Sabrina Carpenter mainstreams cutesy violence towards women

With a deliberateness that did not escape critics and onlookers, the Carpenter-fed algorithm had suddenly decided to choke us on her sweet and frothy song “Espresso” in such a relentless fashion that we soon ended up drinking it down, begging for more. “Move it up, down, left, right, oh, switch it up like Nintendo,” I and plenty of other people too old for her dire Gen Z, Taylor Swiftian fare, found ourselves singing it anyway, day and night, on its release last year. “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know. That’s that me espresso.” Sleep was certainly not improved by the earworm of the song.

In fact, I thought at first that Carpenter was a bot because the songs are such calculated, algorithmic pop, from top to bottom. But it turns out she is real, after a fashion, and has made quite a name for herself being a horny little blonde. It’s not just “Espresso”, with its imprecation to move “it” up and down and to the side. It’s, well, all of it. Her latest chart-topper is “Manchild”, whose video is largely focused on her buttocks, revealed by micro jean shorts, as she leers at the man who stops for her on a desert highway. Then there are her “nonsense outros,” ad libs bits at the end of her concerts lauded for the way they are tailored to the location, which are mostly some variation of telling the city it is “the hottest.” To LA: “I’ve got a personality, but no tits… Los Angeles, your energy is big dick.” A Shakespearian wit she is not.

Gen Z, eh? You can’t win. They’re the sexless generation, all stern feminism and anxiety and androgyny (think Billie Eilish) but also drenched in lashings of overdone ladette that would have made the Spice Girls blush. Certainly, poor old love never gets a look-in.

Anyhoo, the whiplash caused by Carpenter’s generation’s punitive instincts and predilection for taking offense, knocked together with their disturbing taste for the violently sexual, gives way to frequent confusion and controversy, the latest of which has arisen over Carpenter’s cover art for her album Man’s Best Friend.

Formerly, the cover art saw Carpenter on her hands and knees in one of her signature micro outfits, all sexy curves, bulges in the right four places and lean arcs of winsome muscle, looking at camera while her luscious blonde mop is yanked by a suited man whose face is unseen. As far as imagery goes, it’s actually incredibly boring, and a bit sad. As someone who read all four Fifty Shades of Greys when they came out more than a decade ago, and as a long-time listener of America’s iconic agony aunt and sex podcaster Dan Savage, the whole: “I’m cute and in charge and I like being roughed up in the bedroom” thing does not feel fresh and shocking or (to me) liberated. We get it: BDSM is in, and as per the algorithm, it’s gone cutesy and mainstream.

Understandably, though, some raised a feminist eyebrow, and others even without the feminist carapace wondered if the message of this album cover didn’t give young women, her fans, the idea that violence towards women was somehow fine, and definitely hot, as long as it is part of a sexy tableau.

But their concern is pretty impotent now, for that ship passed in the years since Duke student’s Karen Owen’s legendary “f**k list” of 2010, a leaked Excel spreadsheet ranking the sexual performance of members of the Duke lacrosse team, which noted her preference for being bruised through rough sex. Since then, we have all been forced to reckon with the trend of “rough” sex, the vogue even in regular hookups for choking and even worse (but it’s all fine because it is meant to be consensual!)

Carpenter’s cover ought to have just been another high-gloss outing for this kind of thing; no big deal. Why, then, has the album art suddenly changed to a demure picture of her holding on to the arm of a tuxedoed man? This change, she said, was “approved by God.”

Well, OK then. One assumes this is all part of the joke: raunchy submissive pop multi-millionaire “bows” playfully to backlash and simply selects “demure mode”. The reference to God, though, is a bit weird. Either it’s a send-up of the whole notion of female purity or it’s a sop to the everyfan who, in America anyway, may well think God should call shots like this. He does already with a number of saucy-but-pure influencers and other entertainers.

At the end of the day, both covers represent two pre-determined sexy settings. Carpenter’s music is similarly two-note: sexy and playful by turns. But to this wizened old millennial anyway, neither mode is particularly interesting.