I've been obsessing over burqas lately. This all started with reading Lady In Latex II's blog and her descriptions of the sensual feel of her latex burqa.

Technically, the garment is an Afghani chador or chadri, invented by some Afghan king to keep his wives safe from public view, and recently re-popularized by the Taliban running amok in that country.

Technically, a burqa is just the head covering and veil. In the case of the chador, it's become an entire outer garment in and of itself.

Anyway, the lightweight feel of a burqa and loose silky clothes underneath holds some sensual appeal to me.

Never mind it's yet another piece of clothing that's used for repressing women, like the corset, chastity belt and other things that I'm obsessed with.

In my wanderings through Google, it turns out there's an entire genre of web stores catering to Islamic dress codes, including the comical burqini swimsuit. There are also a host of yahoo groups catering to veiling fetishists, hijab-wearing crossdressers and others who share my interest.

For some reason, I find myself attracted to the common Afghan blue chador.

Part of the attraction for me is that the woman could be wearing anything under there. She could be wearing a traditional abayah, or naked with a bondage harness and plugs. Mmm, there's a picture...

I'm thinking about writing a story where the female American victim is captured and forced to live under a burqa. I imagine that she's controlled by high-tech devices fastened to her. Her captors seeing everything she sees, hearing everything she hears, and she's tightly gagged, with a voice coming through a speaker to speak for her. The problem with that is: Why would her captors let her go out like that?

The Burqa Band music video kind of hammers home the idea that this is such a common look in Afghanistan that you really don't know who is who under these things. It's kind of like enforced identity loss, another idea that appeals to me.