Sabrina Carpenter's album cover is not liberation - it’s glamorous despair

Pornified pop proliferates to mass applause and justification, while we all simultaneously wring our hands over teenage girls’ mental health

The photo depicts a beautiful woman in her late twenties kneeling on the floor, her hair tightly wound around a besuited man’s fist. Her lips are plumped and parted, she gazes doe-eyed at the camera, in a skin-tight short black dress.

The couple’s attire suggests they’ve been out at a swanky event; perhaps one where they laughed together, presenting an image of love and togetherness. Now, in the privacy of a hotel room, the faceless man will shed off any pretence this relationship is one of equals.

As ever, the woman performs for the camera. Her male partner’s face is an irrelevance.

I refer to the cover of American pop-star Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album ‘Man’s Best Friend.’ Anyone with a teenage daughter will know who that is.

The popular songstress has gained acclaim for her albums, with their pleasant blend of folksy-pop and cutesy, catchy lyrics, which Pitchfork magazine describe as ‘deliciously dumb and possibly genius.’

I can’t pretend to have known who she was before this week. My initial response to seeing her album cover was formed in ignorance of her work, but deep knowledge – and at least 20 years – of seeing similar imagery become ever more mainstream and ubiquitous.

To promote her album, Carpenter has also appeared naked – aside from white lacy stockings - on the cover of Rolling Stone. Once again on her knees, her voluminous hair was placed to ‘protect her decency’ as we used to call it.

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The internet has subsequently exploded with competing takes, which I imagine was the intention.

On the one hand, Sabrina’s fans, who deride those taking issue with the images: we’re lacking in ‘humour.’ We’re also unaware of the ‘irony’ Carpenter employs in her ‘choices.’ Salon Magazine’s Amanda Marcotte argues that young women who attend Sabrina’s concerts in their thousands are ‘simultaneously relishing femininity while sending it up.’

Carpenter’s schtick is therefore ‘camp for straight women,’ Marcotte argues, defending a stance that ‘feminists can’t let male porn producers be the only ones selling sex.’

This take is consistent if the root argument is that the pornification of everything is inevitable.

Also, that mandatory ‘femininity’ can somehow be liberating and not a prison. It’s going to happen anyway, women are expected to be this way, so why shouldn’t they coin in on the action?

On the other hand, however, far away from the world of glitzy-kitch and glamour of pop-stardom, we have hard-working, beleaguered women fighting strenuously against male violence, often on a shoe-string and in a hostile environment.

“We’ve fought too hard for this,” said Glasgow Women’s Aid in a social media post. “Carpenter’s cover takes us backwards, they argue, to a time when women were viewed solely as ‘pets, props and possessions.’ This isn’t ‘subversive, it’s regressive.”

I admit a weariness that pornified pop proliferates to mass applause and justification, while we all simultaneously wring our hands over teenage girls’ mental health.

In a world of Andrew Tate and accompanying incels, #MeToo and the devastating rise of domestic violence, a beautiful, talented, wealthy young woman stripping to her stockings and aping porn images can’t possibly be viewed as ‘empowering’ for anything other than her bank balance.

And fair enough, some would argue. She’s making a ‘choice’ to do this. Well, yes. And that can be many things, but it takes some chutzpah to call it ‘liberating for women,’ or remotely ‘feminist,’ as some are trying to.

In my twenties, when I was starting out as a performance poet in the early noughties, there was a notable appetite for burlesque. At late night cabarets during the Festival, such acts featured alongside male musicians and comedians. I’d take to the stage with spiky poems, almost entirely about dating, boozing, and sex.

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One evening, in a bit of frustration, I took to the mic and said, ‘I’d like to congratulate the programmers for their gender balance this evening, though I think I’m the only woman on the bill keeping her clothes on!’

I’d thought it an amusing quip, but instead was hissed. Oops. These days, no doubt, I’d get a social media pile-on and a reputation for being an ‘anti-sex feminist,’ which is activist speak for ‘joyless, prudish hag.’

But even at that early age, I was bored of it all. The constant push to make porn ordinary and the private act itself a public carnival. And that was pre-social media, pre-Cardi B and ‘WAP,’ the lyrics of which are unprintable.

It was also well before your average 12-year old had easy access to extremist depictions of group-sex and torture-pornography, in just a few clicks. Add fear to that previous boredom.

Porn is to sex what parkour is to walking down the street. It is performance – an often vicious one. I’m not sure it is possible to be ‘ironic’ about what it is doing to us.

Frankly, it is not just young people we need to worry about. Reports earlier this year showed a direct link between pornography addiction and adult men viewing images of child abuse. This is the context in which the ‘playful’ Sabrina is making her ‘choices.’

Just as Glasgow Women’s Aid are correct to say that images like Carpenter’s are regressive, I’d argue that mostly, they convey resignation: this is just how women are portrayed now, they’ll always be made to, so I’ll ‘subvert’ that by doing it to myself.

This isn’t liberation. It’s glamorous despair.