Holly of The Pervocracy, in a generally positive, nuanced review, gets to the core of the problem with one section of Naomi Wolf’s long-controversial article The Porn Myth

And then the weird part.

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.

Or so constrained. I have — or mostly had — Orthodox friends too, and the way they hide women away isn’t sexy. I went to a Hasidic friend’s Bar Mitzvah once and all the women in the congregation had to sit behind a screen, looking politely at a goddamn white sheet as the sounds of the service sort of drifted through. Being sexier in private (if that’s even true) isn’t worth that shit. It’s humiliating. And when I’m asked to cover my hair, I don’t think it’s because my sexuality is special, it’s because my sexuality needs hiding. My very identity — which is being treated as synonymous with my sexuality — needs hiding.

FUCK THAT.

Read her quote of quote in context here.

A couple of critical points in there. First, it’s a mistake to imagine (as its too easy to do if your primary experiences are via media) that only one major religious tradition obliges women to cover themselves. Yes, there’s probably more controversy over Muslim women wearing scarves or veils but as Holly says, its an obligation in ultra-orthodox Judaism as well. And while we’re most familiar with wimples and veils on Catholic nuns and brides, Christian women of all stations in life were once expected to similarly veil themselves… and even in my paternal grandparent’s solidly American Plymouth Brethren denomination women wore (and may still wear) what I always though of as lace doilies to at least symbolically cover their hair.

The second point, though, is that upon reflection while Wolf spends most of her essay decrying the unreal expectations imposed on women by highly-sexualized imagery of women in pornography, Wolf’s glamorization of acres of swaddling veils and dresses is no less sexualizing.

Final point, of course, is that Holly has a bedrock deep understanding of the difference between sexuality and sexualization. And that she has no patience for the latter in any of its manifestations. Which she makes clear in the rest of her post, in which she largely agrees with Wolf about sexualization (vs. oh, say, largely missing sexuality) in porn.

Cool post.