On the one hand she is putting herself in a category of a feminist, this very strong woman - and she has that beautiful speech by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in one of her songs - but then the camera, it felt very male, such a male voyeuristic experience of her and I just wondered if you had thoughts about that?

That is very interesting and I have definitely been thinking about this since the album came out. I don’t always buy that “it’s empowering” argument when it comes down to a female pop star being explicitly sexual. For me, it takes a lot of convincing. But I actually found this album very inspiring and feminist and, overused as this word is, empowering.

The first thing is that she released it as an album all at once. They are not singles, so you have to consider them as one big self-portrait. There are lots of songs about sex, but also songs about being a mother, and being her own person. And I don’t think there’s tension between these different parts of her life - instead, they seem to inform one another, you know?

I also think seeing these images of her help to change the standard of what we think of as beautiful or sexually desirable, and she expands it to include someone like herself, a woman of colour. Girls who feel underrepresented now feel less so. She definitely shows off for her husband a lot in the videos, she definitely performs for him, but again, it’s so much her choice. It also shifts the male part of it from a male audience to her husband, and I’m happy that she shows off her marriage in a world full of stereotypes about what monogamous relationships look like for African-Americans.

The album is not perfect and Beyoncé is not perfect but I think it is very generous of her to let us watch her relationship to feminism evolve publicly. I know I’m getting into the nitty gritty here! It’s just been on my mind so much.