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The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n On last night\u2019s episode of Saturday Night Live<\/em>, a QVC spoof about a pillow took a meta turn. In the sketch, a young designer named Virginia Duffy\u2014played by the pop star Sabrina Carpenter, this week\u2019s host and musical guest\u2014showed off her ergonomic neck pillow meant for long plane trips. The issue: When the bubblegum-pink cushion was draped just so<\/em> on an upright stand,<\/em> it revealed a distinct resemblance to female genitalia. Scandalized, the shopping-channel hosts tried to minimize the display. But Carpenter\u2019s unblinking Duffy played it straight, seemingly oblivious to their panic and focusing instead on the pillow\u2019s soft feel and comfort level.<\/p>\n The bit, of course, was never really about the pillow. The sketch seemed to reference real-life reactions to Carpenter\u2019s winking pop persona<\/a>, which includes a bawdy act during live performances (she pantomimes different sex positions) and the visuals for her most recent album, Man\u2019s Best Friend<\/em>. 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<\/a> on Instagram, she accompanied the post with a cheeky caption: \u201cHere is a new alternate cover approved by God.\u201d<\/p>\n Carpenter used her SNL<\/em> 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\u2019s deferential to a misogynist male fantasy. Young women who\u2019ve grown up in the spotlight\u2014including former Disney stars such as Carpenter\u2014have often faced pushback when they become adults who happen to be a little lusty. The pop star\u2019s SNL <\/em>performance, then, doubled as a provocative question: What\u2019s the big deal about her sexuality anyway?<\/p>\n The purposefully silly QVC spoof, one of the week\u2019s strongest sketches, was a particularly useful mechanism for that message. Central to that gag was Carpenter\u2019s ability to coyly project innocence. When it became clearer than a Georgia O\u2019Keeffe painting that the pillow looked like female anatomy, Carpenter\u2019s Duffy didn\u2019t 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: \u201cSo this outer layer here is made of memory foam, right? And then this inner layer is filled with a cooling gel,\u201d she said. The problem was how people read into the pillow, the sketch suggested, not the pillow itself.<\/p>\n [Read: The growing gender divide, three minutes at a time<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n Carpenter\u2019s opening monologue addressed the discourse about her more directly. In a brief speech, she called out the Man\u2019s Best Friend<\/em> controversy with a befuddlement similar to the pillow sketch: \u201cSome people got a little, like, freaked out by the cover,\u201d she told the audience, furrowing her brow. \u201cI\u2019m not sure why?\u201d She then assured them that the faceless man was actually the SNL<\/em> cast member Bowen Yang helping her up by the hair when Martin Short \u201cshoved her out of the buffet line\u201d at the sketch show\u2019s 50th anniversary. Even a series of mocked-up images that appeared between sketches became an opportunity for Carpenter to play with her album\u2019s suggestive title: In one, she sauntered through a park while walking a dog.<\/p>\n Yet the artist\u2019s most pointed response to the dispute arrived in a later sketch, where she played a \u201cgirlboss<\/a>\u201d hosting a female-confidence seminar. Early in the segment, Carpenter\u2019s character, Queen Lisha\u2014who paired motivational speeches with upbeat choreography\u2014suffered 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\u2019s girlboss replied with sangfroid: \u201cDo I? Or is your internalized misogyny so deep-rooted that a woman being confident and inspiring just sounds like nonsense to you?\u201d<\/p>\n Her character, the show implied, did indeed suffer some sort of brain injury. But the response was revealing of a knottier theme in Carpenter\u2019s 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\u2019s better, and perhaps more fun, to be in on the joke.<\/p>\n Article originally published at The Atlantic<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n