I’ve known that we were living in a depressingly puritanical society ever since I was in middle school, and my principal took one look at the knitted shrug I was wearing over my uniform polo shirt and told me, “We’re glad you’re proud of your body, but take it off.” (I was twelve!!!) Yet the fact is never more apparent to me than when a fresh round of Sabrina Carpenter discourse blazes its way through social media.

The latest very-online kerfuffle to involve the 26-year-old pop singer involves the recently released cover art for her next album, Man’s Best Friend, out in August. The cover shows Carpenter kneeling on the floor in an all-black outfit while an unseen hand tugs at her mussed blond tresses.

While this may be the most overt example of Carpenter putting her playful and undeniably sexual spin on an already horny cultural trope (Babygirl, anyone?), it’s hardly the first. This is, after all, the woman who made out with an alien at the 2024 VMAs and sparked outrage over the concept of the Eiffel tower sex position while on tour.

“It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” Carpenter recently told Rolling Stone, referring to the backlash against her music’s more risqué references. “They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this,’ but those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it. It’s in my show.”

As usual, Carpenter is 100% right; our cultural fixation on the way that she expresses her sexuality seems like nothing so much as a reflection of our own fixation on sex in all its forms—but particularly when it’s embraced unabashedly by an empowered young woman. Obviously, the notion of a pint-size, blond, wildly sexy pop star is nothing new—put some respect on Britney Spears’s name!—but Carpenter sets herself apart from the rest by being, or at least appearing, fully in control of the image she projects. Watching Carpenter show off her gams during her Louboutin-shod tap dance at the 2025 Grammys, for instance, was uniquely fun in part because the artist herself seemed to be having so much fun. Really, Carpenter should be commended, not criticized, for putting all of herself (including her sex appeal) to use in her art.