I want to tell you a story. A story about how one image—one bold, provocative cover—became a lightning rod not just for Sabrina Carpenter, but for how we police women’s voices, feelings, and interpretations. It’s not just about me. It’s about how any survivor, any person with trauma, any person with nuance is expected to choose one read and shut up. Keep reading—this might not go the direction you expect.
I. The Image, the Reaction, the Rules of the Game
It began with the album cover itself: Sabrina Carpenter on all fours in a black mini dress, a suited man off-frame dragging a fistful of her blond hair. That cover didn’t just hint at submission or objectification—it leaned into tropes of pet-like posturing, dominance, hair-pulling, and control. It’s a powerful visual that asks: who is doing the looking, and who is being looked at?
Some defended it as satire, irony, or shock value. Others saw it as regressive. Glasgow Women’s Aid even called it “pandering to the male gaze” and “regressive,” citing its element of control and violence. Sabrina later released alternate covers calling one “approved by God,” which signals that she was already aware of, and leaning into, the controversy.
From the start, it’s not obvious which side she’s on. But that ambiguity is part of the power.
A few weeks later, she brought Drag Race queens and trans rights signs to her MTV VMA performance. One commenter summed up the dissonance: “Making up for that tone-deaf album cover?” And it wasn’t an outlier opinion. It speaks to how difficult it is for the public to accept contradiction from women in pop.
II. My Initial Response (and Why It Mattered)
When I first saw it, the image brought domestic abuse to mind, not because I believe kink = abuse, but because the stylistic choices and framing can trigger that impression.
I commented that it evoked domestic violence. When I shared part of my own experience with DV, I wasn’t trying to forever victimize myself—I was offering context for why the image hit me the way it did. I was also concerned for other women who might be triggered, because I know how much suffering PTSD causes.
I also feared the album cover could backfire and possibly perpetuate more abuse through its influence. It might be just one straw added to the haystack of violent porn and objectification already saturating the internet and entertainment.
I’m not a prude or against kink or BDSM when it’s practiced ethically and with consent—in fact, in one comment I even offered advice that if the intent is roleplay rather than harm, hair should be pulled closer to the root to avoid the non-pleasureful sort of pain, unless you’re into that kind of thing… I won’t kink shame. I simply offered one possible reading. But these days, especially on Facebook, it seems people are always looking for a fight.
What followed wasn’t debate. It was a pile-on of ad hominem attacks and misrepresentations. I was mocked, accused of “dumping trauma,” dismissed as hysterical, told to get therapy, called out for “playing the victim.” Others mutated my argument, claiming I said things I never said. Some invoked personal trauma as a weapon to invalidate mine. One person accused me of being “mid-transition” even though I’m not. That cruelty was irrelevant—but it was also bigoted.
I should also note that years ago, I was reactive and had a nearly zero-tolerance lens toward anything that even resembled objectification. But I’ve spent time doing exposure therapy to help regulate my nervous system and reduce emotional pain. Some people may think that invalidates my points—but I believe it strengthens them. That work gave me the tools to understand why images like this can trigger some people and also helped me learn how to hold multiple interpretations at once.
Here’s something worth stating clearly: this dynamic isn’t unique to me. It’s part of the cost of speaking as someone who’s survived or lives with trauma. Any woman, any person who’s experienced harm in their life, is often forced into an emotional straightjacket: either stay quiet or risk being mocked for caring.
Many of the voices in that thread likely weren’t even fans of Sabrina. They weren’t making arguments grounded in her discography or artistic intent. They were using her and me as proxies to defend or attack generalized ideas about women. They criticized the image and simultaneously used it as an excuse to criticize me—and women in general. That’s not sincere critique. That’s signal-shaming.
III. The Turn: Listening, Reading, Noticing
It was listening to the album that made me appreciate the depth of the contrast between image and content. At first glance, the cover screams “submission.” But the songs? They bite back.
Take “Manchild.” It’s not a love ballad. It mocks men for emotional immaturity, for failing at basic behavior. Sabrina doesn’t beg — she calls out. “Won’t you let an innocent woman be?” she coos, layering sweetness over critique. The song begins with:
“You said your phone was broken, just forgot to charge it
Whole outfit you’re wearing, God, I hope it’s ironic
Did you just say you’re finished? Didn’t know we started
It’s all just so familiar, baby, what do you call it?”
Or look at “Tears.” It leans disco, but lyrically it’s razor-sharp: she jokes that a man being basically competent is enough to arouse her. It’s satire with a sting. In the music video, she pole dances while singing the song with lyrics like, “I get wet at the thought of you / being a responsible guy”—a cheeky juxtaposition of hypersexualized performance and exasperated standards. The video also features drag performers and trans representation, underlining Sabrina’s alignment with queer visibility and layered self-expression.
She frames themes of heartbreak, anger, desire, disappointment. There’s self-critique in there too, not just projection. In interviews, she’s said the cover was about control: “being in on your lack of control and when you want to be in control.”
That said, not every message in Sabrina’s broader discography screams feminist solidarity.
For example, I initially thought the track “Taste” from her sixth studio album Short n’ Sweet (2024) was about being a side chick—and I wasn’t alone. A quick scroll through fan reactions shows that others had the same first impression. With lyrics like:
“You’re wonderin’ why half his clothes went missin’ / My body’s where they’re at”
“I heard you’re back together and if that’s true / You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you”
—it’s understandable. But a closer read suggests something different: she’s not actively seeing someone else’s partner, she’s reflecting on a past dynamic. The lyric “Now I’m gone” suggests she’s out of the picture. So while the tone is still petty and provocative, it doesn’t depict her as a willing side chick — more like a thorn in the side of someone’s reconciliation. It’s cheeky, bold, and not without controversy.
Back to Man’s Best Friend: While the album plays with biting commentary, it’s important to acknowledge that different schools of feminism interpret provocative imagery (and many other things, such as sex work) differently. For some, visual boldness (whether in fashion, posture, or persona) is a way to reclaim space traditionally policed by patriarchy. Others view it as a perpetuation of harmful archetypes, depending on how and where the power is situated. These tensions don’t cancel each other out—they highlight the diversity within feminist discourse.
Take Kate Nash, for example. In 2023, she launched an OnlyFans campaign called “Butts for Tour Buses” to fund her tour independently. I didn’t expect it from her at all—not because I thought she was above it, but because I hadn’t familiarized myself with who she was—I just listened to her 2007 Made of Bricks album on repeat and had formed a different idea of who she was. So when I saw the campaign, it surprised me. Especially since she hadn’t released an album since 2013, and I’d found myself wondering what had happened to her. (She has since returned with a new album in 2024: 9 Sad Symphonies.)
It wasn’t about titillation—it was a performance art critique on how artists are forced to commodify themselves to survive in the streaming era. She used the platform to blur the line between objectification and authorship, showing how the music industry often demands exposure without offering security. And because sex sells, it was also a very smart move to draw more attention to the issue. Her message: if you’re going to sell my image, I want to be the one selling it.
“If you work in the music business or care about music you should repost this and tag @spotify @spotifyuk & @livenation @livenationuk or start your own protest. It’s time to start being vocal without worrying about being punished. They’ve built an ivory tower & they’ve leaving artists behind, it’s unethical & unsustainable. Album countdowns, playlists & billboards don’t cut it anymore. The music industry needs to pay up. I’m not scared to be vocal & neither should you be.”
Kate Nash on an Instagram reel in which she took her tour bus to outside the London offices of Spotify, Live Nation, and the Houses Of Parliament
VI. Art, Ownership, and Misunderstanding
These kinds of artistic choices—like Nash’s, or perhaps Capenter’s—don’t come from a monolith of feminism. And I know firsthand how complex this conversation can be.
In the past, I’ve been called a hypocrite for doing pole dance, one burlesque show, and one go-go dance performance, and for sharing my dance content and amateur alternative modeling on social media.
What those critics don’t understand is the deeper context:
- I had lost 145 pounds, and these performances were about reclaiming my body and celebrating what it could do.
- It was cathartic. Dance became a way to process emotion, especially grief and healing.
- Pole dancing in particular made me feel strong. (Fun fact: pole inversions release endorphins. I never felt more like a powerful grown-ass woman and simultaneously playfully embracing my inner child than when I was training.)
- My intention was never to titillate. I’ve even used the slogan: “I want to be art, not fapping fodder.”
- It’s a reserved space. People choose whether to follow or watch. I wasn’t putting it on highway billboards. And I fully expect criticism for sharing myself in this article, but that’s kind of the point of this piece—interrogating how we judge female expression.
- I’ve been in relationships where some or all love languages were neglected, often due to emotional abuse in an attempt to control my behavior or due to a partner’s neurodivergence (which is a spectrum with different challenges for different people), despite my healthy and available sexuality to them. Sharing dance became a healthy outlet to reclaim that emotional feedback loop on my own terms.
“My man on his willpower / Is something I don’t understand
Lyrics from “My Man on Willpower” from Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album.
He fell in love with self restraint / And now it’s getting out of hand
He used to be literally obsessed with me / I’m suddenly the least sought after girl in the land
Oh my man on his willpower / Is something I don’t under
Something I don’t understand”
Since becoming disabled, I’ve been on an unwelcome hiatus from dance. Losing that outlet has been deeply difficult. It was more than expression: it was identity, therapy, strength, and joy. I can only hope that with more treatment and physical therapy, I’ll be able to return to it someday.
So when people react to women in pop (or to me) based only on surface optics, they miss the full picture. Empowerment and expression aren’t always about who’s watching. Sometimes, it’s about reclaiming something you were told not to enjoy. They operate in dialogue with systemic issues: economics, control, performance, pleasure, and resistance.So no, I’m not erasing my first reaction. That emotional reading was valid. But I also hold the possibility that the cover is a Trojan horse: baiting the gaze, then subverting it.
IV. Sabrina’s Subversion in Context
Sabrina’s transformation is also part of a larger pop cultural arc: the Disney-to-pop pipeline. Like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera (who Carpenter is a huge fan of, and Aguilera has embraced), Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez before her, she’s made a deliberate pivot from clean-cut, hyper-polished teen star to a provocative pop icon who still leans into that glossy aesthetic.
While it’s not inherently wrong to evolve, this well-trodden path has uncomfortable subtext: a cultural hunger to sexualize women exactly as they transition out of girlhood. The public watches and waits, and then critiques the result… no matter how it’s styled. It’s worth asking whether Sabrina is playing into that pipeline, breaking it apart, or both.
Sabrina’s current persona leans into vintage-inspired, hyperfeminine glamour. She’s described Man’s Best Friend as “glossy, confident pop … served with a wink,” and fashion profiles highlight her embrace of soft pastels, sequins, and lingerie silhouettes that nod to retro “dream girl” aesthetics. This carefully styled visual identity isn’t accidental, it’s part of the duality she appears to be playing with.
This isn’t the first time pop has flirted with contradiction, but Sabrina’s is distinct in how direct it is.
Madonna weaponized sexuality and taboo, famously blending eroticism and Catholic imagery in “Like a Prayer” and “Erotica.” These performances weren’t just provocative, they were confrontational statements about sexual control. (Rolling Stone)
Peaches built her career on radical sexual expression and gender-blurring. Her lyrics in songs like “Fuck the Pain Away” and her visuals subvert traditional power structures, using vulgarity to command rather than be commanded. (Pitchfork)
Fiona Apple, particularly with “Criminal,” embodied vulnerability and confrontation at once. Her music videos, stripped of gloss, often put viewers in uncomfortable intimacy. She didn’t hide her trauma, she worked with it. (New Yorker)
Sabrina, however, doesn’t shed polish or trip into avant-garde rejection of conventional beauty standards. She keeps it glamorous enough to get attention, then pulls the rug from under the viewer.
Billie Eilish is another useful comparison. In her early visuals, she obscured her body, controlled what was seen, when, how. And in songs like “Your Power,” from Happier Than Ever, she critiques male exploitation of women:
“Try not to abuse your power / I know we said that we’re not through / But that don’t make it right.”
It’s soft, but searing. It’s critical of industry norms and real-life imbalance.
In her solo project, Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES writes lyrics that challenge male behavior directly. Her 2023 debut solo single, “Are You Awake?”, takes a more intimate, emotionally stripped-down approach, but still centers a woman’s emotional needs. And her 2024 follow-up, “Change Shapes,” from Vicious Creature, critiques performative masculinity and toxic relational cycles—further exploring themes of control and harm that she’s been outspoken about in interviews. She’s been outspoken about misogyny in music, both in and out of interviews.
Christina Aguilera, in particular, challenged this paradigm early on. Her 2002 feminist anthem “Can’t Hold Us Down,” featuring Lil’ Kim, directly criticized gendered double standards in sexuality: “The guy gets all the glory the more he can score / While the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore.” The song appears on Stripped, the same album where Aguilera shed her bubblegum pop persona for something bolder and more confrontational. In the “Dirrty” video, she wore triangle bikini tops, chaps with exposed short-shorts, and a microskirt, claiming space as both an artist and a sexual being. Aguilera didn’t just lean into sexuality, she used it to provoke, reclaim, and confront the culture that tried to control it.
She also fully embraces Sabrina. In a playful Instagram video, the two appear together saying that Sabrina is Christina’s daughter. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but symbolic — a literal passing of the torch from one subversive pop star to another.
So Sabrina sits between those worlds: accessible pop and sharp critique. She doesn’t demand an exclusive reading.
V. Why This Matters, Beyond Me
These dynamics apply to anyone who’s survived, or is living with, harm. Whether it’s domestic violence, emotional abuse, coercion, trauma from childhood—critics often insist you must present a single, palatable narrative. If your instincts shift, you’re inconsistent, too sensitive, “overreacting.”
But trauma is not linear. Growing isn’t linear. Interpretations can evolve without making the first one “wrong.” We should want complexity, not purity tests of emotion.
The maddening part is how rapidly people reject nuance in women’s expression. They say “choose a single read or shut up” in ways rarely demanded of men. In that thread, people excoriated me for offering one reading of an image that can hit many people differently. They denied my experience. They insulted. They gaslit.
But that kind of dogpile is not about you. It’s about how fragile our culture is around women having layered thoughts about sexuality, trauma, beauty, violence. It’s about how much people want women to perform comfort, never discomfort.
When Beauty Becomes a Battleground: Tova Leigh’s Exposure of Verbal Violence
Online, there’s one rule that seems to hold no matter what a woman looks like: she will be criticized.
On Instagram, creator Tova Leigh frequently demonstrates this through a striking format. She shares a single image of a well-known, often conventionally attractive woman (the kind that media has told us is the best kind of woman) and then follows it with a carousel of cruel, degrading comments from men. The men’s faces appear after their words, underscoring just how shameless and ordinary this behavior has become.
In one of her videos featuring Sabrina Carpenter, Leigh highlights how even someone as young, petite, and hyperfeminine as Sabrina is not immune. Some of the vile comments are: “Be great with a bag to cover face”, “Solid 3”, and “if her ass and tits were bigger, sure”.
One image. Dozens of attacks, simply for existing while female in the public eye.
While I primarily see misogyny come from a lot of men, I want to note many women make horrible comments about female celebrities too, and I see it when I subject myself to comment threads almost every day. It is disappointing, to say the least, and that brings things back to the internalized misogyny I mentioned earlier.
It drives home a brutal point: no matter what you do, someone will be waiting to take you down. Perfect makeup, clear skin, styled hair, a fit body, disproportionately curvy proportions, and a slew of other so-called ideals (many of which completely contradict each other). None of it protects you from the dissection. Beauty doesn’t buy immunity. Sometimes, it paints a bigger target.
Leigh’s work lays this pattern bare. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
VI. Final Reflection & Invitation
Women are multidimensional. Instead of defaulting to criticism at every opportunity, we should do more asking—more listening—to understand the fuller context of their choices, their art, and their self-expression. Curiosity creates space for complexity in ways that condemnation never will.
I am not walking this back. I’ll always say the image initially made me think of domestic violence (it has since grown on me a bit, while I still recognize it causes discomfort). And I can also say I believe, with some evidence, that Sabrina may be performing subversion. Those are not mutually exclusive.
This record might mark a shift in how feminist pop is packaged: the idea that provocation and critique can cohabit in the same aesthetic. That’s a risky move. It may yield misinterpretations—especially in a mainstream pop landscape that often struggles to handle this level of complexity. But it also expands what pop can do.
If you’re reading this and you’ve ever felt silenced for pointing out nuance, I see you. If you want to call something out and also enjoy it, you can. If you want to evolve your opinion, do it. Don’t let culture—or the lack of emotional intelligence and unwillingness to intellectualize nuance—guilt you into sameness.
You can be critical, kind, evolving, and honest…at the same time.