When the pop star Sabrina Carpenter dropped the cover art for her forthcoming album, “Man’s Best Friend,” this week, it became an instant conversation piece.
The image — of Ms. Carpenter on her knees, a suited figure just out of frame pulling her by her hair, as if to use it as a leash — spurred some people to accuse her of “centering men” and catering to the male gaze. Others argued that Ms. Carpenter, whose music often includes proverbial smirks and winks that suggest a kind of knowingness, was playing a joke on the viewer. Others still urged that there was nothing to see here — just a young woman enjoying her sexuality.
Bryce Anderson is the person behind the cover, a photographer and model known for playing with gender expression and beauty standards. Ms. Carpenter, for her part, has said that the strong responses to her risqué behavior — particularly her concerts, which sometimes feature her simulating sex positions — are more of a reflection of other people’s fixations rather than anything to do with her.
“Clearly you love sex,” she told Rolling Stone in a recent interview, referring to her critics. “You’re obsessed with it.”
In an edited conversation, members of the Styles staff — Stella Bugbee and Marie Solis — discussed this very of-the-moment Rorschach test.
MARIE SOLIS: This image seems almost impossibly overdetermined. It also seems caught in a dichotomy of — is it oppressive or empowering? I think that’s too simple a way to talk about it, though.
STELLA BUGBEE: Right. This album art slots itself too neatly into the age-old chasm between pro-sex feminists and those who feel women shouldn’t participate in their own subjugation. The cover seems so deliberately engineered to create controversy. At the same time, I am surprised it has been so effective at doing so. It’s kind of hard for images to break through nowadays.
SOLIS: There’s been some outrage. Another kind of reaction I’ve seen is something along the lines of, “Let Sabrina Carpenter have fun!” But I’m not interested in talking about what Sabrina Carpenter as an individual should or shouldn’t do. I want to figure out what this image means at this particular moment, when it’s being made for a mass audience by one of the most famous pop stars in the world.
BUGBEE: Let’s discuss what we’re seeing. It’s a very pornographic image. She’s on her knees; her hair is being pulled. She’s looking at the camera, participating, pushing us to have a reaction.
SOLIS: She’s returning the gaze of the viewer, which suggests she’s in on this. I think that idea represents a strand of feminism, or postfeminism, at the moment. There’s this thinking that if you’re in on the joke, if you can wink at the male gaze, then you’ve outsmarted it. And that it would be passé, drab and above all not “fun” to struggle against it.
BUGBEE: Bryce Anderson, the photographer of Carpenter’s album cover, seems like many before them to be influenced by fashion photographers like Terry Richardson and Helmut Newton — who were themselves very influenced by pornography.
SOLIS: But even though this image recalls some of those other images, this one feels curiously sexless. Not as freaky or subversive as some of the ones created by those fashion photographers of the last few decades. Why do you think that is?
BUGBEE: Fashion images that are explicitly sexual — and I would lump this into that category, especially given that Anderson makes fashion images — have the most power when they tweak cultural expectations and flick at the obscene and forbidden. I’m thinking of Newton’s fetishistic images that were inspired by Nazis, a mere 30 years after World War II. Pushing buttons, to say the least. How that applies here? Well, in the 2010s we saw a groundswell of feminist conversations that helped reject images like this. This cover suggests a new counternarrative.
SOLIS: It feels like it returns us to a pre-#MeToo world. But maybe more than anything it takes for granted the advancements of that movement and feminism in general. Now that all of that is done and dusted, one reading of this image suggests, women are free to return to these old tropes, unburdened by having to contend with male power.
To go back to the sexlessness I’m picking up on, though: We know that many people in Sabrina Carpenter’s generation, Gen Z, aren’t having that much sex. So this overt sexuality on display seems designed to provoke, to be edgy, but I feel like it’s trying way too hard to convince me.
I had a similar feeling watching the Addison Rae music video for “Diet Pepsi,” one of the singles from her new album. It’s interesting that the two pop stars of the moment are serving up some of the same ideas and imagery.
BUGBEE: Addison Rae’s music video feels even more like simple-syrup sexuality, designed to be metabolized fast and easy. To take any side on these matters almost feels like a trap. It’s more like the question is, as you said, “Why now?”
SOLIS: It does feel like in this cultural moment gender is really polarized. As men intensify their expressions of normative masculinity, women respond in kind.
But maybe we’re getting a bit far from the original image. How do you think it interacts with the album title, “Man’s Best Friend”?
BUGBEE: Oy.
SOLIS: Oy, indeed.
Stella Bugbee and Marie Solis contributed reporting.
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