I agree that there could be a nexus between the rise of pornography and violent sex crimes and the stricter enforcement of conservative religious sexual mores of in the country of late, thanks to PAS's morally sanitising programs and the government's competition with it (Farish A Noor's "Pornography and the Sheikh", July 28).

PAS Kelantan had already prevented companies from using advertisements that display women in public, banned modern dances, mixing of the sexes in public are closely monitored and spied upon, and Muslim women are compulsorily required to cover their bodies and to wear the tudung (head scarf). PAS Terengganu has separated queues for men and women in supermarkets. These morally sanitising campaigns inspired religious officers in Malaysia to charge 44 Muslim couples with 'getting too close' on Valentine's Day.

The more the reality of our basic sexual instinct is repressed due to campaigns of religious moral guardians, the more we dare not face that reality openly, and as a defense against the real, many would surreptitiously and rampantly conjure fantasies and indulge in pornography in support of that reality which cannot face the light of day! For readers interested in this paradoxical psychological process called the Lacanian sublime, it is explored by author Slavoj Zizek in the book The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime .

According to Farish, when he was in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan recently, he was amazed by the extent to which the country was literally drowning in guns, drugs and pornography.

Author, Cam Mcgrath recounting his expatriate life in Cairo, wrote in his book Sexual Repression in Egypt of how due to extreme religious conservatism, sexual repression had led to rampant sexual harassment of visitors and tourists to Egypt. According to the author, "an alarming number of Egyptian men are sexually frustrated their entire lives. Finding themselves among their equally frustrated peers only encourages them to vent. From a tender age they enjoy the male bonding experience of barking and making cat calls at passing women, their favorite targets being young women and female tourists".

Sexual crimes are punishable by death under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islamic laws, the executions and amputations in Saudi Arabia being carried out with a sword in public. Notwithstanding the harsh laws, they are no deterrent to the commission still of sexual crimes like rape, sodomy etc.

Arab customers are so well-known for their excesses when out of their countries that even prostitutes reject their business if they have a say in it.

Fidel Castro of Cuba launched an intensified campaign to persecute and repress gays. Cuban official homophobia led, in the mid-1960s, to a mass round-up of gay people without charge or trial. Many were seized in night-time swoops and locked up in forced labour camps for "rehabilitation" and "re-education".

But did the campaign of repression succeed? No. Many just rebelled against the campaign, went under ground and coalesced in support whilst many others fled the persecution to Florida in the United States.

Repression of a basic recurrent biological instinct such as sex often provokes counter reaction (by fantasies) and rebellion against that repression which leads to more profligacy of the repressed act.

In a celebrated local case on rape (Public Prosecutor vs Chiu Nan Hong), the accused was asked by the female complainant in the midst of the sexual act why he was doing it, and he was reported to have said "Forbidden fruit tastes sweeter".

Indeed it must be.

With the stricter enforcement of laws on personal morality, can the PAS state governments prove by verifiable statistic that Kelantan and Terengganu have less (or more) rapes, incest, abortions, abandoned babies and homosexuality than the national average?

So I would therefore beseech for the good of the country that the moral guardians of society think deeper, read and understand a bit of the field of psychology before they launch campaign after campaign to veil women, ban advertisements, segregate the sexes and impose harsher laws on personal morality that might just achieve the opposite effect.

In saying the above, I am not of course in support of ultra liberal expression in all matters related to sex as in some western societies that may lead to unbridled preoccupation with sex and its attendant social problems.

I think that there ought to be a balance struck between the extremities of repression on one hand and unbridled expression on the other in order to promote an emotionally healthy society. As the first step, I would agree that there should be more open discussion on this topic.