Sabrina Carpenter isn't shy about sex. The uproar over her new album proves people still are.

People started getting mad online about Sabrina Carpenter’s seventh studio album, Man’s Best Friend, as soon as they saw the album cover. On it, the pint-sized pop star wears a black mini dress and heels, crawling on all fours like a dog as a faceless man pulls her hair as if it’s a leash.

The imagery sparked a debate about whether she effectively satirized sexist tropes or promoted them by degrading herself in the name of sexiness. But is pursuing sexiness while also signaling self-awareness so wrong?

“It is not for the pearl clutchers,” Carpenter said of Man’s Best Friend on CBS Mornings. “But I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves.”

Suzannah Weiss, a sexologist and author of Subjectified: Becoming a Sexual Subject, sees how the cover art became controversial. Carpenter is not just being submissive — she looks objectified, as if her desire is to please this anonymous man. But some people find that hot, and that's their right.

"Even in scenarios where women are objectified, it's often due to their own agency. They're finding a way to gain money and power in an (albeit limited) world that objectifies them," Weiss tells Yahoo.

Capitalizing on her sexuality with a clever twist is kind of Carpenter’s thing. She strikes a new sex position at each tour stop where she performs her babymaking proposal song “Juno.” She used to sing a bespoke double entendre for each new city at the end of her crush confessional track “Nonsense” and regularly maneuvers through lyrical gymnastics to wink toward her love of sex in verse. She’s like a classic vaudeville star and a Looney Tunes character wrapped into one and rated R for language and adult themes.

Great sexpectations

The 26-year-old former Disney Channel star became famous as a child, but her persona has changed as she’s grown up, evolving into both a wildly witty songwriter and a blonde bombshell.

Some condemn her hyperfeminity, saying that paired with the fact she’s 5’0” means she’s promoting a perverted male fantasy. She faced backlash for doing a photo shoot that referenced a scene from Lolita and claims it was not intentional, but critics seem to have overlooked the fact that Carpenter was a young TV star ogled by the masses, and 12-year-old Lolita was not the villain of Vladimir Nabokov’s story.

When people say she sings too much about sex, she feels like it’s a sign that listeners are obsessed with it too. “Those are the songs that you've made popular … Clearly you love sex,” she tells Rolling Stone in response.

Sexuality is a very personal thing, and each person who interacts with her art has a different comfort level.

“What one person sees as empowerment, another may view as indecency, depending on their moral framework,” therapist Veronica Anderson tells Yahoo. “An individual’s comfort with their own sexuality often reflects internalized beliefs about control, self-worth and social expectations.”

Carpenter is a member of Gen Z, a generation having less sex than those before them and often the subject of a moral panic about sexlessness. Millennials before them faced their own moral panic about how hookup culture degraded relationships and romance, which then impacted how the younger generation sees the world.

Young people might be avoiding sex not because of the fear of the thing itself, as Sarah Jones writes for New York magazine, but as a response to how abstinence has been promoted as a safer alternative. Lawmakers are working to ban porn, abortion rights have been restricted and sex education is facing a free speech crisis. It’s possible that the people Carpenter’s own age are unsettled by her sexuality, and the people older than her are caught off guard by her subversion of expectations.

‘That’s real to them’

What Carpenter does as one of the most popular singers in the world right now says a lot about what culture values from its powerful women, so it makes sense that her album cover is being sharply critiqued. At the same time, how audiences respond to her sexuality reveals a lot about what we think about women and sex.

All of the songs on Man’s Best Friend are about Carpenter’s interactions with men — calling them stupid, being aroused by their responsible behavior, marveling about how hot they’ve become, killing them in her music videos and so on. Since men are her focus, does this mean she’s anti-feminist, or that that’s just where she is in her life right now?

It’s the seventh album she’s released over the course of her lifetime, and the second in just over a year. It was clearly born from a moment in time, written about breakups and situationships in her real life. Given the timeline, it’s likely that it was formulated in response to the dissolution of her relationship with actor Barry Keoghan. Is she boy-crazy, or is thinking she might be a way of policing her interest in men? Does every album have to be a full picture of an artist’s persona, or a reflection of culture? Should we be demanding more statements from the stars that unite culture in our increasingly fragmented times, or just let them be people?

These are all questions that have to be answered internally by anyone who’s considering them – that’s not Carpenter’s prerogative as a pop star.

What artists put out in the world takes on new meaning for the people who consume it, culture critic Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel tells Yahoo. Carpenter can both feel sexually liberated, and people who see her album cover can be reminded of the ways they’ve been objectified. The fact that Carpenter is so critical of men established the expectation that she’s pro-woman among some fans, who might feel disappointed or betrayed if they sense she stepped outside of that realm.

“We crave authenticity from those we admire,” Gabriel says.

As for Carpenter, she knows where she stands. She tells Zane Lowe that the cover art was supposed to be “cheeky, airy and playful.” It’s a metaphor — a reference to how caring about someone can make her feel like she’s being treated like a dog.

“Sometimes I read things and I'm like, 'Wow, I don't experience this that way, but if they do, then that's real to them,” Carpenter continues. “But what I'm going through in this record, which is loss and heartbreak and celebration and trying to navigate my life as a young woman — it's not so much like I'm above it all, but I'm not beneath it, either."

She didn’t mean to stoke controversy. She didn’t think much about how the album cover would be received. But it definitely wasn’t intended to be taken as a literal act of sexual degradation.

“You can be sure that anything I do and say has a little bit of a wink to it,” she tells Interview magazine. Maybe we should spend a little less time hand-wringing about whether Carpenter is empowering women and let this one speak for herself.