The cover for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, isn’t going over well.
Last week, the singer unveiled the polarizing artwork, which shows her on all fours while a male hand grabs her hair. Within seconds, users on X and TikTok labeled the image “misogynistic” and “irresponsible.” Others claimed that Carpenter was never “for the girls. “She’s never embodied the female gaze,” wrote one poster. “She is the type of man-hater that men prefer, putting on the image of a sexy and vengeful femme fatale, but all in the name of male attention and love.”
While some argued that the photograph was probably satirical, given Carpenter’s reputation for calling out her lover’s mistreatment in her music, others quickly dismissed those interpretations.
Overall, the cover seemed to confirm an observation that Carpenter’s critics have made throughout her Short ‘N’ Sweet Tour: Her sex-tinged lyrics and hyperfeminine image are too “male-centered.”
This line of criticism is all over social media these days, often aimed at women who are sexually forward or perceived as trying to appeal to men. There are a few different slurs and descriptions for this archetype — “pick-me,” “male-dominated,” “not a girl’s girl.” Social media is cluttered with warnings and treatises about these women. At best, the conventional wisdom goes, they’re annoying to be around. At worst, they’re a threat to women’s equality.
It’s a fraught type of criticism, especially when cultural misogyny is regaining a foothold it only briefly lost in the years following #MeToo movement. Meanwhile, the conversation may also be fueled by younger people, who are reportedly developing more conservative attitudes toward sex.
This tension around gender and sexuality feels emblematic of a particularly anxious climate, where every person, image, or viral moment feels like an explosive weapon in a cultural gender war. At the same time, these criticisms sound extremely familiar.
So-called anti-women women have a lot of new names
You can trace the recent fixation on “anti-women” behavior by women to a few viral trends, including the usage of the term “pick-me,” which originated on Black Twitter in the 2010s.
“‘Pick-mes’ are viewed as trying to get men to pick them for sex or love over other women,” says Danielle Procope Bell, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who’s done research on the online phenomenon. “Eventually, the term traveled to other internet spaces, including the ‘mainstream’ white internet and the Black manosphere. Its meaning shifts depending on the group using it.”
For a while, the pejorative was used to mock women who shamed other women for not being submissive in relationships or “respectable” in public. In the 2020s, though, the term spread to TikTok and, as with most Black slang, became flattened. What started as a pointed critique of internalized misogyny became shorthand for a host of behaviors that might happen to appeal to the male gaze. Users flooded the hashtag with innocuous if not totally random signs of “pick me” behavior, from being friends with your friend’s romantic partner to liking beer.
Maybe due to some backlash over the proliferation of the term, TikTok has recently turned its attention to “male-centered women,” a more academic-sounding label that is practically the same phenomenon. A male-centered woman may not shame other women the way a “pick me” once did, but like the latter-day examples, she will spend a bulk of her time and energy on men and their concerns. (There was a time such a woman might have been called the relatively benign epithet “boy crazy.”) On TikTok, you can find videos of women mocking “male-centered” women and explaining how they’re untrustworthy. “Women who are extremely male-centered will never truly be your friend,” explained one TikToker. Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw comes up frequently as the ultimate symbol of “male-centeredness.”
Users are equally aggressive in adjudicating what it means to be “women-centered.” Maybe the most popular measure of morality these days is whether or not a woman can be considered “a girl’s girl” or “for the girlies,” terms used to describe women who know how to get along with other women and support them in various social situations. These phrases are often weaponized on female-led reality shows like Real Housewives and routinely debated online. When a TikToker labeled Kylie Jenner as “for the girlies” after she shared the details of her breast augmentation a few weeks ago (thereby not gatekeeping her look, a primary crime of girlbossery), critics loudly disagreed.
Hidden in these remarks are reasonable concerns about gender, power, and the ways girls and young women can easily be influenced online. Folks mad at Jenner for disclosing her plastic surgery details saw it as contributing to the pressure to fit into conventional beauty standards, one that’s amplified on social media platforms like TikTok.
Conservative propaganda aimed at women is equally hard to escape. From tradwife influencers to women promoting “soft living,” these quietly patriarchal trends can easily seep through our algorithms. When mainstream celebrities like Carpenter or Sydney Sweeney — who recently garnered backlash for selling soap supposedly made with her own bathwater — present products that appeal to men, there’s reason to fear that everyone is succumbing to a larger sexist agenda.
The form this discourse is taking might have to do with the noticeable disinterest in men among women right now. Gen Z is dating less, and more women are pursuing celibacy. Overall, it seems like younger women are acknowledging that they can live complete lives without male partnerships. At the same time, male-centered culture (and politics) seems to be desperately seeking a way to reset gender norms to the 1950s.
Women today have no problem publicly expressing their aversion to men, whether on popular podcasts or through TikTok. Sex writer Magdalene J. Taylor explored casual man-hating online in a Substack post titled “Do Women Even Like Men Anymore?” She connects this trend to the increasingly grim realities of misogyny and violence against women. She also writes that, from a cultural standpoint, “it’s become deeply uncool, as women, to acknowledge any sort of affinity or appreciation for men.”
While the effects of misandry and misogyny aren’t tantamount, this online man-bashing has visibly manifested in women publicly criticizing or policing other women’s relationships to men. Former Vox culture reporter Rebecca Jennings wrote about how “divorce him” has become the immediate advice for women perceived to be in unhappy or sometimes just imperfect marriages on social media. These remarks are often publicized with little concern for how they may affect the women they’re aimed at or a complete picture of their relationships.
We’ve experienced these tensions before
Professor Jessa Lingel, director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg, says that this infighting and division over gender and sexuality echoes previous feminist movements — although it’s not totally clear whether everyone participating in these conversations identifies as a feminist.
Lingel says that “in the 1970s, feminists like Betty Friedan called lesbians a ‘lavender menace’” and “saw them as a distraction from the movement’s goals on economic equality and workplace rights.”
Meanwhile, author Sophie Lewis sees the work of second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin in these current accusations. She tells Vox that the activist, who was notably anti-sex work, has had a literary revival over the past few years, as a “particularly femmephobic strain of radical feminism” is resurging.
Critiquing women’s behavior, specifically those in positions of power, isn’t inherently bad or uncalled for. Lingel says that, in feminist movements, addressing legitimate imperfections has always been necessary. However, it’s hard not to notice how much of these online conversations about the patriarchy center around individual women — real or hypothetical — and not the structural forces that may be influencing their behavior. That is, if their behavior is even really a problem.
Many of these takes, specifically the ones aimed at Carpenter, are mainly concerned with how men will respond to them. They suggest that women are to blame for men’s actions or that they can protect themselves from violence by appearing a certain way.
Likewise, social media facilitates these reductive takes and misguided conversations. TikTok’s algorithm often favors conflict and polarizing opinions. Additionally, the condensed nature of these posts isn’t always great for communicating nuanced ideas about gender, sex, and other social issues.
“TikTok and Instagram, which have pushed more and more to short-form video content, are really tough platforms for the sustained, careful kinds of conversation that you need to unpack the politics of any ideology,” says Lingel.
Like many public conversations about women, we’ll presumably realize in a few years that “hot takes” and hashtags aren’t the best way to have them. The hullaballoo around Carpenter already feels reminiscent of the backlash surrounding fellow Disney star Miley Cyrus’s heavily scrutinized entry into adulthood, while the assumptions made about Sweeney’s character are similar to the way the public has judged previous Hollywood sex symbols, from Angelina Jolie to Megan Fox. These are all women the culture has found empathy for in recent years. But misogyny is always a lesson learned too late.
