[9][11] Madonna listened to the phrase uttered by Gainsbourg and started writing the song and the melody, resulting in "What It Feels Like for a Girl", a track described by her as a complaint about the politics of sexes.

[21] Madonna sings over a synth line the first verse, "Silky smooth lips as sweet as candy, baby/Tight blue jeans, skin that shows in patches" in a mellow and feminine tone, which is driven by a "cool beat" and filtered bass licks.

[21] As the pre-chorus ends, the drums are pulled out and added immediately the chorus starts, washed over by tidal keys and pads, and Madonna asking the question, "Do you know what it feels like for a girl?".

[21][22] Phil Dellio from The Village Voice noticed the presence of "gossamer-like" synthesizer in the background, while author Rikky Rooksby highlighted the equalized bass guitar in the center of the production.

[17] The Above & Beyond remix, which was used for the music video, features "hard and rhythmic" pumping beats and removed Madonna's verses, leaving only the chorus and repeating the Charlotte Gainsbourg sample several times in the middle.

[34] However, on his review of GHV2 (2001), Cinquemani felt the track was "largely lost amid the conventional sonics of Music's final single" and called it that compilation's least dynamic offering, giving a C− rating.

[36] Nathan Smith from Houston Press opined it was "one of the realest and most mature vocal performances of her career as she gently explores the double standard faced by ambitious women".

[38] Writing for Entertainment Weekly, journalist David Browne relegated the track as "an older, wiser 'Into the Groove'", highlighting its "softly padding beat and genuinely empathetic lyrics".

[46] Writing for Billboard, Larry Flick hailed it "a hook-laden midtempo jam [...] that should give the Britney/Christina generation of teenage female listeners a little food for thought", highlighting its "motherly, nurturing perspective".

[47] Also from Billboard, Chuck Taylor named it "one of the more substantive – and mature – musical ventures of [Madonna's] career", while panning its remix version for "reduc[ing] the song to a mindless trickle of beats without any hints of the verses".

[48] The Village Voice's Phil Dellio found the song to be "the perfect answer record to [the novel] The Virgin Suicides (where boys indeed stand on the side of the street looking uncomprehendingly towards girls)".

[53] The same year, Edward Cheung from PopMatters ranked it as the sixth best production by Guy Sigsworth, writing that "an excellently placed spoken word sample (delivered by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a keening synth line immediately set the tone for Madge's track as fashionably lonely".

[54] While ranking Madonna's singles in honor of her 60th birthday, in August 2018, Jude Rogers from The Guardian placed the track at number 37 and wrote that "it sounds like a Saint Etienne song accidentally covered by a superstar".

[56] In 2019, Samuel R. Murrian from Parade ranked it at number 16 on his list of the singer's 100 greatest songs: "Lyrically barbed but sonically soft, one of Madonna's most radical tracks explores the brutality of being a woman in a man's world.

[78] In February 2001, English filmmaker Guy Ritchie, Madonna's then husband, said that they were planning to work together on her new music video; "creatively, we like the same sort of things, so it just makes sense".

[79] One month later, Madonna revealed to Ingrid Sischy that the video would be for "What It Feels Like for a Girl", which she found "ironic because [Ritchie]'s such a macho man, and his movies are so testosterone-driven, but I asked him a long time ago what song on the album he responded to the most, and that's the one".

[81] She then hot-wires a yellow 1978 Chevrolet Camaro from the parking lot, with the license plates reading "Pussy" and "Cat" on the front and back, before driving to the "Ol Kuntz Guest Home" to pick up a semi-catatonic elderly woman.

[82] She then mows down a pack of street hockey players before stealing a red 1979 Pontiac Trans Am from a gas station while a man fills its tank, spilling gasoline all over the pavement.

[89] George Lang from The Oklahoman, called it as the singer's worst clip and criticized Ritchie's directing abilities; "he has great visual sense, but his work often is lacking depth.

[81] Eden Miller from PopMatters echoed this sentiment, adding that MTV aired videos such as Eminem's "Stan", in which the main character drives his car off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend tied up in the trunk, or Robbie Williams' "Rock DJ", in which the singer strips his skin off in graphic detail.

Miller relegated the banning of Madonna's music video was because "the idea of a woman taking her aggression out on men is something even an edgy TV network like MTV was unable to accept.

[95] Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Neva Chonin accused the video for being a marketing ploy and believed that the singer knew it would result in controversy and drive sales amidst the publicity.

[84] Louis Virtel from The Backlot ranked it as the singer's 12th greatest video, calling it "the ultimate (read: solely tolerable) Madonna/Guy Ritchie collaboration [...] She's both chilling and totally confident.

[96] Andrew Morton opined that the video was "entirely consistent with the themes [Madonna] has been exploring for the last twenty years, namely the relationship between the sexes, the ambiguity of gender, and the unresolved conflict, for women in a patriarchal society of being fully female and sexual while exercising control over their lives".

[97] According to Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens, authors of Madonna's Drowned Worlds, the video represented the female fantasy of behaving like a "bad boy" and doing things associated with men.

[100] It became the most-viewed webcast of all time, beating Paul McCartney's performance of "50s rock and roll classics" at Liverpool's The Cavern Club in December 1999, which was viewed by an audience of about three million.

Dancers wearing anime and manga inspired costumes swung from wires in a Japanese-inspired sequence as the backdrops featured scenes of a naked girl being pursued, trapped and sexually abused.

Academic Georges Claude Guilbert, author of Madonna As Postmodern Myth, praised the performance for its "gender-bending and further sense of ambiguity" while Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine found it to be "anticlimactic".

[104][106] The performance on August 26, 2001, at The Palace of Auburn Hills, outside of Madonna's hometown of Detroit was recorded and released in the live video album, Drowned World Tour 2001.

[111] In his review of the soundtrack, Fraser McAlpine from BBC News felt that "the decision to get all the boys to sing 'What It Feels Like for a Girl' is inspired, and represents a genuinely powerful musical moment that doesn't need the television show's plot to make it fly".