imagery we’ve already seen before.

This Is What Empowerment Looks Like? The Internet Discusses

The album cover alone has ignited a full-blown feminist discourse on social media. In it, Sabrina is seen on her knees, eyes turned toward the viewer, while an unknown man pulls her hair. She’s in a mini black dress with high heels posed like a pin-up. Unlike her usual covers, the vibe doesn’t come off as playful or flirty. If anything, it’s submissive. To drive it home, she posted a close-up of a heart-shaped dog collar engraved with Man’s Best Friend, and one of the vinyl inserts for the new album references Lolita. Yes, the book about an adult man named Humbert who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl.

Is this a commentary on how people see her, as her fans suggest? Or is it just more of the same hypersexual imagery we keep getting served in the name of modern feminism? Some fans have pointed out that the album cover is a reference to an old video from the 1980s, where a woman confronts a man about using a nearly identical image for an album cover: a naked woman on all fours, wearing a collar, with a man’s gloved hand holding a leash to her face. In the clip, she calls it offensive and sexist, and he brushes it off. It’s meant to show how absurd that era’s normalization of female submission was. It’s possible she’s trying to satirize how the male gaze has shaped femininity, reclaiming that imagery with a wink for the girls. But even if that’s the intent, the execution is so polished and faithful that the satire gets lost. It looks more like a replication than a rejection. Because the context is lost, the image stands on its own as something sleek and provocative rather than uncomfortable or exaggerated. So, for the teenage girls following her on social media, that distinction often doesn’t register. They’re not seeing critique because they’re seeing another image telling them what power is supposed to look like.

Satire only works when the exaggeration is obvious or when it’s punching up. This doesn’t do either. It’s too polished, too faithful to the original. And instead of challenging the message, it risks reinforcing it. At a time when pornified violence has already crept into real life (when choking, domination, and degrading dynamics have become normal in porn), this kind of imagery doesn’t feel humorous at all but complicit.

Still, fans have tried to defend her latest work. One user on X wrote, “Sabrina is obviously portraying it on the cover referring to how all of you said she’s for the ‘male gaze’. this is how YOU see her.” Yet, that interpretation assumes a level of nuance – and audience goodwill – that the image doesn’t earn. It doesn’t look like a statement on objectification at all. It just looks like objectification.

Even those who typically love Sabrina’s wink-nudge approach to sex are confused. One user wrote, “idc what anyone says this is literally so off putting, she is literally acting as a dog to the man in the cover. call me ‘too woke’ idc… literally no excuse for this being an actual album cover.” Dogs are obedient. They’re loyal, even when mistreated. The term for a female dog, a b*tch, has been used to describe women forever. That’s the reference she seemingly chose to tie to herself and her femininity. Why would any woman want to be seen that way?

User @KillingSwiftly quote-tweeted the cover of Sabrina in the Rolling Stone feature, where she’s completely naked (you’d think it was Playboy), writing, "superstar...more like p0rnstar atp. her whole career revolves around sex now."

So, what is Sabrina really trying to say?

Statement or Submission? No One’s Sure Anymore

In her Rolling Stone interview, she shrugs it off. “It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” she said. “They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it.”

But the problem isn’t that she sings about sex – musicians have been singing about lovemaking forever. The problem is that her visuals, now veering into submissive fetish imagery, are being served to a fanbase that includes teenage girls. Who’s consuming the art matters, but so does the message it’s sending.

In the same piece, she insists, “I truly feel like I’ve never lived in a time where women have been picked apart more, and scrutinized in every capacity. I’m not just talking about me. I’m talking about every female artist that is making art right now.” That’s true as well, but criticism doesn’t mean censorship. When you’re on all fours for an album cover while a man tugs your hair, the reactions aren’t invalid. Their gut reaction stems from seeing an image steeped in power dynamics similar to imagery from degrading 1950s ads.

I think she is referencing these too, but again, is it really on the viewer to get that? Or should her PR team have done a better job making the satire land?

Short n’ Sweet Was Different—And Here’s Why

While she’s leaned into this aesthetic before with Short n’ Sweet via pink, glitter, and coquette-coded visuals, it was girly in a way that felt made for women, not watched by men. There was seduction, sure, but it was rooted in self-possession. The imagery leaned into fantasy, but it was her own fantasy: exaggerated, hyper-feminine, fun, and self-styled. It celebrated control disguised as she teased and performed, but she didn’t do it through pressure or surrender. The female gaze tends to prioritize experience over display. It lingers on emotion, on interiority, on the power of choosing how to be seen. Short n’ Sweet gave the girls that. Even when she was dressed up in lingerie, she was winking with the girls. It was the kind of sexuality and femininity that felt private but shared as if it were a bedroom mirror moment with your best friend.

Man’s Best Friend doesn’t feel like that. What once felt like self-expression now feels more like a performance for someone else entirely. The focus has shifted from how she feels to how she’s being seen. With her on her knees for the album cover and naked under extensions for Rolling Stone, she’s handed us a visual cue: we know exactly who’s in power – and it’s not her. She’s a sex object, the subject of the gaze instead of a creator. The hair that once felt like an extension of her playful persona now acts as a cover-up. She’s not toying with the camera this time; there’s no satire, no ounce of humor in these visuals. Now, it feels like she’s at the mercy of it, as if someone behind the scenes finally said, “Don’t be too smart; be desirable,” and she listened. The control she once had over her image has been sanded down into something far more conventional, and whatever sense of edge or rebellion it once carried now feels more like a product designed to sell.

The Girls Are Watching, But They’re Not Buying It

People could argue that it’s all the same and that it’s all degrading. I’d argue you can tell the difference by looking at the mood it creates. A lot of men didn’t get turned on by Short n’ Sweet – they enjoyed it, maybe, but it wasn’t for them. The girls were the ones having fun with it. It was flirty, a little bratty, and felt like it belonged to the people performing it, not watching it. This new era is sexier, but in a way that can, and likely does, turn men on. And women notice that. 

And while some men on X have claimed she’s “not even hot” or “not their type,” let’s be honest with ourselves. Scroll through the comment section of Rolling Stone’s Instagram post and it’s gifs of cartoon characters drooling, wide-eyed emojis, and men saying things like “need that.” They’re ogling, they’re watching, and they’re engaging with the content exactly the way it was packaged to invite.

This isn’t about saying that men being emotionally and mentally stimulated by sexual imagery is inherently bad. That’s not the point, plus it's natural. Men and women simply process desire and entertainment in fundamentally different ways. Their brains are wired to read imagery, power, and sexuality through completely different lenses. What might feel playful or artistic to one audience can land as pure sexual availability to another.

Mixed Signals and a Missing Message

Meanwhile, the album’s lead single, Manchild, co-written with Jack Antonoff, shot to the top of the charts. The caption announcing it says, “This one’s about you!!” Fans took that as a dig at ex Barry Keoghan, whose tabloid romance with Carpenter unraveled under cheating rumors and scheduling conflicts. He’s not named, but he doesn’t need to be. The music (and the marketing) are all about taking control of the narrative, except the visuals still tell a different story.

That’s where it gets confusing. The message isn’t clear anymore. The songs say one thing, the visuals say something else. It’s hard to tell what she’s trying to say or who it’s really for. That might be why her fanbase – girls who once joked about men and shared their exhaustion with them – don’t know what to make of it now.

This is what happens when you blow up, and the message gets lost in translation. Because at a certain point, you’re no longer just Sabrina Carpenter, the individual. You become Sabrina Carpenter the brand. And that brand has a team behind it, a PR machine that operates in Hollywood, where the only aesthetic anyone seems to understand anymore is hypersexuality. Eventually, they start shaping the image, the visuals, the marketing. What once felt personal and was built for fans starts to feel like it belongs to someone else.

Maybe We Just Don’t Know What’s Sexy

There’s also the possibility that the backlash says more about us than it does about her. Maybe the discomfort isn’t about the image itself, but about our own shifting relationship with sex appeal. In a post-#MeToo, hyper-analyzed, internet-saturated world, a lot of people – especially women – are unsure how to interpret overt sexiness anymore. Everything has to be men's fault. But maybe Sabrina’s not trying to send a message at all. Maybe she just wanted to look hot. Maybe she’s not kneeling for the male gaze or playing into it, but simply experimenting with how femininity can look, without needing it to be wrapped in irony or empowerment. In that light, the blank stare and the pin-up styling aren’t submission or satire – they’re simply aesthetically pleasing and sexy. It’s meant to be an art form, but a woman’s sexual appeal too easily triggers people.

From "men are douchebags" to "I’ll be your good girl"?

Carpenter is no longer just a breakout star. She’s a cultural force, with kids dressing like her, tweeting her lyrics, and mimicking her looks. Unfortunately, as I've stated, she’s gone from breakout to brand, and what that brand is now teaching young women and girls is that being hypersexual is not only expected, but necessary. That this is what power looks like, when in reality, it’s the kind of image that often ends up doing more harm than good. It invites attention, but not always the kind that respects you. It encourages visibility, but at the cost of being taken seriously. Whether she means to or not, she’s reinforcing the idea that sex appeal is the shortcut and sometimes the only path to relevance.

When she wraps herself in bondage-coded symbolism while singing about being misunderstood, she’s trying to play both sides – and getting stuck between them. Not everything has to be empowering or feminist, but when the people who built you up saw you that way – and then you call your album Man’s Best Friend, pose like the dog, and brush off criticism with a wink – you can’t be shocked when the internet barks back.