HT Home / Blogs Home > Adventures of Inderjeet / Music / The under-cover gaze

The Issue: Beauty and the burqa

The Soundtrack: Bette Davis Eyes

There are only two things in the world that make not-so-pretty women appear pretty: beer and burqas.

While it’s true that I don’t drink solely for the aesthetic purpose mentioned above, my relationship with the burqa – usually associated with backwardness in Muslim society and the strange guilt that accompanies the fear that makes women stay literally under-cover in public – is of a one-tracked kind. Let me explain. Each time I pass a lady in a burqa, the only thing I can imagine under the Darth Vaderess cloak is an incredibly stunning woman shielding her beauty from the world’s eyes lest the onlooker goes mad with desire and love.

Without her burqa on, how are we to look at that without bursting into flames?

Statistically, I’m told, the number of pretty women under burqas are liable to be the same as those liable to be plain. (Interestingly, these statistician friends of mine insist that the number of pretty women – with or without a burqa — in the world roughly number the same as the non-pretty ones. This is total bakwaas considering I know from my anthropoligist friends that by definition, ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ — unlike plainness — has to be a ‘minority characteristic’. If every second woman in a place looked like Angelina Jolie, the Angelina Jolie look would hardly be special and, therefore, deemed ‘hot’.)

Well, coming back to the burqa, the point I’m trying to make is that for me it gives any woman a mysterious erotic air, in which she’s hiding something sensuous in a teasing fashion rather than protecting her ‘modesty’ (a strange term that). So when French President Nicholas Sarkozy, wants no women in France to wear burqas (a sign of “debasement of women”), I say he’s worried about what goes through his head when he sees a burqa-clad woman.

Considering that I’ve viewed Mrs Sarkozy’s pictures with her kit off (that never included a burqa) I can understand even more why in true Gallic-style homegrown supremacy of erotic tastes must be held high above all other forms.

The first thing I notice about burqa-clad ladies – and probably the last thing too – is the eyes that peer out of the gauzed front. That being the only window to what lies within, the pair of eyes automatically are invested with incredible, seductive powers – no matter if the contours of the burqa suggest a Shehnaz Huseein underneath it. Which is why Kim Carnes’ 1981 blinder of a song, Betty Davis Eyes, came rushing back to me as I heard about the Sarkozy plan to get all women in France out of their burqas – no matter what they might be wearing underneath.

Although I’ve never heard the original version of Bette Davis Eyes that was written in 1974 and then rejected by Carnes because she didn’t like the arrangement, I can understand why the dame herself, Bette Davis, so liked the song, when Carnes did agree to record it with a new arrangement. It tilts towards what lies under, beneath, sideways, over, above – rather than talking about feminine beauty out there for the picking/checking out:

“Her hair is Harlow gold,
Her lips sweet surprise
Her hands are never cold
She’s got Bette Davis eyes
She’ll turn her music on
You won’t have to think twice
She’s pure as New York snow
She got Bette Davis eyes”

Sure, Carnes in her sandpaper-against-your-chin voice purrs on about her hair, her lips, her hands, her ‘character’ even. But my ‘gaze’ in the song is firmly fixed on those ‘Bette Davis eyes that she has. Hell, she sounds like one of the Arab ladies under those tents. Not to lead gents like me on, of course but, as Carnes tells us seductively in her grrr-ful voice, to:

“…tease you

She’ll unease you
All the better just to please you
She’s precocious
And she knows just what it
Takes to make a pro blush
She got Greta Garbo stand-off sighs,
She’s got Bette Davis eyes”

For crying out loud, why on earth the French would want to destroy such a setting by banning burqas, je ne comprend pas!

(11 votes, average: 4.82 out of 5)

 Loading ...