it's a lens! - Shiva Baby (2020)

Sabrina Carpenter’s Album Cover Art for “Man’s Best Friend”

— REPUBLISHED FROM YEAH MAYBE DON’T READ THIS ONE

I was having dinner in The Hague at an Italian restaurant with my boyfriend. We decided to sit inside and noticed immediately that it was sparsely decorated on account of being opened five days earlier. A golden-foiled bag of coffee inside of a case, fake peppers hanging on freshly painted supporting beams. But one piece of decoration stood out: a panoramic glass picture hanging on the back wall.

I’m no art historian, so forgive my ham-fisted analysis: the picture was a sepia-toned composite photo of (mostly) 20th-century icons. Marilyn Monroe sitting next to Elizabeth Taylor. Gandhi sidling up to Mother Teresa. Barack Obama quirkily posted up under Elvis. Queen Elizabeth II DJs right above Albert Einstein, Mao Zedong, and the Pope striking poses. You’re supposed to get the vibe that they’re all hanging out at some afterparty, casually sharing revolutionary ideas and cracking inside jokes that only their elite minds could conceive.

I made the comment that, to me, the picture represents a kind of futile, naïve Gen X nostalgia fantasy. Nostalgia for the pop culture events that shaped that generation and the fantasy of respectability politics, very “can’t we all just get along?” coded. And like, no! Clearly fucking not. Martin Luther King Jr. was stalked and assassinated by the United States government for believing people should have rights. Michael Jackson, pictured here cuddling up to his rival Prince, has some pretty credible accusations of child rape stacked up against him. People won’t leave Marilyn Monroe alone after her death; the culture consistently gives itself permission to project its (misogynistic, racist, or even sometimes overeagerly feminist) fantasies onto her.

I’m not saying that the 20th century was bad, actually. It wasn’t; the art that came out of the last century fucking slapped. It’s a reason why people overlook the child abuse and domestic violence accusations of the people pictured here. The politics that came out of that time shaped the world we live in today. It’s all there—the gang’s all there.

It also reminds me of something the anthropologist Sherry Ortner wrote in Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties. She specifically reflects on the rampant, growing neoliberal sentiment not only politically and economically, but also its creep into the culture, contributing to a consciousness that identified state (white, colonial, patriarchal) power as both normative and oppressive to culture. Politics and culture move in symbiosis, one responding to the other.

I had such a strong reaction to the picture because it takes all of the political and cultural shifts, mashing space, time, ideas, and execution into a small group of people—all empty vessels ready for projection. The projection here is that they are all the Best, Biggest, Brightest minds we’ve had, that they’re inherently good because of the things they contributed to society. Who gets to be the judge of that, and how does the culture come to a collective agreement?

Looking at that question from a feminist perspective, I consistently think about the popular discourse online. Specifically how participants conflate iconic pop culture moments with significant political influence and social justice movements, pretending like they’re two hands moving in tandem with equal weight. I’ve actually been trying to write this piece for about a year now, and I think this situation—and the fact that I just need to get on with it—have finally converged in my brain, so here we go!

My problem when I write is that I always feel the academic need to read 15 essays, three books, and watch a couple of documentaries to perfectly make my point. But I recently read the Lorde Rolling Stone profile where she said something that motivated and embarrassed me. So I’m going to try something different here, and I really would like to hear your thoughts not only on the situation I’m discussing, but also the analysis.

Just realized it sounds like I’m calling myself smart which is making me cringe even if it is true!! Trying to be smart enough to be basic!

Many of you may click out here, because you don’t want anything to do with The Discourse. And, okay, bye! But to me, this is also indicative of a huge problem when talking about pop culture, which is seen as a frivolous girl’s hobby. It leaves room for the loud and wrong people to be even louder and wronger. It contributes to the way history is written about the situation. It is indicative of the complacency in politics that leads to the attitudes about women turning into regressive policy for women.

When a picture of Sabrina Carpenter set the discourse machine ablaze, I was nowhere near the fire.

I deleted Twitter earlier this June, I don’t visit the Substack social media feed on a daily basis, and the only thing I get on Instagram is workout and WIEAD reels, because I’ve been taking my phone to the gym so it knows I’m doing that now. In a lull during my week of traipsing across Amsterdam, I decided to download the Substack app out of boredom—as per my rule to only download the Substack app out of boredom. The first and only thing on my feed for quite a while was Sabrina Carpenter.

I knew I came in late to the discourse because there was already a furious flurry of think pieces. As anyone who has come into the discourse in the middle would know, it’s disorienting and off-putting. Instead, I watched a video from journalist and commentator Kayla Says titled “Sabrina Carpenter, The Male Gaze, & You.”

I think my problem is that Kayla’s commentary collapses one problem into another: Carpenter’s critics see her as someone who plays into a male power fantasy of hyperfemininity and hypersexuality. Her choice to do this is rationalized by the fact that—at least by choice feminism standards—anything she chooses to do is because she wants to; she’s not being forced, coerced, or oppressed into it. Any choice made by a woman under patriarchy is inherently feminist, even The Photo. Further criticism includes the fact that she sometimes sexualizes herself as a minor (more on that here). There’s also the argument that Carpenter is subverting the male gaze and the people taking her art at face value aren’t media literate.

There is a consolidation of the people who have criticisms with elements of the way Carpenter markets herself and “puritanical freaks,” or a sect of young conservatives who are averse to any depictions of sex in the media. To be clear, there is a rise in young people who think this way. I tend to see them as part of the same crowd who want to be “pure” in every aspect of their lives. They’re the same people who romanticize gender essentialism, “family values,” tradwife life; they’re deep into the wellness industrial / MAHA movement, and maybe even voted for Trump.

What I came away with from Kayla’s video—and from the comments under this it—is that people are conflating comments like “Sabrina Carpenter is setting feminism back 50 years” with the idea that, no, the picture itself isn’t feminist media. Let’s take a step back. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and count to ten. No really, do it.

When you open your eyes, let’s look at this image again.

It’s a headless man, white-knuckling a woman’s hair in his hands while she’s on all fours, with an ambiguous, Mona Lisa-esque look on her face. In the context of the world we live in—the same world Carpenter is releasing art into, a “your body, my choice” world—I’d ask: what specifically is the feminist message? I don’t think there is a clear one here. This image is a small tile in the mosaic of culture that contributes to the normalization and sometimes glamorization of patriarchy.

And that’s just the isolated image. The album is titled Man’s Best Friend, implying that the headless, angry man is her owner, she is a dog, his bitch, her hair a leash. I’m not saying Carpenter doesn’t have anything of value to say here, or that she should be shamed for her artistic expression. But that doesn’t mean it’s feminist, and it’s okay if it’s not.

The first single on the album, “Manchild,” is fun, and I like the video! Carpenter is consistently singing about being in relationship with men. Her introspective assessment is that she’s addicted to being in entanglements with “incompetent, stupid, useless, slow” men whom she doesn’t choose. She “chooses to blame their moms” for their emotional incompetence, poor hygiene, and low intelligence. Like I said, fun! Relatable! But not necessarily feminist! And that’s okay!

I can look at The Photo, know that it isn’t feminist, and not be devastated by it. Because I know there are worse things in the world. From a feminist view, Sabrina Carpenter isn’t setting feminism back because she isn’t a leader or, to my knowledge, even part of the feminist movement.

The other side of this argument follows the logic that because it’s common knowledge that Carpenter sexualizes and objectifies herself, we should know that she is doing that here. But if that’s the case, is there no way that could’ve been clearer? I’m not asking this in a “it’s an artist’s responsibility to spell everything out for us” kind of way, but more of a “it’s an artist’s responsibility to convey something in the way they want to convey it” kind of way. We’ve seen bitches on leashes before!

In case you thought “bitches” wasn’t gender neutral in this context…Sexxy Red Performing at Rolling Loud Miami in 2023

NLE Choppa walking Sexxy Red and Sukihana by their bussdowns for the “Slut Me Out” Remix music video, 2023

The social media response to the photo above

Why a 1960s-style Polaroid of a headless man white-knuckling her hair while she’s on the ground?

I think these are valid questions that me and other feminists are asking. But when the media over-indexes on uninformed outrage and lumps feminists and the idea of feminism in with the crowd, it’s ultimately unhelpful, and adds to the narrative of feminists as chiding killjoys, confused about their own politics, too enamored with pop culture to look at the real issues, angry at everything, informed about nothing that matters. I think that further attracts angry young women, enamored with pop culture, seemingly informed about nothing material to our existence, to adopt that as their feminist politic.

In an essay titled “the bimbo feminists will pay for their crimes” the author discusses the concept of “bimbo feminism,” an aesthetic that has infiltrated TikTok in the past few years. The essay, as explained by the author, was part of a larger dissertation on feminist archetypes, including the bimbo. It read like a well-researched rant, which is how I took it. It was controversial at the time and to that I say: why are you booing? She’s right! The author questions how much one can subvert patriarchy while playing into it and criticizes the perceived nihilism of women who play into the aesthetic.

In response, the author of the essay “hot girls can read dostoyevsky too” criticizes the original author for “going after feminine women,” calling it a “very I’m-not-like-other-girls post.” She calls the author “sour” (read: jealous) for her “opinion on ‘feminism’ disguised as pure and simple misogyny.” But throughout the essay, there isn’t any critical engagement with what the original author was discussing, no direct contact with the concepts being referenced in the essay. Instead, she chastises the original author for not being a “girl’s girl,” stoking rivalry and hate between women (but further down states “we absolutely do not need to love all women, we have the right to point out when someone is being problematic.”)

This is an example of the exact issue myself and other feminists talk about when in critical discussion of pop culture and feminism. The last decade of pop feminism was, as the author writes, “about allowing women to do whatever the hell they want”—this is also known as choice feminism. This was also a popular sentiment in the comments of the video essay I mentioned above, one that Kayla agrees with. The author comes close to engaging with criticism when she states that “beauty as we know is a social construct, and if we want to understand why we seek it, it’s necessary to look at capitalism, misogyny, and many other variants,” but doesn’t reference any specific texts or examples.

Pop feminism doesn’t really engage with theory and mostly looks to pop culture to dictate what is and isn’t feminism. But the feminist movement started by doing the reverse: looking at culture and questioning the normalized misogyny and patriarchy around us, including possible internalization of those norms. The author references Paris Hilton as an example of a successful, rich woman influencer who invented the selfie, but it’s not clear how this aligns with the arguments in the original essay about nihilistic feminism—or feminism at all.

Without any clear engagement with the points in the essay, it seems like the author is positing that the reason someone wrote a dissertation based in feminist theory is because they’re jealous of other women who are smart but also eagerly comport themselves to the male gaze. Again, there is a flattening of quintessential feminist theory, displayed clearly by a flattening of the original author’s writing as well as the long-employed trope of the angry, ugly, envious feminist. It makes way for the binary of good/bad feminist and dichotomy of good/bad woman. The original essay, even with its aggressive tone, has something to say about how women are choosing to advance the feminist movement. The response to that was to shut down the criticism with the same misogynistic tactics that feminism fights against. It reads like anti-intellectualism. My intention isn’t to bully the author, but to use this essay as a specific example of the larger issue at hand. Either way I’m sure I will be viewed as a mean, jealous, angry, ugly feminist for writing this. I’m okay with that.

Choice feminism decontextualizes decades of both feminist scholarship and feminist activism. The movement that started by women holding and attending consciousness-raising sessions where they were encouraged to think critically about—and later challenge—their standing in the social, cultural, and political landscape that we live in. I think it’s important to reflect on what your feminism is couched in. I’m not saying we all need to voraciously read every single feminist text, ensuring we can quote Butler, Anzaldúa, Dworkin, Hill Collins, and Firestone on command. I have a lot of gaps in my feminist knowledge and I’m not afraid to admit it, but I’m also working towards filling those gaps one step at a time.

What I notice with pop feminism is that the idea of feminism is supplanted by the idea of “women doing whatever the hell they want” and being “empowered.” These are nebulous phrases that can mean anything. And I think that’s the point of it; women can do anything they want, even play into the patriarchy or actively enforce it, and it will still be feminist. Pop feminism uses women in the public eye to reinforce this idea. As the author wrote, “Legally Blonde was released in 2001 so why the hell are we still talking about this in 2024?”

This creates another binary, one that outside observers and non-feminists buy into: feminists are either puritanical freaks (the video essay I mentioned earlier), or they radically believe women should be able to do whatever they want without any criticism (the essay mentioned above). Either way, the final adjudication is the same: any criticism of women is an act of internalized misogyny. So where does that leave feminist activists and scholars? Maybe even more importantly, where does that leave young, impressionable women?

In Jia Tolentino’s “The Cult of the Difficult Woman,” she explicates this idea:

“Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political import. It’s also a personal matter, because when we reclaim the stories that surround female celebrities, stories surrounding ordinary women are reclaimed, too.”

But she later points out the flaw in this logic as feminist dogma:

“But when the case for a woman’s worth is built partly on the unfairness of what’s leveled at her, things get slippery, especially as the internet expands the range and reach of hate and unfair scrutiny into infinity—a fact that holds even as feminist ideas become mainstream. Every woman faces backlash and criticism. Extraordinary women face a lot of it. And that criticism always exists in the context of sexism, just like everything else in a woman’s life. These three facts have collapsed into one another, creating the idea that harsh criticism of a woman is itself always sexist, and furthermore, more subtly, that receiving sexist criticism is in itself an indication of a woman’s worth.”

The other problem here, which many observers of pop culture reactionism have pointed out before me, is that the culture now measures social justice ideologies against the media they consume. In extremely simple terms, this means that feminist = good taste, high-quality art; explicit depictions of anti-racism = conceptually rich, technically masterful. The other side of that is that any depictions of racism, sexism, homophobia without a tacit condemnation = “bad art.”

An example of this that I saw online was Barbie (2023) being upheld as a feminist masterpiece while Poor Things (2023) was garbage not worth a second thought. Even if you come to these conclusions, it’s important to examine how you got there. Even if you think that a hyper self-aware cash-grab film about a controversial toy (that is based off of a sex doll) is better (again, better = more feminist) than a film about a fully grown woman with the brain of a newborn who fucks her way through adolescence, I think it’s critical to show your work.

Things are further complicated when we think about, as Tolentino reflects on in her essay, the way culture has treated women in the public eye. The podcast You’re Wrong About, does the same. Host Sarah Marshall is devoted to retelling the stories of “maligned women,” with episodes on Nicole Brown Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Vanessa Williams, Yoko Ono, and Marie Antoinette, among others. Top of mind for me always is Britney Spears. Her narrative arc—from America’s down-home sweetheart living the American Dream to crazy, chronically feckless, fat whore, to righteously vindicated woman, tortured by the public, her family, and her love interests—has an insurmountable influence on the contemporary conversations we have about public-facing women.

With the knowledge of the way we treated women before and the desire to course correct, a muddled, mangled “feminist” logic has taken up space in the zeitgeist. The logic being that if you, a feminist, like something, then it is feminist by default, and if someone criticizes it, then they are participating in a puritanical misogynist hate campaign. It also manufactures consent: it’s okay for women to do whatever they want—including move further rightward (as many are now doing)—and feminists should not only be okay with, but also defend their choice to do it.

Within the context of pop culture, it feels like we are trying to preempt other women, including Sabrina Carpenter, from getting the Britney, Whitney, Anna-Nicole, Yoko treatment by shielding them with choice feminism. Even if the criticism is tepid, someone will jump down your throat either way.

I wonder how pop feminists would discuss this today. Feminist or no? Britney Spears’ famous Rolling Stone photoshoot, 1999 (she’s 17 here).

In Dayna Tortorici’s review of Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl, she calls our current reflection on early 2000s culture a “consciousness-raising-style reappraisal, as millennial women entering their thirties and forties look back at the era in which they came of age.”

I ask: what if in that reappraisal we are projecting a sick fantasy onto the pop stars of today? That even if what Sabrina Carpenter is doing isn’t feminist, that she’s doing it against her will? Or even that she’s cleverly subverting the male gaze and we should all recognize how stupid we are not to realize that now. In 20 years, when we reassess, we’ll see that clearly we were bullying her with our criticisms while she was writhing helplessly in the pop culture machine, and that we’ll owe her a major apology later.

Sabrina Carpenter is being forced to sing about how she “needs big Black cock inside of her.” We should know that. No one should have a problem with it. (I have a problem with it).

Tortorici continues:

“Owing in large part to the second wave’s influence, it is now axiomatic among feminists that women are shaped by the culture that surrounds them. The hopeful belief that follows is that confronting one’s cultural influences—identifying them, analyzing them, and exposing how their assumptions shore up a society of male supremacy—can rob them of their power to indoctrinate.”

Again I ask: what if the reverse is happening? What if we are no longer confronting those cultural influences, but nodding along with them, allowing them to swallow us, and taking pride in that choice? What if we are using celebrities to enforce feminist “rules” that don’t even apply to us?

As Tolentino writes:

“There’s a limit, I think, to the utility of reading celebrity lives like tea leaves. The lives of famous women are determined by exponential leaps in visibility, money, and power, whereas the lives of ordinary women are mostly governed by mundane things: class, education, housing markets, labor practices.”

She expands on the way this liberal feminist idea eeks into the way we view politics. The women of the Trump administration are just doing their jobs, following orders (where have we heard that one before?) so we shouldn’t scrutinize them. I saw this idea playing out in the 2024 election. “Kamala is brat and if you’re not voting for her then you are betraying women everywhere.” You shouldn’t voice your concerns on her record in the California Attorney General’s office, or listen to local constituents who have criticized her decision-making skills (or lack thereof) for years, or even be worried about the vicious, megalomaniacal way she was speaking about continuing a genocide in order to win votes. You shouldn’t even have those concerns because now is not the time to not be a girl’s girl.

The reason I have such a big problem with pop feminism is because it views pop culture as equal in weight with politics instead of as an entry point into feminist thought. I use pop culture all the time to illustrate and explicate many a sociological theory. I think what I studied at university was cool, I want to share that knowledge with everyone, and I think pop culture is one of the most accessible avenues for that. But at no point does it eclipse praxis.

Tortorici ends her review with this exact point:

“I wanted to write this book because I was truly stunned by the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022,” Gilbert writes. But no amount of sifting through the cultural artifacts of the two-thousands can explain the retrenchment of the Trump era. The story of how Roe v. Wade was overturned is not a story of ideology disseminated from pop culture, let alone of hardcore pornography infecting the mind of the populace; it’s a story about dark money, legal strategy, and the slow, incremental way the anti-abortion movement made the procedure harder and harder to access until conservatives finally hijacked the Supreme Court. In other words, it’s a story about politics.
When the audit known as feminist revision became a feature of feminist theory, it was never intended to eclipse in importance the activity known as praxis: organizing, taking over institutions, seizing power to make lasting changes in policy and law. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, but she also co-founded the National Organization for Women. Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, but she also wrote the Manifesto of the 343, which demanded free access to birth control and the right to have an abortion… There is little comparable sense of agency or possibility in Girl on Girl. Gilbert alludes to collective power, but remains hazy on what it is to be used for, and ends her book looking out onto a familiar cramped horizon. Representation matters, she tells us, and, if we can rewrite our limiting storytelling models, we can remake the world. Yes, representation matters, but culture alone can’t do the work of politics, and neither can cultural critique. Gilbert is right that it makes a difference what we see. More important, though, is what we do.”

Sure, I write about feminism and social science through the lens of pop culture, but I’ve also donated the proceeds of this newsletter to trans rights organizations and to relief efforts in Palestine. On social media I try to share direct and mutual aid resources more than infographics. After the Atlanta spa shooting, I attended an anti-Asian hate crime intervention seminar; and then I witnessed an anti-Asian hate crime and used what I learned in that seminar to intervene. One thing I’m working on doing more often is paying greater attention to how new, severely conservative policies directly affect the people in my life and reaching out to them to offer support if they need it.

The illusion that Kylie Jenner’s “boob recipe,” or putting Nara Smith on Tradwife Watch, or worrying if I’m performing the duties of being a “girl’s girl” correctly is just as or even more important than that is cooked. But in the same breath, I am able to look at Sabrina Carpenter’s output and have engaging and rich discussions about feminism, femininity, and womanhood without writing it off as frivolous and without writing her off as regressive.

While I was editing this essay, I came across another from Sunny Lu at The Lavender Menace titled “in defense of Chappell Roan: your anti-choice-feminism feminism is just another form of choice feminism.” In it, Lu weaves together recent criticisms of Chappell Roan’s recent choice to wear a sex doll costume on a guest appearance of RuPaul’s Drag Race with feminist scholarship on sexuality, gender essentialism, and the internet discourse surrounding choice feminism. While I found this essay extremely engaging, there are things that I disagree with here.

I did my cultural anthropology dissertation on queer documentaries, which in no way makes me a leading expert on queer theory, but I think it informs the way I view the same things Lu is discussing. I view Chappell Roan’s Drag Race costume as, well, drag—and high camp drag at that. Where drag originated as a practice of reflecting heterosexual (often white, upper-middle-class) norms back at the audience—sometimes in an attempt to prove that they can indeed conform or pass—Chappell’s sex doll drag was holding a funhouse mirror up to it. The costume also, when put in context, links back to her controversial comments about motherhood. Lu illustrates and explicates this well in her essay.

Much like Carpenter, there was an outsized and misinformed outrage. When you look at the context of where Chappell was giving this high camp drag performance, as well as her music, the fact that she has been vocal about her politics, and if you know even a lick of queer theory, then there’s very little insightful criticism to be had there. Contrasting this with Sabrina Carpenter, whose schtick is playing into patriarchal fantasies for her own sexual benefit, I think there is a difference. Can straight people successfully do drag? Can they embody the complexities deployed in the performance of projection? Or are they simply, happily going with the flow? Thinking back to reading Jonathan Swift in my high school English class: is it satire if no one can fully tell when you’re joking?

Adding to that, Carpenter isn’t very vocal about her politics. I understand Chappell’s performance because of the high-level context I have for her—and I’m not even a fan. Weighing that against Sabrina’s cover art and the high-level context I have for her, I can say that it isn’t feminist and leave the conversation at that, you know, without getting all weird about it.

But Lu writes:

“anti-choice-feminism feminism online demonizes everything from Chappell Roan’s sex doll costume to sex workers themselves and exists as a product of the victory of cultural feminists over the sex radical queer feminists... It is this impulse to exclude other women that, I think, motivates the anti-choice-feminism feminism which I’ve been seeing more and more of online.”

I, as a person who eschews choice feminism for the reasons stated above, don’t feel this way at all, and I don’t know anyone critical of choice feminism who does. I’m not saying that they don’t exist, and I’m more than happy to apply the “if it don’t apply, let it fly” rule, but I also don’t want to state my distaste for choice feminism and have people think I’m some puritanical exclusionary feminist.

Lu goes on to call anti-choice-feminism feminists “performative feminists.” But this group already has a name: pop feminists. I see choice feminists caught up exclusively in conversations about wearing makeup, dressing however one pleases, and whether or not having sex with men is feminist. All of those topics can and should be discussed in any feminist circle—and they have been dissected at length because they’re evergreen topics and great entry points for broadening feminist ideas. But when the conversation ends in the same place it starts and all of the arguments amount to “because you should be able to,” it leaves a lot of room for anything to fill its place. No interrogation and little curiosity, almost akin to a thought-terminating cliché. There’s comfort in absolutism because it gives that person’s ignorance a pass. No work or reading ever required.

While Lu states that “performative” feminists are not angry at the right people, the choice feminists are cheering them on. Which choice feminists do you know that are seriously having conversations about the misogyny happening in other places outside of the Western world? I personally know none, but I do know plenty of intersectional feminists who have the range to discuss Sabrina Carpenter and international politics through a feminist lens.

I’m not anti-choice feminism because I believe there is one right way to do feminism and all others should be banished, but because I think we should all become more intimately familiar with the line between accessibility and anti-intellectualism. When we who claim any kind of feminist label look at the culture around us—and the art that reflects the culture around us—the way we articulate our thoughts about it matters. We should be intentional about it, even if the artists aren’t.

Pretty Political: Pop Feminism and the Illusion of Choice

Your natural nails make you look unkempt