Reference is made to the group of Malay activists who urged the Information Ministry not to ban the actress allegedly featured in a pornographic video compact disc (VCD) o­n three grounds:

1) The Information Ministry's decision to ban the actress would constitutes an invasion the privacy of the actress and husband

2) The ban is discriminatory and emotionally aggravating and will affect the livelihood of the actress and others

3) The recording was originally done for personal use, which is not a crime, but was stolen and reproduced without the knowledge of the actress and her husband

On ground o­ne, it is the person(s) who stole and reproduced the recording that invaded the privacy of the actress and her husband. It is not the ban that will invade that privacy.

Ground two is not persuasive. The ban is expected and intended to aggravate emotional distress and affect livelihood, because the ban is punitive by its very nature. The question of whether the ban is 'discriminatory' depends o­n whether punitive action is justified in relation to the 'offence' and 'misconduct' of the actress - ground number three.

It is conceded at the outset that if the recording was done for personal use and not for reproduction or sale to public as pornography, it is not a crime. In fact, it is the person who stole, circulated and sold the video compact who has committed the crime.

The Information Ministry's proposal to ban the actress from appearing in productions commissioned by state-owned broadcasting station RTM was not based o­n the actress and her husband having committed a crime. The question for the ministry is whether she had behaved improperly and immorally.

The main issue is how o­ne looks at recording of o­ne's intimate moments, or acts with the spouse, for personal use and within the privacy of home. It is a moral question, not a legal o­ne .

In a liberal and secular society, what o­ne does in the privacy of o­ne's home with a consenting party, and does not infringe the rights of any other third party or the public at large, is neither immoral nor unlawful.

However, Malaysian society is not liberal or secular. In fact the administration has proclaimed itself as Islamic.

While I am not saying that there is any religious injunction against private recording and viewing of o­ne's intimate acts with the spouse it is not contentious to say that religious values, as it pertains to sex or intimacy, are conservative and that we are, by and large, a society with very conservative sexual norms compared to (say) secular and Western societies.

This being the case, the private recording of o­ne's intimate moments, even with o­ne's own spouse, must necessarily be viewed improper if not immoral from the standpoint of the conservatives.

It does not escape the writers' attention that in recent years many politicians have suddenly become self-proclaimed moralists who seek to enforce public morality with religious zeal. The net effect of this campaign is the blurring of lines between private and public acts, private and public morality.

To them, it is not o­nly a government's right, but also its responsibility, to legislate morality as well as infuse morality in the private lives of citizens especially of the Muslim faith. Sex is viewed as mandated by the Almighty for the basic purpose of procreation, not recreation.

That is why oral sex and other 'deviant' form of sexual expression pursued for pleasure are morally disapproved or deemed unnatural, and hence unlawful. In this context, the recording is viewed as out of ordinary and deviant, and certainly not a point of recommendation for married couples.

Also, the recording carries the inevitable risks of falling into wrong hands, such as innocent children at home or, as in the present case, purveyors of pornography bent o­n making money off the name of the well-known actress.

Of course the actress can claim that there was no intention of making the recording public, but this does not exonerate her from the 'deviant' act in the minds of conservatives deviant because married couples are not encourages to record, for private reviewing pleasure, their intimate acts.

She should therefore be blamed because the very act of recording carries the foreseeable risk of falling into the wrong hands, and she is accountable for the indiscretion that led to the undesirable consequences.

She ought to have the benefited from the experience of an ex-politician and senator who unwittingly became a pornographic film star and fell from public grace when tapes of his sexual encounters were stolen and circulated in the public realm. So she had no excuse not to know that such an event could happen.

One cannot reasonably expect Deputy Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin, representing an Islamic administration, to say that there is nothing wrong with the act of recording o­ne's own conjugal intimacy for the pleasure of private review.

To conservatives and our moral guardians, pornography for visual titillation and recreational pleasure - for no procreation would result from such viewing - is wrong, regardless whether these acts were carried out by pornographic actors or not.