Loubna Haddad was at her home in Damascus, watching TV with her grandmother. Suddenly Elissa, a Lebanese pop star with inflated lips, shrunken outfits, and sultry looks, popped on the small screen and outraged the old woman.

Despite plenty of exaggerated wincing, Ms. Haddad says her grandmother, "didn't get up, but kept watching." For Haddad, a TV writer, this was no ordinary generation gap and no petty victory. In a part of the world that still restricts kisses and bed scenes in sitcoms, it was a major development.

Elissa is part of a crop of new female Arab singers to emerge in the last two years, most of them Lebanese. Their music videos bring them - via satellite - into millions of Arab homes, as they blow words of heartache over bare shoulders, writhe on beach sand, and stage trysts with mysterious men.

Some critics are responding with more than cringes. This summer, a rival singer accused Elissa - referred to by one magazine as "the artist of bed sheets" - of using sex to sell her songs. In September, members of the Egyptian Parliament proposed a ban on singer Nancy Ajram's videos. The controversy heated up last month when protesters in Bahrain tried to shut down a concert by the same performer, most famous for a song in which she flutters about an all-male cafe.

But more-liberal Arabs are deeply divided over the videos' long-term influence. On one end are those who, like Haddad, hope the videos will help erode conservative attitudes toward dress and sex. On the opposite end are those who see yet another culprit that promotes women as physical objects. Beneath these different views lie mixed feelings about the benefits of Western influence on Arab culture.

To be sure, if it were simply hanging in a closet, Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe's notorious short and skintight red dress (which appears rain-soaked in one of her videos) would not be any cause for controversy. Beneath the hijab or at home, even traditional Muslim women are often bolder in their dress, wearing makeup in the house and removing it when they leave to run an errand, for example. And between husband and wife, conservative Muslims say, all sartorial boundaries crumble.

"[A wife] should wear what makes her husband happy," says one female Islamic law student at the University of Damascus who switches off music videos at the first sight of a shimmying hip. That philosophy may explain why lingerie stores are easier to find in downtown Damascus than are cafes.

Nor are bawdy depictions of women foreign to Arab culture. "One Thousand and One Nights," oral stories that date back centuries, feature plenty of sirens starring in sexual exploits. "It's not a new concept - the femme fatale - in Islamic society at all," says Anisa Al Amin Merhe, a psychoanalyst and a professor at the University of Lebanon in Beirut. "But," she adds, explaining the uproar surrounding the videos, "it's the first time you see it on TV [in the Arab world]."

Moreover, for many observers - directors, musicians, and viewers - while these new performers sing in Arabic and sometimes dance on desert sets to Arabic rhythms, the videos are for the most part a Western phenomenon. The quick shots, the suggestive moves, the pervasive green and blue hues, and the costumes are all American and European influenced.

"There is no Arabic culture in the new songs, bottom line. Just mute the sound, and you'll think [she] is a foreign singer," says Osama Said, a partner at Damascus production house ArtWare Media who has directed videos for Syrian artists.

The result, some say, is nothing more than bad imitation. Ultimately, for Mr. Said and others, Elissa's low-cut, form-fitting Christian Dior dress in her chart-topping video "Aayshalak" ("I live for you") doesn't reflect any kind of shift in attitude toward ideas about freedom or women's equality, but merely an eye for Western fashion.

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