What would you like to see from your elected representatives in Canada, ladies? Do you care about whether they’d like to ogle you? Whether the shape of your body is sexually appealing to them?

Well, if you do, you might want to start doing some squats—at least according to an Ontario Liberal candidate—who posted pictures of his ideal derriere on Facebook next to a thinner bum he didn’t find so appealing. Note to politicians: learn how social media works before leaping into the race, and for the sake of all, keep your sex life off the internet. Have we not learned this already?

The other thing that drew my ire this week is the fact that the NYPD has ceased using condoms as evidence of “prostitution”—but only kind of.

Ontario Liberal Candidate Spends Time On Internet Overtly Ogling, Then Judging, Women’s Arses

It appears the shapes of women’s asses have eclipsed your typical election issues in Ontario, at least for one Liberal candidate. Niagara West-Glanbrook candidate David Mossey posted this on his Facebook page in March, and it’s coming to the public light now, thanks to the PCs:

Screencap via Facebook.

Well, Mossey, I’ve taken notice, and so has the rest of Ontario. And guess what?

The only person who gets to comment on/concern themselves with these women’s lovely butts is the women themselves. Their bodies are absolutely none of your business, and from the looks it, you would be exceedingly lucky to glimpse either of their asses in person, rather than publicly judging/drooling over them like a teenage internet perv in his mummy’s basement.

And further, don’t you have anything more important to do? Or are you such a scumbag that you can’t even pretend to be helping people? Hamilton, for example, is in the Niagara West-Glanbrook riding, and there are a number of issues there Mossey could busy himself with other than the shapes of women’s bodies. Transit frequency and general functioning, for one. Gridlock, for two. Solutions to create housing affordability and higher-paying jobs are also, you know, something he could consider posting to Facebook, as opposed to filthy posts about women’s butts.

For a creature running for provincial office to comment in such a public forum on the states of ladies’ butts and how to maintain them is beyond comprehension. Take note: you need to grasp the fact that if you post something to Facebook, it can, and likely will, become public, especially if your job is to be in the public eye.

And Mossey isn’t the only one in the party whose colossal fuckups were revealed this week. Ottawa Liberal candidate Jack Uppal posted in January about supposed differences between men and women:

“If a woman has a lot of problems, her brain can not [sic] classify the problems,” he wrote. “Women talk a lot without thinking. Men act a lot without thinking.”

Unfortunately, premier Kathleen Wynne has apparently “forgiven” them, and the posts have been removed. To me, it’s clear they’re only sorry for getting caught, like bad little boys playing with their mum’s dildo collection. I don’t believe, for one second, that the first woman premier of Ontario has actually forgiven this filth. It’s straight politicking, and guess what? She should have given these children more of a spanking.

Honestly, I’m not won over by any of the major parties in Canada right now, but this is an all-new low. Trudeau said last week that anyone running for his party would have to be pro-choice, and I thought that was a worthy step for the party when it comes to respecting women’s rights. But I guess a pro-woman stance is just lip service, and candidates aren’t actually making an effort to tow the party line.

A thousand curses on Mossey’s head. Fat asses, skinny-ass asses, round asses and flat ones, whatever you have ladies: love it, own it. Senseless donkeys like Mossey don’t get to weigh in. Am I right, witches?



Screencap via YouTube.
Condom Carrying Apparently No Longer a Sign You’re A Durty Whore

So up until recently, if you carried condoms in New York City, it could be used against you as “evidence” that you are a sex worker (or, in their ugly words and for the sake of specifics, “prostitute”). This week, the NYPD decided that this will no longer be the case.

That said, condoms will still be used in New York as evidence in sex trafficking and promotion of “prostitution” cases. These practices will disproportionately impact young, queer people of colour, who are often stopped and assumed to be sex workers regardless of what their actual circumstances may be. Advocates for sex workers and LGBTQ++ folk are saying the new policy will still allow police to take condoms from both sex workers and teen runaways, under the guise of “investigating pimps and traffickers.” The real story is that police action on this front is informed by racism, bigotry, and outmoded, puritan values surrounding sex, which are being unjustly foisted upon the rest of us. Verónica Bayetti Flores of Feministing points out that this could lead traffickers to punish sex workers carrying condoms because they fear the practice will be used against them.

I don’t have a book deal at the moment, so I can’t give this its due by full addressing everything that is wrong with the fact that condoms will still, ostensibly, be used to supposedly “prove” a person has been engaging in sex work. But I can say this:

1.)  Everyone out there having a wonderful life full of casual sex should be able to take every precaution to make sure they, and their partners, stay safe. We should be free to carry condoms, diaphragms, dams, whatever suits us best, in order to protect us and our partners (whom, yes, we may not always have feelings for, but whose health we should respect, as they are, hopefully, also human beings sharing our planet). This is middle school sex ed stuff, but apparently it’s lost on New York City cops.

2.)  Criminalizing safe sex is just about the stupidest fucking thing anyone could ever do. STIs can develop to the point that they can threaten your immune system, cause complications with conceiving, and with giving birth, and they can wreak psychological havoc and have a long lasting impact on overall health. That’s not to shame anyone who has had an STI, only to say they’re not the most desirable diseases to deal with, and for police to stop us from protecting ourselves accordingly is idiotic. Lack of condom use can also lead to unwanted pregnancies, which are generally unfair to everyone involved. (Again, so obvious, but apparently not to all of us).

3.)  What we’re discussing here is an issue of human rights. The UN specifies that all people should have the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Some STIs can seriously threaten all of that, and by criminalizing those who carry condoms, police stand in the face of those rights.

4.)  There is nothing wrong with sex work. Sex is incredibly healthy for many of us, can be a form of therapy, and I believe (or at least hope) people who provide it as a service will soon be recognized as legitimate therapists.

5.)  It’s our party and we’ll be sluts if we want to. As you were, NYPD, as you were.  

Happily, mayor Bill de Blasio agrees. Bayetti Flores of quoted him as saying:

“A policy that inhibits people from safe sex is a mistake and dangerous…And there are a number of ways you can go about putting together evidence” without condoms.

@sarratch

As consumers have abandoned paper for computer screens, artists have debated the medium's future. This weekend rOtring releases a new product that could influence this debate—the rOtring 800+ Mechanical Pencil + Premium Stylus Hybrid, a tool artists can use to draw on both paper and touch-screen surfaces.

rOtring has produced pencils for over 25 years, and their new 800 series could help carry drawing into the 21st century. To celebrate the release this weekend, they’re hosting the Future of Paper, a workshop at WantedDesign NYC exploring how the digital age has changed paper’s artistic uses.

For people who prefer to have intellectual discussions at home, they have also created the rOtring Institute, a video series where artists like Stefan Sagmeister, Robert Nightingale, and Alberto Mantilla speak about their creative process. In an exclusive rOtring Institute video for VICE, jewelry designer Jules Kim tells rOtring how watching her mother work as an architect influenced her work. If you’re in New York and like to leave your apartment, check out the WantedDesign NYC workshop at 269 11th Avenue this weekend. 

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week Afghanistan's election heads towards a June run-off, a Bangladeshi river ferry capsizes, killing at least a dozen people, a hunger-striking detained Al Jazeera journalist releases a video from a Cairo prison, and Qatar promises to amend labor laws affecting more than a million migrant workers.

You probably love the internet, considering you're spending your Saturday afternoon on your laptop watching documentaries about exotic animal traders. We love the internet too. And that's why we're stoked David-Michel Davies and Neil Vogel of the Webby Awards and Katherine Oliver of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment came together in 2008 to form Internet Week, a celebration of all things digital that breaks down and explores all of the incredibly cool and crazy shit that’s going on between all those zeroes and ones.

For the fourth year in a row, VICE is taking part in the action. With VICE News, Motherboard, the Creator's Project, and Munchies, we're delivering a series of panels discussing everything from journalism and the documentary form to the future of cryptocurrencies. To top it all off, VICE Media co-founder Suroosh Alvi is delivering the keynote address. It's going to be crazy, so watch the livestream or buy a badge and head down to Internet Week HQ at Metropolitan Pavilion (125 W 18 Street) to watch the panels. We can't wait to see you there!

Monday May 19
11 to 11:25 AM
Journalism and the Documentary Format with VICE News
Participants: Danny Gold (VICE News), Richard Wolffe (MSNBC), Justine Simons (New York Times), and Duy Linh Tu (Columbia School of Journalism)

Tuesday May 20
3 to 3:25 PM
Just Add -coin: The Future of Cryptocurrency with Motherboard           
Participants: Alex Pasternack (Motherboard), Ben Doernberg (Dogecoin Foundation), Charles Hoskinson (Ethereum), Margaux Avedisian (Ripple)

Wednesday May 21
11 to 11:25 AM
Creating New Canvases: How Technology Is Enabling New Forms of Art
Participants: Jennifer Wen Ma, Rafael Rozendaal, Jake Levine (Digg), Annie Dietz (The Creators Project)

3:30 to 3:55 PM 
Blog Is My Sous Chef: The Internet as Culinary School
Participants: Flynn McGarry (Dining with Flynn), Helen Hollyman (Munchies), Amanda Hesser (Food52), Adam Tiberio (Tiberio Meats)

Thursday May 22
4:30 to 4:55 PM 
Closing Keynote from VICE Media co-founder Suroosh Alvi

Children of the 90s didn't have to look far if they wanted to learn about Siamese twins, incest, and out-of-control teens. The Clinton years saw an incredible array of TV talk show hosts of varying degrees of respectability—Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich—and if your parents didn’t monitor what you watched too closely, you could spend a lot of time learning facts of life that would never be taught in your health class.

Like many future gay men, my favorite talk show host of the bunch was Sally Jessy Raphael. From 1983 to 2002, the motherly redhead hosted Sally, a popular daytime talk show that discussed gay-to-straight conversion therapy, Jews for Jesus, the Church of Satan, paternity tests, and a variety of other topics that seemed geared toward 13-year-olds eager to learn about the wider world.

I would rush home after school to catch Raphael, whose particular talent was that she never seemed to patronize or judge any of her guests. When she read paternity tests, you could tell she never judged the mamas or the potential papas. Whether she was discussing child support battles or a man who was putting his dick up butts for money, she never came off as patronizing. She resembled John Waters urging Divine to eat dog shit, if Waters was a grandma with red hair. This has made Raphael an icon to gay men of all ages—though she hasn’t courted her homosexual fan base directly, a lot of us feel incredibly close to her.

“You were an integral part of my childhood, and also sort of taught my entire family that my being gay was perfectly normal. I owe you a debt of gratitude,” one gay fan tweeted at her last fall.

So when Patrick Hartz, who has been Raphael’s manager and producer for nearly four years, invited me to her house last month to talk to her about her life and career, I could barely contain myself. Hartz understood my excitement, because he’s another one of Raphael’s gay fanboys. When he was studying at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania in 2000, he scored an internship on her show, which was basically a dream come true.

“I always wanted to work in talk and I was so adamant about working on her show because I was addicted to it and I grew up with it—I loved her,” he said. 

Despite Raphael’s cult-like fan base, she has rarely appeared on television since Sally ended. This year Hartz and his production company Spinboi Films—which he owns with his partner Jason Fine—are trying to resurrect the 79-year-old’s career with Sally Jessy Rides, a new webseries from the gay network Logo where Sally travels on various modes of transportation as she interviews gay icons. On the first episode, Perez Hilton taught Raphael how to use a stripper pole on a party bus. “Imagine there’s some sexy music playing,” Hilton said before he ripped off his jacket and then started humping the pole and rubbing his butt on Raphael’s lap. Afterward, Raphael asked Hilton in-depth questions about how he became a blogger.

“We loved talking with Sally so much!!!” Perez Hilton wrote about the encounter later. “We got some exercise in on the stripper pole and we even got to show off pictures of our totes adorable son, Perez Jr.!!!”

The show’s concept didn’t work on every episode. When Raphael tried to interview GBF star Paul Iacono on a mechanical bull, she struggled to climb onto it and eventually settled on interviewing him at a table. 

When we met at her apartment she was dressed like a society matron—black dress shirt, silver necklace, and (of course) her iconic red glasses—but had the blunt speaking style of a construction worker or old-timey newspaperman.

It was a little incongruous, then, when I discovered that Raphael’s home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side looks gayer than a RuPaul’s Drag Race reunion hosted on Fire Island on the Fourth of July. Raphael decorates her house with figurines and gaudy painted portraits of her family, and mirrors cover her downstairs bathroom from floor to ceiling. Raphael attributes the mirrors to the former owner, Jerry Herman, the composer of Hello Dolly! and La Cage Aux Folles, but takes credit for the figurines and books on the second floor, where she keeps several first-edition Mark Twains and children’s novels from the 30s and 40s that have titles like The Perfect Daddy. The books, Raphael told me, “represented a world that did not exist ever—dad went to work, mom wore an apron, and the kids were perfect.”

She grew up in a working-class family in Pennsylvania, but Raphael has always been connected to show business—her mother performed as a dancer, and her father worked for the Orpheum Circuit, a chain of vaudeville theaters. Raphael scored her first show business job at age six when she starred on the NBC radio show Quiz Kids.

Perhaps because of those roots, Raphael never saw show business as anything but a job like any other. “It’s a working-class thing,” she said. “Do whatever they’re buying—not very glamorous, but that’s the way it is.”

She began her career as a journalist when working for a wire service or newspaper was still a working-class profession. She attended the Columbia School of Journalism, received a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Puerto Rico, and covered Central and South America for the Associated Press and Reuters.

During the 60s and 70s, Raphael bounced around from journalism job to journalism job, taking whatever she could get. After she broke up with her first husband, Andrew Vladimir, she moved from Puerto Rico to Miami with her new partner, Karl Soderlund, her two daughters, and a foster son. From 1969 to 1974, she hosted a morning television show in Miami, and when that gig ended, she moved to New York, where she hosted a radio advice show. Talk show legend Phil Donahue heard Raphael and then helped her land her own talk show. According to Hartz, they filmed a test version of Sally—originally titled The Sally Jessy Raphael Show—in Saint Louis, and the show was an instant hit. For the next several years, Raphael traveled between New York and Saint Louis until the show moved to New Haven, Connecticut, and then to New York, where she taped the program for its last 12 years. 

Raphael envisioned the show as a continuation of her work as a journalist. For 15 years, Raphael spoke to experts about topics rarely covered by mainstream media in the 80s and 90s such as breast cancer and troubled children. “People got a feeling of community and learned something,” Raphael said. “That was 15 years of broadcasting, and that’s not bad.”

Things changed in the late 1990s, when, Raphael said, her producers decided to chase the ratings of trashier talk shows like The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, forcing Raphael to host episodes where she sent kids to boot camp and revealed the results of paternity tests on air. Raphael hated these episodes, although her gay fans love them to this day.

“Wasn’t there anything about the paternity tests or boot camps that you did like?” I asked her. “You were very good at them.”

“Yes. Thank you. That’s nice of you, hipster,” she said, mocking in the manner of a mom telling a 16-year-old boy to cover his boxer shorts and pull up his pants. Raphael hated what she sees as the show’s descent into sleaze, because she despises it when people capitalize on the problems of others. 

But though talk shows during that era trafficked in trashiness, they also gave a voice to the lower classes who were rarely seen on TV. “On talk shows, whatever their drawbacks, the proles get to talk,” cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote in The Nation in 1996. “The rest of the time they're told in a thousand ways to shut up. By any honest reckoning, we need more noise, not less.”

In retrospect, Raphael thinks she could have averted the show’s so-called decline if she pulled an Oprah—by hiring lawyers and insisting she own the show and take on a producing role—when the show’s ratings were rising. But, Raphael told me, her working-class attitude prevented her from staging this ballsy move.

“I have worked my whole life getting a paycheck on Friday,” Raphael said. “I was perfectly happy with having a salary and doing that, because I thought that people would be responsible—it turned out that people at NBC Universal were not responsible.”

In 2003 they canceled the show because of lows ratings. Although Raphael’s procession of teen sluts and other misfits was in many ways the predecessor of today’s reality TV shows, Raphael believes that those programs are what’s wrong with television today.

“If you’re talking about people, people don’t change—I can give you a Justin Bieber through the ages. Television changed,” she said. “Television thinks it’s going to lose its money, and it deserves to—most of it. They go to these cheap forms of entertainment called reality shows, which have as much reality as me going for the heavyweight champion of the world.” 

Raphael has spent much of her time post-Sally with her two adult children and her two teenage grandkids. She’s also been busy with Camp Sally, a summer camp for troubled children that she runs out of her home in Upstate New York. Originally, she only let underprivileged children attend the camp, but now she mostly takes in spoiled rich kids, who she finds are often more fucked up than their impoverished peers.

“The reason for that is over-privileged children, many times, have a sense of entitlement and they become brats,” Raphael said. “I’m a very strict disciplinarian so I frighten them the first day. You would say, They will never come back. Why wouldn’t they come back? They’ve got somebody like me telling them what to do—they love it. Children love discipline!”

Raphael thinks that television needs discipline and guidance as well. She wishes the US government would copy France, where Raphael lives part-time, and the UK by funding journalism and entertainment rather than letting the market decide which shows succeed and which fail. Raphael wishes it were different, and told me she loves that France has a channel for classical music.

“Can you see trying to sell that in America? Doing a music video for Beethoven’s Fifth?” she asked me. “Well it’s there [in France], and it’s on, and I’m pretty sure the cultural administration pays for that kind of thing.” 

Despite her grievances with American TV, Raphael hasn’t given up on the medium. In fact, she has spent the last decade laboring toward a comeback. “I started working when I was about six. I think that becomes a habit that you always go to work every day,” she said. “It’s wonderful not to work, but you kind of miss it. You miss the adventure of making people laugh or talking to people or helping.”

She’s developed at least two other shows besides Sally Jessy Rides. Raphael’s favorite failed pilot, 2011’s I’m Still Sally, parodied the reality shows Raphael hates. Raphael was surprised nobody picked up the show, but from the few clips on YouTube it’s pretty clear why networks passed. In “Sally Spoofs ‘The Jersey Shore,’” she appears as Sally J, a Snookie clone who wears sunglasses and a tight black dress, and says, “I want to get my drink on, so I say to my boo Karl, whom I call K Wow, ‘It’s time for us to get smashed and suck face all night!” The show has some camp value—it’s sort of funny to watch Raphael try to act—but the jokes fall flat.

Raphael, though, blames the pilot’s failure on ageism. “America has an age problem,” she said. “Gay people don’t, but America does.”

Raphael got her current show thanks to her gay fanbase. She regularly watches and livetweets RuPaul’s Drag Race, which brought her to Logo’s attention. “Spinboi Films saw an opportunity there and pitched the Sally Jessy Rides concept to them,” Hartz said. “They commissioned five webisodes and are determining whether or not to order more.”

For the first time in her career, Raphael is consciously courting her gay fans, though it may feel odd to her to go after a demographic like that. The way the entertainment industry treats gays as a discrete segment of the market goes against what Raphael has thought about gays since she met her parents’ homosexual friends.

“I just [see] people,” she said. “I never thought about it, and still don’t unless somebody comes and says, ‘Look, I’m gay!’” That attitude is part of the reason gay men love her so much—but she told me her status as a hero to homosexuals may come from a deeper identification.

“I was expecting to be a decent reporter and to do a good show, and to earn money and not to be famous, but to be a working journalist. Whether it was radio, print, television, I just wanted to be a journalist,” Raphael told me. “But maybe [gays related to] me being a minority when I did my shows—I was the only woman on the air, on radio, on station after station. That’s rejection. That’s having a hard time—gays have always had a hard time.”

Follow Mitchell Sunderland and Matthew Leiftheit on Twitter. 

Another week, more GIFs. Here they are. 

GIFs by Daniel Stuckey

Despite being in the middle of supposed peace negotiations, South Sudan is on the verge of widespread famine and genocide. We knew this months ago, as all signs were evident, which is why we sent Tim Freccia and Robert Young Pelton to shoot a documentary and write and photograph an entire issue of the magazine on the topic. Read it, watch it, and be grateful you aren't starving and fending off murderous guerilla rebel armies who will rape and burn your family and loot their corpses.

Donald Sterling cried like a big stinky racist and reptilian humanoid girl on AC360. Then the troubled LA Clippers owner went on to negate whatever barely measurable levels of sympathy his crocodile tears managed to muster by saying he pretty much wasn't sorry for any of it. His wife, who may end up with 50 percent of the team, also seems like a terrible person who the people that actually do real work on the Clippers would never want in charge.

This doodlebug “trail running evangelist” put on some Google Glass, ran his ass through the grass, and than talked about all the wet dreams he's had while wearing Google Glass along with a bunch of other people for an ad. Motherboard wrote about it without really making fun of them because that was completely unnecessary.

Thankfully the FCC delayed ruining the entire internet, at least for now, by choosing to “advance” the proposed rules on net neutrality by reviewing them for 120 days. Can't wait to see what happens to the FCC's website if they decide to fuck everyone over! 

A couple dudes in Nanchang, China, got to experience the pain of childbirth for a few seconds by getting shocked, or something. All of them were giant wimps, with most giving up before the 30-second mark because the truth is that men are giant babies and have no tolerance for anything.

Beyonce's sister Solange hit Jay-Z in the face, or at least tried to, in an elevator. Noisey had some theories as to why, but one thing is for sure: You got 100 problems now, HOVA! 

HR Giger, one of the most prolific and singularly horrifying artists of his generation, died at the age of 74. We interviewed him a few years back, and you should read it if you care about anything dark and creepy.

The Catholic Church's worldwide parishioner count is so low that the Pope announced that they would baptize animals, minerals, vegetables, and aliens. 

All the dudes on the DL in the NFL pretended to be offended when Michael Sam kissed his boyfriend on national TV after being the first openly gay player drafted into the NFL by the Rams. 

This awesome cat saved a boy from this asshole dog who started grabbing his leg and attacking him.

Follow Rocco Castoro and Daniel Stuckey on Twitter. 

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Chiara Tringali

My favorite friends are strange people. While well-adjusted people have their merits, they are ordinary by definition and rarely surprising—and by rarely surprising, I don’t mean they rarely show up at your apartment with cake and punch. I mean they hardly ever create moments of ingenious idiocy that simultaneously blow your mind and lower your brain-cell count. I live for these moments and cling to people who create them with ease.

My buddy Bas is one of those people. Our friendship is sporadic, but he never fails to shock me. A few weeks before I smoked pot for the first time when I was 14, I met Bas at a local mosque my dad had dragged me to for Friday prayers. I rarely attended mosque, so I tried to feel out the other kids. My friend Shoob introduced Bas as a bass player, and I told him I play the drums. “You could be, like, a rhythm section,” Shoob said. We talked for a few minutes about instruments and metal bands, and then Bas said something weird. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember walking toward my dad’s car thinking, Wow, that kid is fucking weird. My dad stopped forcing me to go to mosque after that night, and a month later, I moved away to another state to live with my mom, but that wasn’t the last time I heard Bas say something weird.  

Throughout the next decade, I bumped into Bas and blazed with him about ten times. At each smoke sesh, he seemed progressively crazier. Once he repeatedly asked for milk like it was morphine, and another time he explained how Super Mario Bros. is a metaphor for the British Raj tearing up India. He went off on a tangent, making less sense every second, and then, right before I completely tuned out, he said something thought provoking: “The toadstools are little brown people serving Princess Daisy—the white monarch. The toadstools have little Aladdin vests on. Even their little mushroom heads look like turbans.” Somehow, Bas made symbolic, historical sense out of a video game about two Italian plumbers who fight an evil turtle for gold coins. His crazy rant was the most brilliant, far-fetched analysis of the classic video game I had ever heard.

More than a decade after the first time we met, fate and necessity made Bas and me bandmates. Bas needed someone to fill in on the drums for a few of his band’s shows, but after a few gigs, I became a permanent member. As the rhythm section, Bas and I had to lock brains like never before. We could play together, because we had more fluid synergy as bandmates than as friends—talking to Bas was like hearing someone recite an exquisite corpse aloud, but playing music with him was like telepathy. We clicked right into place every time we picked up our instruments.

During that time, Bas and I spent a lot of time smoking weed and listening to reggae. Bas’s knowledge of old reggae is only second to his knowledge of classic metal, and he regularly told me his strange theories about both genres. When he went off on a lecture, I usually tuned him out, but one night when I wasn’t listening, he demonstrated his most brilliant and ridiculous discovery.

On that night, a bunch of us were smoking in my living room while Bas sat at the computer, playing songs on YouTube. We ignored him until he dropped an immaculate reggae rendition of Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose.” We laughed and shouted props to Bas, but he was too busy dishing out the hits on YouTube to pay attention to us. 

In about 90 minutes, Bas's reggaefied selection took us all the way from Johnny Cash to Radiohead—he proved you can find a reggae cover of any song on YouTube by searching for a song with the keyword reggae. Along with the strong body of reggae covers of top 40 songs from the weed-loving 60s and 70s, there is a cover of A-ha’s “Take on Me” and an unfortunate cut of “It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday.”

After hearing Bas’s impromptu DJ set, I can’t listen to the original version of any song without thinking about how there’s probably a ridiculous reggae cover of the tune online. A couple of times, I dropped “Kiss from a Rose” in the middle of a DJ set and watched everyone slowly smile as they recognized the tune. I learned that people find it more pleasurable to hear the reggae version of a familiar song than to listen to the original track.

If I didn’t know Bas, I’d still be listening to the original version of “Purple Rain” instead of this amazing reggae version. Bas spews a lot of crazy, incoherent shit, but sometimes when he arrives at his point, he sounds like a genius. I wonder how many other gems he spewed out while I was tuning him out for all those years. 

Follow T. Kid on Twitter. 

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

If you attended school or smoked crack in the last 29 years, you probably graduated from D.A.R.E., the drug-prevention program that taught kids to “just say no.” According to D.A.R.E.’s website, 75 percent of US school districts and more than 43 countries teach their curriculum. This would be great news if the program actually helped prevent addiction.

Since police officers first taught D.A.R.E. over 30 years ago, the American Psychological Association, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Government Accountability Office have critiqued the organization’ tactics. The program lost government funding in 1998, but since 2009, D.A.R.E. has used the acclaimed keepin' it REAL curriculum, a Penn State-developed drug-education program targeting middle schoolers. Keepin’ it REAL has been tested on 7,000 students and—unlike D.A.R.E.—has been included on SAMHSA's National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices. Students who completed keepin’ it REAL were less likely to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes and weed.

This is nice to read about, but do we really want D.A.R.E. implementing any more drug-education curriculums? Studies prove D.A.R.E. has failed in the past, and behind those studies are students who were promised a good drug eductaion but instead found themselves addicted to drugs only a few years later. To learn more about the story behind the data, I sat down with several drug addicts from across America who graduated from D.A.R.E. to learn more about how the classes failed them. 

VICE: What about D.A.R.E. sticks out?
Shorty: We all sat on the floor while people demonstrated people smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. It scared me a little. I was afraid that maybe the first time I tried anything, I would die. They told us how addictive crack, cocaine, and heroin are—the statistics, the numbers, the probability of becoming addicted after the first hit or dose. You know what that made me wanna do? Smoke crack, snort cocaine, and do a dose of heroin to see if I could beat the statistics. I did it all.

What would have gotten through to you—if anything could?
I don't think anything would have gotten through to me. I had an uncle who died of a drug overdose around the time I learned about D.A.R.E.—even that didn't stop me from wanting to try. I needed to take the risk and experience it myself. Others will do drugs because of a lack of education or because of peer pressure.

Did anything about D.A.R.E. help you?
Cliff: D.A.R.E. had a volunteer speaker from a correctional facility speak about his addiction. I felt like I had a connection with him because we grew up in the same environment. I felt having a police officer teach this program was a good idea, because they have experience in the field of drug abuse and they see it every day.

Did your drug education fail you?
I think my school had several resources that could have helped with substance abuse issues. I never [sought] out any help, because I did not care at the time.

What eventually got through to you?
I became sober once I got arrested for a theft charge. I was admitted to treatment several times and eventually started going to N.A. meetings. 

What do you remember about D.A.R.E.?
Travis: I remember them really pushing us to believe that only losers used drugs. The programs were a scared-straight approach [that] appeals to people who aren't addicts. The biggest thing that sticks out is the emphasis on just say no.  We practiced saying, “No.” I was on board with saying no to drugs. I think there was a really big emphasis on abstinence. They never showed us the realities of drugs and alcohol. We all saw a black lung and looked at a liver with cirrhosis, but the effects on your personal life were skipped over almost entirely.

How did you fall into drugs?
I was always curious, but between my religious upbringing and the support of my straight-edge friends, I was able to stave it off until I was an adult and out of my hometown. I would fool around with [cough medicine] and prescription medication, but I didn't make it a habit until I smoked weed with my brother-in-law for the first time. I had nothing else holding me back—I was unemployed at the time, and he asked me if I wanted to try it with him. I didn't hesitate. Every time with every [substance] was different. Sometimes it was to fit in. Sometimes I chased it. The first time I used pills, I immediately felt like things were ok.

What could have stopped you from trying?
Nobody could stop me. I did what I wanted. I ditched friends who objected to my use and made new friends who I could get drugs from or who could help me find them. I had countless interventions and dangerous experiences. I picked up a dealer once who was covered in blood and took him to the dollar store to get a new t-shirt. I drove drunk and high even though I always said I wouldn't. 

Did you think you would ever try drugs?
Madison: Looking back, I was certain I would never use at the time, because I was scared of getting in trouble and never thought I would be exposed to drugs of any kind. I felt the same way about alcohol. I was incredibly naive about the ease of access and prominent existence of drugs in middle and high schools.

Do you think your education didn’t teach you about addiction?
The mention of the disease of addiction was nonexistent. The fact that addiction is deadly to the body, mind, and spirit was overlooked. I was shown pictures of strung out teens who skipped school and stole from their mom's purse or sister's piggybank. I knew that would never be me—I was a high-functioning active drug-addict and alcoholic. It took me a long time to admit I had a problem simply because I had a bachelors in accounting from UD, a high-paying job, a nice house, and plenty of opportunity.

Did you feel your questions about drugs and alcohol were answered in D.A.R.E.?
Shaundra: No. Not at all. It's lead by authority, which kind of gives you a scare tactic. I think it'd be more effective to incorporate real live recovering addicts, such as myself, to tell their stories, if you really want to teach kids the truth about that lifestyle.

Were you curious about drugs growing up?
No. I was never really curious about drugs growing up. I think what happened is I had [told] my dad that I'm bisexual and he kind of disowned me and kicked me out when I was 16—I had previously been bullied about this at school. A few days or weeks later, my best friend asked if I wanted to try marijuana. She had never done it before either, but we wanted to see what all the fuss was about. In hindsight, I think my first time was very much [due] to peer pressure.

What would have gotten through to you?
I'm not sure if anything would have stopped me from trying it, and once I tried it, I believe I was hooked because I have an addictive-personality type. I think the only thing that would have deterred me would have been if the future me would have miraculously traveled back in time to tell me the heartache it would lead to.

You took D.A.R.E., correct?
Dustin: I did in elementary school. The issue was I didn't encounter drugs until later and all the D.A.R.E. stuff I learned had washed away.

Why did you use drugs?
Lack of structure in my childhood and the genetic disposition. Both my father and mother are addicts, and my brother uses meth IV. Culturally, I grew up in an environment where drug use didn't have a negative connotation. I never developed proper coping mechanisms to deal with the stresses. Drugs are an easy replacement coping mechanism. 

What do you think about discussing addiction in drug education?
Addiction and substance abuse is typically a symptom of another issue. Everyone uses for different reasons. Being able to link consequences directly to use and to take away the glorification aspect is something that has to happen. Unfortunately, most children can't understand the path from decision to consequence at an early age.

First things first, do you remember anything about D.A.R.E.?
Leandra: D.A.R.E was the program with the dog back then, McGruff or something like that. They were teaching us about drugs and peer pressure, things of that nature. We earned a red and gold ribbon that said, “Say no to drugs.” We learned the street names and effects of drugs.

What would you have changed about drug education to suit you better?
One of the main things I think the program didn't do was make it real to me. I was young, yes, but I didn't know anyone who was or had ever been an addict, so it was like it just couldn't happen to me. I didn't learn that it could be anyone at anytime. For those who are not or do not personally know someone who is an addict, I tell them to not be so quick to judge, because they don't know why that person is like that. No one wakes up one morning and decides to be an addict. It is a long, dark road full of pain and heartache, compounded by a string of bad decisions, which leads to more suffering.

Screenshot via When Women Refuse
Deanna Zandt started a Tumblr on Monday to prove that Elliot Rodger’s shooting rampage at UCSB was anything but an isolated incident.

In case you’ve been having a few hermitty days of ignoring the internet: protests against systemic misogyny and violence against women are going viral. Much of this social media discourse has been organized under the hashtag #YesAllWomen, which is a direct response to the common retort from men that “not all men” are rapists, perpetrators of sexual assault, or misogynists. Women are using the hashtag to tell their all-too-common stories of routine harassment, sexual assault, and violence, a campaign that caught fire after Rodger went on a shooting rampage that he blamed on his “involuntary celibacy.”

The Tumblr, When Women Refuse, details stories of horrific violence against women as told by the news media. The stories frequently describe men who lose their temper when women deny them their perceived right to sex, as Rodger did. Zandt, a media technologist and author, says we need to move away from focusing on incidents like these as isolated, freak situations.

“With #yesallwomen and When Women Refuse, in the case of structural inequity of gender, I’m hoping that we can kind of get past these flashpoint moments of [gasps] ‘That’s sexism, over there!’ And actually look at this as a structural issue,” Zandt says.

“In the wake of the discussion happening after the shootings and #yesallwomen, men were still digging in and saying ‘No, really, its just that one guy over there.’” (It’s not just that one guy: Rodger was part of an online community of anti-pick-up artists who shared similar sentiments about women).

Saying “not all men” is to derail the conversation and make it about the individual self as opposed to the wider systemic violence that is happening. To use that argument is to redirect the conversation to solely address one’s own thoughts and feelings, and not the very real issue at hand—which, simply put, is that women are scared of men because we fear the violence they are capable of. We’re scared of being killed.

“A lot of the responses I’ve been getting, on Twitter and elsewhere… [people are shocked]. Unless you’re working in this space every day, you probably don’t realize the epidemic of gender-based violence as a widespread cultural problem that we have,” Zandt says.

The idea for the Tumblr came to Zandt after journalist Kate Harding began collecting stories detailing other misogyny-induced violence against women who rejected men for a story she was working on. Harding said it was cool if Zandt made a Tumblr, too. The blog has received 71,000 unique visits in the first 24-hours. Zandt enlisted four other women to help her out. There are now five of them caring for and posting to the site.

As for #yesallwomen, it was trending on Sunday and Monday, and the discussions surrounding it are still going strong. According to a social media analytics platform called Sysomos, the hashtag has been used over 2 million times since the day of the Rodger massacre. With such a huge amount of momentum behind this campaign, I asked Zandt what kind of staying power she thinks this movement could have.

Screenshot via Sysomos
“You know, there’s a nerd discussion right now about the lifecycle of a hashtag. Generally, hashtags don’t last very long. I think we’ll see it for a while, and I think it’ll come back as a reminder.”

She says after the first media surge is over, hashtags can live in our collective internet consciousness as cultural reminders that covered a particular ground in our wide-reaching discussions online. Aside from that, they can live on as signs of solidarity, much like the way they start.

“What we are doing when we participate in these movements is we are doing digital consciousness raising. We are looking at each other and saying, ‘You are not alone. This doesn’t just happen to you. You are not crazy for thinking that it’s fucked up.’

“That, on its own, is such a hugely critical piece for making movements work.”

For now, Zandt has chosen only to post stories of violence faced by women who refuse sex as reported by news outlets. She isn’t posting personal stories because media organizations are generally seen to be more credible than an individual’s tale, and can act as an authenticator—though she does have a call for submissions on her website.

“Men in these conversations will actually respect the Washington Post or even a local TV station more than they respect or believe a woman’s story. But if it’s been in the news and there’s a police report behind it, or something along those lines, men particularly are more likely to believe it.”

Even after the hype dies down, Zandt says she’ll keep up with When Women Refuse in order to provide a resource/repository for journalists and others who are looking to know. And when the story dies down and the media stops reporting on the entrenched hatred of women that constantly leads to their rapes and deaths, Zandt thinks this movement will help fuel the fight against violent misogyny.

“A lot of people are of the mindset that we don’t really need feminism anymore. As far as the actual cultural moment, though, I think we are starting to take baby steps into reopening this issue in a mainstream context.”


@sarratch

Los Angeles is no stranger to visitors from New York who show up in the early spring like shipwrecked lunatics, totally thrashed from the ruthless hell of winter. You usually have to speak to these people slowly and quietly and take small steps as you, like, walk through a park with them, as though you’re gently nudging back into humanity slaves you discovered chained up naked inside a shipping container.

But when Brooklyn-based filmmakers Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo showed up in LA last year, they were ready to let it rip, having already worked together on Shooting Serrano, a VICE documentary about the legendarily transgressive Cuban artist and a handful of other projects. (Their pilot for Every Woman came later.) More importantly, they had figured out how to outfox NYC’s seasonal brutality by shooting scenes, with friends Karley Sciortino and Ry Russo-Young, for a hyper-queer, spiritual, comic webseries called Be Here Nowish, which they were bringing to Los Angeles.

In between their sublets, Natalia and Alexandra stayed with me and decided to rope me into the show. I started writing and developing the story with them. Quickly, they discovered that a hobby that had started as a lark among a few friends—Alexandra and Natalia were also the series’s co-stars, because who else was gonna get naked and work for free?—had become a legit project.

One year later, the show emerged. If I described the awesome plot in detail, I would be a real weird braggy A-hole. Instead, Natalia, Alexandra, and I decided to have a discussion about the show with Adam Carpenter, a Los Angeles comedian who plays Alexandra’s love interest later in the series.

Be Here Nowish had a soft launch last month and now emerges in its entirety, picking up where the main characters, fuck-ups in their own right, left off, finding themselves in Los Angeles among a group of freaky devotees of a guru played by Kyp Malone from TV on the Radio.

VICE: Adam, how did you get involved in this project?
Adam Carpenter: My friend Sam told Alexandra about me. Then she came to my house, I made her pancakes, and I think we agreed on a 30 percent stake in all future revenue.
Alexandra Roxo: I was scared to eat the breakfast 'cause I was vegan and gluten-free at the time, but he had cooked it, and I ate the bacon and pancakes as a gesture of like, “Please be in our show.” It was that moment of Are we going to work together, or are we not going to work together? If I come in after you’ve already cooked me all this food and I decline it, then that would be not really setting a friendly bar.
Adam: I wouldn’t have cared, but I appreciate your fear.
Alexandra: It was a symbolic gesture.
Adam: I mean, I was going to eat breakfast anyway.
Alexandra: Your involvement started right with shooting a tantric sex scene in your apartment, and you were like, Cool, I’ll have this awkward sex scene with this girl I just met in my apartment.
Adam: On a break, I called my then girlfriend just like, "Oh, I’m just having simulated sex with a girl I met yesterday.” She was like, “All right, talk to you later.”

Adam, are you personally involved in any of the kooky spiritual stuff that’s going on in Los Angeles?
Adam: Does Pilates count?

No. Sorry.
Adam: I’ve gotten into a quiet research into the Eckhart Tolle kind of stuff. That’s popular in library audio books, so I listen to those things. I get a little annoyed by the verbiage used, but I’m still on that sort of personal quest towards not identifying myself so much with being funny and to just enjoy being happier more, which is a slow process.

What do you mean about quiet research?
Adam: Well, I don’t want to go to something like the boot camp that we parodied—I don’t want to have group elation towards self-understanding. It just doesn’t resonate with me. I feel like I would personally be out of it because I’m either judging the language being used or I’m trying to get laid by the hot girl in the Lululemon pants.

Natalia, I remember one of the first times you and I hung out as friends, like six or seven years ago, you had a book sticking out of your purse. We were sitting at the bar, and I asked what you were reading. You were super embarrassed, stuffing it back into your bag. You told me people didn’t really like to talk about this type of stuff. I believe it was an Eckhart Tolle book.
Natalia: Maybe it was A New Earth? I remember that, because, yeah, it’s interesting. At that time I didn’t really have a group of friends at all that were interested in exploring these things and different parts of a psyche, and I was doing it on my own. That’s when I went through my first peyote ceremony, and I told some people about it, and they just thought it was weird or didn’t get it. At that time, I was kind of like, All right, I think I need to keep this to myself. Nobody understands. I’m just going to do it on my own. I was meeting people in those groups, but we had nothing in common other than the fact we were exploring these things together, so I wouldn’t ever hang out with them outside of that context. Then I met you and was like, Oh, she’s into that too. That’s how we became friends.

And cut to last spring, when I’m in a leather bondage dress and you’re in your underwear on my roof. Adam, did you know much beforehand about how this show was being put together?
Adam: I kind of had an idea of where my character came in, and what had gone on but in a broad sense. I didn’t know about all the interactions.
Natalia: I feel like that first scene that we did with you, Adam, which was the tantric sex scene—it was kind of crazy that we started with that one. There wasn’t a lot of work or context for your character. It was just really funny physical comedy, and then I think the second scene we did was the lawn scene, which I love because I feel like your character is borderline creepy, but also very earnest. I love the moment of you guys doing the mantras together.
Adam: I think I did research the night before and just was looking for these catchphrases of sorts. So I watched like two hours of meditation things, some amazing shit. That Kim Eng, do you know her? She does a daily meditation. Her voice is like Delilah on the East Coast—she’s got the fourth-biggest radio program in the country. She was talking about how our bodies are just flutes, but the essence of us is the holes in the flute. When we allow ourselves to blow free, that is when the musicality comes out of us and that’s our true essence. Then she starts talking about the things that get into your flute hole. I was just like OMG, this is too rich. Then I kind of understood where you guys were coming from, to an extent.
Alexandra: Well, we don’t like to think of it as making fun of—we like to think of it as finding the humor in.

You guys know that I was worried the show might seem offensive in certain  ways, because I live in Los Angeles and sometimes work in spiritual or magical communities. But the thing is, all of us actually walk this talk. We all practice this, so it’s totally fine when you’re of it. You can sit there and laugh because it’s awesome and also ridiculous, like I did when my girlfriend’s mom performed an exorcism on our dog over the weekend. She has her hand over the Chihuahua like, “I now bind the entity of jealousy. I now bind the entity of fear. I now bind the entity of destruction, and I release it into the light.” My girlfriend and I were cracking up, but we were also really grateful that the dog was being exorcised because he can’t keep pissing in the house like this.
Alexandra: That’s the interesting thing. I think Natalia and I sometimes wonder: Is it just the two of us who find so much humor in our own practices? Because we can be really serious, and we meditate together a few times a week—it’s a part of our work—but then I’ll be filling a corner with salt or putting all of my ex’s presents and things away, closing them up, and Natalia will be like, “What are you doing? Where is all the salt in the kitchen? I’m trying to make dinner, and you used up all the salt.”

That’s hilarious.
Alexandra: And it’s something we can laugh about, but I actually do take it seriously that I got a message from my guides and they told me that in order to move on in my new relationships, I had to get all of the things out of my room from old ones. I feel like the interweaving between how that naturally exists in your daily life can be funny, and how it can also be sacred is also important. Finding that balance is what we’re trying to say in the show, too. 

Follow Liz Armstrong, Alexandra Roxo, Natalia Leite, and Adam Carpenter on Twitter.

Ukraine went to the polls this weekend to choose a new president, but pro-Russia separatists in the east did everything they could to stop voters from taking part. The stakes are especially high because while the rebels deem the interim government illegal, the Ukrainian authorities are desperate to see a strong people's mandate bestowed on a new leader who is able to quell the rebellion.

VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky visited a polling station in Donetsk that was actually running, as people cast their votes and the fate of the country was decided. Pro-European businessman and "chocolate king" Petro Poroshenko was later declared the election winner. Poroshenko said that his first goal in office would be to resolve the crisis in eastern Ukraine, which so far is not showing any sign of ending.

Photo by Andi Schmied

You know how you hate Facebook’s constant, inevitably unhelpful “updates”? Imagine being 80 years old, learning how to use a computer, then having Facebook mess you around while you’re just trying to leave an overly-earnest comment on your granddaughter’s graduation photo. For many older adults, the pace at which technology moves is prohibitive. They can’t keep up and don’t want to, so many give up.

Or at least, they used to. The elderly are getting more tech savvy, participating in the Internet in record numbers. According to an Ofcom report, the number of adults over 65 years of age using tablets to access the Internet jumped from 5 to 17 percent between 2012 and 2013. Despite this, seniors still spend significantly less time online than younger people, and use that time to do significantly fewer things. Most adults over 65 only use the Internet to check emails and browse news websites, but abstain from more complicated online tasks like banking, streaming television, or participating in social media sites.

This is where Tapestry comes in. Andrew Dowling was working as the Director of Technology at a Fortune 100 tech company when he left in 2010, to become founder and CEO of Tapestry—an app that allows seniors to use Facebook and other social media in a simple, accessible way. The app took off, and Dowling found he had tapped into a solution to more than one problem: tech illiteracy was one thing, but what Tapestry was also helping to solve was late-life loneliness.  

Most recently, he’s developed Stitch—a “companion finding” app that some are calling “Tinder for seniors”. The app aims to set up geographically close older people for purposes as diverse as romance, activities or simple phone conversations. I caught up with the 45-year-old entrepreneur to talk about dating on your last legs.

VICE: So where did the idea for Stitch come from?
Andrew Dowling: Building the Tapestry business meant we got to spend a lot of time with older adults who were feeling very socially isolated. And while Tapestry changed many lives, it was clear that for lots of people just staying connected to your family isn't enough—they needed to find new companions.

And that's because one of the inevitabilities of aging is that your social circle gradually shrinks. Some people die, some move to Florida, some find their bodies just can't do the activities they used to. With people living longer than ever before, this means the only way to stay socially healthy is to meet new companions – but for many people at a later stage in life, that's extraordinarily difficult.

Believe it or not, for seniors loneliness is a bigger killer than smoking or obesity. There's lots of research now, which correlates social isolation with higher death rates and greater incidence of dementia. The reality is that we need to stay socially connected, if we want to stay healthy.
How will you get seniors – a typically technology-shy demographic – to use something that works in a lot of ways like Tinder, the Millennials' dream app?
We've been described as "Tinder for old people" but that's actually a bit misleading. The one thing we do take from Tinder is the idea of no unsolicited contact. Our users will only be able to be contacted by someone if it's someone they've already liked. Apart from that a lot of the things we do are very focused on the specific needs of older users, which means we're quite different from Tinder. Everything: from how we verify user identities to their preference for phone calls over chat.

What's the seniors dating climate like, currently?
We've been surprised to discover how active the dating space is for seniors. By the way, we tend not to use the word "seniors" as most baby boomers will tell you they don't identify with that word at all. Terminology is really tough in this space but we've found the term "older adult" works best.

Photo by Andi Schmied

What are some of the challenges of dating – or seeking friendship – while older?
It's a long list. Trust and authenticity is a big one, including scammers – this audience is one of the biggest targets for scammers online, and we've heard some shocking stories about their experiences on dating sites. Health considerations can be an issue, as can the limitations about what activities they can do. For the older end of the spectrum, things like whether they can drive at night or not come into play... lots of things that simply don't apply to a younger audience.

Promising to eliminate scammers from the “companion pool” seems to be a big part of the Stitch enterprise.
I'd say almost half the users we interviewed brought up their experiences with scammers on online dating sites. Someone from the other side of the country would message them and strike up a conversation, try to get to know them and then ask for money. There are a number of reasons this sort of behavior can flourish on dating sites, which means that, for us to combat it effectively, we need to do a range of things to de-incentivize the scammers and protect our real users.

Part of it is in the area of identity verification, part in how we handle the protection of user's identities and part in how we respond to these incidents when they occur. Unlike most other dating sites, we know that the biggest reason many people will be coming to Stitch is because of our promise of safety.

When is it going global then?
The trials have only just started in the Bay Area and so far we think they're going well -- we're certainly learning a lot! We don't have a set launch date for the wider market as it depends a lot on how those early trials go, but we're hoping to have the platform launched globally by the end of the year.

Thanks Andrew.

Follow Monica Heisey on Twitter

One of Rose's clients with whitening cream on her face.

Standing in a small wooden booth cluttered with brightly colored cosmetics boxes a heavily made up woman unwraps a syringe and a needle, then fills the syringe with pink cream that's been decanted from a blue packet. “You must only use a small amount, otherwise you can become albino. This is strong stuff,” she says as she pricks her customer's skin.

Rose is one of dozens of skin bleaching gurus that operate along River Road in downtown Nairobi, a hub for illicit activities that is notorious for its knock-off electronics, budget brothels, flamboyant transsexuals and petty crime. It is also known for its backstreet beauticians, like Rose, who promise clients that their treatments will make them look six years younger and ten shades lighter.

These salons have been around for a long time, and have caused a number of health scares over the years, often due to creams with high mercury content, but recently more extreme treatments have started to become popular and are causing concern amongst health officials.

The popularity of skin-bleaching injections has rocketed over the last 18 months according to Dr Pranav Pancholi, a Harvard-trained dermatologist who works at Kenya's Shah Hospital. Pranav says because it's a recent phenomenon, no one really knows what the long-term health implications are.

“The products used on the streets are not used by certified professionals” he says. “The trade in black market creams and injections is completely unregulated. There is no way of knowing just how dangerous they are.”

Rose injects Mercy, a customer, with skin whitening cream.

On River Road the skin bleaching specialists hawk their goods sitting on stools in the street or standing in the doorways of their shops, some of which are just wooden booths rammed full of small colored boxes and creams. The more ramshackle beauty salons have gaudy hand painted signs, and sit sandwiched between seedy bars, DVD sellers, and starkly lit brothels. Others are slightly more upmarket, with large glass windows and neon signs.

The sellers are all women and know how to hustle. They can be brash and aggressive, often standing outside and whispering and hissing at women who pass by to entice them into their shop.

When I first went to River Road and started to talk to people about taking photographs the sellers harassed me, asking me what I wanted, and even pushing me into a room where they could quiz me about what I was doing. They demanded over $500 to tell their story then kicked me out onto the street with dirty looks when I refused to pay it. Skin bleaching is a sensitive topic in a conservative and religious country like Kenya, and operating unlicensed salons that offer injections is against the law. It only survives though institutionalized bribery and if any of the skin bleachers get into trouble it's likely they'll need to make a hefty payout to avoid jail.

Rose shows her elbows – the only evidence of what color her skin used to be.

Rose is different to the other women I meet. Self-assured, but less aggressive. She is proud of her business and willing to show me around without extorting me for money. Under her heavy makeup her skin is thin and pale after five years of continuous whitening treatment. Her previous skin color is only hinted at by areas of darker skin around her knuckles and elbows.

At first she denies that she provides the skin bleaching injections, but after an hour of talking she tells me that she does offer the injection treatments and agrees to show me how they work.

“The injection lightens you from inside. It makes women clean,” she tells me. “If you want an even color and fast results, injecting is much better than a cream.”

The injection is expensive at $70 per shot, nearly a month’s salary for many Kenyans. “Most of my clients are wealthy and some are national celebrities,” she says. “Many are Somali or Indian. But, those ones never come to my shop. They send a driver with a photo of their skin color and I supply what they need.”

Rose laughs, “Some girls go back to their village and tell them the water of Nairobi made them lighter. There is great shame for wanting to change what God gave you.”

Rose's workplace is one of the many rickety and disorganized looking skin treatment booths. In the tiny room Rose proudly shows me her book of accounts, thick with names and numbers. She also introduces me to a customer who is waiting for her first skin bleaching injection, a giggly, outgoing woman in her mid-twenties who didn't want to be names, so I'll call her Mercy. Mercy tells me that she lives close to River Road and also sells bleach creams.

Mercy is excited about receiving the expensive treatment. As we wait for Rose to get a syringe from a nearby pharmacist she tells me that she has been using skin whitening creams for a couple of years and they have already helped to “brighten” her skin color, but she finds the process too slow.

A box of skin whitening treatment.

She says her dream is to be as white as a European and she will try anything to achieve her objective. “My husband prefers half-caste women to darker girls, and he is proud to be mine when we go to the club,” she says. “I get far more male attention now I am lighter.”

When she gets back from the pharmacy Rose carefully prepares the injection and I take a look at the treatment's packaging.
The instructions indicate that it should be applied as a cream, rather than injected. The pink liquid is described as an “exfoliating pigment erasing solution which peels off rough/tough layers of skin.”

According to the box the treatment should show visible results in one to two weeks. It comes from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it contains AHAs, or alpha hydroxy acids.

Later I show Dr Pranav a photograph of the treatment's packaging and he tells me alpha hydroxy acids are a type of corrosive compound used in chemical peels and can cause serious health problems if used incorrectly. Medical professionals don't normally inject products containing AHAs as they can cause serious infection and kill body tissue causing flesh to waste away. Pranav also explains that the black market creams and treatments used in Kenya often contain powerful steroids that cause skin to become thin and easily damaged.

Mercy cries out when the needle pricks her skin but after the injection she seems pleased that she went through with it. Grinning she gives a shrug and says, “Nairobi is very competitive and Kenyan men like women with whiter skin.”

Follow Wil Crisp on Twitter