Cover defended

Popular weekly's steamy cover sends Montrealers rushing home to masturbate! I would like to speak for legions of others who saw the Mirror cover with Annie Dufresne [Dec. 7] smiling sweetly and pressing her beautiful tits against a radio--thank you and keep up the great work.

Continuez à nous montrer à quel point les Québécois(es) sont beaux, bons, belles et bonnes. It's always heart-warming to know about successful homegrowns and crotch-warming to see how sexy most of them are.

That's all. Tell Annie I said, "Hi."

--Ishmael Martini

I just wanted to respond to that triad of backward feminists who wrote in to complain about the Mirror objectifying women ["Objectifying women?" [e]mail, Dec. 14] .

First of all, allow me to point out that the week after that cover, there was a half-naked man on the cover, which I am sure bothers no one because if it's a woman, people assume she's a victim, while if it's a man, no one flinches.

Either way you look at it, the Mirror is using hot people to get us to read it. So what?

Being a self-proclaimed feminist myself, I find that type of name-calling so boring and passé. We will only make social progress when a woman is allowed to wear whatever she wants and be as sexy as she chooses--in whatever way she chooses--without people saying she is being exploited, degraded or that she's degrading herself.

There is such a thing as free-will and it's time people stop pointing fingers and crying "sexism" whenever some girl looks hot in print. So relax and take a little look at your own sexist tendencies before you blame the media.

I am a happily slutty feminist who wears whatever she chooses. I doubt those three could say the same.

--Karina Manet

The Orphans' ordeal

In your update of the interminably sorry saga of the Duplessis Orphans ["Orphans impatient," Dec. 14], former PQ cabinet minister Denis Lazure said that an effort is being made to force the Public Curator to go through the old records and that "the victims will have to show they were illegally detained in a hospital and falsely diagnosed--these are provable things." This upside-down logic is typical of the Kafkaesque Public Curator.

When the Orphans were originally institutionalized and robbed of their freedom and any chance to have a normal life, psychiatric certificates were routinely signed with a travesty of an excuse for an examination and no possibility of review. It is public knowledge that for most of them, these documents were all trumped up.

Since the Public Curator was responsible for these people's well-being, why does it not have the responsibility of showing that its innocent wards were properly diagnosed and rightfully detained?

Today, the Public Curator claims that the welfare of people is its first priority, yet in practice nothing has changed all these years: it still battles against its wards and denies its sordid past.

As for getting old records, good luck! As the Orphans' campaign for justice began taking on impetus, the Public Curator destroyed all the files that had been closed for five years or more. Poof! The history and the evidence went up in smoke, as if it all never happened.

The end result: no accountability is possible.

-- Ura Greenbaum, Executive Director, Association pour la défense des personnes et biens sous curatelle publique

Corrections

Brigitte Henry's exhibit of underwater photos, Waterproof ["What a water-full world," Artsweek Dec. 14], is actually on display until Jan. 28, not Dec. 28 at Salle Tremblay-Monet (460 Ste-Catherine W.).

In the article "Geeks on the hotseat" [Dec. 7], the MyVirtualModel.com's CEO was wrongly identified as Nicole. Her name is Louise Guay. We apologize for this error.