Shakira covers the latest issue of Allure, all to promote her new album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran. This is her first studio album since 2017, and obviously, there’s a lot in this album about her split from Gerard Pique and her newfound independence. She moved from Spain to Miami with her two sons and she’s moving on in every way. This Allure piece is mostly good, mostly rah-rah-feminist, up until the point when Shakira complains that the Barbie movie emasculated men. Whoops. So close and yet so far. Some highlights from Allure:
Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran: “I want this music to build bridges, to empower people, to help women discover their own strengths. I was in the mud,” she says, referring to her very public and messy breakup with Piqué, “I had to reconstruct myself, to reunite all the pieces that had fallen apart. Making this music has shown me that my pain can be transformed into creativity.” (She is crying diamonds on the cover.) “The songs are full of anecdotes and some very intense emotions I have experienced in these two years. But creating this album has been a transformation in which I have been reborn as a woman. I have rebuilt myself in the ways I believe are appropriate. No one tells me how to cry or when to cry, no one tells me how to raise my children, no one tells me how I become a better version of myself. I decide that.”
No one will control women: “In the past, when women went through a difficult situation, they were expected to mind their manners, to hide the pain, to cry in silence. That’s over. Now, no one will control us. No one will tell us how to heal, how to clean our wounds.”
The story of Adam and Eve. “Eve was a story created by misogynists to put women in the little box where we have to remain silent, not speak our minds, and not be a catalyst for change. To keep things as they are. I think there’s something refreshing about women when they get to be themselves and be unapologetic. Because we’ve had to apologize so many damn times in the past.”
Growing up in Colombia: “My idol was Wonder Woman. I think I was drawn to her because she had black hair like mine, but also because she was a symbol of empowerment and strength in a decade where women were not playing the most important roles. I remember my mom stopped working at some point. She stopped wearing miniskirts, and the length of her skirts got longer because my dad said so.”
Her thoughts on ‘Barbie’: “My sons absolutely hated it. They felt that it was emasculating. And I agree, to a certain extent. I’m raising two boys. I want ’em to feel powerful too [while] respecting women. I like pop culture when it attempts to empower women without robbing men of their possibility to be men, to also protect and provide. I believe in giving women all the tools and the trust that we can do it all without losing our essence, without losing our femininity. I think that men have a purpose in society and women have another purpose as well. We complement each other, and that complement should not be lost… Why not share the load with people who deserve to carry it, who have a duty to carry it as well?”
“I like pop culture when it attempts to empower women without robbing men of their possibility to be men, to also protect and provide. I believe in giving women all the tools and the trust that we can do it all without losing our essence, without losing our femininity.” All of this about a film where the heroine wears cute pink outfits, is traditionally beautiful, gets so frustrated with patriarchy that she briefly gives up, then works with other women/Barbies to reclaim their power within a female-centric fantasy Barbieland. Like… what movie did Shakira think she was watching? Who goes into Barbie and thinks “I wish there were better roles for men?” Or: “I wish the Kens were more three-dimensional?” And even then, everyone feel all over themselves to PRAISE RYAN GOSLING for his bold “take” on Ken, all while minimizing what Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie did! Anyway, I’m not going to write another treatise about Barbie again.
The rest of the interview is meh… Shakira says so much about female empowerment, but really, she’s all about heteronormative gender roles and she has absolutely said sh-t like “Not All Men” in her life.
Cover courtesy of Allure, additional photos courtesy of IMAGO/Regina Wagner / Avalon