I will hold your hand as I say this. Sabrina is an adult woman who likes to make tongue-in-cheek music about luring and murdering men. Her persona since the last album cycle has been very femme fatale—feminine, pretty, cutesy, sexy, kinky, small, submissive in bed, wants a prince charming, also direct, non-conforming, frightening, intelligent, scheming, ruthless, might poison you, callous, player, comedienne. The man on the cover doesn’t even look like Sabrina’s general type, or particularly romanticised. He feels more symbolic of “posh rich old man who has no idea I’ll eat him alive”.
We’re circling back dangerously close to policing women’s sexuality as a political tool, both from the left and the right and it is not a good thing. Our implicit puritanical expectation of white women is already weird (and racist on the flip side when we regard BIPOC women as inherently sexual). Let women exist and own their sexuality in peace without politicizing it. Conventional femininity isn’t inherently unfeminist, even when it is performed for a masculine partner and not just “for the girls”. We can’t make this mistake again, we moved on from and built nuance upon the exclusionary principles of second-wave choice feminism for a reason. We’re not doing 4B. We’re not doing political lesbianism. We all have valid big feelings lately but we have to take a deep breath and stop projecting them onto minor media aesthetics and optics, and instead channel it into real community work. Read a book.