Sabrina Carpenter has hit out at critics who have lambasted her album cover art and defended her ‘really bold’ lyrics, that ‘pearl clutchers’ have taken issue with
Pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter has hit back at critics of her upcoming album Man’s Best Friend after they took issue with the provocative nature of her lyrics and album cover and accused her of ‘exploiting the male gaze.”
“It is not for the pearl clutchers. The album is not for any pearl clutchers no,” the 26-year-old singer told Gayle King on CBS Mornings. “But I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves”
Sabrina did admit that her lyrics are sometimes “really bold” and not always something you “want to sing in front of other people.” However that was very much part of the appeal she hoped would charm the masses.
“It’s like it’s almost TMI,” Carpenter remarked.
“But I think about being at a concert with, you know, however many young women I see in the front row that are screaming at the top of their lungs with their best friends and you can go like, “Oh, we can all like sigh of relief, like, this is just fun and and that’s all it has to be.”'”
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The two-time Grammy winner has also come under fire for the simulated sex positions she demonstrates onstage while performing her song Juno on her Short n’ Sweet Tour, as well as the album cover art itself, which features Sabrina on all fours while a faceless suited figure grips her hair.
Among the critics was Glasgow’s Women’s Aid, who dubbed the image “regressive”. Writing online they said: “Picturing herself on all fours, with a man pulling her hair and calling it ‘Man’s Best Friend’ isn’t subversion. It’s a throwback to tired tropes that reduce women to pets, props, and possessions and promote an element of violence and control.”
However, fans have jumped to her defence, with some arguing that the image itself is a satirical nod to how Sabrina is exactly the opposite of what people are so keen to accuse her of.
“I’m seeing a lot of discourse about Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover… for those of you who may lack critical thinking skills, the cover is clearly satirical with a deeper meaning, portraying how the public views her, believing she is just for the male gaze,” a fan wrote on X.
However a second fan countered: “Satire only works when it clearly exposes, exaggerates, or critiques the thing it’s referencing. Rn, Sabrina’s cover recreates sexist imagery without disrupting it, so it reads as compliance, not commentary.”
Controversy aside, it hasn’t stopped Sabrina from being asked to team up with pop superstar Taylor Swift, with the Shake It Off singer having revealed the pair have collaborated together on the title track of her upcoming album The Life of a Showgirl.
Sharing the news on August 11, Taylor revealed that the song is the only duet on the album, which features a number of tracks titled Cancelled and Ruin the Friendship which are heavily rumoured to be about Taylor’s former BFF Blake Lively.
Lively dragged the 35-year-old pop star into her bitter legal war against her It Ends with Us director-leading man Justin Baldoni last year – who incidentally, previously directed Carpenter in the 2020 Disney+ musical drama Clouds.
Yet while Lively may have taken issue with Baldoni, the same couldn’t be said for the Espresso hitmaker, who had nothing but good things to say about Justin during their time working together.
“No one else could have made us also feel secure enough to give the performances that we did. [Plus] our editors and our cinematographer, like, I love the way the movie was shot,” Sabrina gushed to Access Hollywood .
“It looks so beautiful. It makes everything come to life. I mean, the score, everything is done so beautifully. He paid attention to everything. Nothing was left unattended and I think that that’s a hard thing to do.”
Blake previously accused the 41-year-old filmmaker of sexually harassing her on the set of his 2024 film It Ends With Us, as well as claiming he ran a retaliatory smear campaign online and in the press after she seized control of his movie.
As a bitter fallout unfolded both in and out of the courtroom, Lively’s legal team allegedly attempted to extort Taylor into publicly siding with Blake in the dispute, by threatening to release a decade’s worth of text messages unless she complied, claims Bladoni’s defence attorney Bryan Freedman.
Lively and Baldoni will face off against each other in Manhattan US District Court next March, but the general public have already sided with him.
Meanwhile, Sabrina is next scheduled to perform at the fan-voted MTV Video Music Awards, which air September 7 on MTV and Paramount+. This year the singer is up for a whopping eight awards in total, including video of the year (for Manchild), best pop artist, best pop (for Manchild), and best album.