Keep your pants on

J-F Audet insists people shouldn’t feel “discomfort” in practicing nudity, implying such activity is not salacious [“Nudes homeless no more,” Dec. 19]. But the only way it can be “totally non-sexual” is if he can guarantee no one gets an erection.

Let’s face it, the so-called prejudice against nudism is not esoteric; it’s based on how ordinary civility tries to govern our hormones. Society teaches us various types of relationships, but we develop individually according to different levels of sophistication and propriety. That means “liberation” isn’t always uniformly pursued. So we shouldn’t condemn those whose appetites are too healthy to tolerate the frivolous exposure of public nudity. And perhaps Audet forgets that the original “respect of each other’s private life” was invented at the dawn of civilization. It’s called clothing.

» L.S. Cattarini

Limey lover begone

In response to Shiromi Pinto’s little introduction letter to the city of Montreal [E-mail, Dec. 24], here are six words I managed to string together all by myself: go-the-fuck-back-to-England. We can do without your particular breed of sheltered, self-satisfied, drivel-spewing twit in this city, so just get back on the plane. Rental rates are high enough without wannabe limey ninnies coming in and calling our food “fab.” Not to mention, making extremely awkward comments about cats fucking. But thanks for sharing.

» Andrew Turner

OBJECT: Dummkopf! SUBJECT: Self-complacency of Miss Shiromi Pinto.

My Dear Shiromi, as I read your pedantic letter I was measuring the giddiness level of your fatuousness. Instead of forcing yourself to listen to these bloody French floor sweepers and English squareheads of ours speaking mumbo-jumbo, why you not just fly back to U.K. and go give head to this TV producer of yours? You maybe find out if this moron scream like a bloody-roast-beef-tom-cat when he come! And, by the way, share another fucking pint of a bloody flat and warm ale, like a bloody idiot! Have a good time there, my dear, listening to cockney accents, my dear, for sure! P.S. I’m the Slime, a froggy one.

» Monsieur PoGo

Gravenor’s sins

Kristian Gravenor’s deep insult and blasphemy levelled against Jesus Christ, the son of man, the first-born and perfect son of a renewed humanity, in his piece on two New Jersey priests charged with sex crimes, are crimes he himself will answer to [“Weird Crimes,” Dec. 26]. His headline could have read, should have read, in all honesty and respect due to Christ and his true believers, not “Sex tourists FOR Christ but rather “Sex tourists against Christ,” which would have been absolutely true.

Also, his unrelenting sarcasm levelled at the victims of criminals show a Mirror writer attacking innocent people and enjoying promoting criminal acts. I hope that Mr. Gravenor awakens before he also sinks himself, as he fingers other criminals with Mirror assistance.

» Simon Dismas Quigley

A Jewish accent?

It has become obvious that Ken Hechtman cannot write “news” reports in the Mirror without making stuff up to suit his agenda. Case in point, his article on Jaggi Singh (“Activist down!,” December 19). Hechtman reports that a Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights activist in Montreal, pretending to be a representative of Amnesty International, called Israel’s Interior Ministry and “imitated a Jewish accent.”

A “Jewish accent?” What’s that? As a Canadian born, anglophone Jew, my accent is very different from that of my partner, a francophone Jew born in Morocco. It is also very different from that of my 83-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland, or from that of Jews born in Israel. Again, my own “accent” is not discernibly different from other Canadian born anglos, Jewish or not.

» Helen Shapiro

Correction

In our Dec. 19 story on Emily Strange we named Boutique Scarlett O’Hara as a place to pick up Emily paraphernalia. In fact, the store is now known simply as Boutique Scarlett (254 Mont-Royal E).

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