Sabrina Carpenter fell to her knees, and a storm arose. What's the point of this moral outrage?

The internet has a sex scandal. It's been caused by singer Sabrina Carpenter. At 26, she's a member of Generation Z, a group that's said to be having less and less sex. At least now everyone's talking about it, and has been for days.

The uproar is sparked by the cover of Carpenter's new album, which will be released at the end of August and which the American singer announced on social media. Carpenter once warmed up audiences as the opening act for Taylor Swift. Now she's winning Grammys herself and filling concert stadiums.

On the cover, Carpenter, wearing a tight, short little black dress and high heels, kneels in front of a man in a suit; his face is not visible. The man is pulling Carpenter's hair as if he were leading a dog on a leash. The album title, "Man's Best Friend," reinforces this association. Her face flushed, a lascivious smile on her red lips, Carpenter looks directly into the camera. Her gaze conveys alertness, as if she were completely in control of the situation.

The image could have come from an advertisement for an upscale sadomasochism club. There's even a hint of humor in it. The role play is clear. But many people don't want to see that. They make a direct connection to reality, artistic ambiguity notwithstanding.

Since the singer posted about her seventh album in mid-June, the comments have poured in, with over 80,000 on Instagram alone so far. Traditional media outlets are following suit.

The cover is said to be dehumanizing and degrading. It is a mockery of all women who suffer domestic violence. Abuse is thus fetishized. Reference is made to rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs, who is on trial for sexual assault against women: A video recording shows him beating his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and dragging her through a hotel hallway by her hair.

Carpenter is being criticized for doing #MeToo a disservice with this cover, especially now when Donald Trump is curtailing women's rights in the US. The singer is being pandered to the male gaze, and this objectification of women is solely about men's pleasure. They go on to say that such an image undermines feminist achievements. "This sets back women's emancipation by decades," they say even more dramatically.

Carpenter is also celebrated for her cover. Her fans consider it iconic. Art, in other words. They see her as a feminist who does what she likes in the spirit of self-empowerment. On the other hand, they say it's unfeminist when women dictate to other women what feminist means. You can see: The superstar enjoys her sexuality. And she does it with a wink.

Sabrina Carpenter loves ambiguity, poking fun at men and her own weakness for a certain type of man. In her first single from the new album, "Manchild," already released, she sings about men who remain children. "I swear, they chose me, not me them," she says, playing the innocent. In the video, she sits in a bathtub with pigs and causes a man to drive off a cliff in his car.

In her hit "Please Please Please," she is ashamed of her love affairs, but does so in such a cheerful and unsentimental way that one feels no pity. Dressed in glittery dresses, she portrays herself as a sex symbol from a time when pin-up girls were still a tabloid staple. She cites Brigitte Bardot and Dolly Parton as role models.

The album cover for "Man's Best Friend" fits into this category of self-portrayal. It expresses the sex-positive attitude advocated by many feminists. Sex-positive means affirming every form of sexuality. Everyone should be able to develop sexually; norms are meant to be broken. At sex-positive parties, the motto is: Anything goes, nothing is necessary. Consent is always assumed.

The retro aesthetic of the kneeling woman with the large loop on her dress is reminiscent of erotic thrillers from the 1980s and 1990s, such as "91/2 Weeks" with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke or "Basic Instinct" with Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas. Films that explored a similar narrative: devotion and submission interplaying with dominance and power.

Carpenter's cover was shot by fashion photographer Bryce Anderson. Anderson, like his model, enjoys playing with gender roles and beauty ideals. The influence of the erotic photography of Helmut Newton and Terry Richardson is evident: the vulgarization of the sensual, the pushing of the forbidden.

Yet this aesthetic doesn't offer a benchmark for lived reality. Instead, the images are fantasies that don't care about political correctness. That's the misunderstanding: Sexual fantasies can't be censored. If one tries, one becomes even more morally charged, as many reactions now demonstrate.

Of course, Carpenter's goal is to provoke. Sex is good for marketing. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, she said that those who get upset about her suggestive songs often reveal more about themselves and their fixations. Her critics apparently love sex: "You're obsessed with it." She's not wrong.