Earlier this summer, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter released \u201cManchild,\u201d the first single from her seventh album, \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend.\u201d It\u2019s a fluffy screed against a dude mired in an endless adolescence. Heading into the chorus, Carpenter sounds both rankled and coquettish:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all just so familiar, baby, what do you call it?<\/p>\n
Stupid<\/p>\n
Or is it slow?<\/p>\n
\u201cI choose to blame your mom,\u201d she concludes on the second verse. It\u2019s not the only time that Carpenter has been let down by an undercooked suitor. A big part of the singer\u2019s allure is the way that she ultimately shrugs off the crummy choices she makes while in the throes of lust, boredom, yearning, whatever; she aspires not to normie perfectionism but to something more hectic, funnier, looser, more bonkers. In the video for \u201cManchild,\u201d a hitchhiking Carpenter climbs in and out of a string of preposterous vehicles, including a sidecar fashioned from a shopping cart, a Jet Ski on wheels, and a motorized recliner. It\u2019s a warped, Surrealist vision of Americana: she uses a fork as a cigarette holder, shoots pool with a loaded shotgun, pulls a fried fish from a claw machine. \u201cFuck my liiiiiife,\u201d she coos on the chorus. The sentiment is relatable; desire is often a catastrophic force, obliterating our best intentions for ourselves. (One of her deranged paramours drives off a cliff after she climbs out of his car.) Willful denial\u2014the way women are quick to muzzle rational thought in service of romance\u2014is a recurring theme in Carpenter\u2019s work. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to lie to girls \/ If they like you, they\u2019ll just lie to themselves,\u201d she sings on \u201cLie to Girls<\/a>,\u201d a tender ballad from \u201cShort n\u2019 Sweet<\/a>,\u201d her breakthrough album, which came out last year.<\/p>\n Carpenter, who is twenty-six, has been releasing music since 2014, when she signed with Hollywood Records, a label owned by Disney. \u201cManchild,\u201d which was co-written with Jack Antonoff<\/a> and Amy Allen, reminds me, in a circuitous way, of \u201cDumb Blonde,\u201d a single from Dolly Parton<\/a>\u2019s d\u00e9but LP, \u201cHello, I\u2019m Dolly,\u201d released in 1967. Carpenter is plainly a student of Parton\u2019s, evoking her pinup styling (voluminous hair, big red lips), her persona (sharp with a knowing wink), and her voice, which is rich and husky and accompanied by a country lilt. They both find an enormous amount of humor in the friction that powers love. But mostly they take joy in being underestimated\u2014and proving everyone wrong. \u201cThis dumb blonde ain\u2019t nobody\u2019s fool,\u201d Parton warns.<\/p>\n \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d which was released last week, and was co-produced by Antonoff and John Ryan, is a bright, effervescent pop record with a slapstick lean. Although it contains untold layers of vocals and synthesizers (Antonoff famously delights in a flourish, a big chorus, a wash of reverb), it\u2019s not without air, or a feeling of spontaneity. These days, Carpenter is primarily interested in making twangy, ribald songs that veer toward country, or especially disco; I hear echoes of ABBA, Shania Twain, \u201cMirage\u201d-era Fleetwood Mac, Alicia Bridges, Donna Summer, and early, campy Katy Perry. On \u201cHouse Tour,\u201d a song about inviting your date inside at the end of an evening, Carpenter conjures the sensual certitude of Diana Ross\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s My House<\/a>,\u201d and the friskiness of Prince\u2019s \u201cKiss\u201d:<\/p>\n And I promise none of this is a metaphor<\/p>\n I just want you to come inside<\/p>\n But never enter through the back door<\/p>\n I loved \u201cEspresso,\u201d Carpenter\u2019s breakout single, from last spring\u2014it was clever (\u201cOne touch and I brand-newed it for ya,\u201d she pants, handily encapsulating how, in the intoxication of new love, the world is instantaneously remade) and charmingly self-aware (\u201cStupid,\u201d she mutters, just a beat later). There is a lot here that resembles \u201cEspresso\u201d\u2014the latest album is an obvious companion piece to \u201cShort n\u2019 Sweet,\u201d with the same chatty asides and quick, carnal jokes, the same lovelorn gripes and laments\u2014but nothing that quite surpasses its buoyancy. But I suppose that, too, is a nod to the hamster wheel of sex and love and relationships: you think that you\u2019ve learned some crucial lesson, that you couldn\u2019t possibly do it all over again, and then, of course, you do.<\/p>\n The cover of \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend\u201d features a photo of Carpenter wearing heels and a black cocktail dress, on her hands and knees, before a faceless man who clutches a fistful of her hair. The image consciously hints at porn (the set includes beige wall-to-wall carpeting and heavy white drapes, as if Carpenter were crawling through a Motel 6) and sexual submission, particularly when paired with the album\u2019s title. Reactions were swift and high-pitched. People tend to find the union of sex and violence\u2014or sex and willing subjugation\u2014either fun and titillating or gruesome and catastrophically sinful.<\/p>\n Predictably, the hubbub surrounding the photo was eventually framed as a war between uptight virgins and godless heathens, with a quieter contingent astounded only by the fact that this kind of marketing could still be so effective. (I would also argue that there are enough heartbreak songs on the album to suggest the opposite subtext: that the title is a biting play on the various ways women are dehumanized, politically or otherwise.) Eventually, Carpenter released another cover, in which she is standing on two legs and leaning against a guy in a suit. \u201cHere is a new alternate cover approved by God,\u201d she wrote, on Instagram. (I laughed.)<\/p>\n Carpenter is not the only Disney ing\u00e9nue to rebrand as a libidinous pop starlet\u2014which is to say, she is not the first person to grow up and publicly express desire\u2014but she\u2019s one of the first to do it in the post-Roe v. Wade era, when America is perhaps more confused than ever about the moral rules regarding a casual romp in the sack. Even an innocent scroll on one\u2019s phone presents a succession of impossible-seeming binaries: trad wives<\/a> vs. unhinged porn, incels<\/a> vs. kink-forward dating apps. Sex is ubiquitous and nowhere, essential and extraneous, sacrosanct and super silly. Carpenter, too, somehow seems both sexless and oversexed. On the \u201cShort n\u2019 Sweet\u201d tour, Carpenter, wearing a series of sequinned miniskirts and halter tops, pantomimed a different sex position every night while singing \u201cJuno,\u201d a song about being so rip-roaringly horny that you start fantasizing about getting pregnant. If you have four and a half minutes, you can watch a compilation<\/a> on YouTube: \u201cWanna try out some freaky positions? \/ Have you ever tried this one?\u201d Carpenter sings, as she trots to the front of the stage and throws her legs over her head, or bends over, or does the splits, or rolls onto her side. The cumulative effect is not especially arousing, or even provocative\u2014I found it almost psychedelic, as though I were marooned on a malfunctioning raft in one of those Tunnel of Love carnival rides.<\/p>\n