The Dog Days Of Desire.

Sabrina Carpenter pulled off the most audacious magic trick of pop culture 2025: she weaponized the male gaze while denying she was using it at all. The sleight of hand was breathtaking: pose on your knees, let a faceless man grip your hair, slap a dog collar title on the whole thing, then watch as half the world argues you’re either a feminist genius or a patriarchal pawn. The real genius wasn’t the image itself but the plausible deniability built right into it.

I watched the outrage unfold from my kitchen table, coffee growing cold as the internet cannibalized itself over intention versus impact. Glasgow Women’s Aid called it regressive. The View ladies clutched their pearls. Twenty-six-year-old pop star reduces herself to pet imagery, they said, setting feminism back twenty years. But here’s the thing about controversy, it’s never really about the thing itself.

See, we’re living in the collapse of everything. Women’s rights rolling backward like a broken film reel, tradwife ideology creeping through social media like black mold, and suddenly a pop star’s album cover becomes the battlefield for our collective anxiety about female agency. The timing feels deliberate, calculated even. Drop a provocative image into a culture war and watch it explode.

The defenders came out swinging, declaring the critics guilty of internalized misogyny, conservative policing of female sexuality. They see satire where others see submission. The faceless man becomes every man, the universal patriarch rather than the celebrated one. Maybe she’s commenting on how society views women. Maybe she’s showing us our own complicity. Maybe she’s just trying to sell records.