In 1938, Orson Welles directed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, causing widespread panic amongst listeners who believed the fictional tale of an alien invasion to be real. And in 2025, Sabrina Carpenter released a new single, “Manchild,” and previewed the cover of the upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, on which it would appear, inciting a similar moral panic within the American public.
Sabrina Carpenter is a former Disney star turned pop star who makes music about sex, femininity, and desire. If Chappell Roan sings about lesbian yearning, Sabrina Carpenter sings about heteronormative yearning. She also happens to be a petite blonde and conventionally attractive in every way. This is a woman who’s going to get sexualized without her consent no matter her career. If she were hotel receptionist she’d be getting hit on by the bellhops every day, but she isn’t a hotel receptionist, she’s a popular music artist—the most overly sexualized career option available to women. This is my theory as to why her songs are so overtly horny: she’s saying it about herself before someone else can do it for her.
Or maybe they’re horny because she is.
If you’re reading this blog that is very often about sex and desire, it shouldn’t be news to you that women are horny. Yes, even the straight ones. But the thing about being a straight woman, horny or not, is that most straight men are bad at
a) sex, and
b) relationships.
And so if you write about sex, femininity, desire and yearning as a woman who dates men, you’re gonna be writing about the inevitable frustrations experienced from doing so. Hell, I wrote a whole memoir about it in grad school, and the thesis of said memoir is basically me shrugging and going “What the fuck is this?” That’s what “Manchild” is about. Here’s a sample of the lyrics:
You said your phone was broken, just forgot to charge it
Whole outfit you're wearing, God, I hope it's ironic
Did you just say you're finished? Didn't know we started
It's all just so familiar, baby, what do you call it?
Stupid
Or is it slow?
Maybe it's useless?
But there's a cuter word for it, I know
Man-child
Why you always come a-running to me?
Fuck my life
Won't you let an innocent woman be?
Never heard of self-care
Half your brain just ain't there
Man-child
Why you always come a-running, taking all my loving from me?
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
The reactions from women on the internet after the release of the song were pretty much universal. Videos of young women rejoicing to the lyrics and dancing cheerfully flooded my timeline. Collectively, we shook our heads in disbelief at the male species’ capacity for stupidity, and then wiped our brow with relief that we weren’t the only one to have experienced it first hand.
Then she dropped the album cover and title. I saw it and immediately chuckled and then went back to my life, because I have mouths to feed (my own) and bills to pay (fancy lotion is expensive). The next time I opened the internet it was on fire with cries of bad feminism and setting women back 100 years. The general, outraged consensus was that Carpenter was subjugating herself for fame and was thus a bad role model for her young fans.
Now, just as I assume you, as a reader of mine, aren’t shocked by statements like “most men are bad at sex and relationships,” I’m also going to assume that you understand basic satire and irony. And so I would imagine you understand the album cover in question, along with it’s title, Man’s Best Friend, and it’s first track, “Manchild” to be working in tandem to create one big, ironic piece of satire.
“Satire is only satire if everyone knows it’s satire” has been a common criticism I’ve noticed, which I don’t remember from the lesson on satire in the fifth grade, so I don’t know where they got that from. War of the Worlds is considered to be a satire of British imperialism, but most of the idiots who heard it on the radio that day in 1938 didn’t know that, which is why they freaked.
It’s interesting, too, that most of the disapproval of the album cover—in which Carpenter is posed in a decidedly submissive position—is coming from the left, or people who consider themselves to be liberal and sex-positive. Therein lies a more sinister problem with the larger discourse on women’s sexuality: we’re still uncomfortable with the concept of submissiveness. We talk about empowering women in their sexuality, but if a woman’s sexual preference happens to involve being submissive to her sexual partner, and that sexual partner happens to be a man, we don’t seem to understand how to hold those two things in our heads at the same time. So, someone like Sabrina Carpenter pokes fun at that idea, and it means she’s disempowered, and since she’s a role model for women, she’s therefore disempowering them.
The other loudest complaint is that she’s “blatantly pandering to men and the male gaze,” as if we don’t live in a patriarchy and all of our popular culture isn’t entirely made for the male gaze. Pandering to such conditions isn’t lazy, it’s actually genius. She made something she knew men would want to look at and then she called them useless. That’s a kiss on the cheek and then a kick in the nuts is what that is.
Here’s the thing about women who date men and complain about it: it’s not like our bad experiences are stopping us from dating men. We continue to do it, we continue to learn from our mistakes and theirs, and we continue to believe that better men exist. We’re exasperated by the bad ones because we know good one’s exist. When we find them, believe me, we’ll sing about that too. But the good ones are not threatened by the existence of the bad ones, and certainly aren’t threatened by women complaining about them.
Ultimately, I think the anxiety around this reveals more about the people criticizing it than it reveals about the subject of their ire. Perhaps what Carpenter and other artists like her are really yearning for isn’t just sex, but a sexually satisfying relationship with a man that also makes them feel respected and empowered in and out of the bedroom. Perhaps her loudest critics are offended by that idea because they don’t know how to be in a consensual sexual relationship while also respecting their sexual partner in the rest of their life. If that’s true, their alleged respect for women that they seem so anxious to tell us about is probably false, and they’re probably bad at
a) sex, and
b) relationships.
And if you don’t like hearing it from me, here’s a dude saying the same thing.