It’s been over a year since Man’s Best Friend came out and I’m still bothered by the way it was interpreted. Not because people disliked the album, but because so many people decided what it meant before they listened to it. That misunderstanding has stuck with me for a while.
We all remember the image: Sabrina Carpenter on her hands and knees, her hair being grabbed by a man’s hand. Fans and critics alike immediately labeled the album cover as regressive, anti-feminist, and geared toward the male gaze.
The conversation about the album became about the photo, not the music that was supposed to go with it. Before Man’s Best Friend was even an album it was a controversy. I recall the album cover coming out and immediately labeling it as satire. I thought it was obvious. But after opening the comments section on that first Instagram post, I realized what everyone else thought.
And after the album actually came out, I remember enjoying it. I made a comment to my friend once: “Honestly, I’m at the point in my life right now where I really needed a man-hating album like this.”
Her immediate response was a sarcastic, “I don’t exactly think this is a man-hating album.”
I was so taken aback. How could she think that? The lyrics, to me, were so obviously sarcastic, a hefty jab at men, even. And that’s when I realized the principle of it all: media literacy is lacking more and more recently, and this album is a testament to that.
The phrase “man’s best friend” traditionally refers to a dog: loyal, obedient, and always coming back. Sabrina’s album flipped that metaphor.
Across the album, she is the woman who answers every text, forgives every excuse, and gets emotionally dragged through the dirt. While listeners jumped to assume that she was celebrating being “the dog,” in reality she is pointing out how ridiculous that role is. Critics of the original backlash later noted that the title was actually a metaphor for the ways women are undervalued in relationships. The album was everything but an endorsement of submission.
What surprised me the most about the way people were portraying the songs was that it became so clear, just by listening to them, that everything is ironic. Even her tone of voice is sarcastic. And by listening to the full album and actually analyzing it, some listeners realized that the album was a collection of male personalities.
Manchild, for instance, is about an emotionally immature adult. My Man on Willpower is about a man who neglects intimacy because he needs to “improve” himself. Sugar Talking is about empty promises and paragraphs instead of making an actual effort. And We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night is about the exhausting cycle of almost leaving a relationship again and again.
The list goes on. What I’ve collected from all of the songs in Man’s Best Friend, and the male archetypes it is filled with, is that the album is completely representative of dating in the modern age.
Traditional dating has almost completely gone out the window. With the rise of social media, avoidant and anxious attachment behaviors are being made into buzzwords. It’s so normalized for someone to say that they are “scared of commitment” or “not ready for a relationship” instead of calling it what it is. Situationships are more prominent than ever and hookup culture is in full swing.
Instagram story likes and Snapchat streaks are being romanticized, but what happened to going on dates and flower bouquets? Many women seem to be accepting the bare minimum as the standard, while men are giving constant “mixed signals.” It’s difficult to escape that push and pull, and it’s also difficult not to get attached to inconsistency, which is one of the problems Sabrina is portraying in Man’s Best Friend.
None of the men in her songs are prizes. They are frustrating, inconsistent, selfish, and unavailable. The emotional core of the album is “why do I keep entertaining this?”
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings of the album is assuming irony can’t also be sexy. Sabrina’s public persona over the past few years has been quite campy: she’s hyper-feminine and flirtatious, but most of all, she is self-aware. Some of the press and social media users have mistaken that persona for exploiting women and setting them back, but Sabrina is very clearly playing a character who knows that she is crawling back to the wrong guy.
She explained after the backlash that her interpretation was about understanding control, a lack of control, and knowingly making mistakes that teach you something, and that the album was a portrayal of being ” emotionally yanked around” in past relationships.
In my opinion, that is a much more compelling message than empowerment slogans.
The biggest irony of Man’s Best Friend is that people accused it of seeking male validation when that is exactly what the album was critiquing: giving men more power than the woman telling her story. The cover was asking us to look at a submissive image while the music was asking us why we were willing to believe that was the whole story.
What I generally took away from the album was that women give men too much power and control over their emotional wellbeing. We like to generalize as a society and say, “All men are the same. Don’t trust them. They all want the same thing.” But the truth is, not all men are like that. We’re just finding the wrong ones, and it is much more difficult to escape a man who is inconsistent and emotionally immature.
Maybe that’s why Man’s Best Friend resonated with so many women. It isn’t telling us that all men are terrible; it’s confronting the version of ourselves that keeps mixing up inconsistency with chemistry, potential with reality, and attention with love. Sometimes the hardest relationship to break isn’t with the wrong man, but rather with the hope that he’ll miraculously become the right one.