I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. I think that’s the strangest thing of all now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been.

A Seattle Times review of a recent Madonna tour stop praises the artist for “rocking us as a feminist icon” and applauds the singer for her brazen sexuality: “stripping down to a bra, then pulling her pants down below a thong and baring her cheeks to the Key [Arena].” Even the Guardian’s Freeman, in an ode to Like a Prayer, the writer’s favorite album, speaks longingly about Madonna’s midriff-baring ’80s fashion and the video to the title track, which “featured a woman named Madonna apparently giving a blow job to a black Jesus.”

Through a career that has included crotch-grabbing, nudity, BDSM, Marilyn Monroe fetishizing, and a 1992 book devoted to sex, Madonna has been viewed as a feminist provocateur, pushing the boundaries of acceptable femininity. But Beyoncé’s use of her body is criticized as thoughtless and without value beyond male titillation, providing a modern example of the age-old racist juxtaposition of animalistic black sexuality vs. controlled, intentional, and civilized white sexuality.

Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske took brain scans of heterosexual men while they looked at sexualised images of women wearing bikinis. She found that the part of their brains that became activated was pre-motor - areas that usually light up when people anticipate using tools. The men were reacting to the images as if the women were objects they were going to act on. Particularly shocking was the discovery that the participants who scored highest on tests of hostile sexism were those most likely to deactivate the part of the brain that considers other people’s intentions (the medial prefrontal cortex) while looking at the pictures. These men were responding to images of the women as if they were non-human.