Shakira’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Was a Middle Finger to Decency

The woman’s tongue was the first thing I noticed. Not the hips — we’ve all made peace with the hips. The tongue. Flicking out toward the camera like a serpent tasting the air of a culture that has officially lost the plot. This was the Super Bowl halftime show, mind you. Not a nightclub in Miami. Not a Carnival parade in Rio. The most-watched musical performance on American television, beamed into living rooms from Boise to Birmingham, from nursing homes to kindergarten sleepovers. And there she was — a forty-three-year-old mother of two, no less — undulating across a pole like the feature act at a bachelor party. Let’s be precise about what happened. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez delivered a medley that included booty-shaking that would make a cardiologist wince, a pole-dancing sequence that required actual grip strength, and enough pelvic thrusting to power a small city. The camera cut to the crowd. Celebrities nodded along. The internet exploded with praise. “Empowering,” they called it. “Iconic.” Empowering. There’s a word that’s been hollowed out like a Thanksgiving turkey. Here’s what we’re not supposed to say: this was not empowerment. Empowerment is a woman earning a medical degree, or running a company, or raising decent children. Empowerment is not simulating sex acts on national television while eleven-year-olds watch from their grandparents’ couch. That’s not liberation. That’s exhibitionism with a marketing budget. And spare me the cultural relativism. Yes, Shakira is Colombian. Yes, Latin music has a different relationship with the body. But the Super Bowl is not a Colombian wedding. It’s an American ritual, and rituals used to mean something. They used to bind us together around shared standards. Now they bind us together around shared spectacle, each year pushing the envelope a little further, because the only sin left in this country is being boring. The deeper problem isn’t Shakira. It’s us. It’s the parents who shrugged and said, “Well, that’s just how it is now.” It’s the media that called criticism “prudish” and “racist” in the same breath. It’s a culture that has decided that the human body is a product to be sold, and that anyone who objects is a relic. We used to have a phrase for this. It was called “family entertainment.” Now it’s called “the halftime show.” What did we lose? We lost the ability to be shocked — which sounds liberating until you realize that a society that can’t be shocked can’t be moved. We lost the common ground of shared decency. And we lost the argument that some things are simply not appropriate for children, not because the body is shameful, but because innocence is precious. Shakira, of course, will be fine. She’ll sell more records. She’ll get another endorsement deal. The machine will churn on, rewarding the outrageous and punishing the restrained. But the rest of us? We’re the ones who have to explain to our daughters why the woman on TV is famous. And we’re running out of explanations that don’t sound like lies. So no, I didn’t find it empowering. I found it sad. A nation of three hundred million people, gathered around the glowing altar of the television, and the best we could offer our children was a pole and a tongue. If that’s progress, I’ll take the old ways. At least they had the decency to blush.