J. Lo and Shakira eclipse NFL coach Katie Sowers

Analyses of J. Lo and Shakira’s Super Bowl half-time show are still splashed all over my Facebook feed. Apparently, the motion Shakira made with her tongue left a lot of people confused. Yes, it can look like exactly what it looks like. But it’s actually a Middle Eastern gesture called a zaghrouta, and coupled with her belly dancing, an expression of her Arabic heritage.

It’s understandable if you’re feeling a bit lost. Although it may have appeared as though Shakira and Jennifer Lopez harnessed the trope of the eroticized, racialized, female and made Pepsi millions of dollars by exploiting it, they were actually empowering Latina women.

The purpose of the half-time show was not to mine the depths of the male football fan’s psyche and make money that way. It was all about feminism.

The stars are actually trailblazers, many commentators have noted. It was hard not to tear up when Jennifer Lopez yelled “Let’s get loud, Latinas!” and children appeared in cages. It was a bold political statement, even if it didn’t hit any harder than a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

In any case, the show sure was a gold mine for Pepsi. A google search for “Jennifer Lopez and Shakira Super Bowl” yields more than 200 million results.

A search for “Katie Sowers Super Bowl” hits about two per cent of that number.

Unless you were watching the game and caught the Microsoft commercial featuring her, you may not even know who Sowers is. She’s the woman we should have been focusing on all week.

The 49ers assistant coach is the first woman and first openly LGBTQ coach in Super Bowl history. Sowers is a true trailblazer.

She’s not the first female NFL coach. Jen Welter broke into the profession in 2015. In five short years though, women like Sowers have launched an assault on the ranks. The NFL now counts seven female coaches and 15 interns.

Instead of talking about what it means to have a queer woman lead a team of men into the biggest game of their lives, in a sport that epitomizes masculine American culture — we spent the week talking about women and sex.

There’s no arguing that owning your sexuality, the way J. Lo and Shakira did, can be empowering. But there’s nothing revolutionary about it. Feminists have been saying this since the 1980s and, since the 1990s, we’ve been talking about how Black and brown women’s bodies have been policed and their sexuality suppressed.

J. Lo’s stripper pole and bondage gear, and Sharika’s sparkly cheerleader outfit, could be regarded as the embodiment of that policing.

The stars put their hands on their hips and smiled. They entertained us the way show girls have for centuries.

On the sidelines though, Katie Sower was doing something different. And all week we left her there in the dark. It’s pretty clear ladies that we still have a long way to go.