With reference to Farish A Noor's 'Pornography and the sheikh, Part 2' (July 30), not only the religious ulama but rational secularist too will question Faridah Hanum's actions in Hikayat Faridah Hanum.

Here is a young Malay woman who not only denies her lawful husband his conjugal right to marital sex but actually commits adultery with another.

Her behaviour is sought to be excused by the fact that she is forced to marry her own cousin at her family's request whilst her true desire, justified on grounds of love, is for her paramour.

If she was that independent a woman who could assert her moral choice of straying outside marriage based on genuine love, so she too could, based on same reasons, resist the coerced loveless marriage with her cousin in the first place in aversion of her subsequent predicament! .

Love or lust, what is the distinction when the former could be sublimation of lust or lust a reason for love?

Affection may be a personal matter but when sex justified by it leads to children and family, it is public business!

How could an institution like marriage and family, upheld by religion and laws, be based on so transient an emotion as romantic feelings?

When they change, do we immediately abandon husband, children and home to follow the paramour and create another one?

That Faridah Hanum "treasures and values her sexuality and her sexual life enough to reserve it for the man she truly loves" is really no excuse for her marital infidelity because otherwise this will justify the action of every adulterer and adulteress in denigration of third-party rights of spouses children and even that of society which has to take care of abandoned children due to the fractured family unit!

A civilised society places duty above whimsical personal feelings like love or lust!

In same vein, in a civilised society, people should admit and accept natural lust and demarcate it from reality.

In reality, one cannot act out one's sexual fantasy of copulating with every attractive person of opposite sex.

So to vent or play out these fantasies in pornography is less harmful than playing them out in reality. (This excludes children's exposure to it because children cannot distinguish reality from fantasies!).

In the premises, it is not exactly correct for the writer to denigrate pornography as junk merely because it allows us to vent fantasies without dealing with reality.

It is precisely because pornography helps us vent sexual fantasies, it helps us cope with reality and its constraints in a practical way.

Because pornography allows us to vent sexual fantasies, we do not have to play out the natural sexual fantasies in reality with disastrous consequences to our cherished notions of duty to family and children and our cherished fiction of monogamous and exclusive love.

To the extent that pornography helps us to vent natural biological fantasies so that no harm is inflicted on our above cherished notions and fictions forming a seamless web of values that keep order and the fabric of society together, pornography has an useful socio-psychological function, and as such I would not judge it as an unmitigated vice, bad or harmful indulgence.