Sarah Harte: Same old crap being served up with a veneer of feminist empowerment

Irish Examiner

18-06-2025

I was on the way back last week from moderating an event in Belfast, where we discussed the staggeringly high rates of domestic and sexual abuse north and south of the border.
We also explored the obvious connection between the increasing number of increasingly younger victims and perpetrators of domestic and sexual abuse with the proliferation of porn. `Catching up with the news cycle for my column on the Belfast Enterprise train, two images in the news felt depressingly relevant to what we had been discussing at the '5 Books That Could Save Your Life' event.
One was of Harvey Weinstein in a New York court last Wednesday in his wheelchair, having been found guilty of sexual assault. Weinstein was previously found guilty of rape in a separate trial in California and was sentenced to 16 years in that case.
He also settled a civil case against him. At the heart of much of the testimony is the claim that, as a power player in the movie industry (he co-founded Miramax film studio), he used his "unfettered power" to abuse victims.
Harvey Weinstein in state court in Manhattan for his retrial on June 5 where he was found guilty of sexual assault. Picture: Charly Triballeau via AP
More generally, power and control lie at the heart of all domestic and sexual abuse cases. It is never simply a matter of the perpetrator's actions in a particular case. In the dock with him will be a deeply flawed ideology of masculinity that he has been sold from birth about his right to power and control over women.
The decision by around 100 women to complain about a variety of sexual assaults and rapes by Weinstein (not all complaints ended in criminal charges) fuelled the #MeToo movement. Although it initially seemed like a watershed for the feminist movement, a backlash has been underway ever since.
A counternarrative in the Weinstein case is that ambitious young women, with one eye to the main chance, took advantage of the casting couch to advance their careers.
However, what that narrative does not consider is the vast power disparities between someone who is a gatekeeper and someone young, hoping to advance in their nascent film career, attending a meeting in a hotel room, crossing fingers and toes that they will emerge unscathed.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced last week that his office plans to retry the rape charge against Weinstein over an alleged 2013 attack on actress Jessica Mann.
The cover of Sabrina Carpenter's 'Man's Best Friend' Album.
This brings us to the second image of 26-year-old pop singer Sabrina Carpenter, released during the week to promote her forthcoming album, Man's Best Friend, which is set for release in August. On her knees, Carpenter is having her hair pulled by a faceless man in a suit (the suit presumably signifying power), mimicking a dog.
This image upset domestic violence survivors and organisations, among others, including (hearteningly) some young fans who were savvy enough to decode and dislike the image.
From Carpenter's point of view, who is trying to promote her album, it was successful, garnering plenty of attention and discourse on social media, where opinions seemed sharply divided.
I stared at the picture and felt a fleeting moment of futility thinking "God, what's the point in sharing knowledge about domestic abuse, exploring solutions when marketing teams and photographers willingly pump this damaging crap out".
The more traction images like this get, the more normalised they become.
Carpenter in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine has spoken about how young female artists are picked apart publicly saying that 'girl power' and 'women supporting women' should be the reality but instead 'the second you see a picture of someone wearing a dress on a carpet you have to say everything mean about it in the first 30 seconds that you see it.' Hmmm.
There is truth in what she says, but images are extremely powerful. We are more likely to remember information presented in images than information presented in text, a phenomenon known as the Picture Superiority Effect. We respond to and process visual data far faster than any other type of data.
Sex positive
Sabrina Carpenter's tours are big on 'horny choreography', sexual innuendoes complete with glittery bodysuits, garter belts and simulated sex. Fans lap it up. Her prerogative, you might say. Have fun, Sabrina.
The whole sex positive idea that women should be free to express themselves sexually is both fascinating and complicated. Sex positive commentators would have it that cranks, often bitter middle-aged feminists past their sell-by date, try to police sexual expression and slut-shame other women.
Women should be able to display their bodies as they wish. Somebody wrote on X (Twitter) that 'her [Carpenter] owning and doing what she wants with her body IS feminism'.
There is something in this. I could never stand over the idea of promoting modesty to young women. I'm stone-cold on the concept of moral judgment and outrage. Down that way lies something we grew up with, or at its most extreme, what is being enforced by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
However, questions like these are nuanced. There are often other dynamics behind a façade of sexual bravado, and 'anything goes' sex positivity is incredibly naïve without some component of critical analysis.
Porn and violence against women
The pornification of young people's psychosexual development is having disastrous effects. We see that vividly in the domestic and sexual abuse statistics.
In January this year, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris spelt it out. Online violent pornography is driving much of the violence that gardaí are seeing in sexual assaults on women, rising levels of domestic violence, and normalising violence against women.
Not all decisions we make around our sexuality are inherently empowering because not all decisions are made in a vacuum. The central question is when are choices rendered illusory by circumstances and socialisation?
For example, you can say that a woman selling sex is autonomously doing so. Or you can dig deeper and say that no little girl says, 'When I grow up, I want to be a prostitute' so how did that little girl get there? And how did the guy who pays for her services get there?
Carpenter's career is going gangbusters, but that image, far from satirising and subverting misogynistic tropes in a tongue-in-cheek way as some have claimed, reinforces them.
It's up there with Nicole Kidman in 'Baby Girl', depicting a CEO down on her knees lapping milk from a dog bowl because a young male intern told her to. Fans argued the film advocated for middle-aged women's right to sexual pleasure. It received a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, accompanied by whoops and hollers.
To me in both cases, a filmmaker and a photographer, try to get a rise out of us using tropes from porn. Successfully so, commercially, but you wonder at what cost culturally, because they are trafficking in a retrograde misogyny that does enormous damage, reinforcing women's submissiveness to men as the status quo.
Veneer of female empowerment
It's the same old sexist crap dished up in a shiny new package with a veneer of female empowerment.
Fine for Carpenter and Kidman, whose success may protect them, but not so much for the regular Josephine, duped by the idea of individualist agency as a shield against exploitation.
It also empowers future perpetrators to feel entitled to do to the 'bitch' what they want because an expectation is created.
Messages like this is why we end up with characters like Weinstein, who was allowed to use his power in open sight to access young women's bodies in a consumerist neoliberal society that believes everything is for sale, baby, and why some young women end up finding themselves skirting a line between choice and coercion in a hotel room that ends in a courtroom.