“The air is heavy with perfume. Girls in diaphanous, embroidered saris of fairy-floss pinks, electric blues and lustrous blood-reds float on stage, their every movement preceded by the jangle of ornamental bangles and anklets. It’s the second round of the first Miss India Australia contest… [The pageant] boasts the glamour of a Miss World quest, with entrants marked on talent, poise, decorum and their quick-witted responses to a series of question and answers — but without the swimsuits.” — News.com.au (Australia)

Yesterday PervScan mentioned how the exhibitionism running rampant in society today has devalued the intrinsic appeal of nudity and, correspondingly, inflated the appeal of women who wear traditional garments sanctioned by repressive cultures. Now along comes this beauty pageant in which the swimsuit contest is abandoned in favor of saris. (The sari, of course, is a long piece of cloth worn in a wrap around the body, with one end forming an ankle-length skirt and the other draped across the bosom.)

It would be entirely wrong to think that the sari has less sex appeal than the swimsuit. Rather, in the stead of exposed flesh — gangly legs and plunging cleavage — the sari has an entirely different sex appeal, an allure of its own. Whereas the swimsuit is like a customs declaration, an affidavit saying “here’s the goods” or “what you see is what you get,” the sari is a mysterious thing: it might cling to reveal the contour of a breast, or it might take flight and join the wearer’s body to the wind. Whereas the swimsuit guarantees the goods and thereby gives assurances — consumer confidence, so to speak — the sari withholds and thereby entices. The swimsuit says, “Here I am!” The sari says, “Come find me, if you can…” If the swimsuit is most often found on the beach, the sari’s true lair ought to be the maze. The swimsuit gives itself up to you, but the sari makes you undertake a quest for the g-spot at the heart of the labyrinth.

It’s a different kind of sexy, exotic not because it’s foreign but precisely because it’s not exhibitionistic. Ironically, in this media-saturated, overexposed world of ours, the thirst for novelty may thus carry the sexual revolution right back in the direction of repression — for the simple reason that repression, in the form of burkas, saris, veils, shaytls, and so on, is different and new.

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