I must say I'm somewhat baffled by Meili's letter Women: 'Behave like trash, be treated like trash' which was in response to my letter , which in turn was in response to Aleesha's letter Women, respect yourselves .

Meili says she 'cannot agree at all with me' but if we take out the parts of her letter with reference to mine (specifically paragraphs one, three and four), she actually agrees with me. Therefore, I do not understand exactly what she disagrees with me about.

Reread my letter and Aleesha's. We'll find that Aleesha is not talking about respect of women per se as Meili characterised. Specifically, she is talking about respect for their dresses. Whereas I am the one who talked about respect of women regardless of how they dress. If we think that women are only respectable when they dress conservatively, then we are only respecting the dress and not the person.

To be fair to Aleesha, she did talk about respect of women in the second half of her letter, but that reads like a completely unrelated letter to her thesis in the first half. It is as if she is trying to salvage a point which she wasn't able to justify convincingly. And she even brought up 'Fatal Attraction' and women who 'snare' men, which sounds bizarre and tangential to the point she was making.

I agree with Meili that women have to put their feet down whenever men are disrespectful to them, otherwise men will walk all over them. A person must have self-respect before anyone will respect them. But obviously Meili did not earn her respect by virtue of the dress on her back alone.

I also agree that if a person behaves like trash, he or she should expect to be treated like trash, but then again, what is the correlation between couture and behaviour? One can dress like a king or don a police uniform and still behave like trash. How does one tell a person's character from the way she dresses?

If men are on best behaviour only when Meili is around but 'use and dump' other women as she says, then maybe their respect for her is not genuine. Perhaps they are her subordinates or perhaps they have requests of her. Whichever the case, I wouldn't keep them as my company. Meili asks me to clarify who are the 'men of questionable characters'. I'd suggest she look around her.

If the VVIP acquaintances of Meili or our parliamentarians need to be told to behave properly, I shudder to think what is the quality of Malaysian men in general. Shouldn't they know already that respect for women is a prerequisite?

In most cases, what people really 'respect' is power or money which to a certain extent is reflected by a person's attire. You could be stark naked, but if you are the queen of England or Bill Gates, people will respect you nonetheless. So yes, I would still respect a person wearing shorts to a board meeting, if he or she was the CEO.

I admit, wearing spaghetti straps and shorts to meet a sultan is somewhat disrespectful (to the sultan), but even if Meili dressed in a corporate outfit which shows her calf and coif, that would still be considered as disrespectful from a Muslim point of view, unless of course she is the wife of some foreign dignitary.

If a man blames women for arousing his sexual desire because they show their hair in the street, is that being respectful to the women or is it the women's fault for not standing up and 'politely' telling the man that such behaviour is not acceptable?

All the talk about decency in dressing is rather superficial, subjective and hypocritical. It is best to judge a person by her conduct, not by her dress.