In defence of Sabrina Carpenter

The Espresso singer has stoked yet another moral panic. Jesus wept

When asked for the colour of Rapunzel’s hair during one of her many appearances on Hollywood Squares, Joan Rivers put it thus. “Well, from the pictures I’ve seen of that old little tramp…” She trails off. “Why would you say she was a tramp?” John Davidson asks. “Oh please, you let your hair down and wait for the men to climb up it? What do you call a girl like that?”

I couldn't help but think back to the late comedian’s hysterics when I first laid eyes on Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover this week. It helps that, like Rapunzel, she is blonde — a point which Rivers never actually gets to. “She was locked in a tower, what else was she to do?” “Exactly! Grow her hair and wait for the fleet to come in!”

I thought of Rivers’ joke not because I think Carpenter is a tramp, but because I knew other people would leap to exactly that conclusion after seeing the locks of the singer’s hair clasped by what appears to be a man. I was right, of course. For the past 48 hours my Instagram has been awash with sanctimonious proselytising. “This cover is hell,” said one friend on her story, in an apparent bid to stress just where she sits along our increasingly messy post-feminist fault-lines.

Said friend, like me, was lucky enough to see Carpenter last week at Primavera Sound. A brilliant performance from one of the world’s pop megastars, Carpenter made (and continues to make) precisely zero apologies for the fact she loves sex. It was skimpy, glamorous and tons of fun. If anything, I was disappointed that she didn’t go more ham on Juno, the notorious number that caused a moral panic when she performed it in Paris earlier this year and simulated the Eiffel Tower with two of her gay dancers. I had high hopes that when she purred, “Have you ever tried… this one?” in Barcelona, she might have simulated a move reminiscent of an equally emblematic monument: the Sagrada Familia, which after 100 years is still not complete and is basically a metaphor for edging waiting to happen. Instead, she set off two party poppers from her breasts.

Anyway, from one moral panic to the next. Students of culture who habitually skew liberal have been left up in arms about Carpenter’s upcoming record, hilariously titled Man’s Best Friend. To which the only appropriate response is: sorry, what? This is a woman who, on last year’s smash hit album, Short N’ Sweet, sang the now-iconic lines: “Come right on me / I mean, camaraderie!!”. To cry sacré bleu now is essentially the power-puff girl equivalent of feigning surprise every time Elon Musk says something racist.

But let’s discuss the cover, since that’s the talking point. I think it’s genius. It shows that Carpenter knows exactly what buttons and whose buttons she’s pushing: a deliberate provocation, made smarter by the fact that she’s wearing a rather elegant black dress that wouldn’t look out of place at a Republican country club. Critics want to talk about agency: the fact that she’s clearly being denied it; that she’s hyper-sexualised herself (really? really?? are we looking at the same cover??) and objectified herself (okay, she’s dolled up, but I daresay it’s her call and not ours). But the first thing I noticed with this cover is the anonymity — hell, the semi-erasure of the man holding her hair. If, indeed, it is a man. The model is wearing a suit, sure; but that and the album title are all we really have to go off. You see, like all preceding literary and artistic greats, Carpenter is playing with us. She did it on Short N’ Sweet and she’s doing it again.

One of the most absurd consternations currently being vocalised online is the time-old truism that the culture is slipping; that pop stars are getting sluttier, ruder, more osé. Lyrically, this might well be true (shoutout to Doja Cat, who penned one of my favourite ever lyrics in her song Rules in 2019, in which she admonishes a suitor for trying to play with her emotions and asks him to “play with her pussy” instead). But to anyone claiming that Carpenter is a harbinger of moral bankruptcy, I urge you simply to google the words “Madonna Sex” and report back with your findings. (And remove the safe search filter, please, you prude.)

Several times during the writing of this column, I wondered if it was even worth weighing into the debate; adding my bit to a conversation that has enjoyed far too much oxygen, in a week that has also seen an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East and attempts at delivering aid in Palestine continually defiled by the IDF. So the last I’d like to say on the matter is this. To everyone trying to make mountains out of molehills, I beg of you: grow up.

Will Hosie is the founding editor of Gauche Magazine