A woman in a black dress is on her knees. Her hair, once perfectly coiffed, is being pulled upwards by a man, also in black, but standing up. One of her hands is on his thigh. We can’t see most of him: not his face, not the left side of his body. She’s looking right at us.
She is, of course, Sabrina Carpenter, certified pop girlie, having ridden her inescapable hit “Espresso” to bona fide global stardom. The photo is the cover of her seventh album, Man’s Best Friend, out today, 29th of August 2025. For those less familiar with Carpenter’s particular brand, which winkingly bemoans the trials of being a woman who dates men, she’s not just saying she’s a dog – she's a b*tch. The whole thing, taken together with the album’s lead single “Manchild”, is clearly supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek take on male expectations.
When she first announced the record, this photo was met with a flurry of discourse: moralising, pearl-clutching, praise. The Scottish domestic violence support organisation Glasgow Women's Aid called the imagery “regressive” and “a throwback to tired tropes that reduce women to pets, props, and possessions and promote an element of violence and control”.
No photos are more scrutinised than a picture of a pop star. They are put together by creative teams, selected by marketing firms, pored over by fans, and dissected by tabloids. Later, she produced a secondary cover. In high contrast black and white, Carpenter is a singular, central light spot among darkly clad faceless men. This one, she assured, had been “approved by God”.
The pop girlie is the perfect container for all our ideas and unease about modern womanhood. Schrödinger’s Real Girl exists simultaneously as authentic and inauthentic, empowered and objectified, until the moment someone observes her and collapses all possibilities into a single interpretation she could never control. There's something about our relationship to celebrity that heightens all our takes on an image of a woman, but the core dynamics are always the same. This sort of scrutiny isn't unique to pop stars – it's just the extreme version of a condition all women exist under.
Every woman taking a selfie, crafting a dating profile, or choosing what to wear to work is engaging in similar calculations about how she'll be perceived, consumed, judged.
We talked about the Man's Best Friend cover so much because it allowed us to rehearse the same impossible game we force all women to play: anticipate every possible misreading of your image, then pre-emptively police yourself accordingly. The pop girlie is just a concentrated example of negotiations that happen in boardrooms and bedrooms, on dating apps and on LinkedIn.
What makes Sabrina's case such a useful microcosm for our attitudes to women’s sexuality writ large is that her performance is silly. On her Short ‘n Sweet tour, Carpenter takes a beat during the song “Juno” to do a goofy sex position after asking, faux-innocently: “Have you ever tried this one?” It’s a drag-esque, cartoonish performance of desire. Nonetheless, these positions reliably go viral, often met with the same hand wringing and moral panic that the Man’s Best Friend cover was.
In a recent profile in Rolling Stone, the singer weighed in: “It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” she says. “They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it. [...] I can’t control that.”
Women's images always escape their control. She can tell you as many times as she can that she’s making a joke, but no woman can fully determine how her self-presentation will be read, used, or weaponised. Even when she's being as explicitly performative and non-threatening as possible, her campiness gets stripped away. Suddenly it’s either a.) dangerous female sexuality that must be contained or b.) an anti-feminist ploy for male attention.
The discourse around Carpenter's album cover revealed the impossible bind all women face. Defending it purely as satire suggests that women can only access certain sexual expressions through irony or humour. Straight-faced female desire might be too threatening or too easily co-opted. But satire for whom? If the cultural knowledge required to read the image as subversive isn't shared by all viewers, does it just function as straightforward sexual imagery anyway?
Maybe the Man’s Best Friend cover is a joke, as well as a genuine expression of one woman’s sexual desire. But it is also, probably, straightforwardly sexy to a man coming across it on his Instagram feed. Was it the singer’s responsibility to make sure it isn't? And is it so bad if it is?
In discussions of women and their image, we often talk about how women learn to see themselves through frameworks that weren't created by or for them. We are all reduced to a permanent negotiation with an imagined or real voyeur, assessing how our very existence might be interpreted.
Carpenter's album cover’s chief critics were other women. But the criticisms levied against her were still filtering a woman's self-expression through a hypothetical male consumption. The ‘problem’ with the cover of Man’s Best Friend isn’t that it was sexy, it was that a man might find it sexy. Where does this leave us, if not forced to pre-emptively police ourselves based on every possible bad faith interpretation, as if we're somehow responsible for the worst possible reading of our own bodies?
The real trap isn't just that our images escape our control – it's that we're told this problem is our responsibility to solve, by being more careful, more strategic, more considerate of how we might be misunderstood. The solution is always more self-policing, never questioning why women should have to contort themselves around hypothetical male behaviour in the first place.
Sometimes a woman just wants to take a sexy picture. Sometimes she wants to send it to someone she trusts. Sometimes she wants to put it on an album cover, or post it online, or keep it for herself. None of these choices should require a doctoral thesis in anticipating male consumption patterns – but that may require teaching an old dog new tricks.