shades of blue

it's been a while since people were mad about sabrina carpenter's album cover, and i'm hoping the collective has moved past what i feel is useless anger. now i'm allowed to say things about it without my comment section blowing up. plus, i don't even have a comment section here. owned. losers.

i guess i'll start by saying that i like sabrina carpenter and most of her music is fun but not really for me. i have zero dogs in this fight. you can't hurt me by liking or not liking sabrina carpenter. i do think, though, that sabrina being conventionally attractive, clearly intelligent woman who sings frankly about sex and sexuality makes her into a very polarizing figure and the ideal fodder for arguments about purity culture and feminism. it's just tough to stomach a triple threat i guess.

the reaction to the man's best friend album cover and the reaction to the leading single, manchild, occurred as if each was in its own special solitary confinement chamber. the album cover wiped the lead single cleanly from the collective's memory bank and apparently gave people permission to say things like sabrina carpenter wants women to be stripped of their right to vote. like. what? what in the world? like, if someone expresses two diametrically opposed opinions within a singular piece of media, diptych style, if you will, do you not think their lived reality rests somewhere in between those two extremes? do you not think that maybe sabrina carpenter houses many complex emotions in her heart about men?

for me, the contrast is the point here, and you can't consider the album cover without also considering the song (and vice versa). i'm certain this has been spoken on at length by many a substack essayist, but no one on earth can stop me from voicing my opinion.

can women not consensually perform a submissive role in a relationship? can women not openly and honestly speak about their sexuality? women’s sexuality (however they choose to express it) being under fire gets in the way of productive messaging about women’s rights. i don’t think sabrina carpenter is contributing to damaging my rights as a woman, and i don’t think she has any impact on the politicians creating policies around women's bodies.

also, can we talk about the lolita-inspired photoshoot for one second. begging you to humor me. thank you. i'm fascinated by the take that this photoshoot serves to indulge some type of pedophilic fantasy. like, okay, humbert is a pedophile, and regards dolores as a sexual object. but the point is not that she actually is a sexual object. the point is that she isn’t. the perversion comes from the viewer attributing sexuality to something decidedly unsexual and childlike, right? so sabrina’s position in the photoshoot is not that of the voyeur, it’s that of the film’s victim?

for me, it feels very reflective of how it feels to be a little girl, but even more so how it must feel to grow up in hollywood (see: young girls on the set of almost any children's show in the late 90s and early 2000s). the first time a man sexualized me, i was ten. he was forty, and his son was the same age as me. i didn’t do anything wrong. similarly, the problem in these images isn’t sabrina.

something interesting about today's flattened, anemic form of pop culture critique is how often people take things at face value and then call it media literacy. further, it's interesting how often people express an explicitly anti-woman opinion and dress it up as radical feminism, as taking a stand for the children, or as a position that benefits conversations about sex.

okay, those are all my thoughts for now. bye.