I’m impossibly arrogant to suggest that Shakira’s announcement that libido is the engine of the world was intended to provide critical backup for my post this morning on feminism and morality.

Let’s just say that two Smart Sensuality women are on the same train track.

It’s true that Shakira’s blend of sexuality and philanthropy launched my own re-entry into activism this summer. Shakira, the burqa debate and Lubna Hussein’s defiant standup to the morality police in Sudan cleared out the cobwebs in my head.

Euan Ferguson interviews Shakira for The Observer, getting wise to the fact that there’s a serious brainiac with curves in the room, a woman who inspires you to think about “far deeper things than one might expect, especially if one was coming to Shakira on the music and looks alone.”

What a bloody patroning remark.

If you’re a Smart Sensuality woman with an activist conscience, you totally understand that Shakira’s music is about far-more than gyrating hips (which are lovely) and slithering around in a cage, also inspiring (Read: Controlling Women’s Bodies Is a Fight to the Finish)

Saint Shakira is the patron saint of Smart Sensuality, calling libido “the engine of the world.” That’s my girl!

Shakira in Armani Privé jacket.. VanityFair.com, Michael Roberts photographer.Let me give you her quote precisely, since I’m on quick sand already today with the Catholic Church and the governments of Sudan and Zambia: “Of course, yes. I do think libido is the engine of the world. Forward or backwards. For good or ill. Sometimes when we repress our libido we regress. When we were in the Dark Ages, it was a question of humanity somehow managing to forget about itself. We put God in the centre of society, and people forgot about their own nature and desires. There was a huge deal of repression.

That paragraph, my dearest, darling Shakira woman, is the understatement of the 21st century.

“Until the renaissance, when people could start to… breathe, a little more. Ideas started, or rather resumed. And if this nun I mentioned, the 80-year-old who saw my video, if she was compelled to say something like that, then the rest of us are in a much better place today, right?”

I’m not so sure, dear Shakira, although that’s one cool nun your mother ran into. In America, ours are under investigation for being too … too, modern in their thinking.

Reading on in The Observer interview, I forgive writer Ferguson for his early-on slip of the tongue. He gives Shakira the nicest editorial ride since the NY Times article that launched my relationship with this global philanthropy superstar: Shakira, a Smart Sensuality Activist, Takes Me Back to Colombia, where My life Journey Really Began.

These activism/philanthropy facts of the worth-the-read story are well known in our Shakira Smart Pants channel.

My mission today is feminism, sexuality and the patriarchy/most world religions. Somehow along the way, legislating female sexuality became a major patriarchal preocupation, and women pay the price all over the world even today.

Make no mistake. The renewed focus on keeping women in line is in full swing globally. For every activist like us working to help women, there’s a counterforce trying to get her back under her burqa or in her cage. (My remark is not intended for western Muslim women who choose to wear burqas because they want to. My focus is women who wear burqas because they have no choice.) This is why Shakira dances around in a cage, wanting women to unleash their inner-she-wolves.

There are many thoughtful, educated people in the world — women and men in every country including many Islamic ones — who believe that the world would be far better off with a new set of female-centric principles, rather than patriarchal ones that have caused such misery and endless suffering for thousands of years.

I know that Shakira will back me up on that statement, and I will be making it often. Anne

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