"Semua pilihanraya kecil sebelum ini keputusannya memihak kepada kita. Cuma di Batang Ai sahaja kita kalah sebab mereka ini tidak reti undi, pakai cawat lagi. Saya bukan nak hina tetapi tempat yang pakai molek,undi PAS," katanya . - from a Malaysiakini report, dated July 11, 2009.

PAS president Hadi Awang said the above during the run-up to the Manek Ura by-election.

Members of the Opposition have of late been in the habit of shooting themselves in the foot. No bare-assed men showed up at the Batang Ai polls.

You've got to be really out of it to imagine that. There were some pictures in National Geographic in 1963, 46 years ago, of a man looking at a political poster.

Take a look at the poster and you may recognise some faces from the past.

" Cawat "? Please, not that word! Ibans call their garment sirat , the Penans avet , the Kayans bah, the Bidayuh ta'up .

The various Orang Asli have other words, with which I'm not familiar. Cawat in Malay is about as dignified as saying lampin .

What is primitive about a loincloth? I belong to the Iban sphere, and as I write on my computer.

I wear only my sirat and feel my body and buttocks cool to the air, a pleasant constriction around my waist, and a decent support of my genitals.

The copious front apron of my sirat allows no mound of what's beneath to show through. Is not this loincloth more decent than a Lycra® swim-brief? No objections from my wife, son, or neighbours.

Fifty years ago it was common for men in tropics all over the world to wear nothing but a loincloth, and for women to go without shirts, showing their breasts.

Morality did not suffer, nor did personal comfort. The old ladies of my kampung who lived through that era told me that the level of respect was high. I have seen plenty of tits without moral damage.

Lots of accomplished people wore loincloths. Gandhi is the prime example - MA, lawyer, member of the Inns of Court - though his loincloth was the dhoti style, which covers the butt.

Nonetheless, to Englishmen, any garment that had cloth going between the legs was icky.

Full professors of Sanskrit and literature in India went around (and maybe still do) nearly naked. They taught under fig-trees on campuses, garbed merely with a rag hung between their thighs from a string.

The breechclout-wearing North American Natives who resisted white incursion regarded pants with horror and disgust.

I wonder if Hadi thinks that our Freedom Fighter Rentap was attracted to the powers that were (the Brookes) because he wore a loincloth.

Encik Hadi, nobody wants to call you a ‘towel-head'. Wise up. Not everybody in Malaysia thinks that your aurat is shameful.

To many of us it is our ordinary, old, ho-hum human body.