Help, I Can't Stop Reading Sabrina Carpenter Hot Takes

Could it be because it's really terrifying to be alive right now??

Before We Get Into It

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I’ve been drowning myself in a tidal wave of Sabrina Carpenter. One week ago, she announced her new album and released the cover art, which people FELT STRONGLY about. First, people called her an anti-feminist, bad for women, etc.

Comments on Sabrina Carpenter’s Instagram Post

Then people said she was doing satire or an homage to Spinal Tap. Everyone had a take.

I really like Sabrina Carpenter. I’m maybe older and queerer than her target audience—I never watched her show on Disney (or even heard of it?) Still, I think she’s funny, and clever, and a good performer. But the Internet discourse about her is frankly BAFFLING. There was a whole essay last year (which I am not going to link to) about her selling “a pedophilic fantasy” which I just think is absolutely freaking bananas. Like, can we not blame pedophilic fantasies on adult women?? Sabrina is 26 years old.

Personally, I read Sabrina as camp. I think she’s doing an exaggerated, over the top performance of femininity. Like Dolly Parton. Like drag queens. She’s wearing wigs and lingerie and overlined lips.

Dolly & Sabrina

A comment left on this piece resonated with me:

I feel that Sabrina performs a character for women in a similar way that drag queens do for queer people. She makes a hyperbole of topics that shape female lives (specially straight ones) like weaponized incompetence, performative sexuality and beauty standards, specifically those catered to men.

I have a hard time believing that her album cover art is intended to be just straight up masturbation fodder for (most) straight men as the “Sabrina Carpenter is setting us back” camp seems to want us to believe. Because have you listened to her lyrics? In “Slim Pickens” she says all the good men are deceased or taken and she complains about a guy not knowing the difference between their, there, and they’re. I don’t think that’s for the male gaze, I think it’s for straight women to laugh and roll their eyes at.

That’s camp.

As

Tracy Clark-Flory

smartly put it, Sabrina

deploys ironic misandry alongside a very familiar heterofatalism (which is, in short, a performative sense of being stuck in a disappointing experience of heterosexuality). As Carpenter puts in, “Fuck my life” (read: fuck my heterosexuality). This isn’t rebellion but rather resignation. Men are the worst but she loves them. What are you gonna do?

Sabrina on her knees having her hair pulled isn’t about wholeheartedly loving or catering to patriarchy. It’s about seeing the ways in which you’re willingly participating (dating men) in a system that’s also subjugating you (heteropatriarchy). It’s knowing you’re going to be treated like a dog and doing it anyways.

But it also ignores the greater context of whiteness. Aliyyaa Maya describes laughing when she saw the album cover after hearing about the controversy: “My laugh was so hearty because this is exactly what white women look like to woman of color.” White women who “almost always chose the favor of men before a sisterhood that crossed racial lines.”

We only listen to certain people complain about these systems and only certain people can do intentionally provocative things and have people come to their defense. I think Melissa Fabello said it perfectly:

I think that the rush to defend Carpenter was, subconsciously, a rush to defend the self: one’s own whiteness, femininity, and sexual expression.

In attacking (or defending) Sabrina’s artistic choices, we kind of lose the thread. We let ourselves get dragged around by white feminism and critiquing individual actions while neglecting to see the bigger picture. Calling Sabrina Carpenter bad is choosing to ignore a larger bad context—dwindling abortion access, racism, the threat of nuclear warfare, genocide—these things are actually bad for women (and everyone else for that matter). The point of feminism is liberation, which can’t be won or lost by an album cover—although it might be a brief and welcome distraction as long as we don’t forget what we’re trying to do here.

I’d love to know what you think of the album cover, if you’re a Sabrina fan like I am, or if you got swept up in the discourse this week!

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