Rosalía and her chastity belt
Every gesture Rosalía makes becomes a global event. Time seems to suspend itself for a few seconds, just to allow collective attention to be thrown in voraciously. The Catalan artist's latest move has been the release of the second music video of Lux, corresponding to the song The pearlThe video, beyond its aesthetics and musical narrative, activates a powerful symbolic mechanism: in one of her outfits, Rosalía wears a piece that evokes a chastity belt. But what is really hidden behind one of the most patriarchal objects in the Western imagination?
If you ask anyone in any social circle, the answer will be almost unanimous: the chastity belt was that device knights placed on their wives before going off to war to guarantee their sexual fidelity during their absence—an image of rampant machismo that reduces women to mere possessions of their husbands. However, what is often ignored is that chastity belts are a prime example of a historical myth constructed after the fact, since the historiographical evidence is clear: they never existed as an actual practice.
The idea of the chastity belt is a Renaissance invention. One of the first documented graphic representations appears in the treatise on warfare. Bellifortis (1405), by Konrad Kyeser von Eichstätt, where it appears as a humorous and allegorical element. After centuries of strict regulation of sexuality through silence and moral norms, the Renaissance introduced extreme literary and visual objects that forced debate about affections, marital relationships, marital trust, bodies, and desire.
The chastity belt, implicitly accepted as unrealistic and impractical, thus becomes a moral metaphor and a tool of ridicule that, contrary to what might seem, is not primarily directed at the woman, but at the jealous husband. It serves to reflect on the limits of control, to highlight the male fear of infidelity, and to ridicule the attempt to govern desire with force; in its exaggeration, it makes a power dynamic visible, though it does not resolve it.
During the Middle Ages, women's bodies and sexuality were subject to intense control, but mechanical devices weren't necessary: legal, communal, and religious mechanisms were sufficient. Furthermore, modern medical studies indicate that such a belt would have caused serious health problems, such as urinary retention, infections, or ulcers, incompatible with survival.
It wasn't until the 19th century, at the height of Romanticism, that the belt was presented as a real object and explicitly attributed to the Middle Ages, as proof of the supposed moral and sexual backwardness of that period. This fallacy took deep root, fueled by anticlericalism, the Victorian fascination with bodily control, and a biased view of the past, which explains why many of the supposed medieval belts preserved today are 19th-century forgeries, conceived as erotic, satirical, or cabinet of curiosities.
In Rosalía's case, this stylistic detail aligns with the period of celibacy she has discussed in various interviews. That someone might decide to focus on their work and temporarily abstain from sexual relationships shouldn't be unusual, were it not for the fact that we live in a hypersexualized society that continues to measure individual worth based on amorous prowess. What is questionable, however, is the choice of an object that, despite knowing it has never existed as a real practice, continues to convey, in a particularly crude way, a deeply sexist ideology.