Illustrations by Wren McDonald

“Ten minutes remaining,” the teacher cautions from between the pages of People magazine. I have four test pages to go and I'm stressed out. My heart begins to pound; I feel it beating in the crotch of my Mudd jeans. Aside from the inexplicable rash last summer, it’s the first time I’ve felt anything down there.

By the time the teacher says five minutes are left, I’m solving for circumference and full-on riding the seat. All this repositioning has broken the concentration of a classmate behind me, who kicks my chair hard and menacingly whispers, “We all know you’re farting, Meg. Stop fucking moving.” Suddenly, the bell rings with five problems to go. My stress has reaching a breaking point and so has my clit. I finish the test and come hard. I turn my test in to the teacher, who unknowingly became my first sexual partner by administering a routine unit assessment.

Since that hot and sticky summer afternoon in my middle school geometry class, stress has been my biggest turn-on. As a teen awkwardly stumbling into my sexuality, I tried to find other things that could stimulate my senses in the same way that my Geometry test had done. I’ve watched the grimiest, grainiest porn. I’ve read erotica from every Geocities site left on the internet. I’ve experimented with roleplay from the doctor-patient scenario to fake Hanson brothers porn. No matter how hard I try, the only things that consistently get me off are situations that induce a particular type of acute anxiety.

My top three sexy situations are traffic jams, getting trapped in bad conversations, and being late to an event. (Not all stress turns me on, though. Financial obligations are a definite turn-off. I don’t derive any pleasure from being submissive to Sallie Mae to the tune of $12k, or turning in my rent check.) From that first experience of trying to finish an assessment with a rigid deadline, to the more adult struggle of battling traffic to make it to the airport, my anxiety around time is both awful and arousing. It’s like my brain and nervous system are unable to separate the two; it's a twisted form of sexual control. 

The best part about it is that when I’m masturbating and imagining these scenarios, I’m able to think and feel like I’m running late to a meeting without actually facing any of the real-world repercussions that come with tardiness. 

“Tell me how much you like it,” Forgettable Sex Partner whispers in my ear in between half-assed efforts to give me a hickey. Meanwhile, I'm more concerned with whether or not he plans to spend the night. If he does, I don’t have any breakfast food. I also worry about sleeping with my mouth open. Now he’s speeding up, grunting like my grandpa when he tries to fix the sink. Between grunts, little droplets of sweat fall onto my face. I yawn and try to contort my face into something sexy but realistically more akin to that one Edvard Munch painting. The grunts have become staccato eighth notes. He’s going to come soon. The cheap vodka has long since worn off and I’ve got to refocus. I shut my eyes and queue my go-to fantasy.

The clock is moving fast and the traffic on the freeway is stopped. The car in front of me has its left-turn signal on for no reason; the radio is playing one legal commercial after another. My breathing speeds up. “Injured? We can help,” Sam Benson’s voice booms as I grip the wheel. I’ve got fifteen minutes to make it to the airport, or I’ll for sure miss my flight home for my little sister’s wedding. I’m rubbing my clit (it’s a real Where’s Waldo for him—he can’t find it). At the airport with five minutes to go, I’m trapped in the security line behind a senile old lady who is talking in riddles to the TSA agents. Breathing harder. I make it through, running to my gate as it’s closing. Gripping the sheets, I climax.

Don't get me wrong, I still like having sex with other people, but it can be hard to focus my attention on my partner. When a seemingly non-sexual, ordinary, and unpleasant happening is your main source of arousal, it’s hard to work that into a two-person affair. It’s not like we can role-play with my partner as a flipped over semi-truck blocking my only way to work, or timing me while asking GRE questions. 

I’ve tried to talk with all types of people about it. Hoping to find a community for this form of arousal, I posted on FetLife, where only one user responded, commenting, “It helps me relive the stress of those kind of situations ;-).” They then corrected “relive” to “relieve,” which is totally different. Thanks for that, anonymous user. My doctor's response was similarly unhelpful. “To my knowledge, there isn't a medical term for these specific symptoms. Definitely with anxiety and depression, there are unusual things that the brain can do, but not everything we can explain.” I've only met one other person wasn’t shocked or weirded out by it—a friend of mine who told me that stress is a regular turn-on for her. To this day, she's the only other person I know of with a similar disposition.

I had always assumed that this stimulating sort of stress was common, just not openly discussed. My family was the Catholic use-a-thermometer-for-birth-control (after marriage) type, where sex was reproductive and the clit was still confused with the “pee hole,” resulting in a plethora of God-fearing urinary tract infections (UTIs). I definitely didn’t discuss my blossoming habit with my mom or sisters. 

After my hymen broke like a banner at the start of a marathon on that fateful day in seventh grade, I began a sexual sprint from teenage years into adulthood. Friends and I talk openly and often about sex, but mostly in relation to others. We sift through each other’s encounters with partners, but rarely talk in-depth about what was going on in our heads during those acts, or any type of intimate fantasies. Vulnerability is a natural part of the sexual mix. Revealing yourself to someone, engaging in a way that exposes fantasies or behaviors that may be publicly repressed due to shame or stigma or Catholic guilt—it’s easier to talk about a shared experience, to talk and laugh about someone taking a shit on your finger when it’s up their ass. But it’s a whole other thing to talk about what goes on when you’re essentially fucking yourself.

It’s a mindset that affords me maximum sexual fulfillment, yet I haven't found many others who can relate. Until then, my libido remains gridlocked, alone and aroused somewhere on I-75.

Follow Meg on Twitter

Mopeds and teenage boys have gone hand-in-hand since the 1960s. But in the last year UK BikeLife culture—where young scooter riders upload videos of themselves wheelie-ing down highways and through industrial estates—has exploded, and the scene’s leaders picking up thousands of YouTube and Instagram followers in the process.

These British riders are beginning to receive international attention, not least from Baltimore’s notorious 12 O’Clock Boys dirt bike club. Although they may lack the CCs of their American counterparts, they’ve done a good job of making up for it with charisma and a dedication to the underdog of the two-wheeled world: the humble moped.

In the above video, Daisy-May Hudson lets a nostalgia for the moped gangs of her teenage years get the better of her and travels to the outskirts of London to meet with the underground stars of the UK BikeLife scene. After spending some time at the Ace Cafe—an iconic hangout for bikers and petrolheads—Daisy is taken along to one of the group’s big ride-outs, where hundreds of boys take over the roads with their mopeds.

Follow Daisy-May Hudson and producer Grant Armour on Twitter.

Photo by JoAnne Garza Custer

It started with the soft wail of a baby and a Facebook post. Ingrid Wiese Hesson was strolling through the Beverly Hills branch of clothing chain Anthropologie with her six-week-old baby when he started to make those unignorable hungry-cry noises. But when she sat down near the back of the store to nurse him, she was whisked away by the store manager, who insisted she finish feeding her baby in the store’s bathroom.

Hesson left the store feeling both ashamed and outraged, so she took to Facebook. “My first time being escorted ‘off the sales floor’ for breast-feeding,” she posted on her page. Eighty-eight comments and 134 shares later, that post started a movement.

Within 24 hours, a gaggle of moms had gathered on the steps of Anthropologie, babies on their hips and breasts spilling out of their nursing bras, in solidarity with Hesson. Media crews heard the story and (forgive me) latched on, reporting that “more than 100 moms” had come together to create “Nipplegate” by staging a “nurse-in” at the store.

But the really remarkable thing didn’t happen at Anthropologie—it happened online.

Women pose with their babies in the Beverly Hills Anthropologie. Photo courtesy of Ingrid Wiese Hesson

If you showed up to the store on Wednesday at 3:00 PM, you’d have seen about 40 women (not 100, as many publications reported) lining the steps to the store. Ashley Wright, who participated in the nurse-in, said there were only eight or ten moms left when she showed up around 3:50 PM. And Hesson wasn’t there at all—in fact, she had nothing to do with organizing the event.

“I don’t know Ingrid,” said the woman who organized the nurse-in, who asked to remain anonymous because of her husband’s high-profile career. “I’m part of a mommy group on Facebook, and a woman posted about what had happened to Ingrid, and in jest, I wrote something like, ‘All lactating moms should get together and go to Anthropologie!’ I saw an episode of Modern Family where something like that happened, and I thought it was funny.”

To her surprise, the other women in the group took it totally seriously.

“They were all like, ‘Yes, let’s do it! It’s called a nurse-in!’ I didn’t know people actually did that,” the organizer told me. “People also wanted to do it in other cities at the same time, kind of like an Occupy Wall Street deal, but for Anthropologie.”

While Occupy Anthropologie might sound like the most privileged social movement of all time, it struck a nerve with moms, who were aggravated—but also empathetic—about what happened to Hesson. Breast-feeding is protected by law in 46 states (including California), but women from around the country started sharing on mommy blogs and Facebook pages about how similar things had happened to them. The internet became a space for women to trade stories of retailers who had shooed them away, those who had insisted they were blanketed in nursing cover-ups, and other women who had shushed them when they heard sucking sounds coming from the bathroom stall.

"I nip and I'm proud," said Ashley Wright, as she posed in front of Anthropologie at the nurse-in on August 20. Photo by Ashley Wright

Wright, who has a 19-month-old baby and attended Wednesday’s nurse-in, writes a blog about motherhood and encourages other women to share their experiences about breast-feeding, as new moms are often shamed and silenced on the subject.

“I was able to feel, firsthand, the shame that most people associate with breast-feeding their kid,” she told me. “So I started putting myself out there online to build my family, my village of people, and then all of a sudden I became the breast-feeding leader of the free world.”

Women regularly email Wright, citing her blog as inspiration for “whipping it out” in places where breast-feeding is legally protected, but where they feel guilty for feeding their babies anyway.

“I had a mom tell me she was shopping at Macy’s and her baby started crying, and then she started crying because she forgot her [nursing] cover,” said Wright. “Another mom told me about crying while she was nursing her baby in the car, because people could still see her.”

Photo by JoAnne Garza Custer

You’d think breast-feeding wouldn’t be such a big deal these days, given the fact that our world is fairly saturated with breasts. It’s not contested when we see a boobie-bearing billboard, but as soon as a mother offers a glimpse of her breast to feed her child (like Olivia Wilde on the cover of Glamour this month), people go ballistic.

And that’s why internet groups have proven so empowering for new moms—for organizing "nurse-ins," yes, but also for being a platform that's created solidarity in a group that's often isolated.

Just days before it happened in Beverley Hills, about a dozen moms held a “nurse-in” at a restaurant in Oregon; About 30 moms had a “latch-on” in a public park in Oklahoma last month. What makes them important isn’t how many women were able to physically be there, with their picket signs and glimpses of nipples, but rather how many women felt like they had a forum to share those experiences. That place is the internet.

“I don’t think that something like this could’ve been organized as quickly if it wasn’t for Facebook… and hormones,” the Anthropologie nurse-in organizer told me.

Photo by Melissa Gould McNeely

Since she shared her story last week, Hesson told me she’s received over 300 Facebook friend requests—many from other new moms.

“When I’m breast-feeding, I have my hand free to scroll through my iPhone and because of that, I’m often on my Facebook,” said Hesson. “To see [breast-feeding] as an issue that mattered to so many other moms to me is an incredible sign of collective power—of both social media, and moms, who are typically an isolated group.”

By the way, Anthropologie never got back to Hesson directly about her complaint. Instead, they posted an apology on the company’s Facebook page. They must’ve figured out that’s where all the moms are.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

A big old penis with legs jizzing into an eyeball, circa second century AD. Image via Wikicommons

Last month, archaeologists on the Greek island of Ithaca found a couple of dicks etched into a cliff face at the Bay of Vathy. The dongs, as well as an inscription on another rock written in ancient Greek that read “Nikasitimos was here mounting Timiona,” are estimated to be 2,500 years old. The press scrambled to label it among the world’s oldest and most fascinating erotic archaeological finds, but that’s not quite true. Erotica is everywhere in the historical record, and archaeologists have come across sexual displays and descriptions far older and more fascinating than this. What made this particular finding unique was that—in addition to what the scribbles taught them about literacy during the time of Acropolis—the archaeologists were happy to talk about sex, and willing to acknowledge that the inscriptions suggested gay sex wasn’t just an upper-class affair practiced in limited social settings. Academics have only very recently become comfortable discussing sexual aspects of history, and many still avoid it. That's unfortunate, because there's a whole lot of ancient, instructive, and revolutionarily important smut out there.

The Venus of Willendorf, source of countless historian boners, circa 25000 BC. Image via Wikicommons.

Not counting the stylized and lumpy Venus of Willendorf and her female nude counterparts, the oldest archaeological find on sexuality may be a small figurine of a male bending over a further bent female, both with recognizable genitalia, aged 7,200 years and found in Germany in 2005. But that’s hardly an isolated find. Anywhere you go in the world, from possible pansexual orgies on cave walls in Xinjiang in Central Asia, to pocket-size clay tablets of 4,000-year-old Mesopotamians engaged in doggy, anal, and possibly a stylized form of buzzed-out fellatio, to Ramesses’s Playboy scroll from about 3,000 years ago, the ancient world was full of fuckin’. Any reading man throughout recorded history has been confronted with the bawdy and naughty thoughts of his predecessors, from the lewd and crude in Boccaccio to Chaucer to Sappho to Shakespeare, from The Perfumed Garden to The Plum in the Golden Vase, to the roots of Japanese tentacle porn in Japanese woodblock shunga prints. History is undeniably porny, yet many of us tend to think of it as austere and scrubbed clean.

The key to our image of a clean and starched history is largely a result of a mixture of active destruction and strategic ignorance. Although there was no real systematic (or at least no thorough, well-defined, and long lasting) suppression of dirty materials before the invention of the term “pornography” and development of anti-obscenity laws around 1857 with the British Obscene Publications Act, our ancestors made every effort to stomp out whacking material in their own times using a Justice Stewart Potter–style know-it-when-you-see-it approach. In the 1520s, the church arrested an Italian engraver for printing a pamphlet on better sex positions, and in 1748 the first English-language porn novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, faced staunch censure.

But some historical works, like the tawdry lines from Roman authors such as Juvenal or the dirty doodles in the margins of medieval monks’ books of hours, were already established parts of historical traditions and widely dispersed. “Of course,” writes the late Walter Kendrick, author of The Secret Museum and still a seminal authority on the history of porn and its suppression, “they could not be destroyed... Any relic of the ancient world possessed, merely thanks to its survival, a value that overrode the nature of the relic itself.”

Depiction of Greek men getting sexy with one another, circa 475 BC. Found in the Tomb of the Diver. Image via Wikicommons

By the end of the 18th century, however, many English speakers had accepted the Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire idea that depravity crumbled the West’s ideological and cultural ancestors, so evidence of or engagement with that licentious imagery was considered more dangerous than ever. So, just as history started to expand its audience thanks to the advent of mass printing and the expansion of education, a massive project to whitewash it kicked into gear. In one famous case, academics found it unseemly to deal with an insult in the Roman author Catullus’s Carmen 16, roughly rendered “I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths, / Aurelius, you pathic, and you queer, Furius.” So instead, until 1970, no one even tried to offer a translation, often just deleting the line from manuscripts and claiming that the poem was a fragment, the rest of which was lost to time. It took just as long for scholars to admit that the Turin Papyrus, a 3,000-year-old Egyptian scroll, had an erotic segment showing a great orgy of actions, known by scholars in the 1820s, but kept a secret until the 1970s. Perhaps most egregiously, a number of 18th-century editors committed something known as bowdlerization, the deletion of crude elements, on Shakespeare and other classic authors, at times rewriting whole scenes to work around the absent sexual jokes. As recently as the mid 20th century, the translators of Sufi poet Jalal al Din Muhammad Rumi’s now immensely popular Mathnawi decided to leave the naughtier poems in Latin. Rumi’s stories of donkey-fucking noblewomen and servants and impotent Caliphs remained unavailable to English readers until 1990, when Coleman Barks finally translated 47 omitted poems and published them as Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi.

Pan Copulating with Goat, circa first century AD. Image via Wikicommons

Around the same time, scholars were grappling with the lasciviousness of classical art, too. While excavating Pompeii in the mid 18th century, high society types discovered a vast array of graphic-to-hardcore murals, statues of fauns fucking goats, and a particularly amusing depiction of a gladiator wrestling his own cock transfigured into a raging beast. Unable to destroy the effigies, the Franco-Italian nobles in control of the region created the proto-moral category of pornography and tucked the artwork away in locked rooms in the local museum, later known as the Secret Museum, where only a handful of individuals deemed proper and prepared were allowed to access them. The secret museum idea caught on, and throughout the 19th-century museums around the world started forming their own secret wings and rooms to blot out their more graphic collections from the public eye.

Still, the preservation of these tawdry tableaus for study meant that the secret keepers were obligated to release images of their collections for those unable to visit. Many prefaced their works with introductions warning the reader of the explicit contents within, and enjoined them to be serious and detached critics, to try to desexualize the figures with aggressive theory. Others attempted to protect the young, female, and poorly educated by fogging out the genitals in sexual scenes, or turning them into odd geometric shapes, in their reproductions of the images.

Periodic attempts were made by revolutionaries and libertines to undo the redactions and ferretting of contemporary scholars. In a fit of liberalism, Giuseppe Garibaldi threw open the doors of Naples’ Secret Museum to usher in a new, united, free Italy in the 1860s. Meanwhile Sir Richard Burton attempted in 1883 to introduce the Kama Sutra to the West. But ultimately the more squeamish won out again and again. “Until the 1990s,” explains Roman sexuality-in-art expert Professor John Clarke of the University of Texas–Austen, “academics avoided working on ‘obscene’ Greek and Roman texts or ‘pornographic’ painting and sculpture, letting hack writers publish sensational and highly inaccurate picture books.”

A flying dick with a dick for a tail, circa first century AD. Photo via Wikicommons

What changed, Clarke goes on to explain, was the slow development of a very recent academic consensus that the past ought to be considered on its own terms, and by its own rules. “Well into the 20th century,” wrote Kendrick in The Secret Museum, “…the emphasis fell on the opposite side,” encouraging people to evaluate art in terms of their own social mores. But now it’s agreed that we can analyze the social importance of sexual items in history, distancing ourselves from our current notions and perceptions of them. “Moments of sexual shame,” wrote Barks in Delicious Laughter explaining his views on the eroticism in the Sufi poetry he was translating, “erections and their sudden droopings, a clitoral urgency that admits no limit, the mean impulse to play a sexual trick on one’s mate—these are recognizable behaviors and Rumi does not so much judge them as hold them up for a lens.” It was this spirit that, in 2000, finally saw the Secret Museum of Naples opened to the general public, permanently.

But even in this new age of theoretical openness to sexuality in history, practice often falls far short. “Once I discovered how underworked this topic was in academe,” says Clarke, “I had no qualms about pursuing it. I did of course have tenure and a chair at the point. I remember discussing with [a colleague] how difficult it was for her to get her first job with a dissertation on Roman sexual humor.” Often, it seems, academics (if not moved by subtle personal prejudices or cautions) just fear what the wider public might think.

In 1991, the Biblical Archaeology Review had a minor crisis about whether to publish photos of a ceramic oil lamp depicting a couple fucking, and polled their readership about what to do. They decided to print the image on a page with perforation so those who didn’t want to see it could remove it, and even then a few readers still canceled their subscriptions. And of course the tendency of newspapers to run headlines like “The Earliest Pornography” and “Prehistoric Pin Up,” about the 2009 excavation of a Neolithic female nude a la the Venus of Willendorf, but 10,000 years older, scares off some scholars who would prefer to avoid sensationalism.

Some guy in Pompeii getting a beej. Image via Apricity 

More than all of this, though, it’s just hard for most people to take what we now deem pornography seriously as an academic discipline. “It’s hard to justify to people that, ‘hey, I need money to go watch porn,’” says University of California Berkeley Fellow Matthew Kirschenbaum, who currently teaches a course on contemporary pornography called “Critical Sex Studies and Pornography. He’s one of many academics across America trying to study modern forms of erotica, and says that many feel the need to dress modern pornography up in theory or history to give it a little legitimacy. The study of modern pornography is, to Kirschenbaum, important because it’s a massive and influential modern industry that, while flying under the radar, can affect the way we talk and think about important issues like STDs and, of course, sexuality. But for many it’s hard to hack past the awkwardness of studying something that might turn them on, whether historical or modern, and then to deal with public perception and entrenched moral values before getting down to the social import or historical relevance of erotica.

There are bastions of scholars who are more than comfortable talking about and dispassionately studying sexuality. And with every day we get to chip away at a bit more of the taboos that make something like the announcement of a find of Greek erotic graffiti so headline snatching and provocative. But, at the end of the day, says Kirschenbaum, “it can get awkward showing someone in a class your favorite porn.” That applies often to historical erotica as well. So while we’re no longer actively redacting and hiding our sexual pasts, it’s still odd to see that history, openly discussed, can still make academia squirm.

Members of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) SWAT team. Photo via Wikimedia

No US president has deported as many people as Barack Obama. With more than two years to spare in his administration, he has now broken apart around two million families and counting. Under his watch, thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America have been denied asylum, deported, and then murdered after they were sent back to the land they fled. Some of these people, though, have been doing it to themselves, at least if one believes the government.

It’s called “administrative voluntary departure,” and it works like this: In exchange for forfeiting the right to contest a pending deportation, an undocumented immigrant who has been detained by the government can elect to skip the formal deportation process altogether and effectively deport themselves, while in the process agreeing to pick up the tab for the flight back to the place where they were born.

Why would someone do this? To speed the whole tiresome thing along, perhaps; the government almost never grants asylum, so deportation is pretty much a sure thing. But then, agreeing to a voluntary deportation in many cases means one can’t come back to the United States for a full ten years. If you do it, in other words, you’re basically gone for good, which few who do it understand—for a simple reason: someone in a uniform has been lying to them.

“For years, countless families throughout Southern California have been torn apart by immigration enforcement agencies’ coercive and deceptive ‘voluntary return’ practices,” write Gabriel Rivera and Mitra Ebadolahi from the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “As a matter of standard practice, ICE and Border Patrol have misinformed immigrants about the consequences of ‘voluntary return,’ including withholding the fact that ‘voluntary return’ can trigger a ten year bar against returning to the United States.”

There is, however, good news. According to a settlement announced August 27, the government will no longer use “threats,” “misrepresentations,” or “subterfuge” in order to trick undocumented immigrants into agreeing to voluntarily deport themselves. This includes no longer making “statements about negative consequences to family members if an Individual does not elect Voluntary Return.”

Now, just think about that last line and what it means. It means, in fact, that men and women in uniform have been telling scared men and women held incommunicado in immigrant detention facilities that if they insisted on “making things difficult" by insisting on their right to due process, something bad could happen to their loved ones. And you wouldn’t want that to happen, now would you? Then sign the damn paper.

Residents of Los Angeles show support for refugee children. Photo by Charles Davis

In the lawsuit it filed in 2013, the ACLU alleged that not only did Border Patrol agents verbally intimidate those in their custody, but they “physically abused them” as well. It’s no surprise, then, that many people—including those who had been here for decades—agreed to “voluntarily” leave their life in America behind without so much as a hearing.

As part of the settlement, the government promises to stop all that abuse and intimidation. It also has agreed to inform all those who agree to a “Voluntary Return” that, by doing so, they are forfeiting the chance to “request a hearing before a judge”—and, consequently, one’s “eligibility to be released from detention” back into the arms of their loved ones. Immigrants are also to be informed that they can change their mind, as well as seek advice from “a list of free legal service providers” provided them by the government.

“This is a substantial reform of how Border Patrol and ICE do business,” Sean Riordan, a staff attorney for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, said in a press release. “If the agencies implement the agreement fully, never again should families be driven apart based on immigration enforcement practices that rely upon misinformation, deception, and coercion.”

We’ll see about that. Indeed, while this change is welcome, if it in fact occurs, one shouldn’t forget that, for the vast majority of those kicked out of the United States, there was never even a veneer of “voluntary” about it. Indeed, America’s unjust immigration system remains as horrific as ever. Every day children—“unaccompanied minors,” to use the parlance of our time—who don’t even understand what’s happening to them are being deported without even being given the chance to apply for asylum, which German nationals are more likely to be granted than those fleeing Honduras, the murder capital of the world.

Despite promises of administrative relief from the White House, the deportations continue. At least now, though, we can stop pretending that any of them are voluntary.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter.

Illustration by Jonathan Tune

Unlike the last person who wrote about D&D for VICE, I have no sordid tales to tell of being caught by a bully in flagrante dragono—for the uninitiated, that’s playing Dungeons & Dragons—in the school library. That’s because D&D wasn’t part of my life when I was a teenage girl in the suburbs. But a lot of people (6 million of them, in fact) are fighting made-up dragons in made-up dungeons with made-up fantasy alter egos. As Giaco Furino recently reported, “Dungeons & Dragons Is Officially Cool Again,” and it is not only cool but inclusive. Did you know that not just neckbeards play D&D, but so do hip guys like Mick Jagger and Vin Diesel and your local male American Apparel employee?

But there’s more to the story than neckbeards and testosterone-rich celebs. A lot of women play D&D (which occasionally means encountering rapey dungeon masters) and more of us every day are picking up our first 20-sided die. It’s no small thing, and worth celebrating: the newest version of the game has—no joke—caught up with third-wave feminism.

Dungeons & Dragons has come a long way since 1977, when your horny geek friends could consult the “Harlot Table,” a set of statistics used to score some in-game sex with “wanton wenches” or “slovenly trolls.” And just in case ladies back then had any doubt about being able to match up to their male counterparts (no), female-identified characters’ strength scores were capped below men’s. In fact, just a few years ago, some lucky (read: doomed) woman’s husband-to-be posted a craigslist ad for a topless woman to be the Dungeon Master at a D&D-themed bachelor party. Sign me up, asshole.

But gradually, and sometimes awkwardly, Dungeons & Dragons has become exponentially more female-friendly. The newest version of the game, which hit stores on August 19, debuted a sensibly armored black woman, plates covering all her vital organs, as its example of the “human” race option. No chainmail bikinis here. To wit, women throughout the pages of the Player’s Handbook exhibit more varied body types and skin colors than ever. Coming from a franchise whose art director wrote a piece (apparently since removed) justifying hyper-sexualized female bodies in fantasy art, this is noteworthy. And these illustrations are just the face of deeper changes made to entice more women to play.

More strikingly, the new Player’s Handbook explicitly talks about the gender binary and gender fluidity. “Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior,” it reads. “You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender . . . You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female’s body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male.” So D&D players are being pushed to think critically about gender as a historical construct at the same time they’re deciding whether to be “Quarion the elvaan druid” or “Havilar the dragonborn sorcerer.” Dungeons & Dragons is a game that hinges on the collective process of imagination, and now we’re being asked to summon a world that doesn’t share in our dominant heteronormative paradigms. This, friends, is cool.

One could argue that just because the D&D tomes give a shout-out to the third-wave notion that gender is a historical construct, the actual culture around the game hasn’t necessarily caught up. Lisa Renke, who works in theater and has played the game for 14 years, tells me that she’s had to deal with her fair share of sexism throughout her time gaming. The dungeon crawlers at her high school were unwelcoming, and years later, she still had problems fitting in: “Sometimes I was the only woman in a room with 30 guys. I also had a few uncomfortable moments declining men who wanted to take me back to their apartments to teach me how to make a better character.” Terry Romero, a cookbook author who has been playing since 1988, relayed a similar story of heinous sexism at the table. Once, the guy running her D&D game “deliberately kept forcing my character to trip, fall, or be pushed down by monsters the entire game with a not-so-subtle rape context. I played for less than an hour before walking away,” she says.

But gaming communities are finding ways to ensure less-than-creepy play among the genders. The Twenty-Sided Store, a gaming spot located in Brooklyn that hosts Dungeons & Dragons sessions, has a strict code of conduct forbidding “slights against intelligence, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc.” You will actually get kicked out if you’re a douchebag, and no one’s gonna fist-bump you for making lewd comments to some made-up elf queen.The Twenty-Sided Store has even adopted the “X-Card” practice, which allows a player to hold up a card—without explanation—if something disagreeable goes down.

Lauren Bilanko, a co-owner of the store, says that the gender makeup of people who come in to play D&D is about 60 percent male and 40 percent female.

Nicole Kuprienko, a graphic designer who started running D&D games more recently, says she’s rarely experienced sexism while role-playing. The majority of women I interviewed agree, suggesting that women (and female-identified individuals) are having less trouble than ever contributing to the D&D community, and generally face less overt misogyny and harassment.  

The reason for this evolution in D&D culture is actually pretty simple. A two-year play-testing period, open to anyone who had opinions about the game, preceded the newest version’s release. Jeremy Crawford, lead designer and managing editor for Dungeons & Dragons at its parent company Wizards of the Coast, highlighted the fact that the design team made a concerted effort to boost inclusiveness. Asked to comment, he told me, “There has often been a perception that such games are for straight white men. One of our goals for the new edition of D&D has been to make it as welcoming as possible to its large, diverse audience: people of different races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations. D&D is for anyone who wants to gather with their friends to weave tales of heroic adventure. Our team wants there to be no barriers to that, and for our text and art to imply no barriers...It's hard to have that sense of identification or interest if a character is marginalized or objectified.”

His point is underscored by the fact that the newest version of the game credits women as contributors to its design more than any previous one: About 26 percent are female, as opposed to 20 percent in the last version and 12 percent in the one before that. It’s also telling that three-quarters of D&D’s branding and marketing team is now female.

Maybe you’re still wondering why women would even want to sit around in some sweaty basement pretending to slay orcs. From a female perspective, what’s the deal with pretending you’re some gallant knight or evil sorceress? Katherine Cross, a sociologist and PhD student at CUNY who studies gender in role-playing, says that her D&D characters “were always the kind of characters that were lacking in major television shows—someone who was not reduced to her sexuality. For a lot of women, role-playing gives us an opportunity to author our own visions of power.” While white men have had a myriad of heroic characters to emulate and improve upon over the centuries, women are often starved of these role models. Lord of the Rings arguably includes no heroic female characters, and I’m not so sure Xena: Warrior Princess was particularly representative of girls I knew.

Besides, women tend to grow up learning how to adjust our faces and outfits to express ourselves. Role-playing isn’t much of a leap from there. That being said, I don't really need to rationalize why women role-play—it's fun to kick it with your friends and, in collaboration, craft a fantasy.

But maybe it’s not such a big deal that D&D is becoming more inclusive. It could just be symptomatic of how far we’ve come since 1977, when third-wave feminism didn’t even exist. Lauren Bilanko, owner of the Twenty-Sided Store, points out that “It’s not just the gaming community. We’re seeing more people be present to their surroundings, be aware of how their actions affect society.” She's right, even if we still have a long way to go. At this point, I’m glad that when I walk into a gaming store, no one asks if got lost on the way to the mall.

Follow Cecilia D'Anastasio on Twitter.

Illustrations by Stephen Maurice Graham

It’s 1997, and I’m searching for the fabled "Lara Croft naked patch" on the internet. It is sometime around the era of when it took about 60 years to download anything online, and the screech of the modem made your ears bleed. After about 30 years of downloading, and with blood running down my neck, I finally see outside my 12-year-old body and think, What the fuck are you doing? In a few years you will have the body of a woman and your boobs won’t look like the pyramids at Giza, either. You can just look at your own real goddamn tits. This is a thing for those boys at school to guffaw at and be like, "gross." The internet is a wonderful place for self-discovery.

This was probably the first time I was aware that sexual content was available on the internet, because I understood in a sort of nebulous way that Lara Croft was supposed to be connected to sex. Whatever it was that I was downloading turned out to be a bunch of porn and not anything remotely related to Tomb Raider, unless you are making a very specific euphemism. The look of dismay that was on my tiny face is something I wish someone had taken a photo of. Now, I look at the pictures of 1997 Lara Croft naked and polygonal, and I can’t understand why anyone would bother. It seems like an obstacle to jerking off.

Thankfully, we’ve gotten a little better at this shit as time’s gone by.

1978–1981: PLAYER IMAGINATION FOR PLAYER MASTURBATION

Early on in gaming history, graphics were rather difficult to do on computers. This meant that the text-parser dungeon ruled supreme in the beginning. The erotic capabilities of text were certainly taken advantage of in the early days of the "video" game. Back then, in the primordial soup, something called MUDsex was born: cybersex that takes place in a real-time RPG world.

Like choose-your-own-adventure text games, Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) still occupy a small niche of the internet. Yet in 1978, Roy Trubshaw probably had no idea that his MACRO-10-based roleplaying MUD game would open up a whole new way to roleplay fantasy elf-banging. MUDs enabled players to type out sexual role-play in character. Even if it wasn’t totally anonymous, it wasn’t as awkward as playing Dungeons & Dragons and looking Bob in the eyes while you describe attempts to do the notorious PIV on his level-10 hobbit mage.

This was progress! As game development icon Brenda Romero once said to Joystiq, “The easiest way to incorporate sex into a game without raising flags is to add a chat interface and allow multiple people to play the game.” People could even develop feelings of affection for their virtual sexual partners, which may still have a stigma attached to it (World of Warcraft players who "marry" each other are still subject to internet ridicule). But the determination of human beings to express themselves by virtualfucking is a truly wondrous and (occasionally) inspiring thing.

Today, you can still find texty MUDsexers over at Achaea, although online trollgarden Encyclopedia Dramatica makes it sound like this is a terrible crime. Even though they both have jerking off to trolls in common.

People usually cite the 1981 text game Softporn Adventure for the Apple II as being one of the first games that was actually about sex. Looking at the cover for the game is quite enough to make sex look like the dullest thing in the world. The women seem a bit sleepy. The waiter in the picture is wondering how long he can stay serving drinks in (?) the Jacuzzi without his balls shriveling to the size of raisins.

Softporn Adventure is considered the blueprint for the now infamous 1987 graphical adventure game Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. A parser game where you type two-word instructions to the computer as to your next actions, Softporn Adventure swings between scatology (you can drown in sewage just by flushing a toilet) and rape jokes, the sort that a teenager might make: “She takes a pill… her nipples start to stand up! Wow!! She's breathing heavily… I hope she rapes me!!” Sure, bro.

Both Softporn Adventure and Leisure Suit Larry take you on a sleazefest night out during which you marry a woman who ties you up and steals your money, sleep with a hooker, and "fall in love" with a woman who becomes enamored with you after you give her some fruit. (My fruit-loving nature is oft talked about among the male types.) It isn’t meant to be representative of reality (though writer Charles Benton has said that it was inspired by his personal experience), and it revels in it. However, there’s little sexual content in it, and everything is played for schoolboy jokes.

In comparing Leisure Suit Larry and Softporn Adventure, though, the first-person voice implying the player’s direct involvement makes Softporn Adventure’s story more titillating. And the text leaving the imagery to the imagination makes it somehow sexier.

Leisure Suit Larry suffers from graphics. Most games with sexual content suffer unsexiness via graphics. Every time you try to show sexualized images of bodies in games, it either is too inept or does not match the player’s idea of what a sexual body or situation looks like. If you describe in textual format how an encounter happens, the player can imagine a scenario or person that is attractive between the descriptions, making even the shittiest sex scene somewhat titillating. This probably goes some way to explaining the survival of MUDsex. It’s why people call phone sex lines. It’s about the power of language. It’s why people describe their actions in bed to each other. Sex is often in the head, not in the image.

Having said that, Leisure Suit Larry doesn’t actually try: The actual act of sex is "censored," and the gags (comedy-wise) are what’s important. People often say Leisure Suit Larry wasn’t actually about sex, and they were right: the veneer of it, the image of it, the idea of it, and the shit jokes sold it. And in the end, the commercial success was what mattered. Larry went on to have many successors.

1982–1998: MOSTLY WOMEN WHO ARE NAKED AND STATIONARY, UNLESS YOU ARE JAPANESE. IF YOU ARE JAPANESE, YOU MIGHT BE OK

Very few sex games, or games that include sex, are actually about sex, although Koei’s 1982 game Night Life was sold in Japan as an attempt to help married people figure out their sex life and featured the aptly named chapter "Let’s Fuck!!" Night Life included some nice silhouettes of some popular heterosexual bedroom gymnastics. The faceless people in the drawings serve more as a kind of catalogue of ways heterosexual people can fail to pleasure each other than as a turn-on, although I can’t be sure that in that era people weren’t orgasming at the fact their computer could beep "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" after hours of programming.

Koei, along with companies such as Enix, Square, and Nihon Falcom helped create the early demand for what are now known as "eroge" games, or Japanese erotic games, many of which can be incredibly narratively complex. Many eroge games have helped grow the popularity of the visual novel genre considerably, and are currently generally good about catering to almost every sexual taste, even if the themes can be dark and violent on occasion. Dōkyūsei in 1992 was a landmark title and known for being the first dating simulation game. It follows the adventures of a boy who pursues a girl, but is somewhat… distracted by other girls on the way. This provided a template for many other eroge games to follow.

The Portuguese game Paradise Cafe came out in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum. It was a hideously racist and sexist game about paying women to suck your John Thomas. Also notable is that this was actually a lot more sexually graphic than any other game at the time and featured uncensored pixelated labia and yellow erect penises. The game’s undeniable low point is when a black pimp rapes you for being unable to pay for your fellatio. I would rather have dinner with Piers Morgan than ever play it again.

Most games with "erotic content" are just games that include depictions of women with little to no clothes on, which apparently is enough to have people (mostly men) cum in their pants violently. These titles include Bubble Bath Babes on the NES, Strip Fighter 2 on TurboGrafx-16, The Yakyuken Special on Sega Saturn, Miss World ‘96 (Nude), and other games that Seanbaby mentions in Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 162.

Now blessed with YouTube, the average gamer can look up videos of these and reassure themselves that they would have enjoyed the "erotic content" as much as they might enjoy the "eroticism" of Custer’s Revenge on the Atari 2600, which co-opts a nation’s genocidal shame to portray the unsexiest video game boner in history. WHO THOUGHT GENOCIDE AND RAPE WOULD MAKE A GOOD BACKDROP FOR A GAME? And Custer probably got his dick stuck in a cactus in the process. WHY?

Richard Eter’s 1998 adventure game Fuck Quest is a parody of the original Leisure Suit Larry, in that you go from screen to screen collecting things so that you can fuck a lady. However, Fuck Quest actually climaxes (hurr) with the player lowering a giant disembodied penis in and out of a woman’s orifices until "fireworks" appear on screen, and a silly amount of beeping happens from your certainly overpowered computer, simulating at best what it would be like if a BBC Micro tried to bang its own floppy disk drive.

Fuck Quest is so outlandish that I find it curiously charming: Every screen is childishly drawn in Microsoft Paint, the "House ‘O Porn" sex shop is an architectural feat resembling lopsided tits, and the player has to fool his prey by wearing a Brad Pitt mask to bed. My adventures with it are here on Rock Paper Shotgun. There is also a sequel to the game, Fuck Quest 2: Romancing the Bone, which I haven’t played, but the title alone deserves a trophy.

2000–PRESENT: SOPHISTICATED BIG-BUDGET GAMES WITH RUDIMENTARY SEXUAL EXPRESSION

There’s a dearth of big-budget games that even include sex, never mind those that directly center upon the business of extreme cuddling, and so far the history I’ve presented has been woefully centerd upon the heterosexual male experience. Japan catered better to gay and sometimes even lesbian sexual experiences through eroge visual novels, but the West has typically lacked any enthusiasm for making sexual content in games that cater to non-heterosexual fantasies. However, as big-budget games have widened their appeal and become more sophisticated, they have also become better—if not exactly the best—at representing gay or non-heterosexual experiences.

Ah, yes, The Sims! Everyone’s favorite virtual doll’s house, in which you may place your carefully conditioned virtual housemates into a swimming pool, delete the steps, and watch them drown with the same evil glee you get when you are with your boyfriend in Topshop and you "accidentally" scare the shit out of him by wandering into the maternity section.

The Sims is a series of lucrative video game soap operas distributed by Electronic Arts, a perennial crowd pleaser now working on its fourth edition. In it you can create little virtual AI people and play house. They can fall in love and have sex (known in Sim parlance as "Woohoo"). The actual act of genital joy in The Sims is blurred out for the kids, but in massively multiplayer online life simulator Second Life, almost a sister game to The Sims but without the placid AI, you can buy yourself some genitals and go some extremely shady places if you are brave enough.

In the early days of The Sims, I created a horrorshow of a house in which the likenesses of all my roommates coexisted, resulting in gay love triangles, my boyfriend making out with the other roommate’s girlfriend, and my character attempting to sleep with everyone in the house. My Sim eventually died of hunger because I was too busy trying to get my pissed off-ginger boyfriend back into bed. If there’s anything The Sims taught me it is "Break fast before breaking bed." Or, you know. Death.

Sims are technically bisexual, in that depending on player preference, Sims can be interested in either men or women, conditioned in their preferences by play. This is not the way my personal sexuality works, but it allows for a pleasant fluidity in the way that Sims relate to one another. In The Sims 2, each Sim is created with a slight preference either way. Later with The Sims 2: Nightlife, you get "chemistry" that can rule how much Sims are attracted to one another, where Sims can have two things that are a "turn-on" and one that is a "turn-off," such as beards, "stink," vampires, or—for some reason—logic. The gayer you want your characters, the gayer they get. The more hetero you feel, the more hetero you can make your fuckpuppets.

Erotic frisson is created by making Sims romance one another. The human drama that takes place in your little doll house is thrilling in a Rear Window sort of way. Kieron Gillen wrote particularly definitively on the subject in 2007:

While sex is only a relatively small part of The Sims—crucially, your Sim can meet and form relationships with other Sims—it’s the dark heart that underlies everything. It’s not the engine of the game, but the romantic potential is its fuel, driving it onwards. Perhaps appropriately. The Sims simulates life and life’s nothing but a mass of social fabric wrapped tightly around that spark of attraction.

In light of this, it seems odd that though many big-budget games are obsessed with portraying simulations of ourselves in fantasy worlds, we still face a particular dearth of uncensored sex, or even interesting romance systems that lead to light petting, outside of Japan. This is partly due to puritanical attitudes of media. When, in 2005, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had some leftover assets of an unfinished "Hot Coffee" (clumsy-sex-via-controller-bashing) minigame left in the code, a patch that could be downloaded to access the broken thing was made. The patch was brought to the official rating board’s attention and the whole of America seemed to go aflame. This seemed from the outside to be partly due to the fact that America’s right-wingers already disdained the globe’s best-selling male crime world, and partly due to the fact that few in government quite understood what a "patch" meant.

They also didn’t really know how fucking annoying video games are to modify. As I learned with the Nude Raider patch, a porn video or magazine would have been purloined with more ease. Comparatively, hours spent trying to download/get the Hot Coffee modification to work just to get a blurry mannequin with no genitals to flap about a bit seems a lot like a flagrant waste of Stoya time.

In any case, Hot Coffee was not the only thing that made right-wing America’s rage alarm go off. The EA-published game Mass Effect, a slick space opera role-playing game, taking narrative tips from Star Trek among other things, was targeted by conservative-leaning Fox News in 2008. Fox claimed that in Mass Effect there was “full digital nudity,” players had the opportunity to “engage in graphic sex,” and that it was “being marketed to kids and teenagers,” all of which were false statements. Cutscenes featuring profiles of characters together with no full frontal or explicit nudity are triggered in Mass Effect had sexual images similar to those used in primetime television. The game was rated Mature—appropriate for players 17 and older.

Fox News, Mass Effect Sex Debate Video

Incidentally, the Fox News piece also included the caption "SE'XBOX?", which at the time made me laugh so hard I hurled my uterus up through my mouth onto the floor and a nearby cat ate it.

The joke was on Fox, as usual. By Mass Effect 3, the space opera not only included woman-on-woman sex scenes, but man-on-man sex scenes, too. As Charlie Brooker’s excellent article on the matter touts: "Some people are gay in space. Get over it."

POSSIBLE 2002 MISUSE OF PERIPHERALS

Of course, some games aren’t entirely meant to be sexy, but get co-opted by enterprising consumers for sexualisatory purposes. Tetsuya Mizuguchi, developer of the psychedelic music game Rez, said to Eurogamer that when he made a big release (ahem) of the game in 2002 bundled with a "Trance Vibrator" that he certainly did not mean the vibrating peripheral to be used… down there. Instead, he said, “I like to feel the vibration by the foot.”

Jane at Game Girl Advance clasped the vibrator to her crotch and wrote down her thoughts on the so-called "foot" massager. She seemed to very much enjoy the sensation of the vibrator intensifying its vibration to the beat of the music. My own personal sources say the vibrator is somewhat "weak" for a sex toy, but nonetheless pleasurable.

Today’s hypnotic music-based game odysseys such as Luxuria Superbia and SoundSelf are ripe for such peripheral exploitation. Both have erotic, synaesthetic undercurrents. Surely someone out there could DIY us up some sort of rubbery vibratory controller-friend for them? Could we just mod a Wii controller or something?

SEX OUTSIDE THE WORLD OF CAPITALISM

The state of sex in video games is incredibly healthy in a way it has never been before, if you look less at the big-budget games and look for the smaller, more artistic options. Tools for making some kinds of games are inexpensive or free now, and games can be distributed quickly, easily and at little cost over the internet. These games are often not subject to vetting for "family friendly" material, such as games on consoles are.

Games such as Love Hotel, a free game that resembles SimTower, are available if you wish to indulge at playing a love hotel manager enticing couples for a few hours of the no-pants-dance.

The Copenhagen Game Collective made the Dark Room Sex Game, which is played with Wii remotes or a keyboard and uses audio and haptic cues to have players correspond to a rhythm. The speed increases until your peripheral reaches "climax."

Text games have made a recent comeback thanks to the free hypertext engine, Twine. Anna Anthropy made Encyclopaedia Fuckme and Sex Cops Of Tickle City. Merritt Kopas recently made a game about consensual violence in the bedroom, Consensual Torture Simulator.

My own game, Sacrilege, about taking home men from a club, is a short journey through intense sexual relationships as a matter of emotional terrorism.

Nina Freeman made the adorable How Do You Do It about her teen sexuality.

Ute by Lea Schönfelder is a game about the constraints of society on women as sexual beings. It concerns you attempting to have rhythmic sex bumps with every single man on the map.

And there’s the granddaddy of all online sex games: Sepe’s Cumshot.

SEX-MOBILE

Ledoliel is an iPhone game that is essentially like a grown-up, bizarre fantasy Tamagotchi simulator. It is a "dating toy," where your strange little being is a puzzle that often has strangely mature or suggestive needs and desires.

Sext Adventure is a game by Kara Stone and Nadine Lessio in which you use your phone to sext a bot that will then lead you down a narrative path of erotic dick pics, steamy messages, and even money shots. However, each strand of story has a different emotional journey. It’s not just a game about eroticism, but relationships and how they progress.

TODAY AND THE FUTURE: JAPAN FINALLY MAKES PERIPHERALS USEFUL

In the Year of Our Lord 2013, we finally did it. We finally did it! We made an erotic game that shipped with a cock controller. With the Ju-C Air peripheral you stick your dick into the dang thing and it masturbates the player while also providing in-game feedback. It also has an analog stick, an action button, and a left and right click on the shaft. It comes with the erotic sex game Custom Maid 3D. By shoving your dick in and out at various speeds, you can have your maid of choice respond to your magic wand. You can even make the virtual maid wear a pirate hat while you do it! A PIRATE HAT.

And in 2014… they made Custom Maid 3D available with Oculus Rift. Virtual-reality maid-boning has finally come true. We’re living in The Matrix! We’re in an Asimov book! WE HAVE SUPERSEDED NEUROMANCER. Gods be praised, we can all now go home and fuck a video game.

Unless you don’t have a penis. You can’t come. The future is not for you.

Follow Cara Ellison on Twitter and Stephen Maurice Graham on Tumblr.

If you're the type of person who will never be able to play an actual instrument using your own two hands, then perhaps air guitar, a peculiar craft for the musically inept, is more up your alley. And even though there isn't any kind of technical skillset required to get into the air guitar circuit, there's still some glory to be earned. Enter the The World Air Guitar Championships, the planet's preeminent contest for weirdoes who enjoy showing off their imaginary musical talent. 

The contest is in its 19^th year, and features a predictable cavalcade of oddball contestants, including a 71-year-old rockabilly with Elvis leanings named Bob Wagner, a shameless, fur-coat wearing, Canadian cowboy hat-rockin’ contestant named Thrustin’ Beaver, and a former gymnast named “The Dominator” who used backflips to mask his inability to fake shred. We sent a photographer to document the proceedings and he came back with images that are bizarre, hilarious, and more than a little baffling. We hope you enjoy them.

The finals air on August 29^th at noon. You can livestream it here.

Photos via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr user Derek Keats 

Last week in Genitales’ inaugural column, we talked to a bunch of guys about their peens. It was involved, it was illuminating, and it was, apparently, “unburdening.” I got a lot of emails (not all of them not pervy) in the wake of that piece from men sorry they’d missed out on a chance to talk openly yet confidentially about their relationship to their penises. To those men I say: have those conversations with friends and loved ones, and also I am sorry but this week is about the vagina.

[Note: I know that “vagina” technically refers only to a woman’s vaginal passage, and not to the external features of her vulva, which are largely what we’ll be talking about here, but almost everyone I spoke to used vagina to refer to their genitalia in totalis, something I also do colloquially. Please consider “vagina” shorthand for the whole she-bang going forward.]

The 60 women I spoke to did not feel unburdened of the long-kept secrets of their pussies. Rather, the majority of them were interested in carrying private discussions they’d already been having into a more public space. When it comes to talking about our junk—processing our feelings towards it and intellectualizing our relationship to it—women appear to be miles ahead of men. The women who answered my survey were READY2CHAT, pouring out long emails about every aspect of their vulvas, hymens, clitoral hoods, and more.

The group’s age averaged out to 25, with most respondents from the United Kingdom or America. I let them pick their own pseudonyms. About 30 percent identified as straight and another 10 percent as lesbian, while almost everyone else opted for personalized descriptors like “straightish” or “girls are a sometimes thing.” Here’s what I learned from talking to 60 women about their vaginas.

Vaginas are pretty difficult to describe.
While last week’s men rattled off statistics like their dicks were the starting lineup of the Packers, the women struggled with what adjectives to use to describe their vaginas. Many phrased this portion as a series of questions, creating a kind of textual vocal fry. Laura, a 24-year-old from Norfolk, England, said: “I have medium sized (I think) labia between my clit and my vagina. I don’t have anything around the hole, if that makes sense?”

Descriptions varied widely, with a plethora of colors—from purple to red to pink to one partially albino vagina—and all kinds of shapes and comparisons (more on that later). Overwhelmingly, as we found with the men last week, people thought their ‘gines were basically average. Stephanie, a 27-year-old from Brooklyn, said: “You know how there's one breed of dog that makes you think, ‘That's a very generic dog. A photo of that dog belongs in the dictionary?’ That's how I feel about my vagina. My doctor always says, ‘Looks great!’ which makes me feel validated and like I'm doing a good job taking care of it.”

The most inscrutable vaginal description came from Amelia, a 19-year-old from Scotland, who said her vagina looked like “a baby mouse trapped in a bundle of twigs.”

There are so many different words for vagina it’s basically like naming a child.
In no particular order, survey respondents called their vaginas: Vadge, Front Bum, Vajayjay, Orchid, Little Ouse (a river in the east of England), Bits, Friend, Bearded Axe Wound, Matilda (“fun for when ‘Matilda’ by Alt-J comes on at a party”), Nunee, Minge, Noon, Vaginald (“pronounced like Reginald”), Demona, Vagina, Fleshy Twinkies, Ol’ Vag, Pum Pum, Vajeen (“like Borat”), My Girl, Kitty, Pussay, Fitte (“Swedish for marsh”), Ham, Clam, Fanny, Kitty, Waff, Her, Minge, ‘Gine, Lady Bits, Fertile Crescent, Junk, Cake, Innie, and Botty.

Of all the respondents, only FG, a 30-year-old from London, didn’t have a nickname. “It's a vagina, not a dog,” she said. “I don't want to give it a name.”

Images via Flickr user theimpulsivebuy and Wikimedia Commons

Almost everyone wants you to stop calling their vagina a flower. 

“That feels a bit like the verbal equivalent of scented panty liners (covering up something that really doesn’t need to be covered up. And a bit too pretty for their job),” said a 24-year-old from Melbourne who asked to be called Spongeworthy. “Pussies are no more like flowers than dicks are like popsicles. A better comparison would be like… Pie? Tacos? Hot dog buns?”

She represented the majority of respondents in this, who suggested everything from volcanoes to mountain valleys (lots of landscapes), oysters, and “little furry sea creatures” as more apt comparisons. “We don’t go around comparing penises to dandelions, so why not just call it what it is?” asked a woman named Heather.

Other titles that caused alarm were the classic problem words “pussy” and “cunt.” “Pussy” was a crowd-splitter, even more so than “cunt,” which seems like it’s gaining ground. While many women listed "cunt" as their least favorite word, it also topped a lot of people’s lists as an everyday descriptor of their ladyparts. “Pussy” did not fare nearly as well, with about 50 percent of respondents more or less disgusted by it, sonically. Across the board, the most hated name was “beef curtains,” although Em, a 23-year-old from Toronto made a solid point: “Comparing labia to roast beef is offensive, but people need to appreciate both labia and roast beef more.”

Vagina complaints, in order of frequency:
1) Size of labia (see below) (I mean in the article, not your pants) (maybe, I don’t know your life)
2) Period-related problems (flow, cramps) and/or excessive discharge
3) Prevalence of thrush, UTIs, and other non-sexual infections and inconveniences
4) Fear of childbirth-related tearing
5) Shitty boyfriends from their teen years saying something terrible and scarring about their perfectly functional, healthy vagina

Concerns about unrealistic expectations from porn are largely unfounded.
While a few women said porn presented an unrealistic, idealized “porn vagina” that was “compact,” “perfect,” and “tight,” most of the respondents who talked about porn suggested it was one of the first places they had been exposed to the reality of widespread vaginal difference. “I watch porn to get off, but I also love the range of shapes, colors, textures and sizes of vaginas I get to see,” said Martha, a 27-year-old dental assistant from York, England. Overall, it was listed as a positive tool for self-love more often than a source of anxiety. “There are so many different kinds of vaginas, comparison is really impossible. [Watching porn] really helps me enjoy mine, knowing as long as it works it’s still going to be a source of pleasure for me and my partner,” said Samantha, a mother of two from Oregon.

Things women are most curious about in relation to their own vaginas: 
- Squirting, how to
- Vajazzling, when to try
- Queefing, on command if possible?
- Growing out their bushes “just to see”
- Taste and smell (as one woman put it, “I just think it would be fun to experiment with making it more or less musky, fruity, or sweet”)

Photos via Justin William and public-domain-image.com

Women are very worried about the size of their labia.
While some people were very positive about their labia—“I think I've got a great package! (chubby labia with just enough trimmed pubic hair and a super cute clitoris!)” said Peach, an 18-year-old from Hamilton, ON, and the youngest person to take the survey—this body part was most often mentioned in the “do you have any complaints” portion of the questionnaire.

Negative feelings tended to center around what one woman described as “being a bit too ‘there’ in terms of labia minora.” One woman from London said, “There's a flap that is quite big and you can see it from the outside. I never liked this big, hanging flap. I thought my vagina looked weird. In fact I still don't quite like the look of it." Heather, a 20-year-old from the UK, said: “To quote the great Stoya, if my vagina was an emoticon, it would always look like this :P.”

A Texas woman with long, asymmetrical labia explained the root of the issue: “You can’t see it when I’m standing or anything, but sometimes it gets uncomfortable, and I feel kind of weird about it. During sex it’s not a problem, but it can like, rub against my underwear… Tucking your one hangy labia back in isn’t like picking a wedgie, you know?”

Respondents with large inner labia tended to echo the views of less hung men from last week. Most of them had experienced problems with this part of their body in their younger years, but were increasingly coming to accept and even love it. “One of my labia is larger than the other, and I think I have quite a big clit, but I’m really not sure. I used to think it was beautiful and pink and lovely, but after a shitty ex described it’s appearance as ‘complicated,’ I kinda just feel like all vaginas are weird,” said Anna, a 23-year-old from London who said she feels “very affectionate” towards her vagina overall.

Overall, though, women really, really love their vaginas.
For real. Regardless of complaints about heavy flow, especially pungent discharge, hanging lips, or a desire for different pubes, almost 100 percent of women were wild about their vaginas. Maria, a 27-year-old from London, said, “Mine’s not small and neat like some people’s. I feel fondly about it and protective over it. Nowadays I’m far more outwardly celebratory about having one, and I think that ties in with being more shouty and positive about being a woman.” Melissa, an Aussie, said “I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider my vagina a good friend. We’re VBFs.”

“Love is maybe not strong enough a word,” said Ella, from Edmonton, England. “My vagina is literally the best thing that has ever happened to me.” A 20-year-old named Violet added, “I love it more than Netflix.”

Follow Monica Heisey on Twitter.

Online shaming, whether it's targeting sex offenders or sexually-frustrated teenagers, is one of the internet’s most popular uses. Whether there’s any truth in the claims obviously varies from case to case, but the reality is it often comes with catastrophic results—once the information is out there it’s hard to take back. But I guess that's not something the guys behind Syrienblog are concerned about.

The pro-Assad website focuses on exposing alleged Danish Islamists who travel to Syria to fight for the rebel forces. Its authors do this by anonymously posting people's names and pictures. In some instances they have gone as far as to upload photos of the alleged fighters’ sisters or girlfriends, commenting on their alleged promiscuity.

Through pictures, rumors, Facebook posts, and even old school photos, Syrienblog dissects past lives and sometimes joyfully describes how they’ve been brought to an end by Assad’s troops. So far, the site has posted 16 portraits, most of which are accompanied by a thorough biography.

The website claims to be non-profit and free of commercials, but will pay up to $900 for a tip. In just the past couple of years they have gathered a monthly readership of around 10,000 people. When I initially reached out to the editors for an interview I was turned down because of safety concerns, but after a long email exchange they finally agreed to an anonymous interview over Skype.

VICE: Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
Syrienblog.net: What do you want to know?

I guess I want to know why you started Syrienblog.net.
We started back in 2012. Back then, the so-called ”Syrian rebels” were portrayed as freedom fighters and pro-democratic activists. Obviously that was a lie. The Syrian media called them terrorists, but the Western media demonised this kind of view. The same thing happened in Libya, where Gaddafi was mocked and laughed at when he said he was fighting al-Qaeda warriors. People aren't laughing now. Luckily, the truth is more evident now.

So what's your agenda now?
Today, our main focus is on all the terrorists that travel from Denmark to Syria to commit acts of terrorism. The Danish government has completely neglected to do this—it's bizarre.

Our primary objective is to challenge the government’s passive approach. It's no longer a question of whether or not the conflict is coming to Europe or Denmark. The West has supported these terrorists and ignored the threat they pose. The Syrian government warned us about this situation three years ago, but they were met with laughter and ridicule. Alternative coverage was necessary and that's why Syrienblog exists.

Who are you?
Syrienblog is completely autonomous and independent. There's no group backing us or pulling the strings. Syrienblog is Syrienblog. 

How many people are working on Syrienblog.
We are less than ten people.

Where are you from?
Roughly half of us are European and half are Arabic.

I know you're very protective of your identity, but can you give us any sort of idea of who you are? I'm guessing you looked me up.
Any idiot can call himself Andreas Digens and claim to be from VICE. Yes, we communicated through your VICE e-mail, but we treat everybody the same, sorry. It's a safety issue. We have principles about never getting personal. Consider me as Syrienblog, not as a person.

Your page is registered in Cuba, but you produce content from both Denmark and Syria. How is the website being financed?
We pay for everything ourselves. We don't have expenses like salaries or rent, so it's not that expensive to do. 

The website states that you pay $900 for tips.
We do. That's not any different from people spending money on their hobbies. It's not like we pay that amount on a daily basis.

Your "About" page states that you support Syria in the same way that Assad does, without supporting Assad. What's your actual goal?
Assad is at the moment the only legitimate President of Syria. What's the alternative? A self-proclaimed Caliph? An exiled opposition that lives in a luxury hotel in Turkey and speaks better English than Arabic? Someone who hasn’t even been to Syria in 30 years? That wouldn't make for a trustworthy President. The President serves Syria, not the other way around.

So what's the solution?
Before we can even discuss a solution, the terrorism must stop. The US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and the EU must stop facilitating the terrorists with weapons. Turkey and Jordan must close their borders for Jihadists and Denmark and other countries must stop the many terrorists from going to Syria. The war going on is not Syrian, it merely takes place in Syria. There are warriors from 150 countries and foreign powers are a deciding factor in the struggle.

Is that why you're outing Danish fighters?
We started this to document that the people that Danish media portrays as freedom fighters are really al-Qaeda followers. We wanted to show the extent of this problem. And we think that people have a right to know if their neighbour, brother-in-law or teacher is a terrorist.

You show pictures and name names. You don't think that's taking it too far?
No, not at all. It's not like we break into people's homes and steal their family albums. They put everything on the Internet themselves.

So what's your plan for the future?
To continue the work we do and to keep exposing terrorists with links to Denmark. We have more portraits coming and we will publish them. 

You're very determined to stay anonymous. Why?
It's a safety concern. There's an obvious risk attached to publishing information about armed and crazy extremists that the government has let roam free. We want to postpone the war on Danish soil as long as we can.

So you think the war is definitely coming to Europe?
Yes! Of course it is. You'd have to be pretty naive to think that the thousands of al-Qaeda sympathisers in Denmark and the rest of Europe are going to sit on their hands forever. If someone gets to the point of decapitating "infidels" and they blow themselves up in Syria and Iraq, that means they won't have a problem doing the same thing anywhere else. It's only a matter of time until this war reaches us.

OK. Thank you Syrienblog.

image via The Fine Young Capitalists' Twitter account 

Vivian James is the fictional everywoman of gaming. She wears a striped hoodie and drinks Mountain Dew Throwback. Her name is a play on “vidya games.” She’s a regular person who wears jeans and spends too much time on the Internet. And she was created out of spite by the historically anti-feminist gamers of 4chan.

Here’s some background: Gamers on 4chan are pouring time and energy into backing a project that sponsors female-created video games. Did they have a crisis of conscience? Not exactly. Their charitable efforts are part of a plan to spite Zoe Quinn, creator of the game Depression Quest. A portion of the users on /v/, boards.4chan.org/v/ 4chan’s video games forum (a place historically unfriendly to women and especially to feminists), have long disliked Quinn, a self-proclaimed feminist, for reasons that aren’t especially clear but feel suspiciously like good old-fashioned misogyny.

In February 2013, Quinn’s Depression Quest debuted on Greenlight, the open submissions system of gaming network Valve. Almost instantly, Quinn became the target of a nightmarish amount of harassment, ranging from name-calling to rape threats. One counterintuitive accusation they’ve hurled at Quinn is that she’s a “fake feminist.” Since gaming culture on the whole is notoriously anti-feminist, I’m not clear on why these gamers would be angry at someone who they felt was “faking” feminism—nor am I sure how one does that—but it appears to offend them greatly. Quinn received so many threats that she changed her phone number. The same trolls then accused her of faking the harassment to “get attention.” It was an ugly scene. 

So it’s no great surprise that these trolls felt victorious when, one annoying August day, Quinn’s ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni wrote several blog posts claiming that Quinn had a series of affairs with members of the gaming community who were in positions to give publicity to Quinn’s game—most prominently, Kotaku reporter Nathan Grayson. Gjoni alleged that Quinn traded sex to Grayson in exchange for a positive review of her game. There is no evidence that Grayson ever even wrote a review of the game and Gjoni later “clarified” this claim by essentially rescinding it, but Quinn’s hater base was already fired up, apparently unfazed by the fact that Gjoni’s posts was simply those of a recently jilted ex-boyfriend. 

To add fuel (irrelevant fuel, but fuel nonetheless) to the fire, a Reddit user claimed that Quinn purposely sabotaged a female-centric “game jam,” sponsored by feminist group The Fine Young Capitalists, in order to promote her own female-centric game jam, Rebel Jam. Needless to say, this is not the kind of event that 4chan’s gaming community would get excited about. But they’d developed a taste for blood, and they saw an opportunity to make Quinn look bad in the eyes of the feminists she usually called allies. So /pol/, 4chan’s politics forum, pitched the idea of donating money to aforementioned feminist group, The Fine Young Capitalists’ female-created video games project, arguing that it would make 4chan “look really good.” The idea quickly gained support on /v/. One user described the plan thusly: “We sponsor [The Fine Young Capitalists.] We...become its rallying cry for ‘breaking down the merit wall in gaming.’....Can you imagine? 4chan attacks the cancer and...sponsors the chemo AT THE SAME TIME. We’d be PR-untouchable.”

No really, I'm impressed that 4chan saved gaming by manufacturing a woman who agrees with them.

— Cameron Lauder (@UnarmedOracle) August 26, 2014

For days, 4chan was the number one supporter of The Fine Young Capitalists’ project. Soon a 4chan user suggested that 4chan take their support a step further and design a female character (warning to anyone who follows that last link: It includes material from 4chan, so expect slurs) for The Fine Young Capitalists. Other users quickly embraced the idea. One user suggested the character should be “just an average female gamer to troll everyone,” because “all the tards in the media” would (reasonably) expect something sexist and/or gross from 4chan. And so, from the muck of cynicism and spite, Vivian was born. And 4chan saw all that they had made, and behold, it was very good!—according to them, and to their strange new bedfellows The Fine Young Capitalists. TFYC tweeted that they would, indeed, work Vivian into whichever game they created. And the gamers of /v/ rejoiced, for their character born out of intolerance had managed to become some sort of perplexing symbol for women in gaming. 

TFYC received plenty of criticism for embracing Vivian, of course, and responded by saying—and this is a quote—“when you say that 4chan cannot take part in a project, you are oppressing them.” And that was when my brain said, “So long, world, it’s been fun,” and leapt to its own death.

Vivian James is a character masquerading as a feminist icon for the express purpose of spiting feminists—yes, that’s feminists, plural. It’s not just Zoe Quinn that /v/ wants to take down—it’s the entirety of what they derogatorily call “SJWs,” or “social justice warriors." People who, according to Urbandictionary, engage in “social justice arguments on the internet... in an effort to raise their own personal reputation.” In other words, SJWs don’t hold strong principles, but they pretend to. The problem is, that’s not a real category of people. It’s simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice—and often, those people are feminists. It’s awfully convenient to have a term at the ready to dismiss women who bring up sexism, as in, "You don’t really care. As an SJW, you’re just taking up this cause to make yourself look good!"

If this stupidly complicated story has left you exhausted, as it has me, I have some good news: gamers on Reddit (and plenty on 4chan) are already weighing in on whether they would have sex with this cartoon woman. At least that much is a constant in this world.

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

Some of the SkatePal team in Palestine

In July the Israel Defence Forces blew a hole in Aram Sabbah's leg. Since then, he's been skating on crutches, which has actually proved to be a pretty good way of learning new tricks. Propping his body up, air-pedalling over the board while it flips, he can hang in the air as long as he wants. The downside, of course, is the “big-ass wound” in the 16-year-old Palestinian’s knee—an unwelcome souvenir of the West Bank’s “Day of Rage.”

“There’s nothing much to say,” he says. “I was throwing stones. I’m out of stones. So I crouched for stones, then BOOM… my leg is numb.”

Aram Sabbah

That was in July, when Aram joined thousands across the West Bank in a march protesting Israeli aggression toward Gaza. Israeli forces clashed with demonstrators at Qalandia checkpoint, injuring more than 200 and killing two, including one 17-year-old. Aram was lucky not to break any bones, but his injury will keep him on crutches for another month—or until he “can’t take any more.” Until then, he’s one of two Palestinian skaters teaching children at Zababdeh’s brand new concrete skatepark.

Although Palestine has played host to the occasional mini ramp and fun box, built by enthusiastic foreigners in need of a place to skate, the 1,000 square-foot site at Zababdeh is the West Bank’s first proper skatepark. Opening this week, it was funded and built by SkatePal, a volunteer-run not-for-profit founded by Edinburgh university Arabic graduate Charlie Davis in 2012. It will be run by a small but growing community of Palestinian skaters, including Arham.

Charlie Davis (in the hat) with Mick, a SkatePal volunteer, and two Palestinian kids

Charlie, 27, had been in and out of Palestine since 2006, taking his board with him to skate the handful of street spots in the West Bank. Building a skatepark there had been on his mind for years, and he made loose plans to fund it after his degree, inspired in part by similar projects in Afghanistan and India. It was in 2012, when he was teaching English at an American language school in Tunisia, that he was persuaded to commit to the project.

“A friend of mine asked what I was going to do after this. I said. ‘I have this idea for a skate project in Palestine, but it seems like a mammoth amount of work and I’m not sure if it’s going to work.’ She was like, ‘You should do it—why are you still here?’”

Charlie quit his job, moved back to Scotland, and set up the SkatePal website to raise funds. Within a few months he had several volunteers, and by Spring of 2013 they had their first set of ramps. It took a while for skateboarding to take hold, though.

“I had my skateboard there and the kids had never seen one before,” says Charlie. “And there’s nothing much to do for kids. If you go in the villages and towns they have, like, a concrete soccer pitch at the school—maybe a basketball hoop or two. A lot of them hang around the streets and play cards, or work in their parents’ shops.

“But most of them just hang around in the street, smoke shisha, sit and chat... it’s part of the culture. I just wanted to introduce a sport that gets people focusing on something and challenging themselves.”

The SkatePal mini ramp in Ramallah

Their first attempt at a park was a few wooden ramps at a site in Ramallah set up on land belonging to a community center, but when Charlie returned to Palestine after a trip home he found it destroyed. The concrete park in Zababdeh has been the accumulation of several months’ planning and weeks of building, and they have also funded a 16-foot mini ramp at Ramallah.

There are currently 12 volunteers from the UK and Ireland helping out with SkatePal, largely students from university engineering departments. To date they have raised over $16,000 and are currently planning a third site at Nabi Saleh, a small village of about 600 in the central West Bank.

SkatePal volunteer Kevin Loftus finishing off the concrete skatepark in Zababdeh

Located about 160 yards from an Israeli military base, Nabi Saleh has become a focal point for the struggle against occupation, following the creeping encroachment of the Israeli settlement of Halamish, visible across the valley. Every Friday since December of 2009, Nabi Saleh’s residents have marched in protest at the confiscation of the village’s land and have been met with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, and occasionally live fire.

There have been hundreds of injuries and more than 100 detentions of villagers since demonstrations began. A large proportion of these are teenagers, who can be held for days, weeks, or months—and occasionally longer.

“In a protest the kids are throwing stones,” says Charlie. “And the soldiers know who they are, because the soldiers come into houses and take pictures of everyone in there. So when people throw stones they come in and arrest people, from eight or nine upwards, for a few days, a few months or a few years—it depends.

“The arrests are quite arbitrary, because obviously a lot of kids are throwing stones, but they might just come in and arrest one at random every so often. Nabi Saleh has the highest percentage of young people getting arrested anywhere in the West Bank.”

Skating is clearly not a substitute for direct action, but it is a distraction from the crucible of protest in Nabi Saleh. Charlie wants to build a place for young people to hang out and have fun. He is also determined to keep politics out. “We want to be apolitical, non-religious, everything. You’ve got to be careful what you do; you can’t promote normalization ideas, like saying Israel should exist. You can’t be too pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. You have to be right down the middle. So we avoid protests.”

Adham Tamimi

Aram is one of two Palestinian volunteers and skate instructors at SkatePal. The other, 18-year-old Adham Tamimi, claims to be Palestine’s first homegrown skater. He started three years ago after a visiting American with a board gave him a try.

“When I tried, I fell so hard that I made up my mind that I was going to learn,” he says.

Skate culture doesn’t really exist in Palestine yet. There are ten to 15 skaters, Adham says, “But we don't really hang out with them. It's basically me and Aram just watching some skate vids. I would've stopped skating if Aram didn't join me, ‘cause it'll eventually get boring if I skate alone.”

Once the parks are established, Charlie plans to hand over management to the two friends. They have both been skating for several years and want to help the scene grow. “Locals see them skating and want to emulate them,” says Charlie. “They get excited watching us, but for them to see local people, they think, ‘Oh, this is something we can do and embrace completely, rather than just copying Britain or America or whatever.’”

Charlie with the first SkatePal class at the Zebabdeh park

The classes SkatePal runs, which started this week, are for people of all ages. Typically, though, they get around ten young people between the ages of eight and 12.

“Our friends love the idea of skateboarding,” says Adham. “But some of them say it’s a bit childish so they’re not going to try it. We have to say, ‘No, it’s not childish—you can make money.’ We didn’t listen to anyone; we kept skating.”

If he weren't into skating, he’d “probably be involved in protests, drugs, and stuff like that,” says Adham. “But I don't need drugs or any other stuff, like demos, to be a rebel, because skating is way more than just an extreme sport. It's a lifestyle that I have to commit to.”

Follow Ben on Twitter.

Find out more about SkatePal at skatepal.co.uk

On August 9th, 2014 a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. The death of Brown fueled days of unrest in Ferguson. Protestors took to the streets and were met with heavily armed police officers in armored vehicles. It wasn’t long before Ferguson, a town of 21,000, resembled a war zone. This week’s VICE Meets is a conversation about the militarization of America’s police force, with journalist and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko.

Illustration by the author

It's been a summer of monsters.

Last week, the Islamic State released a video broadcasting the execution of James Foley in Syria.

Foley was a photojournalist. He was a brave, handsome man, who, according to people who knew him, was kind under stress. He was a member of a world I've only dipped into—that of freelancers reporting on war. It's a scene bonded over whiskeys in Gaziantep or Beirut. Because they have scant backup, freelancers look out for their own. This might mean sharing tips on fixers. Or it might mean something beyond the job, like raising money for the kids of a colleague killed in the field.

James Foley was kidnapped two years ago near Aleppo. A foreigner (or well-off Syrian) can net a fortune in ransom. Later, ISIS acquired him. They murdered him on the hills outside Raqqa. The voice on their propaganda tape was from London's East End.

I learned of Foley's death via a Skype message from a Syrian media activist. “Have you seen the video?? James :( May god bless his pure soul.” It was 4 AM. I googled, then doubled over in ugly sobs. Behind my eyelids, I saw the orange jumpsuit ISIS forced Foley to wear, echoing Gitmo. How many captives were still locked in their basements? How many Syrians had they murdered? Those names would never trend on Twitter.

I was in Sweden. The country's neat politeness made an obscene contrast to social media, where the stream showed police rampaging in Ferguson, Missouri. A cop had killed a black teenager named Mike Brown. Police would lay siege to the town to protect the man who shot him. Cops gassed an eight-year-old boy, or a woman fleeing in her wheelchair. Despite their sci-fi toys, the police's violence was as old as slavery. With raw courage, Ferguson kept protesting.

Weeks before, New York City police strangled to death a black grandfather named Eric Garner. A week before that, a California cop pummeled Marlene Pinnock, a black great grandmother. Back in New York, police stripped a black mom naked in the hallway outside her apartment, then arrested her entire family. They had knocked on the wrong door. Social media presented a parade of videos showcasing state violence that black people have endured since they were kidnapped to America. 

Weeks before officer Darren Wilson killed Mike Brown, Israel invaded Gaza under Operative Protective Edge. They bombed homes, hospitals, mosques, even UN schools where Palestinians were told to shelter. After six weeks, the IDF had killed over 2,000 Gazans, most of them civilians. Palestinians tweeted photos of the devastation. Israel claims to have the “world's most moral army.” Those photos showed this to be a lie.

During Gaza or Ferguson, I could not look away. These were events in which I, as a white-skinned woman or an American, was unwillingly complicit. But I wondered about the nature of looking. Was it voyeurism, to watch people attacked each night and do nothing but donate to bail funds? Or was it worse not to look, to retreat because one was able?

Journalism often feels like vampirism. Before Ferguson or Gaza, I'd been reporting from Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Before that, Guantanamo. Sources told me about repression and violence. A journalist on the disaster beat told me to be a funnel for this pain. “Let it go through you. Get it down truthfully. Move on.”

I could not.

Writing about others' trauma bears no relation to living it. Yet I was a ruin more and more. The word “burnout” is dead from overuse. Constant exposure to pain burns in.

Quinn Norton once advised me to write about what I loved. Rage came more easily. I'd make my lines bloody, my words damning. I didn't know how to write about happiness. What did it mean, the night I danced on the street in New Orleans? A brass band howled. I'd woven flowers into my hair, but they dissolved beneath the Halloween rain. My friends and I danced for hours.

It was one night, on one sliver of earth.

We need beauty. But what right did I have, I kept asking myself, in a world so full of hell? 

In his poem, “A Brief for the Defense,” Jack Gilbert attempted an answer. “We must risk delight,” he wrote. Life contains everything. Tear gas in Ferguson. Books read on the grass. Foley's murder. Dancing in New Orleans, till sunrise blots the stars. We're meat—fragile and finite. But joy is survival.

To remind myself, every summer I visit Coney Island. My mother used to visit, as did my grandmother. I love Coney's tattered glamor. I love the animatronic Grandma spitting fortunes, or the monsters Chico airbrushed at The Spook House. I love the dizzy minutes when the Wonder Wheel freezes. I'm above it all. Alone with the sky.

For a hundred years, Coney Island's been a symbol for working class pleasure. But New York lacks space for such darlings. In 1964, Fred Trump (Donald's father) bought Steeplechase, Coney's grandest park. He intended to raze it for apartments. Though he failed to push through the necessary rezoning, he destroyed Steeplechase anyway. On the night before the bulldozers, Trump threw a party.

At the party, bikini models presented bricks to Trump's friends. The moguls hurled the bricks through Steeplechase's stained-glass windows. They must have giggled as the glass broke.

Every year, Coney Island faded. In the early 2000s, Thor Equities bought up much of the boardwalk. They expelled a culture as sparkling as the glass crushed into Times Square's sidewalks.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged Coney Island. No one even repainted the signs.

When my friends and I visited Coney Island this summer, the old parts had shrunk to bones. As we watched the storm come off the water, Coney's lights seemed fainter than ever.

I thought of Fred Trump as he hurled bricks through Steeplechase's windows.

Spaces of joy are always threatened. Blink, and they've been destroyed.

I thought of the gunships blocking Gaza's sea from fishermen, or the Islamic State smashing ancient statues, or the New York cops who would choke a black man to death for little more than being outside in the sun.

I thought of the roses laid in the street where Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown. 

Power seeks to enclose beauty—to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarized zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street.

The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us. Jack Gilbert is right. “We must risk delight” in the summer of monsters. Beauty is survival, not distraction. Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight.

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

Products containing plastic microbeads. Photo via the author.
You’re vigorously scrubbing your face with the newest buzzword-laden exfoliating gel, trying to rid yourself of an incoming breakout. It’s probably something many of us have done, but what you probably didn’t realize about your beauty regimen was that you were actually rubbing little plastic beads all over your face. They’re called microbeads and can be in body wash, hand soap, facial scrubs, and even toothpaste under the ingredient names of polyethylene and polypropylene. If it sounds disgusting that you’re giving yourself a plastic facial, that’s because it is, and not just for you personally—these bits of plastic wash down the drain, creating a catastrophic situation in the water system.

The Great Lakes are a hugely affected by microbeads. You should already know that this fabulous fivesome makes up 20 percent of the world’s freshwater sources. They border eight states, plus they connect to countless rivers that run throughout North America. If you live in Canada, this is of particular concern as our most populous province—Ontario—borders four out of five of them.

“The Great Lakes are our national treasure, even a bi-national treasure,” says Nancy Goucher, the Water Program manager at Environmental Defence, located in Toronto. “We have an obligation, a duty to protect them for future generations.”

And in 2012 and 2013, a study led by Sherri Mason at SUNY (State University of New York) Fredonia and 5 Gyres Institute found a higher concentration of microplastics in one of the bi-national lakes than studies previously done in the ocean. 

“We found more plastics in Lake Erie than any of the oceanic sampling that we’ve done in the last four years totaling some 50,000 miles,” says Anna Cummins, executive director of 5 Gyres Institute in California, an organization battling plastic pollution. “So this one sample in Lake Erie, we found roughly 1,600 particles, and on further examination, we traced many of them back to the microbeads that you find in personal care products.”

One of the microbead ingredients found in personal care products. Photo via 5 Gyres.
Currently, the water in Lake Ontario and Michigan are being surveyed for microbeads, and while they’ve been found to be in all the Great Lakes, data hasn’t been published yet for all of these bodies of water. 

“If you ask me, as a plastic pollution activist, if I would prefer a milk jug in a lake or the equivalent amount of plastic in a milk jug in [plastic] dust in a lake, I would say milk jug every time,” says Stiv Wilson, associate director of 5 Gyres. “[That’s] because by volume, microbeads have a much bigger surface area to absorb these toxins than a milk jug does… that’s what increases their threat.

Once those little blue microbeads from your blackhead-clearing scrub wash down the drain, they enter the water system. They don’t dissolve, but rather, they begin to absorb toxins while they float around from nasty pollutants like pesticides, oil from cars, and flame-retardants.

Plastics repel water and attract fat (which is what many pollutants are made of) so they collect and concentrate on the microbeads. And it doesn’t stop there. These plastic beads resemble fish eggs, which many aquatic species feed on. That means they’re entering the food chain.

“Say a small fish eats a bunch of microbeads, then a large fish eats a smaller fish,” Cummins says. “By the time you get to the larger fish that humans consume, they basically have the sum total of that whole contaminants from that whole food chain.”

With scientific proof that bits of plastic don’t belong in personal care products made to go down the drain, you’d think that the companies who put microbeads in their products in the first place would be willing to immediately find natural alternatives—stuff like sea salt, coconut husk, and apricot shells. After all, some companies already make products with these types of ingredients. But those that don’t are fighting it, and ironically enough, they fight dirty.

The state of Illinois, bordering Lake Michigan, already passed legislation to ban future production of products with microbeads. However, it left a major loophole in the bill—an allowance for biodegradable plastics. That’s a major problem because while the name of these plastics might sound like they’re eco-friendly, they won’t break down in the environment of the Great Lakes. They need to be in a very specific type of environment, and they have a completely unreasonable checklist of factors to go through before they start degrading.

“In order for that stuff to biodegrade, what you need is an industrial composting facility,” Wilson says. “That is, you need an environment of moisture, oxygen, 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and it needs to be constantly filled… There’s no place on earth where you have all those factors at the same time.”

Plastic debris found in the Great Lakes. Photo via 5 Gyres.
Both New York and California have also seen bills in their legislation processes on banning microplastics in personal care products, but there hasn’t been any action in Canada yet. Over the week of August 17, a bill negotiated by 5 Gyres was defeated by one vote in California. And while the state borders an ocean instead of the Great Lakes, legislation there can be a model for the states and Canadian province that do border the lakes.

“Actually I was just talking to the attorney general’s office… they want to allow for biodegradable plastics in the New York legislation,” Mason says. “So basically the attorney general’s office said, ‘We’ll allow that, but you have to verify that they biodegrade and we have to certify the process… the industry kind of turned around and said, ‘Oh, never mind.’ But in Illinois, they are allowing.”

These biodegradable plastics are often marketed as being made out of plant material. But when it comes down to what you make plastic out of—corn, plants, whatever—it’s still the same chemical composition: hydrocarbon. “It doesn’t matter what you make it out of—if you start with plants, or you start with petroleum, or you start with ethylene, or natural gas—it’s still chemically exactly the same thing. So the fact that it’s derived from plants is irrelevant, it’s that the end product is still plastic that does not biodegrade.”

So now that we’ve realized that biodegradable and plant-derived plastic is complete bullshit and that any type of plastic microbead is detrimental to the environment, why are these companies so hell-bent on keeping them in their products? What 5 Gyres has found out is extremely dark and characteristic of corporate greed.

When you look under a microscope at a plastic microbead and then at one made from apricot shell, you would see that the latter was much coarser. When you’re exfoliating your skin, a coarser product is likely going to be more effective at removing dead skin cells. However, if a product is very effective at exfoliating, you might only need to use it once a week instead of every day.

“The whole reason they like plastic microbeads is because they are less effective, and so the consumption of those products [with plastic microbeads] is greater because you use them every day,” Wilson says. “And that’s what they don’t want to lose; that’s what they’re trying to protect. If they use a natural alternative, they’re going to decrease their market share by six out of seven days, or at least I think that’s what they fear.”

Microplastics up-close. Photo via 5 Gyres.
While 5 Gyres has been focusing mainly on state legislation that would ban the harmful microbeads, The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative (GLSLC), a coalition of 114 Canadian and American cities, has been centering in on the companies that make the products. They wrote to 11 of these companies with varied results—some said they were already in the process of phasing them out, while others completely ignored the letters. Colgate-Palmolive agreed to remove them by the end of this year (the earliest stated by any companies), while Proctor & Gamble said 2017. Some, such as L’Oréal and Johnson & Johnson, haven’t even given a date.

So why not? Well, apparently it usually takes two years to reformulate a product, then a company has to get it approved by a government organization. I guess it’s just not enough that mircobeads have been proven to be harmful.

“[The companies] said the biggest problem is working through the Food & Drug Administration regulatory process because it takes some time to get approval for changing the products… None of them said that it was a financial issue,” says David Ullrich, executive director of GLSLC.

Meanwhile, countless of these bits of plastic will continue to wash into the Great Lakes while these already-rich companies drag along and fight the process of reformulating their products with actual natural ingredients that aren’t any kind of plastic.

If you want to stop slathering yourself with plastic right now, your best bet is to switch to products made by companies like Lush and Acure Organics, which use all-natural exfoliants. If you have products with polypropylene or polyethylene, you can send them in to 5 Gyres Institute for use in their future visual demonstrations. And if you’re ever wondering what the fuck else is in the stuff you put on your body, check out this database where you can look up any weird-looking chemical names in your products.



@allison_elkin

Medicinal cannabis from Holland. Photo: Medische-wiet | Wikimedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

On July 22nd, an administrative court in Cologne ruled that three patients, who are currently being prescribed medicinal marijuana could potentially grow their medicine themselves. A gram of legally-imported, medical marijuana from the Netherlands costs between 15 and 20 Euros ($20–$25) in Germany. It isn’t covered by health insurance, and so for most patients, in spite of their special prescription, the price is exorbitant.

The judge ruled that a patient in dire need should fundamentally not be refused the opportunity to grow cannabis, as a last resort. One of the conditions of the ruling was that the patient's apartment had to be extra secure, to prevent access by third parties. Two out of five plaintiffs weren’t able to offer satisfactory proof of the stipulated security measures and so their suits were dismissed.

Günther Weiglein is one of the three victorious cannabis patients. Weiglein suffers from chronic pain after getting into a motorcycle accident that wasn’t his fault. He has been successfully treating his pain with cannabis for years.

I met Günther to chat about the circumstances of his case.

VICE: Hey Günther, may I ask what you’re inhaling there?
Günther Weiglein: Right now I’m vaporizing cannabis by Bedrocan. It’s the first strain the Netherlands started producing. But I'd prefer having some Jack Herer—an old strain developed by Sensi Seeds. It has a high THC content and works pretty well on my fits of pain. I would love to grow some Jack Herer at home if I were allowed to.

Have you had good experiences with this strain?
Not just that. Sensi Seeds offer many choices when it comes to cannabis. And they also co-developed the genetic basis for the existing medical strains.

Günther Weiglein. Photo by the author

Could you briefly explain what the difference between the strains is?
Right now in Germany they offer four strains of pot all by the company Bedrocan: Bedrobinol, Bediol, Bedican and of course Bedrocan. As a patient with chronic pain, Bedrocan was the only strain available to me in the beginning. When I am in pain, I vaporize a bud of Bedrocan. That feels like the pain is covered in cotton. It doesn’t go away, but it’s definitely bearable. Until recently, I smoked weed like most people; I decided to start vaporizing cannabis for health reasons. When you vaporize, the contents are just heated up but don't burn—like a vapor bath for a cold.

But the range of strains they offer in Germany is by no means sufficient. At the moment cannabis patients in the USA have a huge selection to choose from. They can choose between different strains depending on the kind of illness they have.

For example, cancer patients need CBD-rich strains; as a pain patient, I require THC-heavy buds. Some people need sativa strains, and indica works better for others. Then there are the numerous extracts that can’t be dismissed from medicinal use. For us in Germany, there’s a lot of progress to be made.

Recently you became one of three patients in Germany, who theoretically could grow cannabis themselves, right?
Yeah, there were five similar plaintiffs and three of the cases were accepted by the court, including mine. I have had a special approval for the past five years from the BfArM [Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices], which allows me to buy Bedrocan cannabis in German pharmacies. I can get the stuff in a pharmacy, but at the price of 15 Euros per gram, I can’t get it in sufficient quantities. That’s why I submitted a request to grow my own cannabis four years ago; but the BfArM refused. So I brought a case against them to court and just recently obtained said verdict.

Can you immediately start growing weed?
If only. According to the judge, I can start growing because my apartment has the required security measures. But the stipulations that the administrative authorities in Bonn made in similar cases were impossible to fulfill. In principle, they insist that your apartment be as secure as Fort Knox, and you have to finance these renovations yourself.

The room where I want to grow weed is secure enough for the judge but there is a lot of bureaucracy involved. It’s still the BfArM that gives the permission in the end—the judge can’t directly allow it. So neither me or the other two people who won in court have been able to get the necessary piece of paper that actually authorizes us to grow yet.

So is it only a matter of time now?
The verdict isn’t legally binding yet. My lawyer, Matthias Schillo, and I are convinced that the BfArM will appeal the case. They are very good at delaying and stalling, which you can see from how long it took for the case to reach the court. So we’ll still have to wait for the verdict in the appeal. But even if they uphold the verdict, they can still come to me with authorization papers that aren’t referred to in the verdict. For example, the administrators working under the Ministry of Health could come and complain about the wooden door that leads to the grow-room and demand a steel door. Or a better lock, or something else.

A bottle of Bedrocan. Photo: Medische-wiet | Wikimedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

So you can’t just buy one of those tents from the grow shop and set it up in your bedroom, even if you’re really allowed to. What does the BfArM require exactly for you to be able to grow your own medicine?
First of all they need to make sure a patient is actually in need of it. In order to grow, I also have to protect the plants from access by unauthorized individuals. For that I have to have them in a secure room. In my application I stipulated using an old bathroom, which is currently used for storage.

I don’t have to put bars on my windows because I live on the first floor, but if I lived on the ground floor I would have to. I also need a secure cabinet to lock my supply in. Extremely exaggerated measures like double-walls, special windows and having a safe installed, which the administrators demanded of earlier applicants, were off the table in this verdict.

So in spite of the verdict, you’re restricted to the expensive cannabis from the pharmacy. How do you deal with that?
I can’t afford the amount I’m prescribed, so I buy what my wallet allows at the moment. I need more weed in the colder months than in summer, especially during the wet autumn. Growing for myself is the only way for me to get out of this dilemma of always having too little medicine or the wrong type. Conventional medicine also works for me, I don’t want to talk shit about that; but the side effects are nasty in my case, in comparison to cannabis.  

The other patients maintain a low profile, but you continue to give interviews. Why?
Other patients can’t, or don’t want to reveal themselves for understandable reasons. I realized that cannabis patients still have a bit of a stoner stigma. Nevertheless, I still think hemp should only be accessible to people who need it for medical reasons. Hemp needs to regain its value in society; the value it once had. The plant can’t speak for itself, that’s why I try to offer it a voice and to possibly inspire others to do the same.