How Shakira Has Inspired Every Loba to go Tell Their Ex Off

For over 20 years, Shakira has penned some of our generation's most iconic heartbreak songs.

Who hasn't stayed up crying to "Antología" or feel every single word of "Inevitable?" How many of us haven't felt "Ciega, Sordomuda" or put on "Sale el sol" to believe in love again?

At every point of her career, her music has permeated the soul of mujeres worldwide because, let's be honest, if someone knows how to turn her broken heart into art, it's Shakira.

Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images Shakira at the "Elvis" Red Carpet.

Now, at 45 years old, she has made history with her new track "BZRP Music Sessions #53" where she lays out her trapos sucios and all the suffering, infidelity, and public humiliation she experienced and survived with ex-partner Gerard Piqué, washing him away with some much-needed Laundry Service.

Of course, as a woman, her chart-topping success also received mockery and criticism from the public as they expected Shakira to suffer in silence, as they preferred the version of her that reached for her bleeding heart on the floor of a grocery store in the video of "Monotonía" and not the empowered loba that is now howling at the moon with all her might.

Some said she didn't think of her children.

Others that "hell hath no fury as a woman scorned."

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images Shakira with Sasha and Milan Piqué.

Or as Vogue Spain expertly articulated—calling her out for her lack of "sorority" toward the 23-year-old woman Piqué cheated on her with, Clara Chía Martí.

It leaves me wondering: did anyone bother to think about Shakira's children while Piqué brought his lovers to his home? When they appeared on the cover of magazines at social events together? Did anyone ever approach Martí and tell her that she was "lacking sorority" while she paraded around with Shakira's partner?

For centuries and centuries, we've only seemed to care about how women act in the face of their dismay, disillusion, and disappointment, waiting for them to show a shred of emotion to tear them apart.

Expecting and accepting only for them to "rise above" with grace and poise over something that nearly destroyed them. Criticizing how they've chosen to grieve, even if it means putting out the greatest diss track ever written.

Photo by Europa Press Entertainment/Europa Press via Getty Images Gerard Pique and Shakira attend Davis Cup Final at Caja Magica on November 24, 2019 in Madrid, Spain.

Shakira just gave women worldwide a voice—permission, if you will—and an example of how we will no longer swallow our feelings, our pain, and our anguish to save the people around us in the wake of our emotional chaos.

Piqué, like many men who heartlessly and shamelessly parade around with their mistresses, even tried to diminish the new song by mocking it during a live stream of his new project, King's League, saying Casio had become a new sponsor of the project.

He even recorded a video of himself driving a Twingo, leaving him at the hands of a public who no longer finds those kinds of things funny and suddenly understands what Shakira meant when she wrote, "so much time at the gym, but maybe work out your brain a bit, too."

A man who prohibited an incredible artist like her from working with other men to later lead one of the most notorious infidelity scandals didn't deserve a beautiful ballad like the ones from Donde estan los ladrones.

He deserved this—a song with pure, unwavering, fearless feminine power that doesn't hide the cathartic anger that comes from sending your ex a freir tusa.

If 2022 was one of the darkest periods of Shakira's life, 2023 is starting to look like her renaissance. As her new life begins to take shape, she demonstrates that the pieces from our soul left over from even the most devastating heartbreak can become the compost that nourishes the seeds of our new life.

After all, cuando menos piensas, sale el sol.