Manchild

Sabrina Carpenter's critique of masculinity

Sabrina Carpenter released a new single this week, which doubles down on her (catchy, fun) critique of masculinity. In doing so, she continues to be misread by liberals and conservatives alike. She also twists an indirect knife right into the heart of US politics: men are multifariously broken, she shows us, and broken men run this country. Carpenter’s music is great not just because her songs are the best pop objects since Carly Rae Jepsen, but also because they’re smart in a double sense, whose quips and wits advance a substantive critique of how our culture trains men to behave.

Detractors

Carpenter gets criticized and misread across the normative political spectrum, from pearl-clutching, temperamental conservatives (who argue she’s too sexy, raise a moral panic around what she’s teaching children) to liberals (who agree that she’s primarily selling sex, but argue that it’s girlboss to own/perform one’s own sexuality). “Help me understand Sabrina Carpenter and the return of this kind of pop aesthetic,” asks a writer in the r/Feminism reddit:

I grew up with all the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera pop culture, body shaming, objectification, etc etc we know it all and are still affected by it I’m sure… I mean, it’s not wrong to be any of the above, be a man eater, wear whatever you want. But I can’t help but feel like we are back in this girl pop era, what is the difference now? Is there a difference?

I’ve been working on an article that argues there is, in fact, a difference, an argument that I make by reading Carpenter through Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.¹ This might be a different version of what Tracy Clark-Flory calls (invoking Sophie Lewis), “heterofatalism…a performative sense of being stuck in a disappointing experience of heterosexuality). As Carpenter puts in, ‘Fuck my life’ (read: fuck my heterosexuality).”

The difference between the two, if there is one, is that Ward’s formulation uses explicitly lesbian-feminist perspectives to ask what a better heterosexuality might look like. If my argument that Carpenter expresses something of this viewpoint holds, it’s easier to hear Carpenter’s artistic persona as a femme who refuses to settle for unhappiness. And femmes are always deploying sexuality from a place of self-awareness, as both a weapon (against others) and tonic (for oneself). On this view, the operative term for reading Carpenter well is not “man eater” (I use sex like men do) but “Manchild” (I refuse to accept what passes as acceptable behavior for men under patriarchy).

Ward

For Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality is a diagnosis leveled by queer observers who are disturbed by the normative, routine, and horribly predictable dysfunction they witness in heteronormative relationships. Reversing the pitying contemptuousness that straight culture normally applies to queer people, Ward’s work questions the idea that straight relationships are the ideal to which we should strive. In her book and the classes that grew out of it, Ward and her students “worry about straight people,” “feel sympathy for straight people,” and try to become “allies to straight people.”

Ward writes that “queer observers of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight women’s optimism and disappointment” (2020, 8). On the nature of these many disappointments, she elaborates:

Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting for men who have no close friends and who won’t go to therapy. Men are less likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize that they are depressed—a pattern so common as to be termed ‘normative male alexithymia’ by psychologists. (2020, 20)

Carpenter’s music meticulously documents this and other varieties of disappointment. At the end of “Taste,” for example, we see an expression of Ward’s point about men who won’t go to therapy, when Carpenter and Jenna Ortega (after smooching) commiserate about their mutual ex, who had “lots of trauma” that they’re free to laugh about now that it’s no longer their problem.² Implicit in their laughing is that the ex in question burdened his romantic partner with his problems exclusively—rather than getting outside help. It’s implicit because it’s so commonplace that we don’t need it explained.

Readings of Carpenter get confused in part because people can’t get past the fact that she sings about heterosexual romance in perhaps the most pointed way possible—that is, part of her power (but just one part) is how she embodies and personifies performances of female sexuality, adopting the kind of confident pursuit of men that casts her as the agent instead of them. But that’s not the beginning and the end of her artistic persona; her camp humor and her high femme glam are also a part of it. Her giant, sequined heels and her leopard print trims aren’t just fashion choices, but expressions of a sensibility.³ I promise, I’m really not stretching too far when I propose that Carpenter’s critique comes from a queer-feminist orientation.

Femme Aesthetics

Reinforcing Carpenter’s depictions of TTOH is her femme-informed performance of sexuality, which I read less as a hyperfeminine neoliberal ownership of sexuality (a la Katy Perry) and more as an interrogation of what gender does in our culture—this insofar as femme aesthetics are always already self-aware and critically reflexive. As Raechel Anne Jolie writes,

Femme, in particular, was a version of femininity that was socially acceptable insofar as it was legible, but it was formed by the working poor, and it wasn’t for men. Rather than appeasing the male gaze, femmes got dressed for the pleasure of their butches and for the pleasure of their own damn reflection in the mirror. And it was, or became, a little exaggerated. More lipstick, higher heels, tighter sweaters. A femme instinct to up the sex appeal to better spite the male gaze. Ultimately, this kind of femininity—excessive and not for men—was punished. (2020, 159)

If “excessive and not for men” applies to Carpenter even a little bit, then it complicates readings of her artistic persona that focus exclusively on the ways that she performs heterosexuality.⁴ But rather than contradicting her “straightness,” reading Carpenter as femme (adjacent) helps make sense of why she’s so relentlessly unhappy with the men in her life: she sees their failings for what they are.

“We have insufficient language,” Ward writes, “to describe queer people’s experience of finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality has been presented to us as love’s gold standard” (2020, 115). Carpenter’s music renders that perspective for listeners and viewers, speaking in the language of the United States’s most feminized musical genre to call men out for behavior that is as upsetting as it is predictable. To do so with high femme aesthetics also invites us to question the way that normative gender roles play into this dysfunction—and indeed, Carpenter doesn’t exempt herself from this critique!⁵

By persistently declining a happy ending, Carpenter’s music confirms, rather than disavows, the tragedy of heterosexuality that Ward suggests lesbian feminism helps us attune our attention toward. Furthermore, her embrace of high femme aesthetics brings this critique into alignment with queer women in a more or less explicit way, a critique that continues to insist (despite persistent misreadings) that Carpenter performs for her own pleasure rather than that of (mediocre) men, from a place of awareness and self-reflexivity around gender roles. In other words, Carpenter stages for us the ways men and women are expected to perform, and explores both the tragedies and the pleasures that can result—even when that means nominally embracing or giving oneself permission to explore and enjoy a gendered norm (i.e. playing the submissive as a woman).

In self-consciously interrogating one’s relationship to those norms, one already departs from their hegemonic distribution, even if you end up liking some of them for yourself. In both rendering and then refusing to settle for the inadequacies of heteronormative romance, Carpenter stays oriented “toward a future in which straight men like women so much that they actually like women,” a desire that Ward reframes from “heterosexual” to “feminist.” As she puts it, “To be into women, one must be for women” (2020, 172).

Politics

The group that is most correct to worry about Carpenter’s message is in fact that hard right, podcast bro, reactionary manosphere, all of which Carpenter indirectly targets insofar as we understand the terrible behaviors she calls out in her music as exactly the virtues touted by the right. In other words, the right is sensitive to Carpenter because she sees through their bullshit. They are also sensitive because of how femmeness’s excessive aesthetics inherently invoke histories of the poor and minority women who developed them, raising a fascist erogenous-zone where misogyny meets racism meets homophobia.

This is how AOC can enflame the right just by wearing a red lip. Like the rest of us, conservatives can decode semiotic signifiers for what they are—the difference is, they see AOC’s Brown femmeness as a threat rather than a triumph. By contrast, the right needs women like Kristi Noem—who have so thoroughly internalized patriarchal misogyny that they believe in it, too—in order to keep their machine running. They need women to say “yes, boss” in an ideological, critically unaware way, so that the dystopia they envision—where women are objects for men’s pleasure—can appear a natural, already-existing reality, a means of reifying their worldview by force. They need women to wear clothing and makeup that performs this obedience, which may look similar on the surface, but which under scrutiny feels far removed from the queer WOC femmes who also use eyeshadow, just differently. And a whole world in that difference.

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Cited

Jolie, Raechel Anne. 2020. Rust Belt Femme. Belt Publishing.

Ward, Jane. 2020. The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. New York University Press.

1. Academic publishing can take eons, and this one is still in the peer-review stage. One struggle when studying popular music is that the music itself and the scholarship on it work at such different timescales: by the time I find out if this article is accepted or not, Carpenter will have a whole new album out. 😪

2. As happens with some regularity in Carpenter’s cinematic world, the boyfriend is dead, and it was this new couple who killed him.

3. And look, I’m not saying it’s necessarily not complicated to raise high femme aesthetics from the position of a very, very wealthy celebrity. But it’s also not as straightforward as dismissing Carpenter as a neoliberal appropriation of working-class aesthetics. While Chappell Roan performing with cigarette butts in her hair and lipstick on her teeth might more accurately reflect femme culture’s poor and working-class origins—and while her real life childhood in rural Missouri might more substantively justify such explorations—Carpenter’s chic deployments work in concert with Roan, I suggest, in a cultural moment where the point is fundamentally this: Women are desperate for depictions of femininity and gender more broadly that attest to the complexities of their lives, instead of whatever the fuck this is.

4. See too Carpenter’s collaboration with Dolly Parton, of whom Jolie writes “there are few above her on the list of agreed upon queer icons, particularly for drag queens and femmes” (2020, 160). On this note, I’ll also recall a brilliant assessment by Alyx Vesey: “Sabrina [is] seizing the career Miley left on the table.”

5. See “Lie to Girls,” for example, where Carpenter describes the consequences of women internalizing patriarchal dysfunction: “You don't have to lie to girls/If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves,” she sings, directly including herself in the analysis (“Don’t I know it better than anyone else?”). No, she’s not immune to the consequences of patriarchy, some of which she might even find pleasurable in the way that all of our desires are contingent on a host of influences, some of which we can’t shake even if we want to. The point is that she’s interrogating these desires and the way they in part constitute her gender identity, her sexual orientation, the way those two categories in actuality co-mingle. She’s performing the tropes that she learned and the tropes she sees men learn, staging them for us so that we too can reflect on what to keep and what to reject. So that we too can have fun in the process.