Introduction: When Pop Culture Meets Problematic Framing
When Shakira and Rihanna released the music video for “Can’t Remember to Forget You,” the internet quickly exploded with hot takes. Among them were critiques like Danny Lee’s InsideVandy op-ed, which framed the visuals as a kind of “modern harem” and positioned the artists’ sexuality as fundamentally regressive. That framing caught attention—but it also missed the deeper cultural, gendered and racial dynamics at work.
Looking more closely at the video and the reaction to it opens up a bigger conversation about who gets to be sexual, how women of color are portrayed, and why certain bodies are consistently read through an exoticizing lens. Rather than labeling the video as a shallow fantasy, it’s worth asking: whose expectations are really being served when we talk about Shakira and Rihanna this way?
The “Modern Harem” Label and Why It Falls Apart
Calling the video a “modern harem” attempts to situate it within a long line of orientalist fantasies—spaces where women are displayed for male pleasure, passive and interchangeable. That label, however, oversimplifies the imagery and erases context.
First, there is no literal or symbolic male figure presiding over a harem in the video. Shakira and Rihanna are the only central characters. They move in conversation with each other, not in submission to a master. The camera lingers on their bodies, but it also foregrounds their agency: they sing, they initiate touch, they perform for themselves and one another as much as for an implied audience.
Second, the “harem” metaphor imports a specifically orientalizing history—imagining Middle Eastern and non-Western women as idle, erotic, and owned—onto two globally recognized artists who are not only performers but also producers of their own images. To flatten their presence into a single trope is to miss not just nuance, but authorship.
Ultimately, the “modern harem” label tells us less about the content of the video and more about the critic’s comfort level with women who visibly enjoy their sexuality on their own terms.
Sexuality, Agency and the Myth of the Passive Pop Star
Much of the discomfort around “Can’t Remember to Forget You” comes from the intensity of its sensuality: skin, lingerie, beds, cigars, bodies leaning into each other. It is easy to read such imagery as simply pandering to heterosexual male fantasies. But that reading breaks down if we pay attention to who is doing the looking and who is directing the gaze.
Shakira and Rihanna are not anonymous models hired to decorate someone else’s vision. They are highly self-aware performers with long histories of playing with persona, seduction and power. The choreography and staging feel less like reluctant compliance and more like deliberate spectacle: a wink at the audience, not a surrender to it.
Agency in pop culture is rarely pure; commercial music exists inside powerful market pressures. Yet to assume that any overt display of female sexuality is inherently exploitative collapses complex dynamics into a simplistic victim narrative. It ignores how many women—especially women of color—have strategically wielded sexuality as a way to claim space, visibility and control in industries that would otherwise silence them.
Race, Exoticism and the Problem of the “Beautiful Liar”
There is also a racial story running beneath the surface of the critique. Shakira, a Colombian artist with Lebanese heritage, and Rihanna, a Barbadian singer, have both been repeatedly framed as “exotic” throughout their careers. Their bodies are not just sexualized; they are cast as mysterious, foreign and available for cultural consumption.
When critics describe their collaboration in terms like “harem” or imply that it’s chiefly a spectacle of exotic beauty, they reinforce this long-standing pattern of racialized fetishization. The women in this video are not simply beautiful; they are positioned by outside commentary as beautiful because they can be imagined within old fantasies about non-Western women: wild, hypersexual, less restrained by supposedly respectable norms.
This is where the “beautiful liar” trope comes in. The title of one of Shakira’s earlier hits becomes a metaphor for how audiences approach artists like her and Rihanna: they are adored for being alluring, yet treated as if their artistry is a kind of deception that hides something less respectable behind the glamour. Their sexuality is welcomed, but their complexity is not.
Interrogating the exoticizing language used to describe the video doesn’t mean ignoring the reality that sex sells. It means refusing to accept that women of color can only be seen through that lens.
Respectability Politics Disguised as Feminist Critique
At first glance, critiques of the video might sound feminist: they lament objectification, worry about young viewers, and call for more empowering images of women. But beneath that language often lies an older anxiety—respectability politics dressed up as liberation.
Respectability politics suggests that women gain respect only when they appear modest, restrained and palatable to mainstream moral standards. In this framework, Shakira and Rihanna’s lingerie, dancing and intimacy are not just aesthetic choices; they are treated as moral failures, evidence that the artists are letting women down.
Feminism, however, is not about substituting one rigid dress code for another. A truly intersectional feminist analysis has to hold two ideas at once: that media industries frequently objectify women, and that women, including pop stars, can still exercise real agency within those structures. Condemning visible sexuality as automatically anti-feminist replicates the same policing that has historically constrained women’s bodies, especially the bodies of Black and brown women.
Desire That Isn’t Centered on Men
An aspect of the video that often goes overlooked is the way it de-centers men as the target of desire. Yes, the lyrics describe a tumultuous relationship with a man, but the visuals primarily showcase the intimacy between Shakira and Rihanna themselves. They smoke together, lounge together, touch and mirror each other. This is not a fantasy of abundance for a male viewer; it is an almost closed circuit of desire between the two leads.
That dynamic is inherently unsettling to frameworks that only know how to read women’s sexuality in relation to male approval. If women are not performing for men, then what, or whom, is their sexual energy for? Rather than addressing this question, some critiques revert to the familiar language of “excess,” “oversexualization” and “harem,” essentially dragging the imagery back into a male-centered framework, even as the video pushes against it.
Audience Responsibility: How We Talk About Women’s Bodies Matters
Ultimately, the video operates within the grammar of mainstream pop: close-ups, slow motion, bodies on display. What makes the surrounding conversation significant is not whether every choice in the video is politically perfect, but how viewers and writers choose to describe what they see.
To call Shakira and Rihanna’s performance a “modern harem” is not neutral. It carries a history of orientalism, colonial fantasy and racialized control. To frame the women primarily as victims of their own sex appeal is to deny them authorship over their images. How we speak about their bodies shapes how we think about all women’s bodies, especially those that do not fit comfortably within white, Western standards of purity and respectability.
Critique is necessary. But critique that replicates old prejudices under the banner of morality or feminism does little to move culture forward.
Reframing the Conversation Around Pop, Power and Pleasure
Instead of asking whether the “Can’t Remember to Forget You” video is simply good or bad for women, a more helpful question might be: what does it reveal about the tensions between pleasure, commerce and control? Shakira and Rihanna are navigating an industry that rewards visibility, punishes aging, and often equates a woman’s relevance with her willingness to undress on camera.
Within that system, their choice to share a screen, foreground their chemistry, and lean unapologetically into sensuality is complicated—but not empty. It invites interpretations that go beyond objectification, including fantasies of female solidarity, queer subtext and self-authored spectacle. Reducing it to a “modern harem” erases all of that complexity in favor of a single, lazy metaphor.
If we want better representations, we also need better conversations—ones capable of holding contradiction, context and the full humanity of the women at the center of the frame.
Conclusion: Not a Harem, but a Mirror
“Can’t Remember to Forget You” is not a flawless feminist manifesto, nor is it a simple capitulation to patriarchy. It is a glossy, layered pop artifact that reflects back the desires, fears and fantasies of the culture that produced it. The “modern harem” reading says more about existing biases—around race, gender and sexuality—than it does about the artists themselves.
To engage critically with the video is important; to fall back on exoticizing tropes is not. Shakira and Rihanna deserve to be read not as ornaments in someone else’s fantasy, but as artists negotiating the messy intersection of power, pleasure and visibility on a global stage.