There’s nothing funny about Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover

Sabrina Carpenter has unveiled a new album cover to her millions of fans on Instagram: an image of the pop singer, on her knees before a man wearing a suit and yanking her by the hair.

A man upright and standing; a woman genuflecting on the ground. Him fully dressed, anonymous and face out of frame; her fully exposed, in a barely-there skirt and sky-high slingbacks. Him asserting dominance with a tug of the hair; her submitting totally, mouth slightly agape.

The power dynamics couldn’t be any clearer, but the upcoming album’s title — “Man’s Best Friend” — really sends it home. It puts women on the level of dogs … cute little pets, there for male enjoyment.

It’s an amazingly regressive message from a supposed girl-power icon, and it does a tremendous disservice to the millions of girls who look up to stars like Carpenter for cues about femininity and womanhood.

Carpenter might intend the cover with a wink and a nod, but even if she’s in on the joke, her youngest fans are not.

The 26-year-old “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” singer first captured Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s hearts on Disney Channel, where she played Maya on the show “Girl Meets World” from 2014 to 2017.

Like many former Disney stars before her, she launched a successful mainstream career and stooped to hyper-sexualizing her music — and herself — to delineate this new chapter from her kid-actor past.

Take lyrics from her song “Bed Chem:” “I bet we’d have really good bed chem … Come right on me/ I mean camaraderie… And I bet we’d both arrive at the same time/ and I bet the thermostat’s set at six‑nine.”

Or her song “Juno,” an allusion to the 2007 film about a teen pregnancy: “Wanna try out my fuzzy pink handcuffs?… If you love me right, then who knows/ I might let you make me Juno… Adore me, hold me and explore me/ Mark your territory, I’m so f–king horny.”

A parenting blogger for the popular site ScaryMommy.com, makes the case for parents to “put down the pitchforks over Sabrina Carpenter” with a rather unconvincing anecdote: “I found myself at a concert venue scream-singing ‘I’m so f—ing horny’ alongside 15,000 fellow Sabrina Carpenter fans, most of whom fell solidly within the 12-18 age bracket.”

She characterizes the concert as “a joyful 90-minute celebration of femininity and fun” — but I’d describe the stunts Carpenter puts on at her concerts as self-objectifying, at best.

During the tween-packed shows of her recently wrapped “Short ‘N Sweet Tour,” Carpenter knelt down on stage, pulled her own hair back into a ponytail and imitated oral sex with a microphone multiple times.

She also mimicked the “Eiffel Tower” sexual position on stage with two male dancers in Paris, bending over and grinding against one of their crotches as she sang with her face in the other’s genital area.

Of course, Carpenter has countless defenders, from Buzzfeed writers who insist that she “expertly embraces her sexuality without succumbing to the ‘male gaze’” and even singer Carly Simon, who the pop star’s new album cover is not “anything outrageous.”

An op-ed in The Guardian defended her, too, arguing that “to be submissive and strong at once is to break some brains” — but the truth is that Carpenter’s acts of self-degradation are seen through the impressionable eyes of a pre-teen audience that isn’t going to get her cheekiness.

Carpenter’s own answer to critics who say the imagery she evokes is regressive? “If you can’t handle a girl who is confident in her own sexuality, then don’t come to my shows.”

Fair enough. Carpenter is an adult and, if she thinks this is empowering, then more power to her. It’s on parents to decide what’s appropriate for their children, not a pop star.

But that doesn’t mean she’s above criticism, especially when she insists that she is a model of a woman who is “confident in her own sexuality” — even though it seems like she’s expressing her sexuality while on her knees more often than not.

Is this the female sexual “empowerment” of the next generation?

From the outside looking in, it seems that Carpenter is a victim of the mass delusion that has convinced young women that, if they choose to be mistreated and disrespected by men — if they become enthusiastic participants in their own degradation — then sexual disrespect isn’t actually what it is. 

Elder members of Gen Z have been hoodwinked into believing that enthusiastic consent absolves men of the need to treat them with dignity and respect, and that acting like the porn stars on their cell phone screens (or the pop stars on a concert stage) is empowerment.

Generations of feminists fought so that today’s young women could have more choice and freedom than ever before. But a pornified culture has tricked them into choosing their own disempowerment.

It’s time to stop this before the next group of girls fall into this same trap.