Summer is finally approaching. Our metaphorical strip poker game with the seasons has started to shift—every day a new article of clothing disappears. Gone are the oversized sweaters, the scarves, and the long underwear. People are on the street again. Sex is in the air. Bars are bustling. Tinder is bumping. Whether you’ve made it through the winter gauntlet with a relationship still intact or you’re on the spectrum of singleness, you’ll be needing a killer date for your special someone.

Luckily, the ever-reliable romantic comedy film genre has got you covered this summer with Obvious Child, a subversive abortion date movie. When I sit through rom-coms I’m always thinking, What would happen if someone farted right now? and Where are the Holocaust jokes? Well, this movie's got it all—especially unplanned pregnancy.

Obvious Child centers around the plight of Donna Stern (Jenny Slate from SNL and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) after a one-night-stand leaves her pregnant and heading to Planned Parenthood. In her feature debut, director Gillian Robespierre set out to make a different type of story. All of the traditional tropes still come into play, but the sharp writing and Jenny Slate’s singular sense of humor make the story far more relatable and entertaining than something that Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, and Cameron Diaz could ever hope to pull off.

The movie has been an international hit on the film festival circuit, and is the opening weekend feature film for NYC’s Rooftop Films 18th Summer Series this Saturday, May 17.

Full disclosure: I work at Rooftop Films, but I’d be pimping this event regardless. The movie is great, you’ll get to meet Jenny and Gillian, hear the amazing band Rumors and get tons of free booze after the movie.

To get you hyped for the Rooftop screening, I interviewed Gillian Robespierre. She was so excited, she peed and farted at the same time. That’s who we’re dealing with.

VICE: What was the impetus to make an abortion rom-com?
Gillian Robespierre: In 2009, my best friends Anna Bean, Karen Maine, and I wrote a short film called Obvious Child. It was the same premise: A girl gets dumped, has a one-night-stand, and then has a first date in an unlikely place, which was Planned Parenthood.

We shot in the winter of 2009, and we were struggling to find an actress for the role of Donna. The person had to be witty and also have dramatic range. We randomly went to go see this free comedy show called Big Terrific. It used to be in the back of a liquor store, which is now a very fancy restaurant.

Jenny Slate performed. She was so funny onstage that we decided to meet her afterward. Jenny and I have very similar tastes—not just in bodily humor. She has a confessional storytelling type of comedy that runs the gamut of hilarious and truly gentle and clean. Anna, Karen, and I looked at each other and just said, “Holy shit, she’s amazing.” Luckily, we had a friend in common. We emailed Jenny to discuss the short, and she said, "Yes." The rest is history. 

Was that around the time Jenny said fuck on SNL?
Yeah, in 2010. She got on SNL right after our summer wrap party. We all watched her first episode, and she said fuck. I didn’t even hear it. It just grazed by my ears.

How much of this tale is autobiographical, whether it be pee-farting or abortions?
We really just wanted to tell a different story about choice, and about something that the movie industry was not really focusing on when it came to tales about unplanned pregnancy. There was this slew of movies that came out in the mid-2000s that just didn’t really ring true for us. A movie with a happy ending and also a safe procedure was very exciting to us. We really wanted to figure out how to make it entertaining and still sleek. And the pee-fart happens. I pee-farted twice today already.

We can mention Juno and Knocked Up by name. It doesn’t bother me.
I like those movies. I’m not shitting on them. And those aren’t the only ones that came out around that time. There were a slew of them. Also, it was around the time when the Gloucester pregnancy pact story came out, where a bunch of 16-year-olds in Gloucester, Massachusetts, slept with the same drifter and got pregnant because they had a pact to have babies at 16.

I feel like US magazine and all the tabloids always have photos that kind of glamorize young starlets who have children. I don't watch MTV because I’m too old and don’t have cable, but I think kids might walk away from 16 and Pregnant and say, “I could do that.” There’s something one-sided going on with unplanned pregnancy. I just wanted to share the other side.

Did you feel a responsibility to tell a mature story mixed with an immature character who has made poor decisions?
I don’t know if it was a responsibility. We wanted to create a character who was emotionally, intellectually, and financially unprepared to be a mother and so she decides to have an abortion. Also, we knew the choice had to remain as unclear to her as her feelings are towards Max (played by Jake Lacy—we just called him “baby-daddy”).

We just wanted to tell that story and also have it be compelling while following this honest and loveable main character in the Rom-Com genre. Jenny is naturally a very funny person and her honesty and empathy make her a little more likeable or lovable. I think she’s excellent at mixing those two emotions: Being very sad in one second and very hilarious and bawdy in the next. She’s very good at balancing that as a performer.

I thought the abortion was well-handled in terms of having it be her decision and Jake Lacy’s character being mature enough to understand that.
We didn’t just want it to be Donna’s story, even though she’s the main character. It was important to make the leading man just as compassionate and empathetic and wonderful as you would want a leading man in a romantic comedy to be—without that moment where he’s like “stop it, let’s get married!” We wanted him be sweet, supportive, and kind—and also funny. The chemistry between those two is incredible. Jake really holds his own against Jenny.

Did their relationship and jokes come out of improvisation, or was most of it scripted?
Jenny and I realized how much we liked to work together during the short. This was all a script that we wrote. When it comes to the stand-up routine, Jenny is the stand-up. I’m just a fan. I’d never get on stage—I’d throw up! I did a lot of research, but when it came down to writing, I wrote a goddamn monologue. It was not stand-up comedy. Jenny definitely used some of her brilliant brain to translate that into a stand-up routine. I think she’s one of the funniest comedians and actresses of our generation.

Yeah, I’d probably pee-fart if I got on stage.
I’m slowly getting into Q&As, but that’s easy. Somebody’s asking me a question. I don't have to go up there and try to be funny.

What is the worst question you’ve been asked in an interview?
I think the most surprising question is, “Was it ever written with a different ending?” Even though the trailer mentions abortion like 50 times, people are still shocked that she goes through with the procedure. We’ve been brainwashed by movies into believing that the handsome hunky guy will save you and then you’re going to live happily ever after by getting married and having a kid, even though the couple in the film shouldn’t do that. Even after reading everything about the film, people still can’t believe that she goes through with the abortion.

See you Saturday!

Obvious Child kicks off Rooftop Films 18th Summer Series this Saturday, May 17, at Industry City (Secret Party Cove) in Brooklyn. Doors open at 8 PM, with live music from Rumors followed by the film screening at 9 PM. Gillian Robespierre and Jenny Slate will be on-hand for a Q&A afterwards. If you donate right now, you can get a membership to Rooftop Films to see 45 new, independent movies this summer, meet tons of filmmakers, drink buckets of free booze, and do a ton of other weird and fun shit. If you don't live in New York City, look out for Obvious Child in theaters on June 6th.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall, mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Following Catholic uproar, a proposed Satanic mass at Harvard has been canceled. The mass was going to be put on by the Satanic Temple, the group who also has plans to plant a Baphomet figure on the front lawn of the Oklahoma Statehouse. Despite the fact that the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club dropped its sponsorship, the group still managed to have an unsanctioned "black mass" at Harvard Square's Hong Kong restaurant and lounge. What bothers me the most about the official quashing of the Satanic Temple's mass by Harvard is that it is being hailed as a victory for religious tolerance—it's not. Instead, it's a case of a small group getting bullied into submission because it offended a big religion. 

In an editorial for the Harvard Crimson, Francis X. Clooney, Harvard professor and director of its Center for the Study of World Religions, expresses concern for what he calls this proposed “disconcerting incident.” He presents the elements in satanic ritual that invert and “blaspheme” Catholic sacraments as a potential slippery slope, asking, “What’s next? The endeavor ‘to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices’ might in another year lead to historical reenactments of anti-Semitic or racist ceremonies… or parodies that trivialize Native American heritage or other revivals of cultural and religious insult.”

Clooney’s nightmare scenario ignores one important question, that of institutional privilege: While racism is an oppressors’ power play that always moves from the top down, Satanism critiques a target immeasurably more powerful than itself. For Catholics at Harvard to complain about Satanists offending them is like white people complaining about Louis Farrakhan’s “reverse racism.”

In addition to his positions at Harvard, Clooney is also a Catholic priest. I know the history of Catholicism in America, and am sure that Clooney does as well. There was a time when Catholics were persecuted, reviled, and marked as the definitive “un-American” religion. Within the developing field of religious studies, the privileged position of liberal 19th-century Protestantism as “real” religion in its most evolved form also led to unfair anti-Catholic prejudice within the academy. Catholicism has struggled in the United States for recognition both as authentically Christian and authentically American.  

Times have changed, so I’d like to tell Dr. Clooney how the American religious landscape looks in 2014. Dr. Clooney, I am a Muslim. As a Muslim in the cliché context of “post-9/11 America,” I encounter anti-Muslim discourses that use the same arguments that you have employed against Satanists. In more than one American city, Islamophobes have opposed the establishment of mosques by claiming that Muslims are intolerant and incapable of coexisting with other communities, or even that Islam is not a “real” religion and therefore cannot be entitled to the same defense of its freedoms. In the case of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” people argued against the presence of a Muslim community simply on the basis that it would hurt their feelings. 

As a Muslim, I have to support the Satanists. Public revulsion of Muslims in this country is so popular that I have no choice but to stand with religions that are marked as ugly, offensive, and intolerant. Rather than join the anti-Satanist outrage and try to convince Christians that Muslims deserve to be included as “children of Abraham” or whatever, I would suggest that Muslims take a radical stand on behalf of the religious freedoms that we claim for ourselves. The people who wish to insult Muslims are not members of ridiculed fringe groups. They are not just isolated Qur’an-burning pastors, but extraordinarily well-funded and networked activists. Islamophobia is so mainstream that as Muslims, we must support freedom for all marginalized religions, because too many people have marginalized us.

I have no doubt that in his commitment to religious pluralism and interfaith understanding, Clooney supports the inclusion of Muslims as full participants in American life. His work in comparative theology, which focuses on dialogue between Catholicism and Hinduism, reveals great insight as to how we can be enriched by traditions that are not our own. Unfortunately, the projects of interfaith dialogue tend to privilege old religions over new ones, and big ones over small ones. Christian-Muslim dialogue, for example, isn’t typically going to invite Mormons or Ahmadiyya to the table. 

In his treatment of Satanic mass, Clooney’s playing an authenticity game in which privileged religions get to name the terms by which something counts as “religion,” and respect for the sacred thus means respecting what privileged religions mark as sacred. I have seen this game played with destructive consequences for the Five Percenter community. In US prisons, Five Percenters have been historically denied the freedoms of conscience and assembly that are routinely protected for adherents to other traditions. Warith Deen Mohammed, one of the most important Sunni leaders in American Muslim history, endorsed the prison industry’s characterization of Five Percenters as a “dangerous” and “corrupt” group. Incarcerated Five Percenters have been thrown into solitary confinement for no other reason than their personal conviction. Their right to assemble has been taken from them and the lessons that they study have been designated as contraband. Outside of the prison system, Five Percenters have been occasionally denied the right to change their legal names to Allah, with at least one judge stating that for a man to name himself Allah is inappropriate and even blasphemous.

In prejudice against Five Percenters from both Muslims and non-Muslims, broader US Islamophobia, and Clooney’s attack on the Harvard black mass, we find the same mistake: A general failure to ask these people what their outrageous, offensive beliefs, and behaviors actually mean to them. Reducing the Satanic mass to a parody of the Catholic mass, he assumes that the Satanists involved must have no personal conviction that might endow the act with meaning, and discusses the act without any engagement of the human beings for whom it matters.  In his editorial, they remain faceless, nameless, and voiceless.

So who are these people? The Satanists involved in the canceled black mass do not believe in Satan as a supernatural entity. For the Satanic Temple, Satan is more of a singular embodiment of their mission to advocate religious tolerance and pluralism. For them, the black mass is a kind of protest against the oppressiveness of religion. Despite the absence of a higher power, the radical atheism they practice is a religious conviction and no less entitled to public expression or ritual performance than the positions of the “one true church.” 

Clooney justifies his concern by pointing out that the black mass might be hurtful to a “living faith practice celebrated each day in congregations that include Harvard faculty, staff, and students.” In an official statement on behalf of the university, Harvard president Drew Faust expressed an intention to attend a Eucharistic Benediction at St. Paul’s Church on campus “in order to join others in reaffirming our respect for the Catholic faith at Harvard and to demonstrate that the most powerful response to offensive speech is not censorship, but reasoned discourse and robust dissent.” For both Clooney and Faust, Catholicism’s dignity must be protected because Catholics have a place at Harvard, while Satanism gets casually reviled because of course, Satanists have no place. 

What Clooney and Faust miss is that some of us find claims of Jesus Christ as the only means of salvation from eternal torture to be incredibly offensive. Any tradition whose advocates promise to be exclusive possessors of the capital-T “Truth” is going to bother someone. Should all religious discourse that claims supreme truth-making power over other religions disappear from the public? I get that Harvard Divinity School’s preferred religiosity tends to go soft in this regard: At Div School, folks don’t go much for the hellfire talk or claims of superiority. Maybe there’s a Div School version of Satanism that Clooney could go for. Or not, but who cares—Clooney’s personal taste does not provide the measurement of Satanism’s legitimacy. 

It would be great if religions can always play nice. When they can’t, I am less concerned with Satanism’s alleged power to make Harvard unsafe for Catholics than the problem of big and powerful religions enforcing their privilege by stomping on small and powerless ones. This is where Clooney gets it wrong in a big way. There has never been—and I am guessing that there will never be—an openly self-identified Satanist with Clooney’s institutional power at Harvard. Because I care about religious freedom not only for the center, but also the margins, count this Muslim with the Satanists. 

Michael Muhammad Knight graduated from Harvard with a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) degree in 2011, and is presently a PhD student in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is the author of nine books, including Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing. Follow Michael on Twitter.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (Photo via)

Last week, the Australian government decided not to co-sponsor a UN inquiry into human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government praised its "bold" decision, and defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa posed for a celebratory shot with Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison as the former handed the latter a premium box of Dilmah tea.

The deal, which is essentially the Australian government turning a blind-eye to the torture of Sri Lankan citizens, among other abuses, has been criticized as placing Australia "on the same team as China, Russia, and the Congo in opposing the investigation." The agreement is apparently based on the excellent relations between the two countries, which of course doesn’t justify it in any shape or form.

The news comes a few months after Prime Minister Tony Abbott defended Sri Lanka’s human rights record by stating that "sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen.” That ethical apathy wasn’t exactly surprising from a man whose government has been adopting an increasingly militarized stance toward “defending” the country from anyone with brown skin, locking refugees and asylum seekers away in offshore detention camps.

Many of the alleged human rights abuses took place during the Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in 2009 when government forces defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE; widely known as the Tamil Tigers) after more than two decades of conflict. The end of the fighting also ended the Tigers’ hope of establishing an autonomous—or, at least, semi-autonomous—Tamil state in the north and east of the island.

Anbu, a 36-year-old Tamil torture victim, shows the scars on his back from being branded with a hot iron

The Tigers have been linked to numerous massacres and assassinations, and a source told me that during their bus-bombing campaign in the island’s capital city, Colombo, mothers, and fathers would often travel separately to avoid orphaning their children should their bus be blown up. Of course, the UN inquiry isn’t just into Tamil activity; it’s also investigating abuses allegedly committed by the Sri Lankan government, which is why Australia's collusion has rattled so many critics.

"Pugal" (whose name has been changed to protect his family still in Sri Lanka) is a 27-year-old Tamil from eastern Sri Lanka who was recently granted asylum in the UK after being tortured in Sri Lanka, and is now receiving treatment from the charity Freedom from Torture. I met him at the charity's offices, where he told me about the abuses he’d suffered at the hands of people he is convinced were soldiers under the direct control of the Sri Lankan government. Here's what he had to say:

"Pugal" in the Freedom from Torture offices

My brother had sent two people to Colombo. I kept them in my house, supported them and looked after them between 2008 and 2009. When they first arrived, my brother told me they were students and I believed him. But, after two months, I found weapons. They had a couple of pistols and also something that looked like a bomb. They were LTTE members.

Soon after the war ended in May of 2009, the government started a huge campaign of arresting very important people who had helped the Tigers in Colombo. They were checking all the Tamil homes to see whether anyone had arrived there recently. During that check was when they first took me to the police. They checked all the registration but sent us back, saying everything was in order.

After that, these two LTTE guys left my home, but didn’t tell me anything. I couldn’t contact my brother because I didn’t know how to contact him. These guys had left without telling me, and I realized I was in some kind of danger, so I started sleeping at an aunt’s house in a suburb of Colombo. I spoke to a Tamil pastor at the church I used to go to and discussed this problem with him.

He advised me, "Why don’t you just get out of this place? Why don’t you leave the country?" I quickly applied for the student visa to come and study in London, but it was refused.

Tamil protesters in Parliament Square (Photo via)

The second time I applied, I got the visa, but on the night of April 1 they came and knocked on my aunt’s door. My uncle asked, "Who is it?" and they said, "We are the police," but it was the army, not the police. They checked everyone’s ID cards. They checked mine and said they had to take me away for inquiries.

My uncle asked, "Where are you taking him?" But they hit me on the chest with the butt of an AK-47, and with that one hit I fell against the wall. They bent my arm around my back and put me into their jeep. Then they blindfolded me.

They took me somewhere and I didn’t know where it was. They untied the blindfold and I saw that there were already another five people there. One of the guys was an LTTE member who had been living in my house. He was all bloody and it was obvious that he'd been beaten. Then three army guys came in and took me out of the cell. They took me to another room nearby. I knew what was going to happen to me, because everyone knows what happens to Tamils in that situation.

They took my clothes off me and tied my hands to a metal bar. They started asking me questions and beating me. They used iron girders and PVC piping filled with sand and dirt. It hurts like hell, but it doesn't leave marks. That was the first time I've ever been beaten in my entire life. I couldn’t bear the pain. I was screaming. I was crying. It was the first time in my life that I saw in front of me not a man but an animal. I begged them to stop beating me but they wouldn't. They were inhuman. I felt lifeless at the end of it. Afterward, they took me to the cell, but they didn’t untie me. My back was throbbing with pain. I would lean against the wall and push myself against it to numb the pain

The next morning, they came to get me again. They put a number around my neck and took a photograph and fingerprinted me. They brought me back into the cell, untied me and gave me a bun and a milk packet. That night, three army men came and took me. I thought I was going to die.

One guy plugged an iron in and then came and said, "If you don’t tell the truth, we will burn you." I didn’t know how much to tell them. I just kept saying that I didn’t do anything. Even with that, they burned me on my hand. With each question, they burned me on my thigh.

I was tortured for just over a week, and on three different days they tortured me sexually. They raped me and they put their penises in my mouth. They were fully drunk, all three of them.

I'd only had my underpants to wear the whole time I was there.

"Pugal"

On the last day, two officers asked me to come out. They blindfolded me and put me in a vehicle. I thought, ‘OK, they are going to take me to finish me off.’ Because I’m a Christian, I began to pray. I was certain I was going to die. I prayed to God, saying, "I’m surrendering my spirit to you; I’m now going to die."

Suddenly, the van stopped. Then they made me get down on my knees, so I thought this was where they were going to shoot me. But the guys took me out from the vehicle and made me get into another vehicle.

The guy who was in that vehicle undid my blindfold. To my surprise, the guy who untied me was my wife’s father-in-law’s friend. They had contacted an agent [a fixer who can bribe officials and organize foreign travel] and given them a huge bribe and got me out. In total, the bribes—including what I later gave to my agent to help me get to the UK—were 5 million rupees, which is around $38,000. In Sri Lanka, that’s someone’s life savings—enough to buy a modest house. People who don’t have the money to do this. They just die.

Late last year, South Sudan's president, Salva Kiir, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup d'état amid accusations of rampant corruption within the government. Infighting immediately broke out within the presidential guard, sparking what has now become a brutal tribal and civil war that has pitted Machar’s ethnic Nuer loyalists against the majority Dinka, who have sided with Kiir. Machar narrowly escaped assassination, fleeing to the deep bush as Kiir’s troops razed his home and killed his bodyguards. And now the world’s newest sovereign nation is in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.

In February, journalists and filmmakers Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia set out on a grueling mission to locate Machar in his secret hideout in Akobo and get his side of the story. Accompanying was Machot Lat Thiep, a former child soldier and Lost Boy who had advised on South Sudan’s constitution and now works as a manager of a Costco in Seattle. Machot acted as a guide of sorts, arranging Pelton and Freccia’s rendezvous with Machar through a series of endless satellite-phone calls to old contacts and rebel platoons, who would eventually guide the group to the deposed vice president.

After spending a couple days with Machar, he granted Pelton and Freccia unprecedented access to the front lines of a battle in Malakal, where for the first time in history the pair documented the heretofore mythical White Army as they looted, murdered, and pillaged their way to some twisted interpretation of “victory.”

Saving South Sudan is a multi-platform exploration of the horrors of the country’s newest civil war. We devoted an entire issue of the magazine to Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia's sprawling 35,000-plus word epic exploration of the crisis in South Sudan. It's a companion piece of sorts; watch the documentary and read the issue or vice versa. But you won't get a full scope of the situation without doing both. 

Sudan was once home to a great civilization that was the most advanced in all of Africa—but centuries of colonialism and conflict, and a post-independence period ravaged by coups, dictatorships, and incompetent rule, mired Sudan in a series of never-ending wars. Following a violent, decades-long struggle for independence that began in 1953, South Sudan became the newest country in Africa. Its people voted for independence in 2011, but by 2013 the oil-rich, fertile nation was falling apart.
 

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In The Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.

Kevin Allison alternates between candid description (“In scat, the person being pooped on is the bottom.”) and mirthful laughter. Kevin is a kinkster, gay, and a member of the comedy group The State, but more importantly hosts the oft-downloaded podcast Risk! True Tales Boldly Told.

Two years ago, he took the advice of his own podcast sign-off  (“Take a risk!”) and accepted an invitation to “kink camp,"hoping to escape his comfort zone of blasé gay sex orgies. Two years later, he is an instructor at that same camp, teaching a class called “Everything You Can Do To An Ass, Other Than Fuck It.”

Kevin spoke to me about the world of kink. This is by no means a complete list of kink terminology, but rather a brief selection of key terms and terms of interest.

Kevin Allison. Photo by Gene Silvers

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Quotation marks denote the words of Mr. Kevin Allison. Brackets denote paraphrasing by the author. All other text is directly quoted from Mr. Kevin Allison.

BDSM: [a portmanteau acronym for] Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism

Kink: An easier way to say BDSM. Any fetish that has an erotic charge to it would be called kinky.

Thinking of sex as a limitless adventure. There is not a finite number of ways to do it. Sex is a constant process of discovery.

I met a guy in Amsterdam who said that everything is kink. Everything can be thought of [that way]. Pain can be perceived as pleasurable if you’re going about it differently.

Vanilla: adj. Not kinky. Sexual activity that is generally accepted as normal.

Bottom: n. In any activity, someone who is being done to rather than the doer.

[note: the kink culture definition is far more abstract than the usage we find in gay culture, wherein “bottom” usually signifies the recipient of anal sex.]

e.g.  In scat, the person being pooped on is the bottom.

Top: n. Antonym to [‘bottom’]. In kink play, a person who is doing something to a bottom.

Dom/sub: n. A person who is dominant/a person who is submissive.

Versus Top/Bottom:

There’s more psychological weight on the idea of being a dom or a sub, [whereas] a top or a bottom is someone who is basically just doing or being done to. A dom or sub has a higher-status or lower-status psychological role that they are playing.

Switch: n. A person who can be dominant and can be submissive, but does not identify as always a dom or always a sub

Top from the Bottom: v. [to direct or control the experience from the position of the bottom. Not generally permitted in dom/sub relationships.]

e. g. How about if you whipped me with that?

Houseboy sub: n. The agreement was that he would pay a very low rent and in exchange he would keep the house clean, and also just be my sexual plaything whenever I wanted.

Daddy Dom or Sensual Dom: n. [A dom who is] a little bit more sweet and nurturing, like a tough-love coach at times.”

Brat: n. A sub who is [deliberately] uncooperative. Someone who is topping from the bottom. Could be literally age play, someone pretending to be young.

24/7: [Dom/sub relationship in which the dominant partner controls nearly every aspect of submissive partner’s life, according to terms negotiated in advance.]

e.g. Can I tell you who you’re gonna vote for for president?

Negotiation: n. Before the scene ever starts (a lot of people like to do it a couple days before) people talk as human beings, outside of roles: limits, preferences, that kind of stuff. It can be kind of a seductive, fun, fantasy-filled conversation.

People draw up contracts, mostly for 24/7, not usually initial encounters

Protocol: n. [The procedure or rules of a D/s relationship.]Although there are plenty of stereotypical manners that people employ, it's usually a person-to-person agreed-upon thing.

e.g. Don't call me Sir, call me Master.

Soft Limit: n. [An activity that one party would rather avoid, established in negotiation.]

e.g I'd really rather not go there unless you want to in a huge way and you go into it slowly.

Hard Limit: n. [An activity banned by one party during negotiation.]

e.g. If you start take a shit on me, I'll safe-word immediately and end the scene.

Squick: v. [to bother on a pre-conscious level. Connotes an immediate reaction devoid of moral or value judgment.]

e.g. I’d prefer that you not talk about scat play at lunch because it squicks me out. No judgment!

Play: n. [Sex, or sex involving some form of role-playing.] Basically an easier way of saying ‘let’s have sex’ [is] ‘do you want to play?’ People will tag that on the end of different branches of kink, like puppy play. People do like to feel like it’s adult play, playtime

The more playful it is, the more there’s a feel of  “Ahh, this is new.”

Power Play: n. A synonym for “dominance and submission.”

Sapio Play: n. A mindfuck. That part of play where nothing has actually even started happening. A person is just in their brain freaking out.

e.g. [an electro device being waved close to, without touching, the skin of a bound person]

extreme e.g. [a simulated castration, negotiated without explicit mention of its simulated nature, complete with beef brains and caro syrup]

Hypno Play: n. [kink play in which a dom hypnotizes a sub in order to make them believe there are bonded.] I don’t know how much I believe in that or not.

Animal Play: n. [kink play in which one partner, usually the sub, pretends to be an animal]

Puppy Play:  n.  Where the submissive takes the role of literally being like a canine.  The dom treats them the way that a dog trainer would. The weird part is that they also molest them.

It’s almost a way of infantilizing. The way I’ve usually seen it is that a younger person will want to run around with a muzzle on, barking, with a buttplug in that’s got a tail.

Pony Play: n. Anything having to do with horses. People who are really into pony play…you don’t hear about sex happening.  Those people are buying expensive horse gear, like saddles. And they’ll have a kind of horse that they are. “I am a wild Mustang.” Some are into dressage, being paraded around on show. That’s the play for them: It’s just to show off how much they can act like a horse.

I spoke to someone and she said, yes, she has had sex stuff happen in the context of grooming the horse.

Age Play: n. Acting like one person is an adult and one person is a child. [Somewhat taboo, even in the kink community, due to connotation of pedophilic desires.]

Electro: n. Kink play that involves electrically-charged [objects]: stun guns, cattle prods, Violet Wands

Ella Fitzgerald: [A euphemism for scat play, used to get around content restrictions of certain online communities.] People have to say “I’m a fan of Ella Fitzgerald.”

[Kinkster social networking site] Fetlife bans any mention of the word scat. It turns out that is only because of their credit card company, [who] says “we don’t want to have anything to do with that fetish.” [Fetlife is] apologetic about it. [They] don’t mean to ostracize.

After-care: n. It’s considered the dom’s responsibility to bring a sub back down to earth at the end, make sure that person is calmed down, caressed, checked in with, [feeling] okay.

Bottom Drop: n. Subs sometimes fall into a brief depression after an intense scene. They made themselves vulnerable and needy. Now they're on their own.

Sub Space: n. Subs sometimes go into an almost ‘out of body’ or hypnagogic state if they get into the role successfully enough.

e.g. You can't tell someone who is into puppy play, “Oh, bark like a dog!” in random conversation. They'll likely answer, “Well, I have to be in sub space.”

Compersion: n. When someone is pleased to see their lover getting sexual pleasure from someone else. The opposite of jealousy.

Munch: n. A purely social gathering of kinksters, no sex involved.

THE TAKEAWAY

In the week since interviewing Kevin, I’ve found myself using the word squick with some frequency. It’s filled my need for a word that explains, without judgment, that while I support completely honest communication, there are certain topics that I have a hard time stomaching. Sapio might be a less useful vocabulary word, but the concept is applicable to myriad scenarios. A comedian who tells long, story-like jokes might consider the lead-up to the punchline—exposition which can nonetheless draw laughs via anticipation—to be a form of sapio. Topping from the bottom is also applicable outside the world of kink: a student who corrects their tutor’s methods; a restaurant patron with too many requests for the chef. For that matter, Top and Bottom are fun words to apply in an entirely non-sexual context: my physical therapist is a top; the reader of this article is a bottom.  Soft Limit andHard Limit are can also be applied non-sexual topics: mixing sweet and savory foods is a soft limit for me. And while I doubt I’ll have much practical use for the euphemism, I will always quietly chuckle when I hear someone say that they are “a fan of Ella Fitzgerald.”

FURTHER READING

For more kink vocabulary, DifferentEquals.com has a fairly thorough (though less personal) glossary of kink terminology.

Follow Nat Towsen on Twitter.

Vancouver's anti-Enbridge protesters come in a variety of shapes and sizes. All photos via Tomas Borsa and JP Marquis.
This past Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of watching Ezra Levant being told to fuck off, oblige, and nervously waddle down Vancouver’s Sunset Beach—away from an increasingly agitated protest against the Northern Gateway pipeline.

Ezra decided to show up and stir the pot at the last big ‘No Enbridge’ rally to be held before the federal government makes its decision on the controversial pipeline sometime in mid-June. Everyone fully expects Harper’s decision to be “go for it,” and this protest—which had sister rallies across the country—was seen among many as the last legal show of force to be made, before shovels break ground, and Enbridge gets cracking on its $7 billion dollar west-coast bitumen funnel.

My friends Tomas Borsa and JP Marquis (who took these photos) are working on a documentary about the Northern Gateway pipeline, and have been coming to these rallies for a couple of years now. They say they've seen the tone of the rallies changing and an attitude shift among activists that the legal and peaceful protest route is running its course. Some believe there won’t be effect without real action.

Case in point: if the citizens of Kitimat, a community that stands to arguably benefit the most from Northern Gateway, can overwhelmingly vote in opposition to the pipeline—and yet it still gets built—there’s no clearer indication that Northern Gateway is skirting the democratic process. Some argue that the only options left for dissenters of the pipeline is a shift from prevention to pre-emption, and the possibility of civil disobedience and violence.

Although Saturday’s rally was peaceful and family friendly, Tomas had heard rumblings that black bloc tactics and anarchist groups might be mobilizing to contribute to the protests. Although we approached a couple dudes decked out fully in black, we couldn’t verify any black bloc types were in attendance and started catching weird looks for our anarchist profiling.

To get some perspective on the more militant angle, we figured the best people to talk to on that front would be people from the Unist’ot’en encampment, “a resistance community whose purpose is to protect sovereign Wet'suwet'en territory from several proposed pipelines from the Tar Sands Gigaproject and shale gas from Hydraulic Fracturing Projects in the Peace River Region;” a community that Michael Toldedano has already expertly covered for VICE Canada here.



Ezra Levant, protest troll.
While Unist’ot’en supporters were in attendance, no one from the actual camp was there, or they at least weren’t letting their presence be known. Sources who we spoke with close to Unist’ote’n, however, informed us they’d been down just days before and had driven back up with new lumber and resources to what Unist’ot’en sees as the frontlines, and, as one person put it to me, is the “end game” of what all this protesting boils down to.  

Rising Tide has been offering training workshops—like how to chain yourself to heavy machinery—to prepare people for a more disruptive protest. I had a conversation with ‘Matthew Gibbons,’ who was adamant that real organization and collaboration between First Nations, environmental groups, and everyday concerned citizens was essential to make something happen.

“I think it means having thousands of people who are prepared to be arrested by shutting down highways, bridges, infrastructures, where it’s built, locking onto machines, investigating these companies, figuring out all the different links to this chain and taking action against the companies is where we go.” When it came to how to coordinate all of this, his plan started to sound a bit more convoluted. But the spirit is there.

Thankfully, Saturday’s rally remained peaceful, and a few pro-oil dudes did a good job of keeping their cool by answering questions while being terribly berated. That said, however, tension rose steadily throughout the day as Mr. Levant made his rounds. By about 5PM, things were heated. The crowd grew larger, closer to Ezra, and more intense. Somewhere throughout the course of his final confrontational conversation, Ezra had to stand on a driftwood log to avoid backing into activists. When he was loudly challenged for being biased, and called out on his book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, he finally quit it and wrapped up his routine by blowing an instigative kiss to the crowd, pirouetted off of his log, and, as mentioned earlier, waddled away with his cameraman in tow. 

@ddner

The SaucyTime homepage, a website that sets up FaceTime conversations with naked glamour models

It’s hard to imagine being sexy on FaceTime, given that for most people it's just that thing that happens to your iPhone when you press the wrong button sometimes. Also, doesn't it make your head look like a thumb? The only people who seem to use FaceTime are long-distance grandparents, people with babies, and tech jockies. It doesn't exactly scream "future of sex," does it?

This is what I’d believed, but I apparently I had it all wrong. To an increasing number of men with erections and enough data allocation left on their monthly plans, Apple’s pocket Skype is yet another masturbatory aid to add to the arsenal—a new platform for people to talk to girls they’ve met on the internet and paid to strip naked in a private one-on-one show. Of course, looking at it like that, it makes sense; succeeding in business is all about moving with the times. In that respect, the business of taking your clothes off is really no different from journalism or the medical-supply industry.

Amy Lu Bennett, a 26-year-old glamour model from the UK, is a case in point. Anticipating the demise of the men's mags that kickstarted her career, Amy Lu switched her attention to the internet and started her own site, Xtreme Playpen. She posed topless for her own photos and videos and built up a network of girls who would do the same. She also became a cam girl, working for Playboy TV, selling cam sessions on the internet, and pioneering the latest industry trend: FaceTiming men, one-on-one, for cash.

“FaceTime is personal,” says Amy Lu over the phone, while a guy tattoos the face of her dog, Miffy, onto her leg. “Men want that intimacy of being in your bedroom and talking to you on your phone. For them, it feels more like having a girlfriend, and actually—aside from guys who pay—I don’t really FaceTime anyone other than my boyfriend, so I suppose it makes sense.”

Amy Lu Bennett

If you google girls who strip on FaceTime, you won’t get a lot of joy; it’s a trade that still largely exists within chat rooms and private inboxes. In fact, there’s only one established FaceTime service for cam girls online—SaucyTime, a downloadable web app for iPhone and iPad. Its founder, Chris Jeffrey, told me he was surprised that there wasn’t more competition, considering they have upwards of 50,000 registered members for just 40 girls, most of whom are ex-glamour models.

“We take glamour models off that pedestal and make them attainable,” he said. “It’s about personality and attitude, but this isn’t about bearing your breasts—it’s about being a fantasy girlfriend, the sort of girl these guys would want to go out for a beer with. There’s an emotional investment you just don’t get if you’re tapping out messages on a keyboard.”

Chris says that the girls take the majority cut from each of their calls, and it must be beneficial that the marketing and advertising that sustains the site and app all comes out of his own pocket. The cumulative reach of 40 girls plugging the SaucyTime brand via their individual social media accounts, though, is obviously beneficial to everyone involved. For girls like Amy Lu, FaceTime itself provides an easy way to go directly to the customer and cut out website owners like Chris.

“Sites like [SaucyTime] would take a cut,” she explains, “which is why more girls are doing it with their fans directly. I don’t really advertise FaceTime. Someone will see you on TV or online, then they either tweet you and message you, or ask for your email address to arrange.”

Another reason to keep negotiations private is to avoid skinflint users trying to barter for their cyber shows. “I think girls don’t want to publicize that they’re doing FaceTime for a certain amount, because once you put out a rate everyone can say, ‘Well, I saw you only charge this much,’ or ‘I saw someone cheaper,’” Amy Lu explains. Nonetheless, she was willing to give some insight into how much she can earn. While she’d make around $75 an hour for a glamour shoot—in her opinion, not a lot of money (“I had a dog trainer come round the other day who charged me $75 an hour, and she was fully clothed”)—she estimates that she can charge more than $75 PayPal advance for just 15 minutes on FaceTime.

A guy with some stellar lines using SaucyTime

So what do you get for your money? “Every girl is different, but I’ll only go nude,” Amy Lu tells me. “I’ll take my pants off and you can see the triangle at the front, but not any fanny. Other girls do more, but it’s just what you’re comfortable with. FaceTime’s always a two-way camera, so it’s all about the eye contact. It’s all an act to make them feel special. You’ll get different requests: Stocking and suspenders is a common one. I also get a lot of feet fetish people who want to see you rub cream into your feet. It’s not always your boobs… Feet people don’t like boobs, they’re really not interested.”

Any girl I’ve ever spoken to who sells her body in some shape or form—be it stripping or sex—tells me that you get two types of customer: the lonely types looking for some companionship, and the ones who more or less disrespect you and move onto the next girl. It seems the same rule holds true in the FaceTime game: “Yeah, the first guys are what we call regulars, always ringing you, always coming to your cam just to quickly say hello and to tell you that you look beautiful,” says Amy Lu. “Those are the ones who want to FaceTime more; the ones that treat you like a girlfriend.”

Unsurprisingly, being the founder of a company that relies on FaceTime to connect men with naked women, Chris was quick to tout the benefits of using FaceTime to connect yourself to naked women. “You might have a family PC, or wives and girlfriends who look at web history,” he said, “but you don’t share your iPhone with your partner, unless you’re in a really weird relationship where you wear matching sweaters.

“Webcam is static, but this is mobile; you can take the conversation anywhere,” he continued. I asked if he was subtly referring to the kind of imaginative camerawork that a desktop computer doesn’t allow. “In terms of camera angles, yes, but also in ways you might not have considered. The caller might want to show the girl round his house and then take her up to the bedroom.”

FaceTime is also an easy means of communication for traveling customers. Chris told me that he has members in 88 countries, including members of the military stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they have access to WiFi but, because of security reasons, can’t use their phones to make calls. SaucyTime is for the soldiers.

Amy Lu Bennett

I got in touch with one of Chris’s FaceTime customers, and asked why he prefers his iPhone's camera over, say, a webcam or the TV. “The webcam sites normally have tons of guys all typing away and asking stupid questions to a model in an online peep show situation,” he told me. “I'm not interested in getting involved in that. I prefer one-on-one and not being hounded to pay tips so we can have a nice chat, and where whatever happens happens! I always like to chat first and that relaxes us both: find out a bit about them if I haven't spent time with them, where they’re from, and ask about stuff I've read on their SaucyTime profile.”

FaceTime definitely has an intimacy to it that other cam sites don’t—an aesthetic it shares with user-generated porn, which is becoming more and more popular thanks to sites like Reddit and Make Love Not Porn. I asked Amy whether she thinks this homemade look is part of the appeal. “There’s a part of my Xtreme Playpen site called VIP, where we put all the girls’ DIY stuff and men pay to see it,” she said. “I find that the unprofessional photos go down much better than the professional ones. It’s the same as with FaceTime. Guys like that idea that she’s alone in her bedroom, filming it on her phone herself.”

Like user-generated porn, however, FaceTime has its downsides. In the same way that uploading your own sex tape heightens the risk of your family finding out what it looks like when you orgasm, there’s some ambiguity around putting yourself out there to a global cyber audience. Amy Lu’s never encountered a full-blown nutcase, but she told me that guys can be quick to get attached over FaceTime, and that if they iMessage her and she doesn’t reply after say, five minutes, she can expect plenty of abusive messages. FaceTime customers can only see her email address, not her phone number, but she does use the same phone for work that she uses day-to-day. 

I ask if she's ever FaceTimed anyone while out and about. "What, like from a changing room?" she laughs. "No, I always do it from home, really, because I’ve got to be concentrating. If you’re looking out the window and yawning and stuff, they’ll be like, “OK, bye.'" And what about the weirdest place anyone’s ever called her from? “Most of the guys look like they’re at home," she says, "but I have had one guy FaceTiming me from the toilet at work, so I’m guessing he worked in an office."

It's hard to make predictions about which way the online sex industry will go. Five years ago, the trend was to make hyper-extreme porn videos; now, it's to produce clips that look like they were filmed in a back garden on a VHS recorder. But it's clear that the interactive element is gaining popularity, and I'd wager that, in the next couple of years, Chris and Amy Lu are going to have far more competition to contend with.

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter.

Lac-Megantic was home to one of Quebec's largest catastrophes. All photos via Jean-Francois Hamelin
On Monday, May 12th, a SWAT team descended on Thomas Harding’s home just before 5PM. Camo-clad officers swarmed the property and forced Thomas Harding, his teenage child, and a family friend to lay face-down on the ground at gunpoint before handcuffing and hauling away one of three men being blamed for the Lac Megantic train derailment. All this according to Thomas Welsh, Thomas Harding's lawyer, who described the arrest of his client on Montreal's RadioX. 

Thomas Harding, Jean Demaître, Richard Labrie and the Montréal Maine and Atlantic railway company have been charged with 47 counts of causing death by criminal negligence, one for every victim of the oily disaster that spilled nearly six million litres of crude and demolished the town’s city centre. If found guilty, each faces life in prison.

Last year, VICE was on the scene surveying the damage and digging into how a cataclysmic failure of policy and corporate cost-cutting led to a massive fireball that levelled the heart of a small town. In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the rail system wasn’t up to par for such massive oil shipments, this week’s charges are laid against individual employees of the rail company.

Harding was the engineer of the train, Labrie was the railway traffic controller and Demaitre was the manager of train operations. The three of them and the MMA rail company are the only ones being held responsible for last year’s catastrophe. No one else is being charged for the spill—not the MMA board members, not any regulator, and most importantly, not Edward Burkhardt, the chairperson of MMA. As recently as March 2014, Burkhardt was considered to be one of the most likely to be charged with criminal negligence. But when the accused were named, Burkhardt was in the clear.

When asked why the MMA chairperson was not listed with the accused, the spokesperson for the DCPC, Jean Pascal Boucher, told VICE there wasn’t enough evidence to assure a conviction. “In Canadian law we have to evaluate the investigation that the police transfer to our office. So we have to deal with criminal law, he said. "We have to analyze the evidence and if we consider it sufficient to press charges against an individual. That is our responsibility. But if in the evaluation of the evidence we are not morally convinced that we can get a guilty verdict we don’t press charges.”

As for the MMA, if found guilty, there is no set amount of fines that they would face.

“The criminal code provides that if there is culpability, instead of imprisonment, there is a fine," said Jean Pascal Boucher. “There is no minimum, there’s no maximum. It is to the court to decide the amount.”

The funny thing about fining the MMA is that they’re about to be bought by an American company, Railroad Acquisition Holdings LLC, possibly as soon as next week. As we previously reported, MMA filed for bankruptcy protection almost immediately after the train wreck and has avoided paying for the damages they unleashed.

Picturesque Lac-Mégantic, from above.
If sold, there is no certainty that any punishment or liability would be transferred along with the company. Jean Pascal Boucher refused to comment on whether culpability could follow MMA to its new owner, stating only that he can not answer hypothetical questions.

Distance seems to be the best defense against liability. Sure, Harding didn’t apply enough handbrakes before tucking in for the night, but it was the firemen who shut off the locomotive, allowing the air brakes to slowly leak and eventually unlock. It was a faceless person over a telephone who told Harding to go back to sleep and that everything was under control. And it was the Transportation Safety Board of Canada who established a voluntary safety standard for oil tankers (that standard is now in a three year transitional period to becoming mandatory for all oil cars operating inside of Canada).

There is a wealth of people who contributed to last year’s tragedy. With a nine-fold increase in oil transported by rail over a measly two year period, an increase from 15,980 barrels a day of crude oil in early to 2012 to a stunning 146,047 barrels a day by the end of 2013—who is really to blame? Our legal system is bound by reasonable doubt, and those who divvy up annual profits are also the farthest from the daily operations. Are Harding, Demaître and Labrie really the most culpable, or are they simply the most vulnerable?

Click here for last week's episode.

Check back next Wednesday for another episode of Blobby Boys!

Protesting exclusion of LGBT folks from the military at the Portland Pride Parade. Photo via Flickr user PortlandPictures.com

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel caused a bit of a stir over the weekend when he said that the US military's ban on transgender soldiers "continually should be reviewed" during an appearance on ABC's The Week. In addition to reminding everyone that Sunday talk shows aren't just several hours of teeth gnashing and inhuman wailing, Hagel raised a few eyebrows among LGBT advocacy organizations, as his remarks come in the wake of a March report issued by the Palm Center that estimated some 15,000 transgender people are surreptitiously serving in the armed forces right now in addition to 130,000 or so trans veterans in the population at large.

But does Hagel's vague promise to take another look at the issue—coupled with his forthright declaration that "every qualified American who wants to serve our country should have an opportunity if they fit the qualifications and can do it"—mean the Pentagon is actually going to change its policies? One encouraging sign came Wednesday when military officials announced they were considering a request from Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence officer charged with leaking troves of classified documents to Wikileaks in 2010, to be transferred to a civilian prison for gender treatment therapy. Indeed, the latest report suggests Hagel has already approved the request and it's just a question of working out the logistics. More broadly, transgender advocates and military observers I spoke to are actually quite optimistic about the prospects for reform, even if the timeline remains cloudy at best.

"When you are talking about an issue as potentially inflammatory as transgender people serving in the US military, I don't think you step out there unless you mean it," said Allyson Robinson, policy director for the military LGBT activist organization SPART*A and a retired army captain. "I don't think it's worth it unless you really intend to go there."

Hagel has a history of saying exactly what he means—back in his days as a Republican senator, he was a pain in the ass for neocons in the George W. Bush administration, constantly questioning the rationale for the invasion of Iraq and lending a bipartisan sheen to progressive criticism of Bush's foreign policy.

If Hagel is serious about letting trans people serve in the military, he's on the side of science.

"What our commission found was that in many instances, transgender people could serve with no problems," said retired Brigadier General Thomas Kolditz, currently a professor at Yale University who served on the panel that issued the March report. "They could serve honorably and well, they could deploy, they could fulfill all the requirements of military service." In fact, US allies like Canada and Britain allow transgender troops to serve now, including in Middle East combat zones, and the Pentagon employs plenty of transgender civilian contractors who get deployed to foreign countries and seem to do just fine. And whereas the demise of Don't Ask, Don't Tell—the shameful "compromise" President Bill Clinton reached with conservatives in the early 1990s that allowed gay people to serve as long as they lied about their sexuality—required an act of Congress, Hagel doesn't need the OK from lawmakers to tweak this Department of Defense policy.

This is a tricky moment for transgender inclusion, though, because the pressure of sequestration—the insane policy where federal lawmakers decided to take a hatchet to the budget in hopes of curbing the deficit—has the military looking to reduce its manpower rather than scrambling for new recruits. There are also some legitimate medical issues (like the provision of hormone therapy on the frontlines, or in what Hagel called "austere locations") surrounding transgender troops that weren't a factor when Congress told the army to ditch its policy of banning openly gay soldiers.

Still, the writing is on the wall now, and Hagel is proving to be the worst nightmare of the far-right crowd that threatened to block his nomination last year to replace Bush holdover Robert Gates. His willingness to throw military tradition to the wayside could actually make for an impressive legacy, a sort of brightspot for an administration whose foreign policy has come under withering criticism from all corners. And thanks to front-page coverage in Beltway outlets like the Washington Post—which recently profiled Landon Wilson, a Navy intelligence officer who was dismissed when his bosses realized he had once been female—the political class in DC has begun to take notice.

"This is going to be a lengthy process, but we all know how it's going to end," said Kolditz, the retired general. "It's going to end with greater acceptance and with modernized, medically sophisticated ways of viewing gender identity. There were so many doomsday scenarios during the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. People were convinced that good soldiers would be leaving in droves—there were all kinds of wildly speculative predictions that never came true. I suspect it would be the same with changes to transgender policy."

The final piece of the puzzle is another, pending Palm Center report (retired Major General Gale S. Pollock is leading that commission) that will offer practical guidance on how to implement a reversal of this silly policy. Once we have the nuts and bolts down, the only thing standing in the way is old-school bigotry, and even that has begun to fade away.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Photo from Mike Mellia's portrait series Our Side of the Story: South Sudan

The April issue of VICE includes just one article in its 130 pages. The magazine's sole story, Saving South Sudan by Robert Young Pelton, is a gonzo-style dive into the strife of the world’s newest nation, one that has faced perpetual war “with some sporadic days off” since 1955. In April, we received an invitation to a gallery exhibition by New York–based photographer Mike Mellia, whose project, Our Side of The Story: South Sudan, is a series of portraits of South Sudanese refugees turned artists. Subjects included supermodels who've walked for the likes of Louis Vuitton and appeared in Kanye West videos, an actor starring in an upcoming Reese Witherspoon movie, and a poet studying at Columbia University. Almost everyone in the series still has family in South Sudan, or a neighboring refugee camp, and many of the subjects' families don't know the extent of their current artistic lives.

We got in touch with several of the subjects of Our Side of The Story in hopes of giving them a platform to talk about their almost unbelievable voyages from Sudan to America, from refugee camps to runway shows and top-tier universities. VICE will be sharing one of their stories every day this week, continuing with today with Ger Duany's.

Born in 1978, Ger Duany is one of the children known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, who fought in the Second Civil War in the 1980s. He learned to fight before he could read or write and memorized every part of an AK-47 machin gun before hitting puberty. After successfully fleeing to Ethiopia at the age of 14, he eventually made it to the United States where he developed a love for basketball. It led to a college scholarship, but during an off year caused by injury, Ger ended up getting cast by chance in the David O. Russell film I Heart Huckabees. He became close with star Mark Wahlberg and the director, and the gig catapulted Ger into a successful modeling career.

In 2011, he co-produced and starred in a documentary, Ger: To Be Separate, detailing his return home for the first time in nearly 18 years, where he voted in the newly independent nation of South Sudan and reunited with his mother. Ger spoke with us about how playing Division II basketball saved him in America, the massive paradigm shift that came with fleeing Sudan to working with Mark Wahlberg in Hollywood, and why he barely spoke about his past while working in fashion.

Photo by Tarrice Love

VICE: Can you tell me about the time line of when you left Sudan and became a Lost Boy? How long was it before you were in a refugee camp?
Ger Duany: I was among the displaced children who escaped from Sudan in 1986. I walked hundreds of miles on bare feet from country to country to find a better life in the Horn of Africa. We ended up in the Ethiopian refugee camps in Itang, where I stayed for four years. And then war broke out in Ethiopia, which displaced refugees from Itang back to Sudan. This is why we were roaming around in 1991. As a result, all the boys were forced into the military. People think I had a choice but I didn’t if I wanted to survive.

It was rainy season in 1992 in Sudan. I remember it like yesterday. That year I became an active child soldier. At 14, I was considered a grown man, I earned a gun, and then everything changed. My life would never be the same.

How big is your family?
I have a very big family. My dad had several wives, nine to be exact, and I have 63 siblings. I’m not sure if my father included me in that count, but that’s what he told me. They’re all in South Sudan. And those who survived the current civil war were displaced to Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda.

Do you remember life in Sudan that wasn’t torn by war and violence?
Yes, South Sudan is simply beautiful land, with beautiful people with humility of spirit and big smiles. It’s full of thriving nature. If I brought you to my country, I’d take you to the Nile and bring you on an adventure that you will never forget. It’s green and very flat country and our land is like my skin color. Ethiopia is very high in elevation, and when it rains there it trickles down into South Sudan, and the minerals in the rain fertilize our soil. We can grow anything there. The hunger that haunts the land isn’t because we lack fertile soil or agriculture skills. We lack only motivated leaders and organizers. I'm afraid our current conflict will lead us toward famine because war depletes every life source, it seems.

Even throughout the civil war, many memories haven't been tainted. We sang; we danced; we went fishing and hunting. I looked after my family cattle. The civil war reached all corners of Sudan, but it didn’t stop our life from functioning. We created happiness and normalcy in war. 

How did you get into modeling and acting in Hollywood movies? 
My life in the United States mimics my life in Sudan. I never lived in one place for a very long period of time. This is the first time in my life I’ve stayed in one place—Manhattan, for the past eight years.

When I landed in the United States in 1994, I ended up in Des Moines, Iowa, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with other Lost Boys of Sudan. Later, I learned that I had family in Bloomington, Indiana, who had lived there since 1984; my uncle, Dr. Wal Duany, was working as a professor at the University of Indiana. I went to meet him and joined his family and kids who were around my age. 

In Indiana, I picked up basketball—my cousin Duany Duany played basketball for Wisconsin and Kueth Duany was Syracuse’s team captain, and he won the national championship in 2003. That’s how my life really started. I became a kid all over again, and my uncle was teaching and showing me how to live in this country. If I stayed in South Dakota, my life would have gone in a different direction—most of the kids there got into trouble with law, so basketball saved me! It was my therapy, my way of dealing with my post-traumatic stress disorder.

I dreamt of going to the NBA. It's still a vivid memory. I won a scholarship to play at a small college in Mattoon, Illinois and I started to get recognition as a junior college player and then I got another scholarship to attended LA Southwest College. I graduated and I tore my ACL and went back to Indiana for one summer to heal. I had to take time off from school, which resulted in me losing my opportunity to get a full scholarship. It was a nightmare, as that scholarship was my only way of funding my education. 

In the spring, I stayed at Georgetown with my cousin Nok Duany and trained at the Georgetown University gym. During my time there, the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut heard about me. They flew me out and gave me a full scholarship. At the end of my sophomore year, I was cast in the movie I Heart Huckabees. There was nationwide casting looking specifically for a Sudanese refugee who could play a role in the movie, so I stayed in Connecticut that summer and went to the audition. Next thing I knew, I was flown to Hollywood, and the following morning I was in rehearsals with Dustin Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwatzman, and all the rest.

Photo by Matthias Vriens McGrath

When I got there, it was totally different from the basketball environment. I came into this Hollywood world where everyone was so nice and supportive and full of compliments, so much hugging and kissing on cheeks. I bonded with David O. Russell and Mark Walhberg because we loved basketball. Mark and I would play after work every other day in his huge mansion with a beautiful gym. They became like brothers. And they didn’t consider me just another Lost Boy with a heart-wrenching story.

Over the three months of filming, I kept asking David when the filming would end so that I could leave California and go play basketball again at the University of Bridgeport. I had to get back to receive my scholarship again. By the end of September, it was too late for me to get back into school. Basketball was in my blood for ten years.  I had been determined to go back to school to finish my Bachelor's degree in human services, but it was too late.

I took a year off using the money I saved from my summer working on the movie and then transitioned to New York City for more auditions and modeling gigs until school started again. I started modeling, and I meet many interesting people—some managers and agents were interested in my work because of I Heart Huckabees. From 2004 up to now, I’ve worked in high fashion runway and print. I’ve been doing it for just about nine years now. 

Did you consider yourself part of the fashion world?
I never really felt like I was part of the fashion world. It's a tough circle. I eventually became comfortable in the field and worked during fashion week, doing runway shows and collaborating with some amazing designers. I've had so many opportunities, and for that I'm forever grateful and humbled, but my mission right now is much greater than fashion.

When I’m around fashion, my purpose is being around people that have an understanding about humanity, like pairing fashion with clean water projects, fashion that cares, fashion that can make a difference in peoples’ lives. I'm glad I've built great relationships with designers in the fashion industry and they recognize my growth and reach out to me about combining fashion with purpose. I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone in fashion, but life is not solely about the glitz and the glamour. I’m glad I understand that balance.

Clothes don’t change me. Clothes don’t make anybody, the way I look at it. I will always be South Sudanese, but more importantly I’ll always be Ger Duany.

Image by Jeff P. Elstone for INAISCE

Did you ever bring a basketball to a fashion shoot?
[Laughs] Early in my career, I'd show up at castings with a basketball. They'd just look at me as some exotic African guy. They didn't know that side of me. It was separate. In Indiana, basketball is a religion! Then one time on a trip to Milan for fashion week, me and a couple other models decided to play ball. I started dunking over their heads and then they realized I was a force to be reckoned with.

Did your peers know about your life as a refugee and Lost Boy?
Honestly, they didn’t know about my past. It’s not something I talked about; it’s something I tucked in.

When I lived in Sudan, I never looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t have one. I never got compliments about my appearance—that kind of thing wasn’t part of the culture. Then in America, I’d have people say, "You’re a beautiful man!” and I was surprised. I had to learn this language about beauty!

For me, to get the same treatment as any other kid in high school and in college was important, and then in acting and in the modeling world I wanted the same and was grateful to have that. It didn’t come easy. Then when my life story came out, someone would ask, 'Where's your family?' And I'd say I haven't  seen them in 18 years and then my story started coming out.

I’m a different person today from the one I was in my college basketball days, even compared to my days in fashion. So when I went home in 2011 to see my family, it was interesting to see how different I was from them. I’m different in a way where I’m influenced by this part of the world and it was education that let me escape my life as a refugee and as a Lost Boy of Sudan. I hunt for my own identity. But when I go back, I’m still the same guy and I interact with my people in the same way. They can’t believe I was gone for 20 years and I still remain the same.

Tell me about your documentary, GER: To Be Separate.
My director Wanuri Kahui and I went to Sudan in 2010, where we searched for my mom and other relatives. I had been gone for so long and most of my family and relatives thought I perished along the way.

I was desperately searching for my mother; we were separated for 18 years. We could see the struggle had taken a physical and emotional toll on the Southern Sudanese. Wanuri insisted that she would capture it: “Don’t think about the money, just go find your family and I’ll follow you.” Then, I knew that I had a friend.

How did you choose the name of the documentary?
My name is Ger. The name Ger means when all things fall apart, but when we finally tracked down my mother, Kahui asked her, "What does Ger mean?" and she replied, “To be separate.”

I was told that your upcoming film with Reese Witherspoon relates to the plight of the Lost Boys.
The film is inspired by the true story of the Lost Boys. It’s a collection of all our stories put into one narrative by a wonderful writer, Margerate Nagle. If I ever wrote a book, it would complement a movie like The Good Lie because it’s like reliving my past time of trauma in a therapeutic, creative release. I had to dig deep in me and get that story out. Everyone says they have a movie in them, and I think this was my movie. I think this movie is good for my country, not just good for my personal career. We need a platform like this so that our stories can be seen and felt.

Are you optimistic about the future of South Sudan?
In 2010, when I returned to South Sudan, I was very optimistic. I was looking left to right and screaming freedom Oyee! I was excited and overwhelmed with joy. I couldn’t believe it was happening in my lifetime. We didn’t think that South Sudan would become independent, but it happened!

We are the most hopeful and optimistic people with strong faith. I believe this war will eventually settle down and it will make us come together and think about how to move into a newest chapter in the near future. I have to be optimistic because I want the best for my people. We can’t lose hope. That’s what our country stands for, for hope! We’ll get there.

For more on Ger Duany, visit his website.

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.

The protester who screamed, "Fuck your morals!" into the microphone. Photo via FEMEN.
Two topless protestors from the Quebec branch of FEMEN jumped on the stage at Parliament Hill last Thursday while the archbishop of Quebec was reading a letter from the Pope. The event was an annual anti-abortion walk, whose main theme was hopeful prevention, or, legalizing a morning after pill called RU-486. The pill allows a woman to abort a pregnancy up to seven weeks after conception.

Most people have probably heard of the feminist group, which started in the Ukraine in 2008, and has now received international recognition for their topless protests. 

The Quebec branch has been operating for one year and have protested for indigenous women's rights, against anti-abortion lobbyists, and against the Canadian sex trade. After seeing the photos of what happened, I had to reach out to these women to find out how it all went down. I talked to Neda Topaloski, a Canadian representative of FEMEN, about the genesis of their protest, the motion to reopen the abortion debate by the Consevative government in 2012, and demonstrating in front of a member of the clergy with "My Pussy My Body" scrawled across her torso.

VICE: So, what exactly was the protest about on Thursday? 
Neda Topaloski: We were protesting for every Canadian woman to have free access to abortion, in a medical and safe way. We were also protesting against the powerful lobbyists that work all year long to try to make abortion illegal. We want them to stop organizing these events and doing such massive propaganda against women. In a democracy like Canada, people should be stopped and denounced when they make anti-human lobbies. We want to drag the attention to the alliance of church and state on this abortion debate. It is extremely dangerous.

So you believe that church and state are working together here?
Yes, exactly. On Thursday the Archbishop of Quebec was on stage. He was speaking when we intervened. There were a couple members of parliament from Stephen Harper’s Conservative party, as well as senators, all together on one side. Church and state are supposed to be separate. When you have political and religious leaders organizing these types of things, with history and money and power backing them, it worries FEMEN. Religion is way too close with the government. Together they are trying to achieve legislation against women’s rights in general.  

Abortion is legal in Canada, do you believe there is a real threat of that changing?
There could be. In 2012, a motion to reopen the abortion debate and make it criminal was proposed by a deputy of the Conservative government. Many voted in favor, including Rona Ambrose, who was the Minister of Women's Status in Canada at the time. This is what religious lobbyists achieve when they work against women's rights.

What was happening when you protested topless?
The archbishop was reading a letter from the pope and we came in and started screaming "Fuck Your Morals" into the microphone, and on us was written: "My Pussy,My Rules" and, "God Out Of My Vagina."  We function with very clear and direct messages.

Yes, you really do. And the goal of FEMEN is to give women’s voices to women’s issues, correct?
Yes. I don’t think that all the white men dressed with traditions of misogyny should be talking about women’s issues in general. For example, on that stage on Thursday, you only had white men giving speeches. There was no women at all. Not in the church and not in the state, and they were addressing an issue that is about women’s bodies. They are actually telling us women what to do with our bodies and our lives and there was not a single woman to speak for us, except for the naked girl that was screaming and not recognizing the authority of those old men. Everybody says Canada is a democracy and that we live in justice compared to other places in the world. Then you see the people who actually have power decide to turn it against half the population, against women. They control it in a very archaic way.

Delphine Bergeron, mid-arrest. Photo via Yannick Fornacciari.
How do you think Canada compares to the rest of the world in terms of women’s rights and equality?
You know, it’s all the same thing over and over. Of course, when you compare us to countries where religion is still making the law of the state it can appear that Canada is better. But, overall, it’s the same here because those forms of patriarchy are still effective. The main forms of patriarchy through history have been religion, the sex industry, and politics. Those three things have always been controlled by men and that is still happening now. But of course, you know, here we say we live in a democracy and a free world where everybody can speak freely. In practice this system—this consumerist system—is a new modern form of patriarchy in the free world. It fuels women’s bodies, women’s objectivity, and representation of women as submissive.

Do you think that even when a woman is in a professional setting that she is still judged based on her appearance?
Of course. Here in Canada you can be whatever you want. You can be a famous lawyer or doctor, but it doesn’t mean we encourage girls that way. In Canadian politics, women are perpetually judged on how they dress and the way they look. We don’t have the same treatment. We are always reduced to looks.

Do you think your form of protest is effective?
Yes. Even the images that come out after the protest have the ability to simplify the issue and bring it attention. It’s a little bit sad when I think the last time I saw a women fight—like really fight for her rights—was Joan of Arc. Is she the only example of a female role model we have who will fight?  Lara Croft is a sexualized version of a woman who fights. When you see FEMEN in pictures, nobody has changed it and nobody has arranged it and especially even if they tried to make me shut up, the fact that I scream more and more and more, it shows for once that no matter what happens is a woman that doesn’t give up on her own voice.

Being topless is part of the protest, can you explain that?
We see nudity all the time. The only difference is that mine is not in a sexualized context and mine is not controllable—this is what bothers people. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with my body or with my breasts. The only thing that is wrong is how people see it. It’s not supposed to be that outrageous, especially not in a free country. It’s not supposed to get people so mad and so violent against us. After all, I’m just a woman speaking for myself and I use my body because everybody else uses it. The capitalist economy uses it, the church uses it, and the sex industry uses it. But when I use it, it becomes a crime and everybody talks about it.



Neda, left. Delphine, right. Photo via Yannick Fornacciari.
Do you get scared before you do this type of protest?
We’re always nervous, but we prepare. We know what we’re going for. The most important part is to stay strong and aggressive on stage. You know this is the part for me to learn while doing a few protests: Nobody in life teaches us to be strong and to scream our voice. We are not used to doing that and it might often appear weak unless you really, really insist. So, of course we’re nervous but when it happens it has to appear as anything but weak. You’re a naked girl in the most fragile position in the world and everybody criticizes you. it’s really easy to be hurt or to have violence done against you. If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will.

Do you ever experience violence towards you at these types of protests?
Yes. People were very violent towards us. I was barely on the stage and I was pulled back and there was a lady there who opened her pen and put it in the other FEMEN protestor’s arm and pulled it down and made a big scratch. There was also an older woman in a wheelchair who had an umbrella and was hitting us and the photographer. They were extremely mad that the police didn’t take us quicker.

What happened after the RCMP stepped in?
Right. We were not actually arrested. We were just carried away and we can’t go back to Parliament Hill for six months. We ended up getting lost in Ottawa, without our cellphones and water. But they had given us our shirt backs so we weren’t naked.

Do you believe your protest was a success?
I think it was relatively successful. 90 percent of Canadians support abortion rights and I really wanted to draw their attention to what was happening at home with lobbyists. When you put a Member of Parliament and a Bishop together, these two people have more power than all of the popular vote. I think that some people that are lobbying are doing a very good job and—because the popular vote is still for abortion—we don’t tend to look at it. But I think that FEMEN drew a little attention to that.

Would you like to see more women protesting like this?
The ultimate goal for FEMEN is to have more activists and more women rebel. We call for other girls all over the country and the world to get naked and win—because we believe one girl can and will change the world.


@angelamaries

Reality Bites Screenshot via YouTube user thecultbox

Hey, did you hear about the western Antarctic ice sheet? The melting there has reached the point of no return, which means we’re getting an extra ten feet added to our sea levels in the near future. A clear and direct threat to human life as we know it—we should be rioting in the streets, or at least posting more ice memes than net neutrality memes, right? Instead, as everyone knows, the scourge of the postmodern world, the Millennial generation, is too busy updating Snapchat on the iPhones they bought with their parents’ credit cards. But is it really all our fault?

Generation X has a lot more to do with our current shitshow than they believe. I’m not blaming them for the way the world looks—that’s on the Boomers—but our big brothers and sisters in Gen X screwed up our cultural priorities by teaching Millennials that self-obsession is the highest mark of cultural capital.

When we first started dating, my wife asked me to watch Empire Records with her, which she sold as a quirky Generation X romp about a gang of loveable misfits working in a record store, dissecting pop culture and dispensing snarky comments at and about customers. I have a pretty strong stomach when it comes to media consumption (I am part of the first internet generation after all), but this movie shocked me.

On the surface there’s nothing particularly upsetting about Empire Records. It’s a pretty mediocre ensemble dramedy stapled onto a basic plotline that culminates in a giant party, John Hughes 101 type stuff featuring a very young Liv Tyler. The film’s ideological universe is what horrified me. The individuality-obsessed characters in Empire Records are preoccupied with critiquing popular culture, but completely oblivious to their own unfathomable level of privilege. The eponymous record store is independent (of course), yet somehow manages to employ about a dozen twentysomethings and teenagers who are at best incompetent and at worst actual liabilities to the store. In one scene, they hold a faux funeral for a coworker who has attempted suicide (“I went to rock and roll heaven, and I wasn't on the guest list”); in another, the “artist” of the bunch glues quarters to the counter, actually saying “I don't feel that I need to explain my art to you”—all while supposedly on the clock at the store. How did we ever think watching movies like this was fun?

In the introduction to his 2009 book X Saves The World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking, Jeff Gordinier, a card-carrying Gen X-er, talks about how his generation has been ignored in recent years in favor of the cultural parent-child conflict playing out between befuddled Baby Boomers who still believe that by dropping acid at Woodstock they changed the world, and their selfish Millennial offspring who will buy anything with a recognizable logo because they “just love stuff,” according to Gordinier.

Gordinier finds Gen X caught in the middle: the skeptical and morose group that questioned authority, societal values, and moral standards. With all the ironically distanced gravitas of Janeane Garofalo pointing out that Evïan is naïve spelled backwards in Reality Bites, he argues that his generation offers the western world’s only chance of surviving the cataclysmic problems largely created by Boomers that the Millennials are too ineffective to solve. According to Gordinier, Gen X are dreamers, innovators, individualists, and critical thinkers: a Promethean generation of clear-eyed antiheroes.

If you were born in the 1990s, odds are you don’t even know what Gen X is. In short it’s your fortysomething cousin or uncle who drives a Hybrid, sports a Dinosaur Jr. t-shirt on weekends, and occasionally busts out the old hacky sack to the dulcet tunes of Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains. Gen X invented grunge, the commercially viable cousin of punk rock. They popularized Doc Martens, briefly turned MTV into a drum circle with the Unplugged series, and made indie cinema a thing. Their existential search for a cultural identity was glorified in meandering offbeat comedies and dramas set in coffee shops, record stores, minimarts, and other sites where a white twenty-something might make a comfortable if Sisyphean living while expounding bite-size philosophy and snarky one-liners. Jaded Gen X slackers nihilistically accept the machine of which they are a part, and can dissect its fundamental facile and evil nature with all the clarity and urgency of a nineteenth-century Romantic poet. 

Anyone born between 1965 and 1980 is a member of Generation X, a term that was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which revolves around a group of young outsiders critically examining consumer society and Western culture. Coupland has built an entire career of dispensing drolly bleak prognostications from his vaunted Gen X perch; in 2010’s “A Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next Ten Years,” he promises: “We'll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back…You're going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought.” 

On the surface, at least, it seems he might be right. Urban Outfitters can’t keep cheap florals and high-waisted shorts on the shelves, cool kid music acts like HAIM and Autre Ne Veut offer tweaked takes on 1990s favorites, and normcore (aka dressing like the cast of Seinfeld) is making a weird play for cultural relevancy. Pop chanteuses trying to establish personal brands have found 1990s nostalgia an unusually rich vein to mine, as Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” video (supposedly an homage to, but really just a reshoot of, Clueless) indicates.

But a major downer lurks under all this neon fun: Generation X’s sexy whatever attitude is based on a philosophy of resignation, whose cultural artifacts taught Millennials that introspection is the highest human act. The music, movies, and other detritus of the 1990s correctly depict that it was a great time to live in, the one period where it actually seemed like capitalism was working for us. Material wealth in the Western world was at an all-time high and the economic engine of the middle class looked virtually unshakeable. Remembering what people were afraid of really puts things in perspective: killer bees, earth rays, and Marilyn Manson. Honest to god! That’s how relatively calm everything was in America in the 1990s: Marilyn Manson, the walking Ed Hardy billboard briefly married to Dita von Teese, was actually thought to be a threat to the moral fabric of society.

Gen X movies like Slacker, Reality Bites, Empire Records, and A Dream for an Insomniac operate under the same paradigm. “Anything less than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time,” says Ione Skye’s aloof and “deep” character in the latter, an unemployed actress in San Francisco who spends her days quoting poetry and shooting the shit with her friends at the local coffee shop. Only the idealistic pursuit of true love matters to her, a reasonable priority, given her mysterious ability to live comfortably in San Francisco as an unemployed actress. But the bloated 90’s didn’t last. If you work in a coffee shop today, there’s no time to hang out with your friends; Right to Work laws and an influx of desperate unemployed people have made job security a thing of the past. And if you’re unemployed in today’s San Francisco, you may as well be dead.

Gen X’ers complain that Millennials are mindless consumer drones obsessed with brand identity, but they are the ones who cannily designed brand identity to be cool and appealing within the Gen X ideological universe. At the root of Apple’s mythic appeal is the power of its perceived story of the outsider underdog beating the big bad corporate villain. iDavid versus Microgoliath. Ignore all of those supersized Stalin-style posters of Steve Jobs; Apple is all about you, and you are the most important person in the world. Buy a pretty new device!

Generation X fell in love with its own image and shaped Millennials in their hall of mirrors. The oft remarked-upon Millennial inertia reflects how utterly useless this ethos is in a world that might as well be another planet compared to the 90’s. Rather than an inherently solipsistic generation, the problems Millennials face are evidence of the failure of a bullshit philosophy on a crumbling societal structure. There are no jobs in independent record stores today, no time for shallow coffeeshop existentialism.

Empire Records Screenshot via YouTube user Denverfilm

By draining idealism of its optimistic sincerity, Generation X created a culture obsessed with methods of content delivery but disinterested in content. Social media, the greatest innovation of our time, offers unprecedented opportunities for social action, but the only facet that consistently holds our attention is our own image. Millennials are not by nature conceited; it’s just that little else seems worth the effort. This cultural nihilism was a stream of discourse that our big brothers and sisters in the 1990s could choose to buy into or opt out of; for us, it is inherited, pervasive, and insidious.

Millenials have been accused of being oblivious to the real shit sandwich the twenty-first century is shaping up to be. But how can we do otherwise? If the Gen X cultural expression of the 1990s taught us anything, it is that not giving a fuck is the only truly meaningful personal act. Don’t get me wrong: not giving a fuck is always cool, but it isn’t a political statement, and there’s nothing constructive about it. Stop believing there ever was. Ethan Hawke’s character in Reality Bites is not an outsider hero. He’s just a privileged white dude living in the best decade this part of the world has ever seen.

So, yeah. We get it Gen X. Evian is naïve spelled backwards. Thanks.

Follow Theis Duelund on Twitter

Municipal Councilman Ras Baraka campaigning in Newark ahead of the mayoral election, which he won. Photo courtesy the author

All else paled in comparison to questions of criminal-justice policy as the Newark, New Jersey, mayoral race reached its bitter conclusion Tuesday. Looming over every press conference stunt, dubiously sourced accusation, and miscellaneous hardball maneuver was a murder rate that today stands as the city’s highest in 24 years. This while only a harbor away in New York, historically low violent crime rates continue to plummet; indeed, almost every other metropolitan area in the US has seen precipitous declines in these deaths. But not Newark. Whenever society-wide advancements are said to have been made, history shows that the benefits seldom flow equitably to Newark.

Whereas in 2013, the average American enjoyed yet another consecutive year of greater domestic tranquility, Newark was wracked by escalating chaos. “War zone” became a descriptive term of choice. Celebrity Mayor Cory Booker had by this time essentially abandoned governing the place, opting instead to continue his nationwide motivational-speaking tour and prepare for an ultimately successful US Senate campaign. Left behind upon his departure were the eternal woes of municipal dysfunction, a problem to be inherited by some luckless successor.

Mayor-Elect Ras Baraka claims to have looked out upon the beleaguered city and, after careful consideration, devised an ingenious remedy for its many ills.

“I think drugs should be decriminalized, period,” he told me.

Yes, that would include crack, methamphetamine, and heroin. Perhaps not a policy position one would expect to hear promulgated in the context of a ferociously contested election marked by persistent fear of drug-related violence, but maybe there is something brewing in Newark.

Baraka’s vanquished opponent, Shavar Jeffries, touted his background in law enforcement as the central rationale for his candidacy. Courting voters in the South Ward at the city’s annual outdoor “Bikefest” celebration the weekend before the election, Jeffries, a former prosecutor, was often asked to simply introduce himself, as few people seemed to recognize the man. His cold pitch would typically begin with the talking point that he was uniquely qualified to quell the violence, and the charge that Baraka had presided over a 70 percent increase in the murder rate as councilman for the South Ward.

Jeffries dismissed the notion of drug decriminalization as a realistic approach for ameliorating misery in Newark. “If it’s decriminalized, then you’re doing your thing,” he told me. “Nobody’s touching you. Do whatever you want, be addicted. Destroy your families. Be addicted and then maybe commit an act of violence to feed your addiction.”

“What I support is drug court,” Jeffries added, in reference to the state program the candidate often told listeners he had helped expand as state assistant attorney general under former Governor Jon Corzine. Indeed, both mayoral contenders joined with Corzine’s successor, Chris Christie, in heralding the alleged successes of state drug courts. “All progressive people in this area are supporting drug court,” Baraka said, suggesting the program represents a great leap forward in finally treating nonviolent drug crime, as the oft-heard axiom goes, not as a criminal-justice issue but as a public health problem. “It makes no sense to lock up a drug user at all," Jeffries said.

In 2012, Christie signed into law a bill that made New Jersey the first state to institute compulsory drug court for some offenders, which both candidates have indicated they support. Jeffries acknowledged that an offender admitted to drug court who violates the terms of his enrollment—by relapsing on the drug he is addicted to, for example—can be subject to carceral punishment. Thus, drug courts in New Jersey fall squarely within the auspices of the criminal-justice system, as has been ruled by the State Supreme Court, which defined the program as "a creature of the judiciary."

Plainly, then, the drug-court regime is no genuine alternative to the criminal-justice system—it is rather an expansion of that system into additional realms. Poor or nonexistent record-keeping practices by law enforcement agencies stifles independent inquiries into the government’s claims of positive results. A truly genuine reform proposal would stem the flow of individuals into the criminal justice system in the first place. One means of doing this would be to remove criminal penalties for possession of illicit substances. To that end, before the New Jersey State Senate is a bill that would make possessing marijuana legal for adults aged 21 and over.

Jeffries denied that such a reform would have any practical value for Newark, a tactical choice that might have contributed to his downfall. “You might as well ask me about—let’s send somebody to Mars. It’s just not relevant to what’s going on,” he said. “Marijuana charges—that’s just not happening in the city.” Twenty-one-year-old Naimah Muhammad might have a different perspective on the subject, given his February arrest by Newark police on charges of simple marijuana possession.

Puzzlingly, despite endorsing the concept of drug decriminalization, the victorious Baraka also hedged on the question of marijuana legalization per se. When asked for his view on the senate bill, he equivocated, remarking obtusely, “If the people decide they want to go further, that’s when they go further.” It is a telling sign of the times in Newark that the winning candidate, portrayed as a “radical” by opponents who enjoyed funding from the charter school crowd and associated hedge fund and private equity titans for his readiness to negotiate with gang leaders, would apparently be unwilling to voice a clear position on marijuana legalization while he claims to support systemic change to the entire drug-prohibition regime. Even his opponent, Jeffries, eventually conceded that he would “probably support” a statewide marijuana-legalization initiative. And Baraka’s actual willingness to exert mayoral power on behalf of drug-policy reform remains unclear—he will command considerable control over police procedures but limited political capital.

Paradoxes and contradictions. But so it goes in Newark. About this there is little doubt: The city’s young men deserve to not fear arrest for nonviolent drug crimes, which inflicts trauma and indignity on the individual, his family, his peer group, and dramatically destabilizes his ordinary life. Such law enforcement actions do not promote public safety but hinder it. The new mayor of Newark would do well to recognize this.

Michael Tracey is a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.

Photo via Flickr user Scary_man8

Habitual synthetic weed smokers are being urged to seek help or face violent withdrawals after being forced to go cold turkey by the New Zealand government’s sudden reversal on its synthetic drug laws last week. Until then, the country had been attempting to regulate the drugs rather than criminalizing them, as bans often just resulted in manufacturers coming up with new compounds that weren't covered by the law.

The original long-term goal was to make it possible for New Zealanders to get high on a variety of synthetic drugs that had all been tested and proved to be low-risk. In the interim there were 36 products that could be purchased at approved dealers around the country. But parliament just passed a bill that makes it illegal to possess, sell, or supply any party with pills or synthetic cannabis. Violators could be sent to prison for up to two years or fined up to NZ$500,000 ($433,500 in American dollars).

The decision follows increasing reports of aggression, addiction, and insanely long lines of people waiting to get their highs. Prime Minister John Key conceded that the attempted regulation of designer drugs had failed, telling the press, "We should have removed all of them from the start."

The sudden ban meant there was a lot of product on the shelves to be dealt with. Anecdotal tales emerged of synthheads stockpiling and gangs taking hold of leftover drugs for black-market purposes, alongside very real stories of last-minute armed robberies and massive drug bonfies. Meanwhile, scores of people who have been using synthetic weed on a regular basis are set to suffer potentially serious withdrawal symptoms as their supplies dry up.

The Ministry of Health has advised hospitals to prepare for a surge in people seeking help after being forced to quit the potent dope substitutes cold turkey. Social worker Maggie Wood told Radio New Zealand that she had clients who were “terrified” because of the rapid change paired with a lack of support. “I'm working with a client right now that's in a real mess because of it, because it's got nothing available for him once it stops so what are we expected to do with the mess that's been created,” she said.

Because synthetic cannabinoids are a recent creation, information about their effects is limited, but toxicology experts have warned that severe withdrawals from synthetic cannabis can cause violence, psychosis, and suicidal thoughts. Paul Rout, CEO of New Zealand's Alcohol Drug Association, told me that over the last two years calls to the association’s helpline regarding synthetic drugs have increased tenfold, and are now on par with methamphetamine and marijuana.

Rout said he expects the helpline will only receive a “modest” increase in calls following the ban, but added that since publicity has emerged around the law change the number of people calling has jumped 63 percent, a figure which includes friends and family members of addicts seeking guidance.

“I think some people will move to other drugs such as natural cannabis as a way of managing their withdrawal symptoms,” Rout said. “But there will be a group, and we don’t know how big, that are likely to have significant problems withdrawing or want to stop and have found it is difficult to do so, so need some help.”

Like many people, Rout assumes the ban may simply push the drugs underground, where minors will be able to buy them. People may also turn to other, more harmful illegal substances. With the changes in law still so fresh, that all remains to be seen. But at least one person has already been caught selling back-alley synthetics and charged with selling a prohibited substance since the changes came into effect last week.

From here on out, any psychoactive substances that manufacturers want to peddle in New Zealand will have to undergo a rigorous testing process, paid for by the manufacturers, to prove that the product is relatively safe before it is allowed to be sold. One undeniable upshot of the legislative changes is that controversial animal testing was taken off the table for good.

All the talk around the subject of synthetic cannabis has renewed calls for legalizing the real deal. NORML spokesperson Chris Fowley said that as long as cannabis remains illegal, there will always be demand for synthetic substitutes.

“We stand with the vast majority of New Zealanders who believe cannabis is the safer choice," he told me. “We also believe that in the absence of comprehensive cannabis law reform, people will continue to use synthetics, but in even more risky ways.”

The country’s overall drug policies are due for review later this year.

Follow Danielle Street on Twitter.

Someone with a cold sore, a result of the herpes virus (Photo via)

I can't see many people bettering David Golding's break-up story. After his then-girlfriend found out that he’d given her herpes, she dumped him, reported him to the police, and watched as he was jailed for 14 months for passing on the STI. The reason the sentencing was so severe is because Golding was charged with (and pled guilty to) grievous bodily harm (GBH), which usually means stabbing or beating the shit out of someone—not giving them a virus that roughly 25 percent of the UK’s sexually active population already have.

Unsurprisingly, sexual health organizations weren’t very happy about the verdict, claiming it contributed to the wrongful stigmatization of what is really a pretty “trivial” condition. Those same organizations were just as outraged last week when the Court of Appeal rejected Golding’s appeal against his conviction. Lord Justice Treacy, sitting next to two other judges, said that even though Golding had acted “recklessly rather than deliberately” in giving his ex the virus, his original conviction was appropriate (though did reduce his sentence to three months).

I called up Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Virus Association, to see how this latest verdict has gone down in the herpes world.

Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Virus Association

VICE: What do you think about the judge’s decision to reject David Golding’s appeal?
Marian Nicholson: I find it to be absolutely shocking.

Do you think the sentence itself was disproportionate to the offence of giving someone herpes?
I don't want to comment on the length of the sentence itself, because I don't know enough about proper sentences for GBH. But I don't believe this case was in the public interest; the judge even said that Golding didn't give his girlfriend the virus deliberately.

Does the judge's decision to reject Golding's appeal pose a threat to anyone else in the future who might find themselves in a similar case? 
Of course. It's a disaster for common sense. The sexual health doctors are all with us on that. We're conferring with all the top sexual health doctors from an organization called BASHH [British Association for Sexual Health and HIV]; they're all horrified at the ridiculousness of basically taking someone to court for passing on a cold sore.

[Genital herpes] is incredibly common. It's almost impossible to prove who you got it from; anyone with a cold sore on their face doing oral sex could give it to a partner on the genitals. So, basically, they're saying that anyone with a cold sore on their face could end up in the dock.

Do you think the stigma attached to herpes might have had something to do with the original sentence and the rejection of the appeal?
Medically, a cold sore is incredibly unimportant. Up until the invention of anti-viral drugs in the early-80s, there was no stigma associated to having a cold sore on any part on your body. To this day, any doctor who knows about the condition will tell you it's better to get it down below because, on your face, it's a much more serious condition. 

It's better to have genital herpes?
Yes, and this isn't good news when you've spent millions developing an anti-viral drug. So the stigma was created by the drug companies while advertizing genital herpes treatment. I'll give you an example: a medical book for nurses printed in the 70s doesn't include the word herpes in the index. Once the drug companies created all the fuss, they started doing caesarean sections for mothers with genital herpes, and yet they allowed a mom with a facial cold sore to kiss her new-born baby.

Why hasn't it been de-stigmatized?
Because the condition is so medically unimportant that you don’t have a concerted effort to de-stigmatize it—such as the campaign we saw in the late-80s with HIV. It was important to de-stigmatize HIV because it kills, and you need to get people aware of it to treat it. Doctors can’t be asked to do something about de-stigmatizing a cold sore; they know it’s only a cold sore. Sadly, the judiciary are just as affected by the herpes stigma as any other layperson.

Do you think this case might make the demonization worse?

I don’t think it's going to get worse. We get people ringing us up on our helpline who are very concerned that they'll never have a partner again. And that’s been happening long before this case; it's been happening ever since the helpline was established in 1985. I don’t think it can get worse, because it’s already pretty bad.

What would you like to see happen to improve the situation?

We would like to see education. By the age of 25, seven out of ten people carry this virus, statistically. By the age of 35, it would be very hard to find a woman who does not have this virus. If you've had seven partners, statistically we would expect you to have simplex herpes type 2 [which produces most genital herpes]. The reason you don’t think you have it is that only one person in five gets it badly enough to be diagnosed. So [going by the Golding logic] this is basically going to put a fifth of the population in court. 

Follow Jack Gilbert on Twitter.