As an author currently working on a book designed to help people think more critically and logically, can I thank Steve Stevens for his comments on the proposed Worthing sex shop (The Argus, January 10).

humorous examples of how not to make a coherent case against a sex shop in the town's Rowlands Road.

Although he throws in serial killer Ted Bundy, marital breakdown and the risk to children, the main thrust of his argument, as ever with Mr Stevens, is that the shop would promote what, for him, are deviant sexual practices.

Once again, he appears to fixate on the manacles and whips the shop would sell. As a psychologist, I find this rather curious.

There are many other reasons why pornography might be bad, such as the exploitation of customers and those involved in producing the images.

Sigmund Freud would find fixating on manacles an example of a psychological defence - despising what you most desire.

Shakespeare also recognised this defence mechanism when he wrote "methinks the lady doth protest too much".

I assume that, as with most human attributes, such as height, weight and intelligence, where most of us are average and a proportion of us fall above or below the average range, the ability to love and to be loved is similarly distributed.

So for those of us who, for one reason or another, fall below the average range and who find it difficult to love and/or are much more difficult to love, maybe pornography is much more important.

As a democrat, which, as a war veteran, I assume Mr Stevens is too, I also object to manacles.

But the manacles and whips I object to are those, for instance, used on prisoners in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison camps, where seemingly no rule of law, US or international, prevails.

These images are truly pornographic.

Surely these must count as a more obscene stains on the democracy Mr Stevens fought for, than a small sex shop opening in a quiet shopping area of a Sussex seaside town.

-Peter Rhodes, Worthing