​Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are slated to become a more common cause of death than cancer by 2050 worldwide, according to a new study sponsored by the British government. 

"Antimicrobial Resistance: Tackling a Crisis for the Health and Wealth of Nations"was issued by the ​​​Review on Antimicrobial Resistance on Thursday. It combines data from two models that mostly concern stats on E. coli, malaria, and TB infections. It also notes that areas with high malaria, HIV, and TB rates are likely to suffer the most from the effects of these bacteria. India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Russia are probably the countries most at risk, the report said.

According to a statement from Jim O'Neill, the economist who is chairing the review, "Drug-resistant infections already kill hundreds of thousands a year globally, and by 2050 that figure could be more than 10 million." Cancer killed 8.2 million people in 2012, the most recent year with complete data. It's worth noting that cancer deaths, at least in the United States, have declined by 20 percent since 1991 ​according to the American Cancer Society.

Governmental bodies around the world are increasingly expressing concern about the growing threat of infections caused by bacteria that have adapted to the drugs that used to kill them. The World Health Organization's 2014 report on the matter warned of the need to "stay ahead of emerging resistance," and said that "every country and individual needs to do more."

The Centers for Disease Control's online fact sheet on antibiotic resistance emphasizes that doctors should prescribe drugs only when absolutely necessary. But in the US, 80 percent of antibiotics are being used on farm animals, according to Reuters, and many believe that's the root of the problem.

Regulating agriculture's use of antibiotics has been an uphill battle so far, with government measures like last year's GFI #213, based on the FDA's Strategy on Antimicrobial Resistance, falling seriously short, according to critics. The consumer watchdog group Food and Water Watch claimed that the measure did little if anything to curb the excessive use of antibiotics, thanks to generous loopholes that allow antibiotics to be used in schemes aimed at fattening animals faster. 

The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) is a proposed alternative to the FDA's regulations, explicitly designed to "end the routine use of antibiotics on healthy animals and curb the growing threat of superbugs." So far, legislatures haven't been kind to such aggressive bills.

In the UK, the same body that commissioned the "Antimicrobial Resistance" study is set to release its own recommendations in the summer of 2016.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Creed frontman Scott Stapp's battle with mental illness has taken another disturbing turn. Last month, ​he released a video through Facebook in which he looks bedraggled and gaunt, claims he's bankrupt, and sketches out a vague conspiracy theory about the IRS and a variety of shadowy, nefarious individuals trying to bring him down. As grim as that sounds, it's even worse when you remember that he filmed the whole thing in a Holiday Inn.

Fortunately, Stapp was put in a 72-hour psychiatric hold for his own safety before the situation had a chance to escalate. When that hold ended, though, Stapp's situation deteriorated significantly.

During a frantic, bleak 911 call ​obtained by TMZ, Jaclyn Stapp, Scott's estranged wife, describes a manic episode following his release from his care facility that culminated in a threat to kill Obama. Jaclyn said he fled shirtless on a bicycle while in possession of between 400 and 600 pages of documents that he said were "CIA documents." 

"He thinks he's part of the CIA, they're trying to kill him," Jaclyn says early in the recording. "He's a CIA agent and he's supposed to assassinate Obama." Stapp was also carrying a screwdriver, a wrench, and a hard drive according to a report from ​Rolling Stone. Later, he placed his own call to the police in which he accused Jaclyn of stealing his truck, which necessitated him riding a bike around town.

Stapp's wife alleges that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia​ and exacerbates that illness with self-medication, though Jaclyn said that he was "off of the drugs" at the time of the call. 

Jaclyn is currently seeking a divorce from Scott, citing his drug abuse and ​tendency to disappear for "days or weeks at a time." As for Stapp's finances, a report from Jon Wiederhorn of Billboard magazine states that Wind-Up Records ​actually paid him $1.3 million in advanced royalties for his recent solo album, Proof of Life. More money, in the total of $3 million, was paid to all the members of Creed for royalties connected to their last album—2009's Full Circle, which Wiederhorn's article reports sold 444,000 copies, a far cry from the band's heyday.

Follow Dave Schilling on ​Twitter.

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​Pretzels, 2014. All photos by ​Walter Pearce

Here is a collection of portraits I have taken over the last few months. Included are photographs of friends, lovers, and people I have only met once. —​Walter Pearce

Click ​here and ​here for parts one and two of Walter Pearce's Photo Diary

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​Henry

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​Lauren 

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​Spencer

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​Logan

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​Mirella

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​Morgan

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Follow Walter Pearce on ​Instagram.

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Someone sitting on someone else's face outside parliament. Photos by Thomas Hjelm

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

​Today at the UK Parliament, some people sat on some other people's faces while every living photographer in England took photos of it. The people doing the face-sitting were there to protest against  ​the recent ban on all sorts of stuff in British-produced porn, including ​female ejaculation, face-sitting, urination ("water-sports"), fisting, and a few more arbitrarily-selected sex acts.

The government's amendment to the 2003 Communications Act at the beginning of last week was a quiet one, apparently in the hope that nobody would notice. However, unfortunately for all the politicians trying to get into work today, actually quite a lot of people noticed. Then they told the internet about it, pointing out that the ban is essentially a preachy bit of moral judgment on what constitutes OK and not-OK sex, as well as specifically targeting female sexual pleasure.

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The subsequent online uproar inspired 1,100 people to click "attending" on the face-sitting protest's Facebook event page. However, turning up today, it seemed that around 950 of these attendees had gotten cold feet, suggesting it's a lot easier to sign up to simulating a sex act in public than to actually do it.

The organizer of the protest, 2013's  ​Sex Worker of the Year Charlotte Rose, probably didn't succeed in her goal of breaking a world record for the most people sitting on each other's faces in one place at one time (she said it costs too much to get the Guinness Book of World Records to adjudicate anyway). But the overwhelming, outnumbering (sometimes kind of sleazy) press presence means she probably did a pretty good job of making her point.

I had a walk around and asked some of the demonstrators why they were there.

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Karin and Sarah

VICE: Hi Karin and Sarah. Why are you here today?
​ Karin: I think these new laws are absolutely wrong. People should do whatever they like to do.
​ Sarah: I think female ejaculation and water-sports shouldn't be banned in British porn. If we can't get it in British porn we'll just get it elsewhere, and what the hell is wrong with it anyway? It's just a really stupid law.

I notice you're wearing a lot of PVC, and you have a ball gag there. Why are you protesting in this way?
​ Karin: Because we're perverted!
​ Sarah: Yeah, we're perverts!

What do you think of the turn out? There seems to be more press than protesters.
​Karin: I'm very disappointed in the British fetish scene. I thought there would be lots of us, and then I see just me and Sarah. I'm very unimpressed.

Any other thoughts?
​ Sarah: I think there should be more actual research into what female ejaculation is, because it definitely isn't piss.
​ Karin: And I've never heard of anyone who died of face-sitting, which is what some people have said.
​ Sarah: Yeah, where are the statistics on that one? Someone might die from face-sitting? Jesus Christ. God's sake. Get a grip.
​ Karin: There are some girls who cum like boys, you know? It happens. So what the fuck is wrong with this? Are we not allowed to cum, or what?

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Hi, Molly Malone. Why are you here today?
​ Molly: I'm here mainly to support fellow porn performers and sex workers. It feels like a really targeted and already stigmatized area of sexual expression that's being censored. As a queer person and a gender non-conforming person, I'm someone who doesn't have heteronormative sex and doesn't watch heteronormative porn, and also I have a lot of friends who make wonderful non-heteronormative porn, and it's just heartbreaking that that's something that could be criminalized in the UK. 

And from a civil liberties point of view, the risk to free speech that this could potentially lead on to; the thought that, one day, we might not have the internet as we know it now... we need to fight for those civil liberties and this is quite a lighthearted way to do it.

How will the ban affect UK porn performers?
​ Well, you'll either have to [quit or] be a criminal, which, to be honest, a lot of us have to be anyway. I feel very strongly about sex workers' rights, and the laws harm sex workers regardless. I'm a porn performer, mainly in spanking, and a good friend of mine has already sold his website because he can't afford to be made a criminal. What I hope is that some people will refuse to bow down to the law and continue to make videos on demand that don't apply to the restrictions, and that they'll be a test case and that will be thrown out of court and that will be the end of it.

What do you think about the selection of things banned?
​ It seems really to target non-heteronormative acts. So things like piss-play, fisting, face-sitting, spanking, bondage: they're all things that people who might not have traditional access to classic penis and vagina sex might do. I used to spend a lot of time talking about how the trans and gender non-conforming community can access sex and pleasure in the same way our straight and cis-gender friends can, and to have that denied just seems like such a disgusting backing up of the heteronormative matrix.

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John (Dutch didn't want to be photographed)

Hi John and Dutch. Why are you here?
​ Dutch: I'm just here to get someone to sit on my face.
​ John: I'm here because every few years another Tory MP gets busted in a Soho sex dungeon.

Right. So what are you protesting?
If you look at it in a really harmless way, it's a decadent series of pleasures. Why on Earth would anyone take that away? The idea of censoring female ejaculation... what? It makes no sense to me in any way at all.
​ Dutch: It should be a compulsory part of sex education.
​ John: It should be a compulsory part of sex. This idea of "Well, we must stop face-sitting because it's desperately unsafe"... it's just a very strange thing to do. What out-of-touch draconian fuckwit thought of this?

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Hi, Adam. Why are you here?
​ Adam: I'm here first as an individual, but I also represent the Campaign Against Censorship. I think this new law is bad. It's sexist, it doesn't make any sense at all. I have my own feelings on why it's going on—that house over the road, they cannot find one MP not implicated in a scandal. This is the ideal time for Mr. Cameron to bring up something like this to mask his own evils. This is a government that wants to censor what people do in their private lives. To me, censorship in itself is far more evil than anything that could ever be banned. I'm not talking shagging hedgehogs or sex with children, I'm talking about what two people do as consenting adults.

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Hi Zoe and Grace. Why are you here?
​ Zoe: We're fighting female repression, in its simplest form. The government's trying to ban female pleasure, they're trying to ban what people can watch. They don't care if it's consensual. They don't care that people have different fetishes, different things that they find fun. It's patriarchal shit, essentially.

What impact will it have on British porn performers?
​ Grace: I don't think it will stop them. But I think it's very oppressive; it's just taken feminism and female expression back a step. I hope we'll fight it so that not much impact is made, but it could affect everyone—men, women, porn performers, porn watchers... all sex workers in general. I think it's just bullshit.
Zoe: It's highly misogynistic, obviously.

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Hi, Tee Tee Bang. Why are you here?
​ Tee Tee Bang: I'm here because I believe in sexual liberation. I think that we shouldn't be so repressed as a nation. I think it would make our children happier if we just talked about sex. If we were more open about it, it would give us a healthier lifestyle—it would be a positive thing. We've had our sexuality repressed in this country for so many years; there are so many things we don't talk about and it's just not right. You know, we've got girls walking around with body issues, and they don't know what they're doing when they get to the bedroom—they don't know what's right and what's wrong, and we should just educate them more.

What do you think about the list of banned things?
​ I think it's really dumb. My personal favorite is squirting, because I didn't even know that was a thing until I started watching porn. It was such a taboo for so long, and now we've finally all agreed that it happens they want to ban it? It's nuts. What, so a man can cum and it's completely OK, but if a woman does it's not?

You seem pretty annoyed. Did you join in with the face-sitting?
​ Yes! I met a lovely girl called Rachel who asked me if I wanted to sit on her face. It was really fun.

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Hi Dual, Tigress, and the infamous Boom Boom. Why are you here?
​ Tigress: They're trying to take away our freedom within sexuality. Personally, for me, it's extremely suppressive of the female side as well. Female ejaculation is perfectly natural, perfectly normal, and the majority of women can actually achieve it if they let themselves go. So why they'd want to take this away from us, I'm not quite sure. We've moved forward so much in terms of acceptance, gay marriage, all these things, so why are we now going backward? Just because it's pornography? I don't understand it, so we need to take a stand.

What do you think about the list selection?

Humiliation, abuse, tethering, spanking... these are all extremely minor things within the fetish world. If they think that's a big deal they should meet some of our friends. Again, it's just taking away our freedoms, but it's not even a dangerous thing, so I don't understand the uproar. Instead of concentrating on their tiny little penises, maybe they should take some interest in the NHS or sorting out our actual society.

What do you think, Boom Boom?
​ Boom Boom: Porn is a reliever. When you ejaculate you're like, "Oooh." It's a reliever of a stressful day, and now they're taking away things people love. It's going to cause a huge uproar.
Dual: And who doesn't love a good spanking? Everyone loves a good spanking. Even you, I can see it.

Love it, mate. So what inspired your outfits?
​ This? This is just Friday. It's our day look. Just trying to blend in. They just picked us up like this. 

Follow Charlotte England on ​Twitter

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Deeni doll photo via Twitter user ​Hussain Master.

Yesterday a woman in England's Lancashire County drew local media attention after she launched an "Islamic doll" with no facial features. Dubbed Romeisa, the doll's face is entirely flat, cushy, and eerie, draped in a hijab. Ridhwana B., the doll's creator, designed it as the first model of a larger Deeni (Arabic for faith) Doll collection, which seeks to comply with what some interpret as Islamic religious law's prohibition on the depiction of distinct features on any children's toy.

"I came up with the idea from scratch after speaking to some parents who were a little concerned about dolls with facial features," B, a former teacher at a Lancashire Muslim school,  ​told the Lancashire Telegraph. "I spoke to a religious scholar in Leicester who guided me through what was and was not permissible when producing the product," she said.

The doll, after four years in development, is manufactured in China and undergoing limited distribution (via inquiries to  ​info@deenidolls.com) for about $40 a pop. Believing the selection of toys for observant, strictly orthodox Muslim children is quite limited now, B. claims she is considering launching a wider range of products and writing a book on Islamic child rearing.

Although it's attracted a good deal of local interest, B.'s doll is not the first faceless model in the world. In the thriving niche of Islamic toys, there are actually several dedicated faceless doll makers, but the Lancashire Telegraph reports that B.'s dolls are unique for their high-quality production.

Faceless dolls derive from Islamic religious texts that prohibit the depiction of humans and animals in any medium (although encountering faces on things like coins is accepted as unavoidable). This stems from the belief, familiar to Christians and Jews, that one ought not create or worship idols and the fear that depictions of man or beast will lead to false worship, or at least distract people from their focus on Allah.

Creating dolls in human and animal form is explicitly exempted form these rules, so long as they have no facial features, based on stories that the Prophet Muhammad's wife, Aisha, played with dolls and the belief that they can teach young girls how to show affection and care for children. In the past this has led religious authorities to suggest that observant Muslims burn the faces off of their children's mainstream dolls for lack of accessible faceless alternatives.

Muslim attitudes on depictions of humans and animals in art have varied over time. Often such images have appeared in religious texts, justified as useful visual aids and indicating the historic, although not universal, acceptance of human images by devout Muslims. Even depictions of the Prophet Mohammed, quite controversial in recent years, were fairly common until the 17^th century and tolerated into the modern era. (For those in New York, there's a pretty good one from medieval Afghanistan on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

This acceptance of human forms continues in much of the Muslim world. For example, many of the numerous toys aimed at Muslim children—like Iran's Sarah and Dara (local competitors with Barbie, who herself has donned a burqa in a bid at inclusiveness) or the globally marketed Amina, Little Farah, or Razanne dolls—convey religious and cultural values but carry human features.

For those who do observe the taboos on doll faces, many small-to-large producers, like Aisha Dolls, Faatimah's Dolls, Rainbow Dolls, and Smart Ark, have offered a wide range of featureless editions in many shapes, sizes, colors, and types of clothing for years.

Many wish to purchase such dolls for more than just religious observance or the inculcation of traditional female and maternal values. Some Amish communities continue to produce and use faceless dolls both to avoid idolatry, to endanger a sense of equality, and to avoid vanity. And the Waldorf educational system, with its focus on self-directed learning, values and makes faceless dolls as a tool for undirected, imaginative play.

Despite their niche market and possible cross-cultural appeal or re-appropriation, the fact that B.'s dolls originated and are sold in Britain has raised some hackles amongst Brits who see them as yet another sign of a foreign culture usurping their own. One headline on the dolls' release reads, " Britain surrenders to Islam again."

It's a bad time for B. to receive that kind of press. Riding a wave of xenophobic nationalism, fueled by accusations that Islamists recently tried to take over a Birmingham school district, hate crimes against Muslims increased by 65 percent over the past year in parts of the UK. Any perceived provocation may, now more than ever, result in atrocious backlashes.

But for the vast majority of humanity not convinced that some cloth and stuffing can bring down their culture, the Romeisa is just a toy. It's a bit of a creepy toy that will make some think more of a horror movie than playtime session, granted—even B. acknowledges that some will find it strange. And some may not agree with the traditional or religious values it relates to. But as the Waldorf folks will tell you, children love to make up their own narratives for their playthings. And a faceless doll can truly be anything they want it to be. It's conceivable B. could, for this very reason, garner a fair market outside of the Muslim world. Although for now we'll have to wait and see how her Deeni Dolls stack up to the surprisingly robust faceless competition. 

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

​ Among the most interesting details published in the ​Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's torture program released this week was the revelation that two psychologists were paid $80 million to develop and carry out the agency's "enhanced interrogation" program.

On Wednesday, the day after the ​Senate report was released, VICE News published an exclusive i​nterview with one of those psychologists, former military officer James Mitchell. Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen—referred to in the report by the pseudonyms "Grayson Swigert" and "Hammond Dunbar"—were military psychologists tasked with developing an efficient interrogation program for the CIA based on their experience in the Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, which prepared military personnel against torture through mock interrogations.

According to the Senate report summary, the pair "reverse engineered" the most effective SERE methods to develop the CIA's interrogation tactics, including the now infamous waterboarding method, despite having no experience in interrogation themselves. The summary states that in 2003, the contractors were directly involved in the interrogation of accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The report also explains that in 2005, Mitchell and Jessen left the CIA and created their own company that contracted interrogation services for the agency. According to Senate investigators, the firm received $81 million before the contract was terminated in 2009.

Because of his non-disclosure agreements with the CIA, Mitchell was unable to confirm or deny details about his work with the CIA in his interview with VICE News. But the findings in the Senate report raise important questions about the ethics of his and Jessen's roles in the agency's interrogation program, and about the disturbing psychological theory of "learned helplessn​ess" that apparently informed the CIA's techniques.

To find out more about all this, I spoke to Stephen Soldz, a professor of ethics at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, who has also been a vocal critic of the US government's use of psychological torture in War on Terror.

VICE: You have been an outspoken critic of psychologists who participate in interrogations. What exactly are the ethical issues here? 
Stephen Soldz: There are two levels of ethical implication, for the general public and for psychologists in particular. There's a good reason why torture is illegal through an [inter]national conve​ntion signed by a majority of countries (though also unfortunately breached by many of them.) Torture is a particularly brutalizing procedure, or set of actions. Torture can be torturous to societies, which should be moving to reduce the level of brutalization. So at the general level, torture lessens the values on which society is supposedly based.

And for psychologists?
For psychologists and health providers, it's also a violation of the fundamental tenants all the health professions: The "do no harm" ethic, the [ethic] of informed consent—that [psychologists]do things with the agreement of people and that we don't use our skills to hurt people.

Is there any way to successfully apply psychology to interrogations without crossing the line?
Of course. I mean, good police do it all the time. You know, people try to get information from people who [don't want] to give it all the time, and that's ethical. But torture involves the deliberate infliction of harm in the process of trying to get that information. I'm not an interrogator, that's not my skill set, but I've talked to a number of interrogators who are very clear that not only is it ethically wrong to get near the line of torture, but if we even approach the line, then we're really in trouble.

What is the psychological basis for some of these interrogation tactics outlined in the report?
Referring to the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, which is a synonym for torture, they apparently based it on Martin Seli​gman's theory of learned helplessness. The idea, as I understand it, is that you torture somebody and you increase their level of hopelessness and helplessness, and then they basically give up and you can do whatever you want. Then the idea is that you switch, and what you want them to do is cooperate with you, and they're supposed to do that.

Does it work?
I'm not an expert on the efficacy, but I don't know of any evidence that learned helplessness gets to the point of inducing cooperation, or even submission. And I don't know of any evidence that says [that] in submission, people tell you truthful intelligence that you want to have. In fact, many interrogators deny that.

Have there been any studies on whether or not learned helpless could lead to divulging useful information?
The CIA has claimed to have some classified studies, but I'm not aware of any. I do know ​[CIA officials] were collecting data on these enhanced interrogation techniques. But actually, people within the CIA were very concerned that this violated human ethics rules that we've had since World War II, since the Nazis, which bar human subject research without informed consent. 

Is there a vetted, better way of collecting that information?
Veteran interrogators claimed that [the CIA] would've gotten more useful information if they had treated them [detainees] differently. Like how they did with the Nazi generals in World War II, where [intelligence officers] got credible information by playing chess with them and building a relationship, during which they spoke freely and let things slip. These enhanced interrogation programs were a way that the interrogators didn't have to be very smart.

Wasn't there some value to having a psychologist's input on the enhanced interrogation process? At the very least to make sure it didn't cross the line into torture?
Well first, there is no evidence that psychologists do that. This was a myth that was permeated partially by the [Department of Justice's] Office of Legal Counsel when they created the torture memos. The myth was, you'll have these health professionals to be there to tell you if things are safe or not, but what they really did was get health professionals to say that [the tactics] wouldn't cause "severe, long lasting harm,"which is how the torture memos defined torture. Then if it did cause severe, long lasting harm, [the CIA] could say, "We didn't intend to do that" because a health professional had told them it wouldn't. So it wasn't about protecting [detainees], it was about legal protection for the torturer. It was a get-out-of-jail free card.

What Mitchell and Jessen brought to it, and Kirk Hubbard [the former head of the C.I.A.'s research and analysis division],was the patina of science. People could rationalize themselves, saying, "We're not torturing people, we're just doing what the scientists tell us we need to do to get information." We're in a culture where science has great prestige. It wasn't that [psychologists] actually brought real knowledge based on psychology, it was that being psychologists bought them a certain aura of professionalism that made it easier for everybody, and provided that ethical cover.

Follow Jules on ​Twitter

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​On Friday nights, people around the world leave their offices to fill their innards with cheese fries and shitty booze to put the pain of the workweek behind. This makes for ​some ​gross yet beautiful moments, so we've decided to send photographers to the planet's finest (or shittiest, depending on your point of view) cities and towns to capture Friday night as it unfolds. For this week's installment, Peter Lambert went to central Liverpool to watch drunk people sing karaoke and a couple of men beat the shit out of each other.

Previously: ​Friday Night in London's Shittiest Tourist Trap, ​Friday Night in Times Square

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Images courtesy of Allison Moon

When some LG​BT readers hear the name Allison Moon, they automatically think about Moon's lesbian werewolf novels. In Lunatic Fringe and Hungry Ghost, she uses those lesbian werewolves as a means to explore lesbian politics in a hilarious way. But when Moon isn't writing horror stories, she's working as a sex educator.

The author has traveled the country teaching classes with names like "How to Drive a Vulva" and    promoting her sex-ed ​website. She's currently expanding her practice by working on a book, Girl Sex 101, which combines comics and erotica to teach sex-ed to girls who identify as queer—a fluid umbrella term for gender and sexual minorities. Last year, she raised money for the book on Kickstarter and surpassed her funding goal by about $12,000.

​Moon's latest release, a memoir titled Bad ​Dyke, explores the evolution of her sexual identity. Beginning with her first sexual fumblings in small-town America and continuing through her globetrotting adventures as a "bisexual polyglot," the unapologetic book takes readers through Moon's shifting thoughts on labels and sex. We follow Moon as she and her boyfriend seduce strangers on faraway beaches, and later we see her lose her attraction to men and identify as a lesbian.

Interested in learning more about Moon's unconventional career, I spoke to her about her memoir, teaching sex-ed, and her thoughts on the term queer and other labels.

VICE: What inspired you to jump from writing lesbian werewolf novels to writing a sex memoir?
Allison Moon: I wanted to try out nonfiction, and I love stories about sex lives—sex is endlessly fascinating to me. Most of the stories were already developed and performed for a show here in San Francisco called Bawdy Storytelling, but I wanted to develop the book into a more cohesive collection that explored the arc of my sexual identity, so I added stories like "The Skinny" and "Headline News," which are light on sex but introduced my burgeoning queer identity. From there I plumbed my past for moments of discovery, insight, or adventure that spoke to that theme.

Did your queer identity change or evolve while you were writing?
I put together the book in about two months, so not really. But I think the writing did help me uncover some long forgotten memories of crushes and puppy loves of girls from my childhood. It helped me create a more cohesive understanding of my own sexual narrative. With queers there are two prevailing narratives: the "I have always known!" versus the "And then suddenly everything was different!" I think the truth for most of us is in between, revealed in tiny moments of discovery or excitement—the movie star crush or quickening heartbeat when we're near a crush that we don't have the means of contextualizing.

I noticed that your identity, or maybe just the labels you used, changed when you were in a different social environment. That's happened in my life too, and it can be confusing. If you're attracted to a certain kind of guy but there aren't any around, for example, are you still bi?
Labels are so contextual. They're affected by region, age group, social strata, and plenty of other factors. Here in the Bay Area, queer is prevalent. In the Midwest, I often hear "gay woman" instead of lesbian. But a label isn't just how a person identifies inside her own mind, but rather she's describing relationships and interactions inside a community. When I describe fluidity of [identity], I often say, "Let's say you're a lesbian and your partner decides to transition her gender from female to male. What does that make you? Are you functionally straight now? If you maintain your lesbian identity are you betraying your partner's gender?"

This is precisely what I mean when I say labels fail the multiplicity of the human experience. We don't have words that sufficiently describe sexual people. This is why I chose to call the book (and myself) Bad Dyke. I am functionally a dyke—my culture, my community, and my preferred sex partners are all dyke. But then there's this one small issue of my primary partner.

It's so complicated.
Exactly. This is why I think queer is becoming so popular. People are craving umbrella identities that don't attempt to put a fine point on anything but rather open up a conversation.

You discuss a lot of these issues in Girl Sex 101. Is it a how-to book, except with erotica?
Girl Sex 101 is a hybrid illustrated sex-ed book and erotic novella all about queer lady sex. Erotica is awesome, but it can sometimes be too vague to be a teaching medium, but sex-ed how-to [books] can feel sterile and removed from real-life experiences. I thought combining these two genres would allow the strengths of both to deliver a better experience for the reader, one that's both hot and educational.

Allison Moon is the author of the memoir Bad Dyke, the queer sex-ed book Girl​ Sex 101, and the lesbian werewolf novels Lunatic Fringe and Hungry ​Ghost. Follow her on Twitter.

Tara Burns is the author of the Whore Diaries series. Follow her on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of The Poly Life

These days, ​tech entrepreneurs are pumping out smartphone apps for every sexual minority. ​Grindr, Thindr, Cuddlr—there's something for everyone. But until recently, ​the polyamorou​s community had been underserved in the sex app market. So Christine Tseng and a poly family created ​the Poly Life iPhone app to fix that.

The app is intended to help people navigate the particular difficulties that can come along with polyamory.  While ​swingers and people in open relationships can have sex with other partners, polyamorous couples fuck and love more than one partner. Although this lifestyle comes with many bonuses—including increased emotional fulfillment and sexual support—poly families deal with additional obstacles, like balancing a schedule to accommodate multiple partners and how to find attendees for a poly Christmas party. One poly family—known as a "quad" because the group consists of two married couples and their seven children—has dealt with these issues for years. Eventually they met with Tseng, an app developer, to develop solutions to these problems. 

"It took over a year and a lot of countless hours to bring this app and all of its features to life. I've always had a love for computers and technology, but I didn't start developing apps until the summer of 2011, so I'm definitely still a newbie," Tseng said. "I learned a lot about the app world and about polyamory by working with the creators, [the poly family]. It was a long, hard road with ups and downs but we are so proud of the end result."

Interested in learning more, I called a member of the family—who asked to remain anonymous—to discuss the app, jealousy, and how he manages his busy life.

VICE: What are some of the app's features?
The Poly Life: The features are Calendar Events, which allows users to create and manage their appointments privately or with each other; Poly Chat, a very easy way to chat with selected partners; and Poly Family, an optional way to keep poly family/lovers organized. We needed this feature because we all have other partners. Poly Fun is the only public feature in our app and a great way to create and share events with all users of the app. Relationship Status is an optional way to organize your relationship status with other partners/lovers. Our favorite part of the app is the To Do List. We've all forgotten to pick up toothpaste or toilet paper at some point. Now we can give each other chore reminders and assign them with no excuses for dropping the ball!

How does the calendar feature work better than a standard calendar or Google Calendars?
This seems to be the big thing people like to pick on—we're not saying our app's calendar is better than Google's, and we're not trying to replace it. We wanted an app that had a calendar and private chat, and sharing chores/to-do lists, and most importantly, a place to keep our boundaries up to date.

Was a poly app missing in the marketplace?
Yes, it was. There's nothing out there that's made for people in multiple relationships. You have dating apps, but nothing that's geared toward extended and alternative relationships like ours.

How did you become a part of this busy lifestyle?
We sort of fell into it. We were lifestylers [swingers] until one day my wife told me she was having feelings for the male half of a couple we were playing with on a regular basis. The four of us had become friends, but nothing more than friends with benefits, so it came as a surprise when she told me she had feelings for him. That got us talking about her dating, not just sleeping with men, outside of our marriage. It was hard at first, especially for me. I never thought of myself as a jealous guy, but suddenly I was getting jealous when she would go on dates without me. We worked through it by communicating and creating boundaries for ourselves. We've been poly for six years now.

What advice do you give newcomers to the community, who could benefit from the app?
It's not easy. If you're not a good talker, polyamory isn't for you. It's a lot of communicating with each other, especially if we start dating someone new. Jealousy and making assumptions were our biggest hurdles —they still creep up. Jealousy is a bitch. When we were swinging, it was purely sexual with little jealousy for either of us because we always went home together at the end of the night. But when you start talking about having feelings for someone else and spending alone time with them, that was a swift kick in the ass. Understanding that we didn't love each other less, and the other partner more, was our biggest struggle.

How did you find the app's developer, Tseng?
We had all seen the first season of the Showtime ​ Polyamory: Married and Dating ​series. We liked how it portrayed poly in a positive light. We saw an email Natalia [the producer of the series] sent out saying she was looking to speak with families for season two of the show. We emailed Natalia, and she emailed us back, and we started talking about being considered for the show. Our biggest issue is that we're not out to most of our family and our community. We live in a conservative town, we believe in God, we go to church—and we're polyamorous. That's not going to go over well with some of our neighbors or our bosses. We talked about coming out and what that would look like for us. We went back and forth, but decided we couldn't do the show for many reasons. Our kids were our biggest concern and the backlash they would experience. As fun as it would be to do a TV show, it was too much of a risk for us. During our Skype sessions with Natalia, she mentioned Christine [the app developer] and that's how we met her because Christine is also an editor who's edited for Natalia for many years.

Why did she mention Christine?
It's a funny story. We missed a scheduled Skype session with Natalia. We had to reschedule a couple of times with her. It can be challenging to get the four of us together. We joked to Natalia about needing an app to keep us in line; Natalia mentioned that she knew a developer that she could introduce us to if we were serious. There wasn't anything out there made for polys, so we talked about it, thought about it, and took Natalia up on her offer.

Follow Sophie Saint Thomas on ​Twitter. 

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Photos courtesy of Janice Dickinson

When ​Stoya told me Janice Dickinson writes an advice column for Michael Turnbull's glossy independent gay magazine, ​Loverboy, I died and went to heaven. The funniest advice columns always come from ​people I would never take advice from. That said, I have considered Dickinson one of my gay icons since my middle school years, when she appeared on the best season of The Surreal Life. She is beautiful and grew up in my hometown—​Hollywood, Florida, where Anna Nicole Smith died. Unlike many reality star heroines, she also always remains blunt and honest. Who can forget when she ripped apart wannabe models on ​Finland's Next Model? Iconic!

The column symbolizes all the values of Turnbull's magazine, which has had two issues so far. "Loverboy was born out of the need for a high fashion gay magazine," he told me. "We have artsy indie queer zines and mainstream magazines that appeal to the masses, but nothing in between. Loverboy mixes high campery with fashion, sex, and a little gay history along the way."

After reading Dickinson's column in Loverboy, I asked Turnbull if we could excerpt the self-proclaimed first supermodel's column. Turnbull was happy to oblige.

Dear Janice, 
As a famous model do you have any tips for taking the perfect selfie? I am trying to get some action on Grindr and my current selection doesn't seem to cut it with the boys.
Poser, Paris

As the world's first supermodel, my advice to you dear friend, is to take some powder and make sure you take it early morning so you are fresh—never mid-day! Remember to pucker up and purse those lips of yours!

Dear Janice,
I recently picked up gonorrhea from a one-night-stand, but I've also just started dating this guy and we're ready to sleep together for the first time. I have to put him off till I've got the all clear but I don't want him to lose interest. What do I do?
Confused with the Clap, Cheltenham

For God's sake, keep your trap shut! Why were you having unprotected sex in the first place? Have you lost your brain cells somewhere? Always protect yourself. It's a big bad world out there!

Dear Janice,
When we first started dating, my boyfriend really enjoyed me fingering him. As our relationship progressed, he asked me to use a couple more fingers before using my whole hand. Now he loves me fisting him up to my elbow which kind of grosses me out. How do I tell him that shoving my arm up him does nothing for me?
Small Hands, Stockholm

Go buy the Robert Mapplethorpe book. Look into it further—you might change your mind—but if I were you, I would just sit him down and talk to him. Tell him how you feel. Use your mouth not your fist.

Dear Janice,
When I meet with a guy and flirt with him, I instinctively play the submissive role. However, when it comes to sex, I like to be active not passive. I just worry that when it's in the flirtation stages I'm giving off the wrong signs and we'll be wasting each other's time if we both find out we're tops. But I don't want to say, "Oh hi nice to meet you, by the way, I'm a top." What do you suggest?
Power Top, Toronto

Well, this one is real easy. You just have to be direct. If you meet a guy you like, just be direct—there's no shame in that. Say, "Hey Mister are you a hungry bottom?" If he says, "Yes," then you're mismatched. End of question.

Dear Janice,
I've recently become addicted to taking photos of strangers in public places. Whether it be sneaking a shot on the tube, slyly videoing someone on the treadmill at the gym, whatever. It's hot taking the shot, and it's hot watching it later. I'm not sure if this is healthy behavior though. What do you think?
Secret Snapper, Shanghai

You're breaking the law, asshole. If you are really into your voyeurism, go into your local bookshop and pick up the nearest Helmut Newton book. He'll be able to get you off all within the safety of your own home. 

Follow ​Janice and ​Mitchell on Twitter. 

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Photos by the author

As Gam​ergate and a thousand other microscandals have illustrated, there's a fair bit of misogyny and homophobia in nerd culture. This is slowly changing, however, thanks to the efforts of people like Sean Z. Maker, a digital artist and author of an epic pansexual comic series called MYTH.

In 2010, Maker founded Bent-C​on, which is basically a queer version of Comic-Con, in Los Angeles to bridge the gap between LGBT artists and fans and geek culture. The idea is to showcase work from people who are marginalized by the heteronormativity of mainstream comics, and also to show gay audiences that they are more represented in this realm than they might realize.

I sat down with Maker at Bent-Con in November to find out what it's like to be gay in the comic book world.

VICE: I've heard that things are difficult for pop-culture nerds in the LGBT community, because within the nerd community, there's not a lot of gay talk and within the gay community, there's not a lot of nerd talk.
Sean Z. Maker: It's almost like a double closet. It's funny you should say that because we promoted [Bent-Con] at [a gay pride event] two years ago, and I remember the distinction was so funny... We had people look, but not stop, and then once they ditched whoever they were with, they would come back and go, "This is great! When is [Bent-Con] going to be?" And, I'm like, "Oh, bring your friends," and they're like, "No, I can't tell my friends!"

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When you were younger and you read comics, did the lack of an LGBT presence deter you from getting more enthusiastic about the genre?
​ You're like, Hey, what about me? I like this stuff, too, and I want to see things like that. Or, What's wrong with having someone who looks like me or feels the way I do being represented in that sort of storytelling?

Can you tell me a little bit about your projects, about MYTH?
​ Well, MYTH actually has been put on hold since I've been doing this show, but that's changing. After the end of the show I'm moving back into digital publishing. [Have you] ever heard of Heavy Metal magazine? It was a magazine that was originally published in Europe back in the 70s that was eventually bought by Kevin Eastman, who created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He bought it, Americanized it, and it's very sci-fi/fantasy—a lot of adult themes, but it's very hetero-centric. I'm a big sci-fi/fantasy fan, but I always thought that it was a sort of a limited story, because you're only getting one type of perspective. MYTH is sort of my love letter to that and it's very pansexual, so it's all-inclusive—I don't limit anyone's experience.

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What's the origin story behind Bent-Con?
​ Bent-Con was an experiment of a collective of creative friends in 2010 to see if we could draw audiences to work that was specifically geared toward diversity and inclusivity—so LGBT, female-related, people of color, that sort of thing. We did it in Silver Lake in December just to see that would happen, and we were happy to have foot traffic of over 400 people that day, and we were like, "OK, I think we're on to something."

Before Bent-Con, what were your experiences as a member of the LGBT community in the comic world like?
​ Not terrible. It was just a different time, and we were the needle in the haystack going to more mainstream conventions—and Bent-Con has never been about segregating ourselves from any community. It's just about recognizing what's there.

There's another nonprofit organization called Prism​ Comics and they like to identify LGBT comic creators, and I would do work with them. I remember this 16-year-old kid came up to the booth [at a mainstream convention]. He was really shy. I could tell he was interested but didn't really know what to say. He came up and started asking all these questions, and he wasn't from California—he was visiting from, like, Iowa or Idaho—and he had this whole experience of, "Well, I want to be an animator for Disney, but I think when they find out I'm gay, they're going to fire me or they're not going to like me." You and I know different, but he's from Iowa or Idaho, so he doesn't have that experience. So, I thought something like [putting LGBT-authored work out there] becomes important because they'll find themselves reflected back.

The great thing about our show is it's all about safe fun, everyone having a great time—not everyone here is queer, obviously. It's really just creating a space that is matter-of-fact and sending that message out to the larger entertainment [world].

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What were some of your favorite costumes that you saw at this year's convention?
​ Oh, gosh, there was Braniac. There was the female Thor—she was amazing. She's taller than me and I was like, "Oh, my gosh." There was kind of a fetish-y Batman that I saw, and I was like, "That works."

What did that entail?
​ Well, it was sort of a corset top with the cowl. I was just amazed and titillated and a bit like, "I don't know why, but I just like that."​

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A bunny statue. All photos by author

​The Bunny Museum doesn't really look like a museum. It's a one-story Spanish-style house like all the others in its quiet Pasadena, California, neighborhood—it just happens to have over 30,000 pieces of bunny paraphernalia stuffed inside of it.

Spouses Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski live there too, surrounded by what became, almost accidentally, their life's work. Steve gave Candace a stuffed bunny for Valentine's Day in 1993, they started trading bunny gifts on holidays, then they began exchanging bunnies even on regular days, and by 1998 they had so many objets d'bunny that they opened their home to the public and called it a museum.

Candace, who styles her long platinum-blonde hair in carefully messy waves and cakes her face with makeup and glitter, looks like a bohemian Dolly Parton and exudes a vivacious energy. This is a woman who follows her passions: She's also an angel expert, she dresses from head to toe in red every day (she finds the color best represents her personality), and she wrote and self-published a b​ook called There Is an Answer: Living in the Post-Apocalyptic World, which explains the teachings of Emanuel Swedenb​org, an eccentric 18th-century Swedish mystic. The Bunny Museum, though, is Candace's primary focus, and she looks after it with love and enthusiasm.

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Candace Frazee sitting next to her collection's newest addition

When my friend and I pull up to the museum there are two young women, dressed in red like Candace, struggling to carry a large white sculpture out of a U-Haul truck and into the museum. Candace asks us to sign in and wait outside a moment while she helps the girls and the sculpture get settled. I am the museum's 22,256th visitor, I am told by the sign-in sheet.

After a few minutes, Candace comes out and asks for our "bunny money," meaning the $5 admission fee and a bag of vegetables for each of the four real rabbits that live in the museum. She leads us into the entryway, passing a broken arm made of wax lying on the floor and a glass case of freeze-dried bunnies—former pets who have moved on to the great hutch in the sky. She tells me that I'm very lucky to have come today; that sculpture is a new addition to her collection, a piece designed by a French artist named Lucile Littot, who is filming a movie shot in part at the Bunny Museum.

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Detail from  Lucile Littot's sculpture

The sculpture turns out to be a glittery saucer the size of an inner tube with a hodgepodge of items stuck onto it: a white dress, white panties, a two-headed taxidermied bunny Lucile bought off eBay. Candace is currently filming a Bunny Museum documentary, so she grabs a camera and films Lucile and me discussing Lucile's film. 

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Candace then escorts us through a few different rooms jam-packed with stuffed bunnies, porcelain bunnies, piñata bunnies, and so on. She's sweet and the concept comes from a good place, but I can't help but feel a bit anxious wandering around the home, which is insanely cluttered and only marginally cleaner than something you might see on an episode of Hoarders.

She gets distracted with the business of them the new sculpture and tells us to go ahead and "hop around." We wander into a few different rooms, all equally busy with bunny odds and ends. In one room we see a couch and a TV, a reminder that Candace and Steve live here surrounded by all this stuff. Here and there are pieces of stray rabbit poop.

Ah, right, the real bunnies: There are two of them in the pantry closet that doubles as a "bunny den"; a geriatric bunny, blind and incontinent, hiding in the corner of the kitchen; and a four-month-old Flemish G​iant that's supposedly already the size of a small Corgi that we oddly can't find. We stand around awkwardly wondering where Candace went and if our tour is going to resume.

We hear noises outside and find her with the two women loading more bunny sculptures into the shed out back. Candace apologizes and promises to devote more attention to us soon, so we schlep around the backyard. There are bunnies here too, of course: 3D chalk drawings of bunnies line the pavement, an old Rose Bowl float in the shape of a bunny sits idle in the grass, and a short "bunny path" leads to a rock garden in the back that is, obviously, shaped like a bunny.

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The Flemish Giant

We finally return inside and sit down with Candace, who tells us about the exhibit she was working toward with Mike​ Kelley, the famous LA artist who was both a fan of the Bunny Museum and an idol of Candace's. Just then the enormous, red-eyed Flemish Giant makes an appearance, and I scan the room wondering where the hell that thing has been hiding. I try to keep my cool as she explains that she had already begun thinking of ideas for the exhibit, such as a trail of real bunny poop that would guide museum visitors around the space. She began collecting her pets' droppings in August 2009, which she keeps in a large mason jar in the same glass case as her dead bunnies. It's those little touches, the planning ahead, that make the Bunny Museum special.

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Photo via Wikipedia

Back in the 70s—when men were men, women were women, and breasts were real—Hollywood was obsessed with the idea of the outsider. Mobsters, bank robbers, whistleblowers—these were the heroes of 70s films. The final collapse of the studio system in the late 60s resulted in a decade of artistic (though admittedly bourgeoisie) auteur-driven films, before the 80s ushered in the age of the blockbuster, a precursor to today's franchise-driven cinema industry.

But back to the breasts. There's nothing quite like the mammaries of 1970s cinema. The most common, simplest way for women to transgress on film during this decade was through their sexuality—a source of power that was wrapped up in pain, pleasure, and nonconformity all at once. This was a vision of femininity that was unhinged and demure, crass and doe-eyed, all at the same time.

"In the 1970s and 80s as feminists began to examine the dynamics of the gaze of visual media, theorists such as Kaja Silv​erman argued that the female spectator did not simply adopt a masculine gaze but was always involved in a 'double identification' with both the passive and active subject positions," explains Cambridge University sociologist Wendy Chin-Tanner. "In this way, cinematic representations that subverted, challenged, and disrupted dominant cultural narratives of gender and sexuality had real power to change the way women viewed themselves, their bodies, and their sexuality."

No one represents this ideal more than Valerie Perrine, an actress who remains one of the most underrated talents of the 70s. She gave authentic, rasping performances opposite some of the decade's most prominent leading men, including Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Redford, and worked with acclaimed actor-driven directors like George Roy Hill, (Slaughterhouse Five) Sydney Pollack, (The Electric Horseman) and Tony Richardson (The Border). Perrine was an exquisite beauty with wide-set sea-green eyes defining a cherubic face. And she had a body seemingly made for sin. But she was more than a pretty gal with to-die-for tits.

Among her first onscreen performances were appearances in Slaughterhouse Five (1972), a PBS adaptation of Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambath (1973), and Lenny (1974), a critically acclaimed biopic of the comic Lenny Bruce. The latter, directed by Bob Fosse, starred Hoffman as the controversial comedian and Perrine as his wife, Honey Harlowe, and is as much a sad love story of two misfits as it is a cultural critique. 

Perrine's performance won her a BAFTA and landed her nominations for an Oscar and a Golden Globe; she also took home top prizes as best actress at Cannes and best supporting actress at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.

"She was the thinking man's sex symbol," says screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Ed Wood (1994). "Valerie Perrine always felt very kind of real and honest and yet she had this sexual freedom that was sort of new to movies at the time. She could be a really good dramatic actress and a really good comedic actress. But you got the sense there was a real human being there."

Photographer Ricky Powell remembers Perrine as a "cool, laid-back actress with an outward cute naiveté and inward slickness."

So what happened to her? Why isn't she a household name>

Valerie Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1943 to a British mother and a father who was a US Army officer. She spent time as a child in a convent in Japan, and her army-brat teenage years included stops in Paris and Rome. She majored in psychology while at college college, but dropped out because the routine of school bored her; instead, she headed to Vegas to become a showgirl. Her ambition, moves, looks, and magnificent breasts served her well, and soon she was performing as the headlining dancer in the "Lido d​e Paris Revue" at the Stardust.

Her big break came at a dinner party in Los Angeles, where, according to an interview she did in 2013, a casting agent spotted her joking with her boyfriend over the phone and asked if she'd ever acted before.

In her screen test for the role of Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse Five, Perrine came in with no headshots to offer the producers, but at their request she wore one of her showgirl outfits, a G-string and skimpy bra, so they could see her figure. She got the part, naturally.

In the movie, Perrine is a naked siren who seduces Michael Sacks's Billy Pilgrim by floating in a tub, her buoyant bare breasts on display. (Years later, Perrine met Vonnegut at Elaine's in Manhattan, and he conveyed his pleasure with the cinematic adaptation.) She was in the same situation a year later for Steambath, where she was the lone female in a sauna that's really a waiting room for heaven. When PBS aired the artsy adaptation of the absurdist play, it was the first time full-frontal nudity appeared on television (viewers saw Perrine from the side).

Her nudity might not have been essential to the plot of either film, but the way she displayed herself was both performative and pioneering. The ease with which she inhabits her naked body onscreen is practically a blueprint for future generations of actresses.

"I was the only actress on the lot that could care less," she tells me of the nudity in Steambath. After years living in Europe, traipsing about St. Tropez in nothing but a G-string, she had no hangups about her body.

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That attitude helped land her the role of Honey Harlowe in Lenny. It's a complicated role—Honey is a stripper, then a wife, then a junkie, then a mother, then a relapsed junkie. In essence, Perrine plays two Honeys—the one who five minutes into the film performs a show-stopping striptea​se, and the Honey who becomes that sad woman who never got it together, but can manage a nostalgic giggle from time to time.

"I just try to be real," Perrine has said of her craft. Her nuanced facial expressions and the way she holds glances with Hoffman give her performance a lived-in quality. (The two complement each other intensely; Hoffman was nominated for an Oscar as well.) The only problem was that Perrine was too good a dancer.

"Honey wasn't supposed to be a good dancer, and this was disappointing," says Perrine. "I was being directed by Bob Fosse and I had to look bad." Fosse choreographed Honey's moves to be off the beat but "I kept getting it right every time."

She also gave a great performance in W.C. Fields and Me (1976) opposite Rod Steiger, who she calls a "real jerk." But the biopic of the 1920s actor and comedian who lived in Charlie Chaplin's career was a flop, and Perrine never again got the acclaim she did for Lenny, though she did appear in two box-office hits, Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), as Lex Luthor's girl Friday. Her other movies include The Electric Horseman (1979), a film about a rodeo star gone corporate starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda; the disaster that was Can't Stop the Music (1980); and The Border (1982), an overlooked film about corruption on the California-Mexico border starring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel. By the 90s, she had essentially disappeared from Hollywood, though she did resurface for a small role in Nancy Meyer's What Women Want in 2000.

Maybe her shrinking from the public eye can be put down to her aversion to continue being merely a sex goddess. Perrine says she turned down the role that went to Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981), because she "didn't want to do another film that had to do with sex." She did numerous Playboy pictorials—and has a couple autographed issues of her Superman-themed cover issue on her Facebook page up for grabs, but even for the uninhibited, there comes a time when what was once subversive becomes redundant.

Even if her star faded with time, she left behind a sensational body of work, literally and figuratively. "Perrine's performances play against the backdrop of a key era in feminist film criticism," says Caroline Hagood, a film scholar who is currently at work on a book on female poets writing about movies called Women Who Like to Watch. Notable writing from 1973, when Steambath came out, includes Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and Marjorie Rosen's Popcorn Venus; Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape followed in 1974.

When asked the key to surviving Hollywood, Perrine says with conviction, "Don't take it seriously. I'd do a film and then go off and run to Europe." In all our conversation, I don't detect a note of regret. And why would I? Even in the small pictures she made, she fines a way to stand out.

Take this video of her performing as Lillian Lorriane, one of Ziegfeld's legendary women, in the multimillion-dollar television spectacular Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women (1978). As a former Vegas showgirl, Perrine must have known many women like Lorraine: beautiful, starry-eyed creatures without the chops to truly make it. Yet she plays the act with grace and poise, and an all-knowing grin that says she's smart enough to know the difference between them and her.​