Submission? Impossible

If you think the cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s new album Man’s Best Friend’ is disturbing, then you’ve misunderstood the singer’s provocative persona

- Helen Coffey

Quick someone inform the church elders! Sabrina Carpenter just released the cover for her new album and it's a little bit provocative! The artwork in question has been branded by turns "disturbing", "disgusting" and "triggering", sending shockwaves through the "Espresso" singer's fandom after she shared it on Instagram. I encountered these visceral reactions via a number of scandalised headlines before, in fact, I'd even seen the picture

itself. My imagination conjured up all kinds of depraved imagery in the interim – because surely, for people to be this offended, the cover of Carpenter’s forthcoming follow-up to the Grammywinning Short n’ Sweet album must be truly reprehensible?

So it was that I clicked through to find a photograph of the 26year-old pop star on her hands and knees, clad in a short (yet otherwise demure) black dress and looking off past the camera while a faceless person – viewers have jumped to the conclusion that it’s a man, but there’s nothing to prove that – stands to the side, loosely holding a wad of her signature blonde locks in their hand.

Look, I get it. The woman called her new album Man’s Best Friend and then there she is on the floor like... well, like a dog. There are potentially uncomfortable and sordid connotations around female submission and male dominance when you link title and image. But to come to such flawed conclusions, you’d honestly have to have zero context – to know literally nothing about Carpenter, her music or her brand.

For starters, Carpenter is not some manufactured Nineties tween pop princess whose every move is dictated by a lewd, middle-aged band manager with dollar signs in his eyes, coaxing her to squat down because “sex sells”. To suggest she doesn’t have agency on a cover that she posed for in a set-up