[Avodah] More on Married Women Should Not Wear Wigs (Micha Berger)

[David Riceman]

RMB:

<<Sei'ar be'ishah ervah is different than other examples of dress. 
Otherwise, there would be no distinction between single and married women.
  It seems more that there is a gezeiras hakasuv requiring hair covering 
by married women (from parashas sotah), and then once uncovering her 
hair is rare, its exposure is ervah. The issur causes the label "ervah", 
and in other cases (eg revealing or tight-fitting clothing) the ervah is 
inherent and is the cause of the issur.
  But even if this theory is wrong, there must be some distinction 
between an ervah that applies to all women, and one that applies to 
married ones only. One can't simply assume it has to do with sexuality, 
because attraction isn't correlated to her being married.>>

There are four basic issurim:

(i) A man may not gaze at a woman he may not marry.

(ii) A man may not gaze at someone or something which may later induce a 
shichvas zera l'vattalah.

(iii) A person may not look at something distracting while reciting 
krias shma.

(iv) A married woman may not go out "v'roshah parua".

I'm inclined to guess that the first two are derabbanan, and I have no 
idea about the third.  The gemara says clearly that the fourth is 
d'orayssa, but IIRC a small number of contemporary poskim cited in Otzar 
HaPoskim argue that it's derabbanan.  I'm still recovering, but I hope 
to look a little harder later this week.

The reason for the first prohibition is to reduce the occurence of adultery.

The sugya in Berachos, as construed by the poskim, is confusing because 
it talks about issurim (i) and (iii) without making the transition clear.

I think your problem is that you fail to distinguish between (i) and 
(ii) (they are different simanim in EH).

David Riceman