Vulnerable Power
With so little happening in the world these days, I thought I’d write about the singer Sabrina Carpenter, whose latest single, “Manchild,” debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100. It’s a pretty good synth-pop tune with elements of disco and country that tells an amusing tale of a lover who barges in and out of Carpenter’s life. She can’t quit him; he won’t grow up. “Why so sexy if so dumb?/And how survive the Earth so long?/If I’m not there, it won’t get done/I choose to blame your mom,” she sings. It’s funny and, for a lot of people, relatable.
But my focus here is not really Carpenter’s single or her upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend. I think her music is enjoyable, but it’s the post-# MeToo sexual aesthetic she’s been cultivating that’s the most interesting part of her rising star. I’m not sure if Carpenter represents a “turning point,” but things are changing, even if subtly, and it’s reflected in her artistry, which seems to occupy a kind of liminal space between the old and the new.
It doesn’t distinguish Carpenter that she puts on sexually suggestive outfits and performances. Virtually every female pop star does that. In recent years, however, there has been a confused dynamic at play with these spectacles. Some contrast might be helpful here, so let me point you to Katy Perry and “Woman’s World.”
Perry conceived of the tune as a self-consciously feminist one and intended it to empower women. The song, she said, came to her as a vision of the “feminine divine.” She should find a different muse.
The song “Woman’s World” and its music video were awful heaps of incoherent slop. Dressed in a skimpy Rosie the Riveter outfit, Perry pranced around, spilling out of her tops, singing about how it’s a “woman’s world” and men are “lucky to be living in it”—a declaration that struck viewers as odd, considering that the entire thing seemed to have been built for the male gaze. It’s a woman’s world, built by men and for their pleasure, apparently. A lot of attempts at “girlboss feminism” follow this contradictory pattern: women engage in self-sexual objectification as a means of “empowering” themselves against men. The message always seems trite and muddled for obvious reasons.
Carpenter offers more attractive and coherent aesthetic. Indeed, it might be a little too potent for some—and I do not just mean religious conservatives.
The original cover for the album Man’s Best Friend depicted Carpenter on her knees before a man who held in his hand a tuft of her hair. She crawls toward him in a black dress with her hand placed against his leg. It is provocative, not only because it is so suggestive, but because it portrays the female in a sexually submissive position. The music video that accompanied the release of “Manchild” showed Carpenter hitchhiking in a pair of tiny daisy dukes in a tied-up shirt.
All of this was too much for certain progressive critics.
“Carpenter is not a feminist icon,” wrote Hannah Holland, an MSNBC producer. “And it doesn’t appear that she wants to be. Her brand is cheeky and hyperfeminine. Her aesthetic deliberately and successfully embraces the male gaze.”
Well, yes. That’s why it works so well. Feminine power is in the possibility of submission. It is mystique and vulnerability. This comes through best in her song, “Please Please Please.” It’s about a girl who is confident in herself, in looks and taste and judgment, and yet opens up to a guy who is liable to gut her.
So she sings, “Heartbreak is one thing, my ego’s another/I beg you, don’t embarrass me, mother***ker.”
That line of the chorus is the only part of the song that contains profanity. The way in which it is used makes it seem, at first listen, that Carpenter is leaning into being a strong, independent woman, even talking like a man to another man. But it is, in fact, the most vulnerable part of the tune. It gets at the absurdity of women trying to act like men by imitating their mannerisms, speech, and direct style of confrontation. Carpenter speaks in the way women have been taught to speak by those who purport to empower them, but underneath it all, she is still a woman who wants to surrender herself to a man who she hopes proves worthy of her love.
That comes closer to “feminine divine” than anything popstars like Perry have put together. It also evokes an older kind of sensuality, one that locates the sexes in complimentary instead of warring roles.