My freshman year in college, I was with a group of friends eating lunch in the cafeteria. Above us, the TVs were blaring music videos. Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever,” came on, and one by one, all the men in the cafeteria stopped eating, their eyes fixed on the TV. Then, all the women.

Afterwards, there was a long silence, the sort of bizarre and awkward silence that happens when half your table is fighting a hormone surge that would cripple ordinary men. Finally, one of the guys broke the hush.

“Dude. What the hell?”

And that’s the thing about Shakira, right? Sure, she’s totally sexy and sells it relentlessly. But somehow she’s never had the “sleazy” tag appended (unlike the Britneys of the world), maybe because her songs seem so upbeat that the sexual thing comes off like a funny mistake, like it’s 1996 and she’s the exchange student that will change Dawson’s life forever with her carefree topless outfits? I don’t know. It’s clearly all sex all the time, but whenever I see her I’m just like, “Oh, Shakira,” like she’s trying to get me to decoupage my coffee table or something.

She has a new video out, “She Wolf.” I saw a clip of it that confused me and thought no more of it until my friend E. said, “No, you have to see the whole thing.”

You guys, Shakira rolling in mud in front of a herd of horses was vaguely eccentric. This video is fucking loon behavior.

I’m not even talking about the naked cage part. The cage part is obvious and hilarious and a blow to feminism and a boost to nude-leotard manufacturers the world over and at one point she circles one of her legs like it’s a tail, but at least all that makes sense. The rest of it is just – she’s dancing in a colon? One of the lyrics is, “A domesticated girl, that’s all you ask of me/Darling it is no joke, this is lycanthropy”? Then she sees a wolf that’s really a woman, so she puts on her samba outfit and goes up and performs her So You Think You Can Dance solo on the roof? And one of the lyrics is, “I’m starting to feel just a little abused, like a coffee machine in an office/So I’m gonna go to my closet and get me a lover and tell you all about it”? (Wait, WHAT?)

Then she falls into her closet and goes to sleep, which, fine, all of us have fallen asleep in strange places. Also she enters the room from the doorway, then lies down facing the doorway and looks out the window at the moon even though that’s not physically possible and seriously, can we talk about the giant sparkly colon again? Seriously.