Stop Blaming Women for the System That Bends Them
Sabrina Carpenter, sex work, and the exhausting performance of “correct” feminism online.
This past week, I haven’t been able to scroll more than two minutes on Twitter or TikTok without seeing some kind of discourse about Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover. At first, I thought it was some fleeting controversy - something people would pretend to be annoyed about for a few days before moving on to harassing the next woman under the guise of feminism. But for some reason, this one’s dragging on.
Why has a single image sparked so much debate? Is it just about aesthetics, or is it tied to a much deeper discomfort with how we interpret womanhood in public?
Let’s talk about the image.
The album, Man’s Best Friend, features a cover showing Carpenter on her hands and knees while an anonymous man grips her hair. People online have accused the artwork of perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes and trivializing control, power dynamics, and objectification.
And look, I understand why that opinion exists. But it’s been said. It’s been understood. The conversation has now spiraled far beyond critique and into a familiar cycle: people dogpiling on a woman, using “feminism” as a convenient excuse to be outright misogynistic. I’ve seen fake setlists mocking Sabrina go viral, with people delighting in degrading her. At this point, it’s not about the image. It’s about how easily a woman becomes a scapegoat.
Arwa Mahdawi, in The Guardian, wrote that the hair-grabbing visual was “in particularly poor taste considering recent court testimony that Sean “Diddy” Combs grabbed his then girlfriend Cassie Ventura by the hair and dragged her into another room where he assaulted her.” That comparison, to me, is a reach. Sabrina Carpenter did not say, this image is feminist. She did not caption it, this is activism. So why are we interpreting it as such? Why must every single thing a woman does be political, deliberate, and perfectly correct?
Feminism isn’t about attacking individual women.
I’ve seen TikTok comments accusing Sabrina of “setting women back 50 years.” And it’s in that kind of language - hyperbolic, righteous, and completely disconnected from reality - that you can see how certain corners of the internet have gone so far left, they’ve looped back around to being right-wing again.
Blaming one woman for the existence of the patriarchy is not feminist. It’s deeply misogynistic. Whether or not you personally enjoy the imagery, the act of piling global structural oppression onto the shoulders of a woman who made a cheeky pop album is absurd. There’s no critical lens here… just a hunger for purity politics that makes feminism less about liberation and more about shame.
The sex work conversation is part of this, too.
This scrutiny reminds me of the rise in anti-sex work content disguised as “feminism.” In the mid-2010s, social media was flooded with pro-sex work posts - glossy clips of pole dancers and OnlyFans models claiming huge earnings. I understand the backlash, especially when that content was algorithmically fed to young girls. But that’s the fault of the platform, not the individual women in those videos.
Now we’re seeing a pendulum swing in the opposite direction; one that condemns sex workers as “evil,” “damaged,” or “anti-feminist.” Let me be very clear: blaming sex workers for a system in which men still hold all the power is not the feminist take people think it is.
It’s worth repeating: most sex workers are not rich. Most aren’t profiting off luxury aesthetics or empowerment discourse. They are often vulnerable women navigating economic hardship and exploitation. Even the top 1% who do “make it” are still working in a system that grooms women to sell their bodies and convinces them it’s empowerment.
The issue is not women choosing survival. It’s the system that sells survival as sexuality.
Stop pretending this is about empowerment.
If you’re criticizing sex workers because you think they’re brainwashed by the patriarchy, but you’re not also calling out:
the men who fund it,
the managers who exploit them,
or the platforms that profit off it...
...then your feminism is performative at best, misogynistic at worst.
OnlyFans managers (many of whom are men) encourage women to display fake wealth, buy luxury items they can’t afford, and push further and further for content that sells. And when these women burn out or lose everything? They're disposable.
Even the most “safe” and “empowered” women in the industry are likely carrying trauma from having their bodies treated like products. That’s not their fault. It’s the result of being born into a society that profits from the objectification of women. Shame won't fix that. Empathy might.
So what does this have to do with Sabrina Carpenter?
Everything.
The discourse about Sabrina’s album cover is rooted in the same refusal to hold men or systems accountable. It’s easier to scrutinize a single woman than to challenge the culture that made her image controversial in the first place. It’s easier to sneer at a pop star on her knees than ask why we’re so uncomfortable with women choosing to be provocative on their own terms.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about imagery, sex, or power in pop culture. But when that conversation turns into harassment… when it becomes about punishing women instead of understanding the forces around them, we’ve lost the plot.
Sabrina’s not setting women back. The way we rush to humiliate a woman every time she breathes wrong? That might be.