Hair-Covering Explained by New York Magazine

There's an article in this week's New York magazine which is getting all the attention. But that's not the article I want to talk about. I found this article on their Web site. (I found it intriguing. It is titled "The Porn Myth." Note the title and decide on your own if you want to read it.)

The article has many discussion points on the topic of First Amendment values and Andrea Dworkin, specifically, but those are for another time.

I found this vignette really interesting:

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. "Can't I even see your hair?" I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. "No," she demurred quietly. "Only my husband," she said with a calm sexual confidence, "ever gets to see my hair."

... And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day--in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman's hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

The article in a nutshell is about how men have become so desensitized to the female body and how women know they can never measure up to the pictures of the idealized woman that are everywhere. But, the author posits, Orthodox men don't have that. Orthodox men are forced to acknowledge that the female body is beautiful, that their individual wives' bodies are sacred.

I don't know if this plays out the way the author thinks it does. But there was something beautiful even in the description, something that made hair-covering special in a way that you don't hear about it in all the talk of expensive/uncomfortable/customized sheitels.