The singer’s album Man’s Best Friend bottles young women’s increasing sense of healthy relationships being out of reach
Sabrina Carpenter’s country-tinged synth-pop album Man’s Best Friend initially drew attention for its divisive album cover. But as masculinity researchers, we see her work differently. It’s a cultural marker of a wider phenomenon: young women’s increasing withdrawal from dating and committed relationships.
Carpenter bottles the palpable exasperation of young women’s experiences with emotionally unprepared partners. And her feelings show up in the data. Women are more likely than men to say dating is harder than it was 10 years ago and they are twice as likely to cite physical and emotional risk as the reason why. The disproportionate emotional labor placed on women in relationships, paired with rising economic insecurity, does not compute.
If Taylor Swift’s pop ballads embodied millennial aspirations of love, then Sabrina Carpenter, for gen Z, instead captures the sense that healthy relationships are out of reach. In her song Nobody’s Son, Carpenter sings: “There’s nobody’s son / Not anyone left for me to believe in,” a growing sentiment we have found in our research. Gen Z is undoubtedly diverging by gender, as 62% of single women report they are not looking to date at all, compared with 37% of men. And the gen Z women who are dating are increasingly choosing older men. This has wide-ranging implications, from political futures to fertility rates.
