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On last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, a QVC spoof about a pillow took a meta turn. In the sketch, a young designer named Virginia Duffy—played by the pop star Sabrina Carpenter, this week’s host and musical guest—showed off her ergonomic neck pillow meant for long plane trips. The issue: When the bubblegum-pink cushion was draped just so on an upright stand, it revealed a distinct resemblance to female genitalia. Scandalized, the shopping-channel hosts tried to minimize the display. But Carpenter’s unblinking Duffy played it straight, seemingly oblivious to their panic and focusing instead on the pillow’s soft feel and comfort level.
The bit, of course, was never really about the pillow. The sketch seemed to reference real-life reactions to Carpenter’s winking pop persona, which includes a bawdy act during live performances (she pantomimes different sex positions) and the visuals for her most recent album, Man’s Best Friend. On the cover, the singer is on all fours beside a faceless man who is yanking her hair. Some criticized the image for promoting a regressive characterization of a subservient woman. Carpenter started selling a version of the album with a different, more demure photo on the cover. But when she announced it on Instagram, she accompanied the post with a cheeky caption: “Here is a new alternate cover approved by God.”
Carpenter used her SNL appearance to fire back at her critics. Aided by her gifts in delivery and physical comedy, Carpenter again and again dismissed the idea that she’s deferential to a misogynist male fantasy. Young women who’ve grown up in the spotlight—including former Disney stars such as Carpenter—have often faced pushback when they become adults who happen to be a little lusty. The pop star’s SNL performance, then, doubled as a provocative question: What’s the big deal about her sexuality anyway?
The purposefully silly QVC spoof, one of the week’s strongest sketches, was a particularly useful mechanism for that message. Central to that gag was Carpenter’s ability to coyly project innocence. When it became clearer than a Georgia O’Keeffe painting that the pillow looked like female anatomy, Carpenter’s Duffy didn’t react. Later, she guilelessly cajoled one of the hosts, played by Mikey Day, to feel the pillow; horrified, he yelped at a producer to blur the image of him touching the pillow on-screen. Even when men called in to the show to ask raunchy questions, Duffy remained unmoved. She simply tried to sell a product: “So this outer layer here is made of memory foam, right? And then this inner layer is filled with a cooling gel,” she said. The problem was how people read into the pillow, the sketch suggested, not the pillow itself.
[Read: The growing gender divide, three minutes at a time]
Carpenter’s opening monologue addressed the discourse about her more directly. In a brief speech, she called out the Man’s Best Friend controversy with a befuddlement similar to the pillow sketch: “Some people got a little, like, freaked out by the cover,” she told the audience, furrowing her brow. “I’m not sure why?” She then assured them that the faceless man was actually the SNL cast member Bowen Yang helping her up by the hair when Martin Short “shoved her out of the buffet line” at the sketch show’s 50th anniversary. Even a series of mocked-up images that appeared between sketches became an opportunity for Carpenter to play with her album’s suggestive title: In one, she sauntered through a park while walking a dog.
Yet the artist’s most pointed response to the dispute arrived in a later sketch, where she played a “girlboss” hosting a female-confidence seminar. Early in the segment, Carpenter’s character, Queen Lisha—who paired motivational speeches with upbeat choreography—suffered a concussion after her backup dancers threw her a touch too hard into a window. A conference participant, played by Sarah Sherman, sat in the front row, concerned and scoffing. When Sherman insisted that Carpenter had a head injury and needed to go to the hospital, Carpenter’s girlboss replied with sangfroid: “Do I? Or is your internalized misogyny so deep-rooted that a woman being confident and inspiring just sounds like nonsense to you?”
Her character, the show implied, did indeed suffer some sort of brain injury. But the response was revealing of a knottier theme in Carpenter’s ongoing evolution from former Disney starlet to raunchy pop queen: Sometimes other women are the ones overly concerned with her every move. Carpenter seems self-aware enough to realize that bristling against this sort of talk gets her nowhere. It’s better, and perhaps more fun, to be in on the joke.
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