We are accustomed to believing that Arab women experience conditions that are worse than those of western ones. And yet in the western media women are increasingly subject to the “tyranny of beauty” (with consequences that are also political as last summer’s Italian gossip columns proved). There are on the contrary new and interesting perspectives in the Arab media. Why then is the Islamic veil debated so much in the West, when our own TV channels broadcast an increasingly emphasised eroticisation of the female body?