Sabrina Carpenter has a new album out — and how better to promote it than to blow up the internet with a picture of her arse?

The 26-year-old pop star has pulled off the same magic trick as almost all of the actresses-turned-singers formerly in the Disney stable (Miley, Christina, Britney, Selena, Demi, etc.), lurching towards hypersexuality as a signal of artistic maturity. As the tabloids might put it, she’s all grown up. Posing for the cover of Rolling Stone on Thursday, Carpenter gazes up out of the frame like a startled kitten, lips parted, clutching her bare bosom; hair extensions ripple down to a tiled floor. The wardrobe credits simply read: “Stockings: Palace Costume”. The image is a slightly campier version of any crusty wank mag from the Seventies; she is at once superstar and porn star, her pose one of objectifying exposure, the humiliation of which can almost be read in her glassy expression.

Carpenter is canny, and will have anticipated the outrage generated by this shoot and the cover of the new album itself — Man’s Best Friend — in which she crouches on all fours beneath a besuited bloke grabbing her by the hair. The tonal lapse in her stylistic choices is self-evident: though Carpenter has built a career on being a coquettish, blonde Betty Boop — even simulating different sex positions each night on her last album tour — she has maintained a fan-friendly pseudo-feminism throughout, lyrically sniping at former boyfriend Barry Keoghan (feminism is when you hate your exes, right?) and throwing in winking, tote-bag-worthy quips (“sorry if you feel objectified”) as an insurance policy against charges that it’s all a bit too slushy.

The singer’s brand is built on being in on the joke; the fluffy, fembot aesthetic of her recent career cranks the sex-kitten factor just beyond sincerity, suggesting she is, after all, “for the girls”.  But with the new album and magazine covers, this joke has finally become old. Whatever Carpenter’s intentions, it is hard to see either image as anything more or less than pornographic humiliation.

Perhaps the outcry is unfair. Expecting our pop stars to shun the male gaze is, after all, fairly new, as the bumprints left by 2000s sirens on California studio floors attest. The difference is that Carpenter has deliberately engaged in feminist pretences: her persona is more that of the wronged girlfriend than the nightclub seductress. Therefore, by submitting herself to naked photoshoots, or having a poor male model grab her blond bouffant, she’s short-selling us. The debate that resulted saw actual — and so occasionally alienating — feminism spar with its younger, prettier, Buzzfeed-coded cousin who “lets” men objectify her in the name of choice. This latter philosophy, along with the other logical nonsenses of 2010s libfem thought, is now thankfully on its way out.

The bigger problem with Carpenter, who is my age and should therefore know better, is that she represents the depressing atrophying of creativity. The most radical thing a Gen-Z woman can do, it seems, is rehearse the priapic porn apologism of Hugh Hefner from half a century ago. In 1999, Hefner bragged that Playboy, like the women’s movement, had been a footsoldier in the sexual revolution in which women themselves were the “major beneficiaries”. “Female emancipation” was, according to his twisted logic, the gift of bare boobs.

Hefner was right, of course, that the emergence of pornography into the mainstream allowed women to better express themselves. The limit of this expression, however, was spreading your legs across a print gutter. If Carpenter were a true radical, she’d find another way to make us look.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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