Posing as a dog ‘for the girls’: what in god’s name is going on with pop culture?
In her 1996 hit song “Ironic”, Alanis Morissette takes us through scenarios ranging from irritating (a black fly in your chardonnay) to downright devastating (a man’s long-awaited flight turning fatal). Ironically though, none of these situations are actually ironic. Much like Morissette, defenders of US singer Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover, titled Man’s Best Friend and featuring Carpenter’s hair being pulled like a dog on a lead by a faceless man while on her hands and knees, also seem to have a little trouble understanding the concept.
For most people, the image of a young woman posing as a dog and being dragged along by her hair by a man would be understood as yet another sexist and demeaning image. It is not even a particularly exaggerated version of the degrading presentation of women that advertising, pop culture and the entertainment industry surround us with every day.
Some fans of Carpenter, however, say that the cover, and other promotional material like her cover for Rolling Stone featuring her nude but for a pair of knee-length white stockings, are an ironic nod and wink to the “male gaze”. What seems like garden variety sexism is, in fact, according to Carpenter’s defenders, the clever use of sexist imagery to gain attention, “reclaim” her sexuality and sell records. She doesn’t perform sexism for men, she performs it for her own gain. Profiting from your own degradation is therefore not a sad reflection of the state of sexual politics, but boundary-pushing social commentary— subversive entrepreneurism.
Dr Emma Phillips, an academic at the University of Canberra, author of a PhD on the topic of sexualisation, argued in the Age that “we see Carpenter being an active agent in her sexual life, and immediately she’s derided for that”. But Carpenter isn’t being derided for having agency in her sex life. She is being criticised for an album cover that glamorises the abuse of women, with nothing to suggest subversive intent. This is not sexual agency. It is what it looks like: a transparent attempt to sell records through ever-more-extreme sexist imagery. Women are supposed to aspire to look and be like her, and men to have sex with her, and both desires are harnessed to make money.
Another Carpenter defender, Markiel Magsalin, writing in Vogue, argued that the cover is “a masterclass in satire” but one that the “audience [isn’t] equipped to recognise”. It is hard to see this as anything other than the collective gaslighting of women. What seems to be a sexist image that adds to the mountain of sexist and demeaning images women have to endure through every single day of their lives is not what it seems—it is a fellow woman making an ironic statement that you have failed to understand. Your reactions are not a healthy awareness of the sexist rubbish around you and an effort to resist the effect it has, but a reflection of your own stupidity. This trash album cover is powerful social commentary, not the tired cliché millions of women perceive it to be.
We are told that Sabrina is doing all of this in the name of empowerment, or “for the girls”. In reality, Carpenter is just a reheated version of what the music industry, among others, has been selling for decades. That it is women who are now doing it and making some of the money only makes it more contemptible.
Carpenter has form cashing in on reactionary tropes. Before the dog thing it was paedophilia. She wears bejewelled “baby doll” lingerie on stage in her Short n’ Sweet tour, harking back to an outfit worn by actress Carroll Baker in the 1956 film Baby Doll, where the adult female lead literally sleeps in a crib. In one less-than-subtle photo shoot with W magazine, she made visual reference to the film Lolita, where a grown man pursues a child. Sabrina is presented as childlike, and as Jade Hurley, a feminist writer on Substack points out, she more than alludes to this in her “Nonsense” outro: “I’m full grown but I look like a niña/ Come put something big in my casita/ Mexico, I think you are bonita!”
So just as the official line of society is that sexism is wrong, but there is sexism everywhere because it is profitable, we are told the sexualisation of children is wrong, except when it turns men on and sells records. In an interview with Vogue, talking about the corseted sparkly lingerie she wears on stage, Carpenter described how “there’s a stiffness to the corset, so it’s a little harder to dance in. But my waist is non-existent, so we love her”. Girls, don’t move, don’t breathe—but remember it’s worth it to be thin and sexy. No-one said empowerment would be comfortable after all. Just think of the money someone is making—one estimate puts the total likely revenue from Carpenter’s latest tour at $50 million.
All this is nothing new—women have had to be sex objects first and foremost and artists second for decades. Some have eventually spoken out against it, most notably Britney Spears, who describes being uncomfortable about being sexualised and infantilised in the 1990s but being too under-confident to object. But the normalisation of the violent porn and the sexual exploitation of women in the sex industry have only made this more prevalent, and criticism of it more marginal.
Marie Solis, a writer for the New York Times, remarked that, despite Carpenter’s latest album cover being so overtly sexy, it is a remarkably “sexless” photograph. Unlike actual satire or irony, it doesn’t make you question received wisdom or the status quo. It just makes you wonder why an adult woman would want to present herself as a sexualised dog. Carpenter is not reclaiming anything. Instead, she is presenting a Hollywood glam version of female sexuality that still puts men firmly at the centre. With this latest cover and like much of Carpenter’s recent work, we are being force-fed sexist imagery in order to make industry producers, men and “empowered” women, big bucks.
