There’s protecting your peace, and then there’s whatever Rosalía’s got going on. During a new music video for her song La Perla (The Pearl), the queer singer tries everything she can think of to ward off a toxic ex — including donning a medieval chastity belt.
In the track, Rosalía sings about her former lover being a deceitful “peace thief” who gets by on his charms. Seemingly in response to that pattern of fuckery, she spends the La Perla video steeling herself against future attacks.
She kicks off the song by slicing a fencing sword through the air. Later, she can be seen donning a biting suit and walking two attack dogs, then heading to a skating rink and suiting up in a hockey uniform (Rosalía Heated Rivalry camo when?!).
But the star’s most memorable form of self-protection proves to be a medieval chastity belt, which she pairs with a cropped hoodie and low-rise trousers as she strolls the streets of Miami.
Although Smithsonian Magazine claims that chastity belts are actually a myth, the hardware was rumoured to have been used by men in the middle ages to lock up their wives and daughters’... nether regions while they were away. Whether or not they were real doesn’t really matter as much as the male power fantasy of literally locking down your ladies’ goods so you can go die in a war, cuckolds be damned. (It is worth it to mention that while this form of chastity belt is believed to be a myth, chastity has existed in many iterations over the years and is quite popular today as a sexual fetish.)
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Rosalía’s decision to irreverently show off such a chastity belt is in line with the medievalist, Catholic-inspired bent of her recent album Lux, which features several songs inspired by the often-murderous, rebellious lives of female saints. As several fans were quick to point out on X, the belt also looks a whole lot like something else if you put your mind to it.
“I thought it was a strap,” one X user wrote.
“If you squint, it’s a strap,” another joked.
Will the singer don the belt to ward off Sam Levinson’s history of troubled productions while appearing in Euphoria season three alongside ex Hunter Schafer? Unclear. But, if Rosalía can create an ambitious, 13-language album that reframes her faith through “female mysticism, spirituality,” and an orchestra-backed Björk poem, she can certainly reclaim medieval chastity belts for the strap-loving crowd.
This article was originally published by Them.
