This kind of outlook is a trumped-up version of a base form of misogyny—the kind that assumes that if a woman looks good, she can’t be smart too. A misogynist watches Beyoncé holding an incredibly difficult pose on a chaise lounge for “Partition,” or Beyoncé wearing her trademark stage costume that shows her flexing quads as she beasts her way through her dance routines, or Beyoncé surrounding herself by athletic backing dancers who part their legs agonizingly slowly in a feat of grace, and thinks: if a woman does this, then she can’t also be a feminist. Surely, if a woman does something that’s sexually attractive, so thinks a misogynist, she must be doing it for me(n).

The best rebuttal of this kind of Bey-bashing came from writer Tamara Winfrey Harris in Bitch magazine last year: “Through a career that has included crotch-grabbing, nudity, BDSM, Marilyn Monroe fetishizing, and a 1992 book devoted to sex, Madonna has been viewed as a feminist provocateur, pushing the boundaries of acceptable femininity. But Beyoncé's use of her body is criticized as thoughtless and without value beyond male titillation, providing a modern example of the age-old racist juxtaposition of animalistic black sexuality vs. controlled, intentional, and civilized white sexuality.” You don’t even have to look so far back in pop history to find equivalent white popstars who get away with as much: how many times does Gaga have to get nude before anyone accuses her of hindering the feminist cause?

Both Twigs and Beyoncé are currently making adventurous music that defies categorization, yet critical discourse is having a hard time doing them justice. On the one hand, you’ve got a rising mixed-race popstar struggling to define herself outside of a boxed-in alt-R&B narrative, and on the other you’ve got a major superstar struggling to push her agenda because the press don’t think it fits in with their—again—boxed-in R&B narrative. Yet both women have made albums that are not only challenging sonically, but actually have a lot in common in terms of their themes of sexuality, control and identity. While crowds of eyes are out to objectify them, both albums stare fiercely outwards with strong individuality; gratification is theirs for the taking. Both women have taken their visual identities by the horns, too, with Twigs having built her name on the arresting, surreal videos that accompanied her every track, and Beyoncé creating her “visual album.” For Twigs’ “Kicks,” where she sings frankly about masturbation, you’ve got Beyoncé's “Blow,” a song all about oral sex. For Beyonce’s brazen slogan of sexual confidence—Yoncé all on his mouth like liquor—you’ve got Twigs’ I can fuck you better than her.

Twigs’ message has been lost in translation as critics have brushed over the nuance of her music to make it into something they understand, aka “alternative R&B,” aka “it’s sex music, but it also sounds weird!” LP1 is definitely about sex, but on the whole I don’t know that I’d call it sexy: it deals largely with the juggling act of learning to understand yourself while also desiring others. In the album’s sleeve, she quotes 16th century poet Thomas Wyatt with the line “I love another and thus I hate myself.” As she’s saying she can’t fill up your gaps in “Pendulum,” and as she’s telling you you’re lying about recognizing her in “Video Girl,” she’s piecing together a whole sense of herself that’s independent of the lust she feels and the images of her that you see. It’s the most important pop narrative I’ve heard since, well, since Bey-day last year. And yet these empowering themes have been glossed over. There have been some incredible exceptions—check Jessica Hopper’s review for Wondering Sound, which details the ways in which LP1 is about fantasy and internalized desire far more than it’s about consummation—but on the whole, Twigs’ music has been reviewed as some kind of acceptable, “experimental” variation on a marginalized form. Perhaps I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth because of the 34 online LP1 reviews listed on Metacritic, 26 were written by men. For a ground-breaking album about female sexuality, that feels at best a bit negligent, at worst a bit male gaze-y. It feels like the male-dominated critical discourse is happy to marginalize music with terms like “alternative R&B” until it becomes apparent that that music is world-changing: then they become the authority on it.

In the forlorn final lines of Twigs’ “Video Girl,” a song about the disjuncture between the understanding you have of yourself and the understanding other people think they have of you by merely looking at you, she whispers, I can’t recognize me. In “Pretty Hurts,” a song about the disjuncture between the pressure on women to look a certain way and the effect it has on their internal happiness and well-being, Beyoncé belts, Are you happy with yourself? These two lines form the clearest parallel I can draw between these albums: it’s not about sex, though that’s obviously a large part of it. It’s about self-reflection and self-idealization and the building of an identity, particularly as an oppressed or marginalized person in a world that’s trying its damnedest to objectify you. It’s about doing what makes you happy above and beyond what society says you should be doing. That’s a message I want to hear blasted on BBC Radio 1 playlists and to see illuminated in neon lights on the MTV VMAs stage. Whether they call themselves R&B, pop or nothing at all, FKA Twigs and Beyoncé are the most powerful, innovative and feminist voices we have in music—fuck an “alternative.”