Hardened, perhaps, by my long years of exposure to the sight of topless, G-stringed and even stark naked females on Sydney beaches, I find it difficult to get fired-up about the issue of modesty in dress for women. But I confess I can also see the Kota Baru Municipal Council's (MPKB) point of view in its insistence, following 'mounting' complaints from the public, on decent attire for female workers in stores and restaurants.

There's a time and a place for everything, after all, and a quite valid case to be made, in my opinion, for not distracting customers from their shopping and eating with excessive displays of assistants' and waitresses' own dishy merchandise.

How much female flesh it takes to cause offence or how much skin constitutes sin, is of course entirely another matter, and very much in the eye of the beholder. For example, whereas the MPKB clearly considers the female pusat so provocative as to entirely prohibit its display, I'm personally quite neutral about the sight of a navel.

On the other hand, I'm an unabashed fan of some items of female apparel that the MPKB deems offensive, like tight pants and mini-skirts, and an absolute sucker for cleavage. But a great many people apparently aren't, and I guess that's the point. It all boils down in the end to a matter of local manners, customs and attitudes.

And local attitudes can be very uptight indeed, to judge by pronouncements on the subject by Kelantan Menteri Besar Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, who has previously urged Muslim women not to wear lipstick lest it arouse men to rape, and declared that women dressed indecently, at least by his high standards, are contributing to a rise in the incidence of sex crimes.

With opinions this phallocentric prevailing in Kelantan, and male members of the population apparently so easily incitable to criminal copulation, you could be forgiven for having some reservations about the state.

But of course this is really none of us outsiders' business. If we consider such places too puritanical for our tastes, we can always register our protests by avoiding them like the plague.

Raping the rakyat

It's not so easy, however, to avoid the fact that sexist attitudes to female attire are by no means confined to Kelantan, as evidenced by expressions of similar sentiments to those of Nik Aziz by various members of the Malaysian Parliament.

One of whom recently went so far as to advocate a 'stiffer' penalty for prostitutes in Malaysia, after he was informed that in Brunei they deal with such fallen females by whipping them. A practice and a proposal that had me wondering at precisely what point does the pursuit of morality turn maniacal.

Or even into a murderous reality, as with the Taliban and other hyper-hypocrites of their ilk, who obsessively insist that women cover themselves in the name of virtue, yet see no harm in turning their AK47s on anyone who dares disagree with them on this or virtually any other issue.

But at the risk of outraging such crazies, I happen to hold to the self-evident truth that a woman's body belongs not to some band of self-appointed lords and masters, but entirely to herself. And that she's free to cover-up her charms or not according to her own conscience, convenience, comfort and sense of chic, not in response to coercion.

Rather than picking on women and threatening them with the spectre of rape if they refuse to cover-up, self-styled moralists in positions of power and authority would be far better occupied in uncovering the activities of those of their peers engaged in raping the rakyat and pillaging the nation's riches.

Rather than wasting their influence on issuing threats, veiled or otherwise, to females they consider insufficiently clad, they should be using their influence to strip away the veil of secrecy and lies behind which the corrupt conspire to cheat the rest of us.

Instead of worrying about how wantonly women do or don't dress themselves, it would be far more productive to employ their time and trouble to forcibly remove the cloak of spurious respectability behind which so many kleptocrats conduct their nefarious affairs.

The true obscenity in this or any other society has nothing whatever to do with the looseness or otherwise of women's morals, or the depth of their necklines or the brevity of their skirts.

What's truly shameful is the laxness of standards of governance, the depths to which some members of our so-called 'elites' are prepared to descend in pursuit of power and profit - as currently evidenced by the murky conspiracy behind the Mongolian murder, the massive 'commission' on the submarine contract and the shady motives and machinations behind the mooted Utusan-NSTP and plantation megamergers and the lengths to which they go to cover their tracks by declaring their doings 'sensitive', 'controversial', 'confidential' or subject to the provisions of the Official Secrets Act.

In short, it's time for Nik Aziz and other honest opinion-leaders and upstanding citizens to turn their attentions from whether the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of Malaysia are covering-up their bodies sufficiently, a question that women are well able and entirely entitled to decide for themselves, and channel their efforts into uncovering all the rip-off merchants in the body-politic, thus exposing them and their bosom buddies in business to the public opprobrium and legal penalties they so richly deserve.