I would like to respond to the letter entitled Sex monsters: Media shouldn't influence .

Firstly, Psychopathica sexualis was published in 1886, not in 1999. Richard von Krafft-Ebing was one of the pioneers at that time who published articles on homosexuality. He believed homosexuals are constitutionally different from heterosexuals, that their minds - and sometimes even their bodies - set them apart from the heterosexual majority.

Krafft-Ebing elaborated an evolutionist theory considering homosexuality as an anomalous process developed during the gestation of the embryo and fetus, evolving into a sexual inversion of the brain.

Some years later, in1901, he corrected himself in an article published in the Jahrbuch fuelle Zwischenstufen , changing the term anomaly to differentiation. Thus, he considered homosexuals as normal people with a different sexuality. Many of his views were later challenged by Freud who published a withering criticism of Kraft-Ebing's theory in 1905.

Kraft-Ebing was also the first to dispel the myth that sexual predators were different, unlike normal people. His studies showed that the sexual predators were, in fact, normal people (often tortured by their unusual sexual desires) and often hold respectable jobs and have families who love them.

I do not agree with the writer's view of blaming the media for sexual perversions. If for years all the women's magazines in Malaysia had pictures of breasts blackened coupled with strict censorship laws and still the sexual crime rate is increasing, then we are barking up the wrong tree.

If we blame pornography as the root cause, then how come countries that legislate prostitution and have no censorship do not have as high a sexual crime rate as we have. For instance, the incidence of incest is very high in our country. How could this happen?

I am not tying to propagate pornography, but I would definitely like to read my magazines like the Australian Women's Weekly without the pages being blackened or torn right out in an attempt to lower the country's sexual crime rate.