Now celebs need burkas
These days their every personal flaw is being exposed. There's only one way to fight back
Kathryn Hughes
Monday July 10, 2006
The Guardian
The tabloid newspapers and celebrity magazines have greeted the arrival of high-definition television (HDTV) with a kind of whooping glee. In a string of "before and after" photo features, they offer previews of what terrible secrets Teri Hatcher, Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Hurley are about to have exposed to the cruel gaze of the world at large (respectively, hectic flush, acne, crows' feet). The message is clear: in this new economy of super-sightedness, power has passed from the looked-upon to the looker. No amount of covering up with slap is going to save you from a kind of visual rape in which you and your enlarged pores are laid bare before the world's probing, mocking glance.
This savage scopic economy (that's what cultural theorists call it, anyway) has been in the ascendant for some time now. Witness Heat magazine's weekly "circle of shame" feature, where attention is directed to a malfunctioning bit of a celebrity's body that might otherwise have gone unnoticed: fingers that resemble claws, ears that droop like an elephant's, an apparent third nipple ... and all ringed and tagged to make sure that no amount of lipsticky smiles can distract you, the viewer, from your stern task of seeking out the visual truth in a world of smoke and mirrors.
In this new x-ray world there will be few hiding places, and so the options left to those most likely to be caught in the public gaze are severely limited. The old-fashioned approach might simply be to redouble your disguise and hope that the all-seeing eye will skim over you before passing on to more important targets. To this end the beauty columns in the high-end newspapers are suggesting a product called Cover FX, a skin foundation originally developed to deal with burns and vitiligo, now being sold as just the thing to take with you when you go into battle with HDTV. Its dense putty layers will, quite simply, blot you out, reducing you to a kind of blank screen on which a new, more pleasing face may be painted.
The other, more modern approach is to glory in your fakeness, joyfully drawing attention to the fact that you have been assembled with the world's searching gaze in mind. You can see this in the Big Brother house, where none of the female contestants is remotely bothered about having had breast enhancements. Instead, here - as elsewhere - the talk is all about size, shape and provenance. In the press, too, the talk is no longer about has she/hasn't she had cosmetic surgery, but about who has got it right (Anne Robinson) and who has got it wrong (the hapless Teri Hatcher, who is fast becoming a terrible warning about what can happen to a nice woman in the savage age of high definition).
Then again, consider the wives and girlfriends of the England soccer team, who were recently accompanied to Germany by a couple of operatives from the Fake Bake tanning company. No one pretended for a moment that a job lot of pasty girls from the chilly north-west of England owed their gleaming golden tans to anything other than artifice. Indeed, far from being kept secret, like postmodern madwomen in the attic, allowed out after dark only with their spray cans to perform their magic art, the fake bakers were incorporated into the Baden-Baden narrative as surely as Coleen's luggage or, indeed, Posh's breasts.
In these circumstances you can begin to see the point of the burka. Every now and then a Muslim feminist will write a piece for the papers suggesting that turning yourself into a small black tent is, in fact, marvellously liberating since it removes you at a stroke from the scopic economy. Until now that logic has always seemed strangely topsy-turvy, but in the age of high definition it may indeed turn out to be the only truly practical choice.
kathryn.hughes@btinternet.com
In a water-side park a Muslim family was out together. The man was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and playing soccer with his small son. The woman was draped in black from head to toe (except face). I cannot figure how that is comfortable in that heat, and it impedes her from playing ball with her son as well. Why wasn't her husband wearing more traditional dress with long sleeves and long skirt/pants? He'd be very jealous if other men looked twice at his wife, but it seems okay for him to show his body and possibly allow women to give him a second glance in front of his wife. Now that is equality, isn't it? 
