ShakiraShakira's provocative new video is proving a YouTube sensation, but on X Factor a girl group is being told to dress more 'demurely'. Jess Cartner-Morley is confused

The video for her new single She Wolf has Shakira on all fours inside a cage, wearing a nude-effect leotard, shiny corset belt and very high heels. She whips her hair from side to side, breathing heavily. She mimes licking the bars for a while, then opens her legs and wraps her thighs behind her head. And then – just in case you didn't get the message – she dry-humps the floor.

This video has had 35 million views on YouTube. At 32, Shakira is now the fourth wealthiest woman in music, after Madonna, Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand, with a fortune estimated at £23m. She was one of a small handful of non-American artists to perform at the We Are One concert in the days before Obama's inauguration (another was Bono); The Observer called her latest album "preposterously brilliant".

How to square this, then, with the fate of Kandy Rain, the girl group that became the first act to be voted off this year's X Factor? Slammed by the judges on Saturday for being too "provocative", Kandy Rain found the public to be equally unforgiving the following evening. Am I the only one who found it faintly surreal to watch these young women being told they didn't stand a chance in today's music industry because everyone thought they showed too much young, toned flesh and should have dressed more "demurely"?

I'm confused. Do we want pop stars to be sexy, or not? (There is, obviously, a vast differential in the quality of songwriting, performance and production in the case of Shakira v Kandy Rain, but we shall leave that aside just for now, on the grounds that both acts are, on their very different levels, as much a visual act as an aural one.) Often, the furore around female singers and sex is couched in terms of their being too old (Madonna) or too young (Britney Spears circa 1998) or too thin (any of Girls Aloud) or too fat (Britney Spears circa 2007). But what happens when the women in question are of respectable age and BMI?

Sex still sells, but these days it's a crowded market. As Kandy Rain have just discovered the hard way, raunch culture has made the once-potent commodity of glassy-eyed hip thrusts in stilettos such an everyday element of pop culture that we can't even be bothered to pick up the phone and vote for it any more.

Shakira, on the other hand, not only pulls off dance routines worthy of Michael Jackson but also makes the history books by being probably the first pop star to howl like a wolf on record since Jackson in Thriller. And in She Wolf, as in any Shakira song, for every lingering close-up of the singer licking her lips while singing "my body's craving/so feed the hungry" there is a moment of classic lost-in-translation lyrical madness – this time, it's "I'm starting to feel just a little abused, like a coffee machine in an office." Genius. And to update a well-worn adage, 35 million YouTube hits can't be wrong.

This article was amended on 15 October 2009. The original said that Shakira performed at the Obama inauguration and that she was one of only two non-American artists to do so.

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