At least Suaram backed All-Women's Action Society (Awam)'s attempt to stage Eve Ensler's renowned work, The Vagina Monologues .

It is not only City Hall (DBKL) that found the 'v' word offensive but also many women, women groups and their leaders.

It can be surmised that most have neither seen nor read the play but might have summarily concluded it denigrated women's dignity with the reference to their genitalia!

On first mention of the provocative title, the immediate reaction even among the educated is: "What breast monologues? As one of your male letter writers would ask, why not penis monologues? "

There are also many women whose religious belief extols a lady's sexual modesty and forbids expressions of her sexual fantasies or experiences. The prohibition is not only unfair but also an outrageous and pretentious heresy.

For the umpteenth time, The Vagina Monologues is a collection of interviews that Ensler did with women about how they feel about their bodies. The stories distilled from the grit of women's experiences are both humorous and heart-wrenching, but each offers an insight into the life of a woman and how she feels about her body, her memories and experiences of sexuality.

The play has pitched the banner in the international fight against violence on women.

And yet our local women could not come to terms with the fact that a play that is explicit about our sexuality can actually promote without denigrating our dignity. That we cannot come to terms with our sexuality is precisely the problem that the play seeks to address. But then can we help it? We live in a society in which the sale of vibrators is banned and the talk of sexuality is taboo.

Such a play is a point of conflict between secular western values and conservative Asian, particularly Islamic religious values. Seen from these perspectives DBKL is not entirely wrong that the tenor of the play runs against the grain of Islamic values as the religion emphasises women's modesty.

Western secular values emphasise that sexual modesty is a millstone around women's neck that is put in place by patriarchal cultural values, the first step to women's emancipation is to be able to feel free enough to confront and say aloud the vword a dozen times.

There exists a deeply rooted cultural differences between Asian and Western women that explains how far we are prepared to go along with and be persuaded by western mores of liberality (expression triumphing over repression in areas of sex) in the road to emancipation. The current debate on whether the ban on the show is justified underlines the cultural conflict and take it to the forefront of public debate.