As my opinion is not necessarily reflective of Malaysian men's in general, it is regrettable that Hedi seized a passage out of context from my letter as an occasion to question whether Malaysian men as compared with western or Scandinavian men are "truly so weak that they cannot control themselves in lust" and to unfairly generalise on the "apparent weakness of Malaysian men which makes gender relations so very difficult in this culture" just because of her disappointing experiences with a few "Muslim men, both local and Arabs" as pointed out in her letter Stone-Age gender divide lives on in Malaysia .

In respect to my questionable remark, "Can a wife strut around the matrimonial home or even sleep next to her husband in a perpetual state of near undress and yet claim that her husband is not entitled at any time to be so provoked as to force her?", it is intended not so much to justify forcible rape on grounds of lust, albeit provoked, than to dramatise by an extreme example the point made throughout the tenor of my letter that when laws are lobbied by women groups to be changed to protect women (such as making marital rape a crime), it is sometimes done with only women's interest and perspective in mind without the slightest consideration to the principle of fairness, and justice to men in the process.

The writer said, "The same is true about marriage. I always have the right to say no and no one, not even my husband, has the right to violate me".

Of course, and if I may add in most cases of wife abuse, the aggrieved party is probably not scantily or provocatively dressed or undressed as the case may be, and had they been customarily strutting around in the state of undress, it would probably not have elicited much attention of an average husband, more moved by novelty than familiarity!

I am sure that most other husbands do not violate their wives but a few will certainly do.

The question is — in criminalising marital rape by a broad brush just so that we could punish the few brutish husbands who do violate their wives, has consideration been sufficiently given to the other problem of opportunities being presented to some vindictive or malicious wives who, for whatever reason best known to them, would falsely accuse their innocent husbands of marital rape?

If the fact of marriage and cohabitation raise no presumption of the wife's consent — if whatever provocative acts of undress by a malicious and devious wife deliberately calculated to induce the husband to act in the manner that she would be enabled to accuse him of marital rape will not be taken into account at all against her to mitigate the husband's defence, where then does an innocent husband stand in the face of such a law?

How does he prove the falsity of the wife's allegations of rape or the fact of his entrapment into it, when basically it is her word against his, and it is easier for a woman to make a false allegation and win sympathy than for the man to prove its falsity and his innocence?

Are we promulgating marital rape laws to punish a few cases of "guilty husbands" so that all wives are protected, never mind a few innocent husbands, falsely accused, are hanged or sacrificed in the process?

Is that the priority of our criminal justice system to neglect and pay the price of convicting a few innocent men so that a few guilty others are caught and punished so that no woman is ever victimised?

On the narrow point then on provocation, the writer should take note that even by the standards of her own western laws, provocation by victim has always diminished the wrongdoer's responsibility and mitigated his punishment.

An example of this is when a person kills his/her spouse immediately caught by him in the throes of illicit sexual act with another and a lesser charge of manslaughter is normally preferred by the state instead of murder.

The absence of premeditation here makes the act of killing, though still criminal, somehow less condemnable because of diminished responsibility on the wrongdoer's part, and a lesser manslaughter charge carrying a lesser punishment is deemed appropriate when the act of violence is occasioned by a sudden loss of self-control contributorily induced in part by the immediate provocative conduct of the victim towards the wrongdoer so reasonably affected.

The irony is that while provocation is a mitigating factor in a serious crime like killing, somehow in the case of alleged rape, even within a marital context there, provocation is divested off its customary mitigating effect because it concerns — you guess it — a woman being a victim. Has anyone thought of the possibility of the man being victimised?

In truth, feminists have pushed the legal systems of Western countries towards a "double standard" situation where in many cases women can successfully plead provocation in crimes against men, while men cannot successfully plead provocation in crimes against women.

Case in point as the writer rightly pointed out, no husband is excused from committing a crime of "marital rape" on his wife no matter how much she contributes by way of frequent undress or near undress to provoking his temporary loss of control.

I stress that the converse is not true as dramatised by Lorena Bobbit's case.

In 1993 (Virginia) Lorena Bobbit waited until later in the night when her husband was asleep to sever, with premeditation, his penis with a knife and then drove off along the highway and tossed it out the window!

To a charge of causing grievous hurt to the husband, her defence was that she was an emotionally distressed battered wife, and the immediate provocation was, according to her, the husband came in, one night, apparently, after a drunken spree with one of his friends and she woke up to find him on top of her.

She reflected, "premeditated" and later in the night did the act. Yet she got off on provocation defence.

I hope the writer will adopt an outlook of moral relativism rather than absolutism of cultural viewpoints, and not look through the prism of western values in sanctimonious judgment of us, oblivious of her own double standards in bending backwards to save women from victimisation without balanced appreciation of the bigger picture in every given situation.

Of course, our women are by no means as autonomous or "equal" as their Scandinavian sisters because of our cultural and religious mores. But that does not imply that our "gender relations [are] so very difficult in this culture" as to be oppressive.

Rightly or wrongly, and whatever my own personal beliefs may be to the contrary, we as a society in general, with our more conservative religious values, generally don't approve of extreme expressions of individual autonomy like extramarital sex, single motherhood, or abortion by choice, marriage of same genders or the philosophy of serial monogamy.

Nor are we, may I add, at the same time plagued by social problems of fractured family and children uncared for by both parents to the extent as do Western societies.