A clear pattern of male characters suffering fatal, often gruesome, fates in Sabrina Carpenter’s recent music videos has gone viral, prompting the Grammy winner to address the recurring joke directly. The ensuing debate pits fans who see it as a subversive, campy reversal of the “male gaze” against critics who label it a glaring double standard that would provoke swift backlash if genders were reversed.
The discussion centers on Carpenter’s visual storytelling across multiple singles from her 2025 album Man’s Best Friend, including the explicit gore of Taste (featuring Jenna Ortega), the creative executions in Feather, and the fatal cliffside plunge in Manchild. The consistent narrative thread—where men are the primary recipients of violent comeuppance while women survive—has been noted by viewers and labeled by Carpenter herself as a unofficial rule of her “Cinematic Universe.”
“In the Sabrina Cinematic Universe, women never d*e. Men, unfortunately, suffer most of the loss,” Carpenter stated in a behind-the-scenes video for Taste, acknowledging the pattern with casual humor. The video for Taste exemplifies the formula: Carpenter and Ortega engage in an increasingly absurd battle to the death over a boyfriend, surviving impalement, voodoo dolls, and other mayhem before the man finally meets an “unlucky end.”
This tongue-in-cheek violence is not isolated. In the 2023 single Feather, men who catcall or leer at Carpenter suffer cartoonish yet lethal fates: being struck by a truck Final Destination-style, fatally fighting each other in a gym, and a particularly memorable scene where a man is decapitated after Carpenter jams his tie in an elevator door. The 2025 track Manchild continues the theme, showing a man’s car flipping multiple times off a cliff. The pattern becomes a meta-joke within the Tears video, where Carpenter’s character mourns a boyfriend she believes died in a crash, only for him to miraculously survive—before she promptly kills him again with a stiletto heel, declaring, “You have to give the people what they want.”
The online reaction has been sharply divided. One side celebrates the videos as a long-overdue, campy reversal of toxic tropes. “This is the glow-up we needed after years of male gaze music videos,” one fan commented. “Sabrina said ‘if y’all can glorify violence against women in every other genre, I can make it camp and slay.”
However, a significant contingent of critics sees a profound double standard. “Imagine if a male artist made a music video showing women getting deleted and beaten up. He would be cancelled in a day,” argued another commenter. “But a woman artist can literally delete men and nobody cares? Never tell me again that mis
