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William T. Vollmann Channels His Female Alter-Ego Dolores in His First Art Exhibit

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William Tanner Vollmann is the last of a breed of macho male American writers. Hardly a mention of the author goes by without bringing up the lengths he's gone for a story: joining the mujahideen in Afghanistan, smoking crack with prostitutes in San Francisco's Tenderloin, and becoming an FBI Unabomber suspect along the way. Most recently, he's taken on a different type of exploration through his female alter-ego Dolores, the subject of his first art exhibition, It's My Job to Be a Girl, which opened this weekend at Steven Wolf Fine Art in San Francisco.

The show, which puts Vollmann's paintings and photographs alongside the work of artist-slash-author-slash-porn-star Zak Smith, is a fitting return to San Francisco for Vollmann, who made the city's darkest corners the subject of some of his earliest work. As the author sipped on some no-name Scotch in his bunker-like Sacramento studio, we chatted about what he's learned by becoming Dolores.

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VICE: Hey, Bill. What are you working on today?
William T. Vollmann: I'm getting ready to start on a project—it's going to be a series of block prints from the Bible, and everybody from God to Jesus and everyone else is going to be a woman with no clothes. I think probably the human race would be better off if it were all women. I'm lining up my models and getting my blocks ready, so that's going to be a lot of fun.

What's it like casting the woman to play God?
The fun thing about any sort of visual representation is you get to decide what sort of symbol or representation you want. For me, God would have to be a mother figure. I'll want some kind of Rubenesque-looking lady who looks as though she's giving birth.

Has the Charlie Hebdo shooting affected how you're thinking about this project?
It seems very likely that, by writing for VICE, you and I are already on ISIS's list. We can be fairly sure, I think, that over the next few decades that the world, even the secular, Western world, is gradually going to lose more freedom of speech.

People will say, "Oh, yeah, freedom of speech, but is it really worth insulting the Muslims?" And then someone else will say, "What about us fundamental Christians? It really hurts our feelings when someone talks about global warming, and so we don't want you to do that anymore." They'll just keep tightening the screws. So we might as well enjoy freedom of speech while we have it.

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You've been making art for a long time, but this is your first gallery show. How did it come together?
[Gallerist Steven Wolf] contacted me, and I said what I usually say: "I don't want to have a show because my friends who have shows just end up paying money and going into debt. I don't have an ego; I would rather just sell through collectors ... and I won't do it if it costs me a cent." So he said, "All right, I'll pay for it." Every time he comes up, I get him a little sloshed and then he takes me out to lunch and he says, "Don't worry Bill, I'm gonna make a lot of money off of you." I'm hoping that's true.

What will you be showing?
I have to paint, most of the time, a fairly ugly woman with whom I share my studio. You'd be amazed at how much space she takes up—she keeps her body parts in my meat locker—but she means well. She's not too beautiful but wants to be. If I ask her to pose, she's always up for it, so there are no ethical issues about exploitation and so forth. So, all in all, it's been a good thing.

How so?
I feel like I've learned something about what it's like to transform and, really, how alien the matter is that I thought was just me. I'm some sort of a skull with flesh on it, and this can be altered to a degree. So suddenly here's Dolores, who looks all the better of course when I take my glasses off. All the same, she has these creases at the corners of her eyes that curve away and down just as I do. So when I make paintings or drawings, I make sure I put those in. She has a certain kind of mouth. I had never really paid any attention to what my mouth was like.

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How would you describe Dolores to somebody who's never met her?
Well, there are two Doloreses. One is a literary character, and while I was doing all this cross-dressing and making these works of so-called art, I was also writing a novel, which may or may not ever be published. It's called How You Are. It began with my present and then imagined an alternative future in which being Dolores was the most important thing to me, and then I eventually became a transgender Mexican prostitute, who came to a very bad end. It was so interesting imagining stuff, talking to the prostitutes, writing descriptions, and just trying to make everything come out as grim and terrible as I could! Do you believe that people have more than one personality, or that, say, an actor playing a role becomes that role, or is still the actor? What would you say?

With those examples, I would say that the actual person has more roles than an actor. An actor's just playing whereas we actually inhabit these things.
Yeah, I think that's probably right. When I first started doing this Dolores stuff, it was kind of an exercise, although it was fun. I was surprised by how excited that it made me, in a lot of ways. Back in the 80s, I was writing a book called The Ice-Shirt, and there's a little Inuit myth in there about the origin of the human race: There were two brothers and then in the end one of them was turned into a woman, so I thought, "Well, I guess I should try to imagine this." Back in San Francisco, these two transvestite prostitutes made me up as a woman, gave me a dress and dried orange peels for breasts and so forth. And a friend took some pictures and I thought, Oh, wow. I was amazed by how pretty I looked.

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When I started trying to do the Dolores stuff, years and years later, I kind of thought, Oh yeah, I'll put on a wig and some breasts and lipstick and I'll look like that. Then I looked in the mirror and it was like some aging Elizabethan courtier, with all the bad pockmarked skin and the bags under the eyes and the hair not very well combed. And I thought, Oh, of course, I'm old now. I forgot about that part. In my male existence, I'm a little afraid of aging and death, as we all are, but it's very easy for me to reconcile myself to the deterioration of my appearance.

I just think, Well, you know I never cared that much about it anyway. But poor Dolores thought, I would really like to be a pretty woman.She can't be. I can't be. So then, I realized if I really wanted to continue with this, instead I just have to try to be an old woman. It's not so bad.

When do you feel most like a woman?
Well, sometimes when I'm in the studio, if I'm by myself, maybe I'll put on makeup and a dress and so forth and I'll lock myself in and just cook my meals and read and write, do my laundry, do whatever I want to do, all by myself for a couple of days. I get used to the feelings of the breastforms, and the feeling of the wig, which makes my head a lot more hot, and then it starts to feel a very natural after a while. That's kind of fun and sweet. I feel like I'm somebody different.

Will your relationship with Dolores change now that you're doing less of this work?
I wonder if there will even be a Dolores anymore. I talk about Dolores in the third person—a lot of cross-dressers do that. There were times when it was very real for me, and then making the actual art is kind of artificial. So am I just kidding myself? Is there really any such person? Yes, I have felt different, but maybe I should just call that me. Do I want to keep dividing myself into two in this way? It was all very unexpected to me, the intensity of the whole experience.

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Dolores isn't the only woman in the gallery. There are also some reportage-style photos, including pictures of prostitutes.
I have really, really loved prostitutes for many years. They know so much about a certain kind of category of human nature. Almost all of us experience love and desire and rejection. Prostitutes know so much about that: A lot of the really good stuff about comforting people and taking away their pain. A lot of the bad stuff about the pain they sometimes feel themselves, and the ways in which some of them manipulate their customers, or are abused or worse by their customers. But it's such a primal human thing, and they become experts.

How do you connect with a subject in a way that you can capture these real kind of moments?
I began my relationship with prostitutes as a very lonely young customer, and then people were always saying "prostitutes are this," or "prostitutes are that." "Prostitutes are all exploited," or "prostitutes are empowered," and "prostitutes don't kiss."

I grew up a little bit and got to meet more of them in different parts of the world, eventually I realized, you know, prostitutes are simply women. A prostitute who exchanges sex for money is not too different maybe from someone who exchanges sex for a nice dinner, or not too different from me, who will exchange a book review for some money. After a while, you say the continuum is so blurred, maybe it covers almost all of us.

You can check out It's My Job to Be a Girl until March 7 at Steven Wolf Fine Art, which is located at 2747 19th Street, Suite A, in San Francisco .

Follow Heather on Twitter.


Ink Spots: 'One Beat Zines' Are a Self-Publishing Feminist Powerhouse

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Cover art by Donya Todd

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out there are many more magazines in the world than VICE. This series, "Ink Spots," is a helpful guide on which of those zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not staring at ours.

Independent publishing in the UK is currently riding the crest of an ever-swelling wave. Comic fairs and zine conventions are on the rise, as are the number of artists making all the stuff sold at them. Because as much as web comics continue to produce a ton of phenomenal artists, a thirst for physical work by DIY storytellers means that a once stale UK publishing scene now feels reinvigorated; just look at the success of collectives like Breakdown Press, Self Made Hero, and Nobrow.

One publication to stand out among this flurry of new printed produce is Double Dare Ya, the first release from One Beat Zines. Crowd-funded in September, it contains a collection of illustrated essays about the Riot Grrrl movement from a range of contributing writers and artists.

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Comic artists Julia Scheele and Sarah Broadman head up One Beat, so I sat down with them to discuss the formation of the collective and the rise of independent publishing in the UK.

VICE: How did the formation of One Beat come about?
Sarah Broadman: We wanted to have an outlet that was fun. We knew, after putting together Double Dare Ya, that we wanted it to be a place where people who aren't on the comic scene could bring work. It can be difficult to get creative things out there; we just want to be a vehicle for people to do that.

Julia Scheele: At zine fairs, girls would ask me how you get started making zines and comics. I found myself trying to explain to them how I started, which was just to grab a pen and paper and put something shitty together.

So One Beat is a DIY comic distributor as well as publisher?
Julia: Yeah. We want to encourage newcomers to the scene, help them put together a zine, and then give them a way to distribute it through us.

[body_image width='1000' height='1415' path='images/content-images/2015/01/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/27/' filename='one-beat-zines-body-image-1422361495.jpg' id='21504']Artwork by Laura Callaghan

Why do you think it's important for the voice of comics and zines to push artists that aren't as established?
Sarah: Because there are a lot of people out there who have great stuff and, for whatever reason, it's not happening.

Julia: Also, the comic scene is really thriving in the UK at the moment, but there isn't much political stuff around.

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Artwork by Eleni Kalorkoti

What's the selection process for submissions?
We're looking for work that we find interesting and challenging. We're quite open as to what we accept. That's one of the reasons we want to make zines—we don't want to just publish comics. Essays, articles, poetry—we're purely looking for stuff that we find interesting.

It's refreshing to see a desire for long-form writing again.
Sarah: One of the really nice things about the work in Double Dare Ya is that it portrays a lot of different ways of people expressing their thoughts about the same topic.

Julia: I was a little bit nervous about it because, sometimes, comic audiences can get annoyed. There's a mentality of questioning why so much writing is taking up space where there should be illustration.

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Artwork by Kristyna Baczynski

Your manifesto states your passions as feminism, music, and comics. Will these always be central in what you do?
Not everything that we take on needs to be political or about feminism explicitly. We're planning on doing a celebration zine for the new Sleater-Kinney record in March. That will be the next anthology that we publish.

Sarah: We're not going to rule anything out. Although, obviously if you send something in saying "women are shit," we're not going to publish that.

There's a big surge in independent publishers in the UK. What does this mean for the voice of zine and comic artists?
Julia: With established publishing not doing very well, the things that are being published are quite safe choices. It's exciting that people can skip that step and publish their own material. That's the how the comic scene in the UK has grown. People ask me if zines are having a comeback, but they've never really gone away.

Sarah: I think you're totally right. Even if nobody wanted to talk about them any more, there would still be people photocopying down at the late shop with their pennies. That's never going to change, and it's always going to be a really important means of publication. It's no different from the pamphlet culture that you got in early modern England, with satirical cartoons about whoever was in power at the time.

[body_image width='1448' height='2048' path='images/content-images/2015/01/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/27/' filename='one-beat-zines-body-image-1422361613.jpg' id='21507']Artwork by Lize Meddings

It's an interesting time for politics and cartoonists. Can you see yourself publishing anything overtly confrontational, like Charlie Hebdo?
Sarah: We wouldn't be comfortable publishing anything satirical which contained images that are directly offensive to people of a certain faith. We would never publish anything that didn't fit in with our very much third-wave feminism views. I think freedom of speech is one thing, but I think there has to be sensitivities with the press. It's not about people being censored—some things are just not appropriate.

Going forward, are there any writers you'd like to work with on an anthology?
Julia: I would love to do more with Leigh Alexander. I really, really love her writing. I'm hoping to get some writing for the Sleater-Kinney zine. I like Laura Snapes a lot as well.

Sarah: The people that I don't know are what I'm most excited about.

Why's that? Because they bring the most exciting stuff?
Yeah—you just don't know what you're going to get. One of the best things about social media is that we can get submissions from people completely disconnected to us who are doing amazing things. The great unknown can be really exciting.

Finally, what do you think is more powerful: imagery or word?
Imagery has the most immediately powerful reaction upon you, but, for me, often words can linger more.

Julia: As a comics artist, I have to say: both of them put together! I've always liked comics because you can combine the two to make something completely new.

You can buy One Beat comics and merch from the One Beat shop.

VICE Vs Video Games: Whatever Happened to the Mascots of Our Beloved 90s Platform Games?

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Video games are more popular than they've ever been, but somewhere along the way we lost something: mascots, to be specific. Once upon a time, every franchise worth its salt had an anthropomorphic rodent or high-jumping plumber on the box, a far cry from today's landscape of grim men with scars and swords and guns.

The video game mascots many of us grew up with were intrinsically tied to platformers, and it's been nearly 20 years since that genre was dominant, though several of the best-selling games of all time, like Super Mario Bros. 3, are from that 1985–1996 period. Back then, children were the biggest market in gaming, so it only made sense to develop characters that aped Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Developers searching for their piece of the pie looked to Super Mario Bros. as a replicable template, which led to the explosion of the platform genre and the accompanying mascots.

Platformers are defined by the gameplay mechanics of precision-based jumping and navigating obstacles between point A and point B, as well as a cartoonish aesthetic. When the industry began trending away from 2-D sprite-based graphics toward realistic 3-D polygonal models around '96, side-scrolling platformers became essentially irrelevant.

The platform mascots' jump to 3-D, as it turned out, was perilous. Many that flourished in the eight- and 16-bit eras didn't quite make it. Some faded away, some made sidesteps and found success elsewhere, and others died of humiliation. Now that it's been nearly 20 years since that fateful transitional period, I thought it'd be a good idea to take a look at the most notable platformer mascots to see how they fared.

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MARIO
Peak game: Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, 2010)

Mario is the undisputed platform alpha. The Super Mario franchise invented the platformer, then reinvented the platformer in 3-D with the crucial, clutch Super Mario 64 in 1996. His level of consistency and success is sometimes overlooked, but it's clear that the character and series is unparalleled and peerless. There's never been any real misstep in the series, and most of the games are all-time classics. He's also the consummate brand mascot and acts as the head of an empire. His protégés, Yoshi, Wario, and Luigi, have each had successful platform series of their own, and when Mario headlines a non-platform series—Mario Kart, Paper Mario, Mario Party, etc.—it's an indication that it will be reliably solid.

The only downside to Mario is his stupid voice, his insufferable face, and his complete lack of appealing personality traits. Maybe someday he can relax the Mickey Mouse schtick and be his true self: a self-medicating maintenance man who knows how to get some air on his jumps.

Mario, like rock 'n' roll, Saturday Night Live, or action movie stars, has had his fade from glory prematurely predicted many times, and each time he seems to come back as youthful and powerful as ever. Although fewer people pay attention to Mario than during the platform genre's heyday, the high-pitched toilet technician continues to raise the bar with each entry.

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SONIC THE HEDGEHOG
Peak game: Sonic & Knuckles (Sega Genesis, 1994)

The 'tude, the 'tude! My God, but what will we possibly do with all this 'tude? Sonic the Hedgehog may be the Poochie of video game mascots, but goddamnit if kids didn't love him for it.

The genius of Sega's approach was to change the paradigm of how you evaluated the worth of a game: The way they framed the question, it wasn't about which games were better, but which were "cooler." Sonic directly challenged Mario's "coolness" as a character by being, essentially, an adventurous Mickey Mouse with a family-friendly amount of 90s irreverence. He was edgier (literally so, with those spikes on his back), he was faster, and his games used something called " blast processing" (not an actual thing).

The last of the 16-bit Sonic games, 1994's Sonic & Knuckles, remains the series high point, blending standard hop-and-bop platforming with the thrill of building momentum. On its own, the game's levels stand about equal to the other Genesis classics, but Sonic & Knuckles truly shines when "locked-on" with Sonic 3 to reveal the full experience the developers originally intended. After the 16-bit era closed, Sonic disappeared for the entire 32-bit generation, resurfacing five years later with the first proper 3-D Sonic game on the Sega Dreamcast, the uneven Sonic Adventure, and the franchise has remained messy and inconsistent since then with several very low points along the way.

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MEGA MAN
Peak game: Mega Man X (Super Nintendo, 1993)

This franchise always struck me as an almost blue-collar series, with a very workman-like attitude toward producing sequels. The original Mega Man series began in 1987 and spawned eight games in nine years, all of which were good and about the same level of quality, give or take. The games don't vary much, which is why the high points tend to be cited as Mega Man 2 and Mega Man X, two instances where substantial change did happen.

In addition to consistency, the series also was known for frequently frustrating difficulty ( as kids these days have learned), and the best video game music of the generation. Although the series found rejuvenation with 2008's retro-themed Mega Man 9 (and then 10 in 2010), creator Keiji Inafune's departure from Capcom in 2010 has left the character stranded, with no games releases since or any in development.

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KIRBY
Peak game: Kirby's Adventure (NES, 1993)

Easily the cutest of the platform mascots, Kirby has mostly been resting on his good looks for most of his career. He started strong with two solid platformers in a row in 1992 and 1993, and then almost immediately went into coasting mode with remixes, spin-off games, and cameo appearances. In terms of gameplay, Kirby is sort of a cuter Mega Man; most of the games involve copying an enemy's weapon and adopting it as his own. Mega Man accomplishes this by defeating a boss and taking his weapon; Kirby swallows them and downloads them into his body. It's the most adorable eating disorder in gaming.

Kirby's Adventure remains the definitive Kirby experience, although a relatively recent revival, Kirby's Epic Yarn, received the most positive reviews for any Kirby game thus far.

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DONKEY KONG
Peak game: Donkey Kong Country 2 (Super Nintendo, 1995)

As a character, Donkey Kong is pretty boring. He had more charisma in his original incarnation as a King Kong ripoff who threw barrels down construction sites. His rebooted personality featured such personality traits as "wears a tie" and "enjoys bananas." I don't even want to hear about Donkey Kong's weekend, much less go on an adventure with him, but when Donkey Kong Country debuted in 1994, the real star of the game was the then-impressive CG graphics.

Donkey Kong was such a boring guy that he was sidelined for the superior sequel in favor of his more personable sidekick Diddy Kong. In that game he gets kidnapped and Diddy, along with new sidekick, Dixie, heads off to rescue him. This became a trope, and in the third entry, Diddy is also kidnapped and unplayable along with Donkey. Donkey Kong Country remains the only platform series that insisted on benching the headliner for rookies.

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CRASH BANDICOOT
Peak game: Crash Bandicoot: Warped (PlayStation, 1998)

Crash Bandicoot was like the Denis Leary of 90s platformer mascots: a shameless ripoff who relied on marketing. His character was a carbon copy of Sonic—an obscure mammal with an action-y name with cool accessories (jean shorts! skater shoes!) who fought an evil bald scientist. (The Crash gameplay, meanwhile, mostly consisted of watered-down versions of Nintendo concepts.) Still, Crash had an effective career, contributing to Sony's ascent to dominance with the original Playstation in the 32-bit era, but never broke any new ground.

The final effort from the original creative team at Naughty Dog was also Crash's best game. The four main series entries that have followed since have been various degrees of disappointing. After a few sequels and an obligatory kart racing game, Crash hasn't been seen since the Bush administration.

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BUBSY
Peak game: The conception meeting, during which this probably seemed like a good idea (1992)

Bubsy was a schmuck. He was all 90s attitude, but too obnoxious, and with nothing else to offer beyond that. His first game came with a lot of pre-launch hype from an aggressive marketing blitz, but the game was, at best, "not the worst thing in the world." It would go downhill from there, as Bubsy's lasting legacy will be his hilariously failed jump to next gen with Bubsy 3D for the PlayStation in 1996. It has been widely panned as one of the worst games of all time, featuring atrocious visuals, completely broken mechanics, and absurdly torturous music.

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EARTHWORM JIM
Peak game: Earthworm Jim (Sega Genesis/Super Nintendo, 1994)

Basically an outright parody of platform mascots, creator Doug TenNapel's Earthworm Jim is an ordinary earthworm who gained powers by having a super sci-fi space suit land on his head, then went on to battle his villains like Professor Monkey-for-a-head (he had a monkey for a head) and Queen Slug-for-a-butt (she had a slug for a butt). As far as video game humor goes, there's admittedly a low bar, Earthworm Jim was about as good as it got, on par with an average episode of Ren & Stimpy.

The game was an instant hit. The follow-up was equally well-received, but the next-gen attempt, Earthworm Jim 3D, was an unmitigated disaster that should've never seen the light of day.

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SPARKSTER
Peak game: Rocket Knight Adventures (Sega Genesis, 1993)

"Who the fuck was Sparkster?"

Developed by Konami with some of the same development team behind the Contra series, Sparkster was an opossum knight with a sword and a jetpack who fought an army of robots and pigs, and as stupid as that sounds, his series of platformers were among the better ones of the 16-bit era. He was the only platformer mascot with a jetpack, which is a bit surprising considering this was the 90s, when dreams of jetpacks were rampant.

Like a lot of these mascots, he made an attempt to capitalize on nostalgia and return to gaming in 2010, but nobody cared.

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BANJO & KAZOOIE
Peak game: Banjo-Kazooie (Nintendo 64, 1998)

Banjo, like Donkey Kong, is a boring mascot. He's a bear and he goes on adventures. The bear mascots for toilet paper have more personality. What is notable about Banjo and his bird friend, Kazooie, is how they impacted the platform genre.

The original Banjo-Kazooie represents when the Rare-Nintendo partnership was one of the best gaming had seen. After Super Mario 64 invented the 3-D platformer and demonstrated how it's done, Rare's Banjo-Kazooie came along two years later in 1998 to take it to another level: The graphics, level concepts, art direction, puzzles—everything was a significant step up.

Rare had been responsible for a great number of exclusive hits on Nintendo systems in the mid-to-late 90s, starting with the Donkey Kong Country series on Super Nintendo, and including Goldeneye 007, Conker's Bad Fur Day, and others.

The Banjo sequel that followed was mostly good but, like Rare-developed games, suffered from bloat. There were too many side-quests, the stages were too large; it was a case of sometimes bigger is not necessarily better. By the time Rare released Donkey Kong 64 in 2000, it appeared the creativity had all but dried up for Rare. A few years later, Microsoft, which had just entered the video game hardware business, spent big money to snag Rare away from Nintendo, and like what happens when a desperate sports franchise overpaying for an aging free agent, the partnership was mostly fruitless.

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RAYMAN
Peak game: Rayman 2: The Great Escape (1999, multiplatform)

Rayman is like the quiet kid of the platformer mascot class who could perhaps secretly have been the best of them all but, due to timing or circumstance, never quite found the attention he deserved. Part of the reason is that he looks stupid. He has a dumb, stupid face, and he doesn't have limbs. When I see Rayman, I think, I hate this thing, whatever it is.

But his games have always been critically acclaimed. Debuting in the 32-bit era, Ubisoft's Rayman series wisely stuck to platforming in 2-D rather than trying to make the concept work in 3-D. As a result, the series was massively underrated since gamers were more interested in 3-D games. 1999's Rayman 2: The Great Escape was regarded at the time as the finest sidescrolling platformer the genre had seen, with inventive direction and gorgeously clean graphics.

Humiliatingly, Rayman ended up taking a backseat to a spin-off, the Raving Rabbids party minigames, which have been far more commercially successful.

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COOL SPOT
Peak game: Cool Spot (Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis, 1993)

Branded content, baby! This is what we play for. The Academy may have ignored The Lego Movie, but on this list, corporate-sponsored mascots will get their due recognition.

The 7UP logo was here to not only have fun, but also to remind you to stay hydrated with refreshing, sugary beverages. His basketball high-tops and sunglasses seemed to say, "Oh yeah, this is one cool soft drink company!" Accordingly, Cool Spot's legacy as a platformer mascot remains the chillest asterisk.

In fact, there were many "adver-games" beyond 7UP's Spot games. Cheeto's had two Chester the Cheetah games; Domino's had two platformer games for their Noid mascot; McDonald's had a few platformer games, too, including Treasure Land Adventure, which at one point featured Ronald McDonald fighting an apple. If that's not art, then I don't know what is.

THE REST OF THEM

There were so many more platformer mascots in the 90s, and quite a lot of them were simply poor imitations of Sonic the Hedgehog. There's not much to say about characters like Rocky Rodent, Awesome Possum, Gex, and Aero the Acrobat, beyond the fact that they existed.

There was Boogerman and Conker in the category of "self-consciously edgy and humorous." Boogerman's joke was "lol boogers and farts." It was like the uncle who thinks he's a hit at the kids' table because he farts a lot. Similarly, the crux of Conker's Bad Fur Day was that he was a Rare-developed cute animal mascot who said "damn" and "shit" and "hookers"; in other words, a longer version of the movie Ted.

There were the underrated ones, like Ristar and Klonoa. Ristar was a cool game on Sega Genesis, but it never became a series. Klonoa was late to the party, debuting with a solid 2-D platformer on the PlayStation in 1997, and nobody really cared outside of Japan.

Recent additions to the category, like Sackboy from the Little Big Planet series on PlayStation, Ratchet and Clank, and Jak, are all fine platformer mascots, but they're part of a different generation. They're revivalists or throwbacks, like a young band trying to be the Rolling Stones.

Though mainstream gaming has moved away from platformers, developers—mostly on the indie side of things—are still making new ones, with titles like Super Meat Boy, Fez, Braid, and Spelunky leading the genre.

The old platformer mascots live on, though, in our nostalgia-soaked pop culture landscape, fan art, and, of course, the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Like bands that were once rivals teaming up to tour together, or The Expendables for old action stars, sometimes the best option is to stick together after the glory years are gone.

Illustration by Ashlyn Anstee.

Follow Grant Pardee on Twitter.

Is Getting Married to Yourself the Next Hot Self-Esteem Trend?

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Yasmin Eleby had ten bridesmaids and sang "I Believe I Can Fly" at her self-wedding. Photo via Facebook.

Yasmin Eleby did not want to be single at 40. So when her birthday rolled around she bought a purple dress, rented out a Houston-area museum, and rounded up ten bridesmaids. Then she married herself.

"She's attractive, she works hard, and she's worldwide," the CEO of the museum told a Houston Chronicle reporter. "It doesn't hurt her that's she's now indicated to others that she has high standards."

Sologamy, as it's called, is not recognized in the United States or Europe. Self-marriage isn't a legally binding union, but part of a self-empowerment movement that started in 2000 and soon became a minor trend —which means Eleby is far from first woman to marry herself. And while there aren't really any obvious benefits to doing it—you don't get tax breaks and your mom isn't going to be relieved that you've "settled down"—some advocates say the world would be a much better place if everyone did it.

Back in 1957, a University of Michigan study showed 80 percent of people thought people who preferred being single were "immoral" or "sick." But in the 90s, there were shows like Sex and the City and Ally McBeal that showed women prizing friendships and, crucially, themselves over their relationships with men.

That idea coalesced with Sasha Cagen at a 1999 New Year's Eve party. She was anxious about not having anyone to kiss, although she realized at midnight that absolutely no one else did either. So the next year she wrote her manifesto on quirkyalone, which she defines as "a person who enjoys being single (or spending time alone) and so prefers to wait for the right person to come along as opposed to dating indiscriminately."

Last year, she started offering coaching and lessons on how to embrace the quirkyalone lifestyle. It's her whole business. Among the things she's proselytizes is the self-wedding, which she views as a much-needed coming-of-age ritual that functions like a Bat Mitzvah or a quinceanera. Five women have done it under her tutelage, Cagen says, and she married herself last year.

"If it catches on people would be comfortable having registries," she told me. "We don't really have a way of saying we've arrived as adults. This says, 'I'm really to take myself seriously as a person.'"

It used to be that you went from living with your parents to living with your spouse, at which time you were an adult. But in 2005, a whopping 51 percent of American women lived alone. The sea change inspired a book by NYU professor Eric Klinenberg called Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, which combated some of the "spinster" or "weirdo" stereotypes that used to come with living by yourself. He agrees with Cagen that there shouldn't be some huge anxiety of turning 33, looking around, and panicking about not having someone to marry.

"In fact, people who live alone tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married," Klinenberg told Smithsonian in an interview. "So one thing I learned is that living alone is not an entirely solitary experience. It's quite a social one."

The practice has two more advocates in a husband-and-wife duo that started a company called I Married Me. For $300, people can send away for a ring (rose, gold, or silver) and a box full of inspirational cards. Jeffrey Levin says the idea came when he met someone who performed self-weddings at Burning Man. And when he married his wife, he also married all 120 of their wedding guests... to themselves. (He told me that he gets about an order per week on his website.)

Who knows if Eleby was inspired by sociological studies or terms like "quirkyalone," or anything other than an excuse to go on a honeymoon. She didn't respond to my request for comment, so it's hard to say if she considers it comical or life-changing. If you're willing to take the word of someone trying to make a buck off the micro-trend, it's definitely the latter.

"To be honest, it's a hard sell," Levin told me. "People think it's very self-absorbed. It's not something they embrace too quickly. When they do it on a personal level, it's quite profound and quite powerful."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The Canadian Military Is Hunting Cocaine in the Caribbean

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Members of the US Coast Guard in international waters. Photo via Flickr user Canadian Joint Operations Command

The coke-smuggling cartels using the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean as home base for their illicit operations just gained a new enemy on the high seas: Canadian soldiers.

Today the Canadian Armed Forces just recommenced Operation CARIBBE—its official mission against transnational criminal syndicates using the seas of the Americas as trafficking lanes for cocaine and other narcotics.

The deployment of Her Majesty's Canadian Ship (HMCS) Winnipeg—a Royal Canadian Navy Vessel—to the eastern Pacific marks the start of Canada's 2015 contribution to a wider operation involving American and foreign militaries cracking down on narco-traffickers in the region.

While the Winnipeg, seven other maritime vessels, and one Iroquois-class destroyer equipped with Sea King helicopters scour Pacific and Caribbean waters, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) is supplying CP-140 Aurora surveillance aircraft from its long range squadrons for the mission.

In 2014, this same maritime operation netted CAF soldiers over "four metric tons of cocaine and more than 500 kilograms of marijuana"—some of those contents coming from an historic bust of Colombian narco-traffickers destined for foreign shores. That seized blow cache, stowed away on Colombian speedboats ferrying it across the Caribbean, had an estimated worth of $24.5 million.

Operation CARIBBE, done in conjunction with several continental and European allies, is a nine-year-old mission that began in November 2006. Aimed at disrupting the lucrative illicit drug chains mostly supplying European and North American cocaine markets, the multinational effort dovetails into Operation MARTILLO—an American-led international mission fighting the infamous war on drugs.

DND's official Operation CARIBBE website celebrates the past results of the mission with statistical breakdowns of coke seizures.

For example, Canadian soldiers helped capture 5,000 kilos of cocaine in 2013, "36 bales of cocaine weighing 1,086 kilograms, with an estimated wholesale value of more than $29 million USD" and 144 bales worth $116 million—all in 2012—while in 2011 they helped seize 201 metric tonnes of cocaine worth an estimated $4 billion (according to "street prices in Miami").

"Canada has been a resolute partner alongside our allies in addressing security challenges in the Central American region," said Minister of National Defence Rob Nicholson in a statement. "For nearly a decade, we have remained committed to working with partner nations through Operation CARIBBE, preserving the safety and security of Canadians, and suppressing trafficking in international waters."

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

VICE Premiere: Ryshon Jones's New Track Is Really Depressing

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A lot of artists try to escape the shittiness of human existence with their music, but Philadelphia MC Ryshon Jones wallows in it with the hope of finding some sort of greater truth. His latest track, "What iDesire, iProtect" is a perfect example of his penchant for staring directly into the void. He kicks off the song with, "Uphold my stability, cuz society killing me, and anxiety filling me..."

The intense and claustrophobic song will appear on Jones's upcoming full-length, You're Safe Now.Like "What iDesire, iProtect," Jones's new album lyrically investigates why we're all so fundamentally fucked up.

Preorder You're Safe Now here.

The Precious Memories Club Believes Everything Should Be Photographed

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Photos by the Precious Memories Club

Meet & Greet is a photography book after my own heart. The book is a group effort from the Melbourne-based collective Precious Memories Club, and is ostensibly a series of street portraits with the stories of how they came about. It's a pleasant change to get the inside story behind these images because it gives them context, rather than the shroud of mystery common to most photography books. I got in touch with Matthew Ware and Timothy Coghlan, two of the photographers behind the book, to get the inside story behind the inside stories.

VICE: What is Precious Memories Club?
Matthew Ware: I don't really know, but it seems to be a group of photographers/people with cameras all from Melbourne. Members range from the ultra-experienced, well-studied photographers to the "don't really give a shit/take my point and shoot wherever I go" to people somewhere in between.

Timothy Coghlan: A good bunch of mates who document the world that we are surrounded and consumed by each day through the lens of a camera. All about saving those precious memories.

I imagine a lot of your photos have a good story behind them, but often that side of it is left as a mystery to the viewer. Was the process of writing the stories behind the images in the book difficult?
Matthew: The whole idea for this book came about because I was walking through the city late one night. I must have been in a good mood or something and I was feeling really inspired. I came across all these unreal characters and for whatever reason had the courage to talk to them. I came across a woman vomiting out the front of the Big 3 Cafe on Swanston Street. Her friends were holding her hair back and stuff. I took a picture and bailed before they knew what happened, and then heard, "HEY DICKHEAD, DELETE THAT!"

I love this stuff. I love the experience and I love talking to weirdos, so I came up with the idea of this book because half those pictures turned out shit but I liked the experience I had taking them and I wanted to share it. So for me it was pretty easy to write, but I think other people found it a little harder. You also have to find the line where the story actually adds to the picture, as opposed to takes away from it.

Timothy: It was really easy. It was nice giving context to each photograph. I feel that it provides proof that an effort was made to understand the moment or the subject that was being photographed.

Do you think it changes the way people look at the photos?
Matthew: For some people it definitely does. Personally I like to know what's going through an artist's head when they make something. If I don't like a piece of art it's usually because I don't know the context. But convince me with interesting or unusual context and I'll probably love it.

For this style of documentary/street photography I don't think it really changes how people see the images, but maybe it changes how they see the photographer.

Timothy: It gives the viewer an understanding of why the photograph was taken. It provides an insight into each photographer's thought process and what they find interesting when photographing.

Tim, your photo of the guy at his funeral is a pretty heavy image. Is there a line when it comes to taking a photo that you won't cross?
Timothy: Whenever I take any photo, no matter what the subject is, I never question whether should I take it or not. I am yet to come to a line that I feel I should not cross when I have a camera/iPhone. I like having a record of what I see and what is going on around me.

My old man was really ill at the start of 2013, he needed major heart surgery and visiting him in the Intensive Care Unit seeing him hooked up to all the machines was real heavy. But I had a camera so I took a photo of him. I really like that photo too. When taking photos that are of heavy subject matter, I think it is best to make sure that the photo respects the situation I'm documenting.

Meet & Greet launches at The Good Copy on Thursday 29 January at 6 PM.

To pre-order your copy click here.

Words by Max Olijnyk. Follow him on Instagram.

The Film That Made Me... : 'Black Swan' Was the Film That Showed Me I'm Not Alone

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

We're often afraid of admitting how much we've been shaped by the culture that surrounds us. To submit to the idea that a mere film could alter some integral part of our being is essentially to admit that the "pure original" we defined ourselves as in the pages of our teenage diaries was a lie.

The depressing mire that is existential philosophy has taught us about the solitude of selfhood; we can reach out through the bars and try to cling to passing forms, but at the end of the day we're stuck inside the prison cell of our own brains with only our thoughts to keep us company. Pretty grim, and pretty much a recipe for crippling loneliness.

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So it's natural for us to seek our own reflection, to crave that confirmation that we're not the only ones with all these strange thoughts and doubts that we can barely communicate to the outside world. Art, in all its forms, hopes to provide that confirmation. It's where the whole magic of the thing comes from; that single moment when a character, story or passing emotion seems ripped straight from the pages of your own soul. Like a sliver of light pouring through a crack in the wall, it shows us we're not alone.

The first time I saw Black Swan, I was sitting in the darkness of a cinema at 10AM in the morning, having volunteered to attend a press screening on behalf of my friend who ran the student radio station. He'd assured me there was no way a film about ballerinas was going to be anywhere near as traumatic as that other Darren Aronofsky movie I'd seen—Requiem for a Dream, the one where the old lady thinks the refrigerator is going to murder her.

How wrong he was.

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To its credit, Black Swan is at least swift in granting success to its female protagonist, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman in her Oscar-winning role), and she lands the lead role of the Swan Queen at an esteemed ballet company's production of Swan Lake early on. But the bar is high: Nina must dance both the parts of the virginal White Swan, whose precise turns Sayers naturally excels in, and the Black: her debauched, seductive double who possesses total freedom.

The Black Swan is the unattainable ideal, magnified by her jealousy towards her carefree cast-mate Lily (Mila Kunis) and out of reach because, in reality, Nina is so incredibly highly strung. Deep in denial, she struggles onwards in an act of such obsessive pursuit that she only constricts herself further, the victim of paranoid delusions. Victory will only be achieved through the complete destruction of reality, but the result is an act of such total insanity that Nina is left bleeding onto a crash mat on the opening night.

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By that final moment, as the figure of Nina—so close to death—looks up to the gathered crowd and whispers, "I was perfect," I'd become a weeping, snot-filled wreck. This was full-blown ugly crying, the kind that shudders through your body and turns your face all blotted and red. Even my attempts to quietly exit the theater and keep my dignity proved futile, running straight, as I did, into the middle of my fellow audience members, still hysterical and embarrassed. They, on the other hand, blinked back into daylight unchanged.

How exactly had a movie about warring ballerinas caused such a violent, emotional reaction? I dismissed it as a case of the morning grumps and tried to put it out of my mind. But as time rolled by, the film came back to me, insidious. Every time, frustration with the world turned into frustration with myself; every time, self-analysis turned into self-hatred. Why? Because I had graduated from university and I still hadn't landed the high-earning job, stable relationship and enviable Instagram feed of my classmates. In fact, I was so far from what I constituted as the basic success rate that I labelled myself as a failure in the very role of "adult human being."

I'd spend my days interrogating myself on how I'd failed to become this pedestaled image of success, never quite embracing the irony that this very interrogation was stopping me from going out and actually achieving any of those things. Like Nina, my contempt was cyclical. Somehow I'd prepped myself for failure so great that every living moment was now under threat of disaster; I would imagine someone bursting in on me to deliver some unimaginably terrible news, and I would wake up in the morning with a pain in my chest. My increasing levels of stress and paranoia started reflecting Nina's. In short, I was making myself feel miserable for no good reason.

At least one thing started making sense through all the madness, and that's why Black Swan had left me in such an emotional state. It's because Nina Sayers knew things about me before I even knew them myself. What's so masterful, so affecting, about Aronofsky's film is that he's managed to take a centerpiece of traditional ballet, the Swan Queen, and transform her into the ultimate symbol of feminine anxiety. While that's not to say that masculine anxiety is any less dangerous—as demonstrated by this year's Whiplash—there's something about society's demands on the feminine that have grown beyond the completely unrealistic and into the impossible.

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Women are expected to somehow magically capture completely contradictory states within one mortal body: to be both the Black Swan and the White, Madonna and whore, career woman and doting mother, Gillian Flynn's "cool girl" and Disney princess. We paint women as simple vessels of sexuality and then call them sluts for expressing it by their own means; we label the women glued to their desks as terrible mothers and then call the near-absence of female CEOs a "lack of ambition." We take superhero toys out of the hands of little girls so we can replace them with Barbie dolls, only to then humiliate any bleached blonde who dares walk into a boardroom. To be a woman is to never even know what society expects of you in the first place, let alone suppress any natural desires so we can conform to the crowd.

Nina Sayers came to symbolise for me a simple message: that demanding too much of yourself really is a dangerous business. I had become so consumed by my own anxiety that the concept of the innate solitude of selfhood had just become my day-to-day reality. I'd exiled myself in a sort of psychological banishment. I may not have stabbed myself with a piece of mirror or engaged in imaginary lesbian trysts, but I had certainly become fixated on my own Black Swan: my own personal idea of perfected womanhood.


The Chinese ESL-Industrial Complex: How English Teachers in China Are Lied to and Exploited

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Chris* thought it might be a fire inspection. Walking into his Chengdu, China, office at Disney English, a Disney subsidiary that teaches English through the antics of its animated characters, he was not alarmed by the throng of blue-uniformed law enforcement officers crowding the center's front desk. This was China, after all, and having been teaching in the country for several months already, he'd learned not to be taken aback by bizarre situations.

Then the uniformed men began to seize all foreigners, and Chris realized he might be in serious trouble.

Chris was herded into a classroom with his coworkers. The officers in blue, who turned out to be officials from Chengdu's Public Security Bureau, pulled the foreigners out for questioning one by one. Disney English had apparently failed to register for work permits in the city, leaving the teachers accused of illegal immigration to China.

"Just trust Disney that we have your backs and we'll take care of you, that's all they ever said," Chris recalls.

Chris, a former private school administrator who applied to teach at Disney after falling in love with Chengdu's energy, is not alone. While the prominence of Disney's brand makes a subsidiary's legal malfeasance surprising, perhaps it shouldn't be. Interviews with numerous former and current ESL teachers at public and private schools in China found that nearly every teacher had been subjected to one or many labor abuses.

(A Disney spokesperson reached for comment told us, "In every region where we do business, we abide by the local rules and regulations and we have no further comment.")

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All original illustrations by Sarah Mazzetti

Many English teachers at Chinese schools see their contracts handled by for-profit, third-party hiring agencies rather than by the school. These agencies earn a commission for each teacher placement and often employ teachers on tourist or business visas rather than the legally required work visa. They also offer contracts to foreigners who do not qualify for work visas, instruct potential teachers to lie on their visa applications to avoid revealing work plans, provide paychecks late or not at all, and deny teachers the paid leave and paid sick days offered by the school.

Chris continues to work for Disney English. The center manager of his branch emailed him that though "some of our team members feel upset about [the] working permission issue" and though the "extreme situation" caused class to be canceled, "don't be worried" was her advice.

But Chris, like many other ESL teachers across China, is worried.

Due to mistreatment by employment agencies, many of the foreign teachers we interviewed reported suffering from emotional strain, struggling with restricted salaries, and fighting frequent battles with their agencies in order to receive paychecks. While they all expected to face some cultural difficulties, none realized quite what they would be in for.

In 2012, David, a Canadian, booked a flight to Qingdao, a city in northeast China, after getting a job offer from a teaching agency. David received the offer even though he'd made it clear he did not have a bachelor's degree. "[The agent] just kind of shrugged it off. He said that sort of thing wasn't really a big deal," David recalled.

Such reassurances are odd given that many schools ask that their foreign teachers have bachelor's degrees and the Chinese government requires it. But the loss of a teacher, qualified or not, would mean the loss of potential profit for an agency, giving it incentive to bend the rules.

The Qingdao school rejected David, deeming him unqualified. Undeterred, the agency shipped him off to Shanghai, where another outfit accepted him. This new agency provided David with a tourist visa rather than a work visa, and skimmed off a portion of his wages throughout his time teaching at Shanghai schools.

"It's a common scam for agencies/employers that are unable to secure such a permit to bring employees to China to work illegally with non-work visas," Gary Chodorow, a prominent US-China immigration lawyer, wrote in an email. "[But] the statute is clear that work in China without a work-type residence permit is illegal."

Some companies refer to the teachers as unpaid interns and pay them in cash-stuffed envelopes each month.

These agencies seem to fully understand the illegality of their practices. Rooney, a Shanghai native employed by one agency, said he was visited twice by Shanghai police who demanded to see the work permits for foreign teachers in his charge.

"They kept warning me that if the teachers don't have the certificate, they'd be banished from the country," he said, and his agency "said they'd send it the next day, but they didn't."

Despite the existence of specific requirements, misinformation regarding legal employment is epidemic. Agencies frequently assure teachers like David that visa or foreign expert certificate requirements either do not exist or can be easily bypassed. These illegal operators instruct teachers to apply for tourist or business visas, rather than work visas.

Because foreigners cannot legally earn money in China on non-work visas, some companies refer to the teachers as unpaid interns and pay them in cash-stuffed envelopes each month.

"I'm afraid of not having a visa when I should have one, and it's causing me a lot of stress, financially and mentally," said Lisa, who at the time was teaching on a short-term tourist visa that was nearly spent. (She has since obtained a legitimate work visa and remains in Shanghai.)

The envelopes can conceal further problems. "I remember getting a couple of bills in my salary that were counterfeit," said another Canadian teacher named Doug. "The manager just laughed it off, made it look like I was being an idiot or something, so I always ran my bills through a money counter after that."

Since Doug, like David and Lisa, worked on a tourist visa, he had to travel to Hong Kong every six months to renew it. Even as the flights sapped his bank account, the agency never contributed to the bill.

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An immigration raid on the Chengdu Disney English office.

Provincial public security bureaus can fine schools 10,000 RMB (about $1,600) for each illegal foreign employee, and reserve the right to confiscate any profits earned from illegal workers. But at the same time, parents at schools such as Lisa's will pay nearly three times more in tuition if their children to sit in front of a foreigner rather than a local teacher. Because the potential gains from having Western faces are so high, many schools apparently believe the benefits for employing any foreigner outweigh the risks of being caught hiring one illegally.

If schools or agencies do hire illegally, Dan Harris, an expert in Chinese law, told us, they decrease costs by as much as 40 percent by avoiding taxes and benefits payments.

"[Agencies] don't want to raise issues, or they will lose their placement fee commissions," said Chris Devonshire-Ellis, founder of the Dezan Shira & Associates law firm. "There is a black market for unqualified English teachers in China."

"Many [teachers] are not even aware they are breaking the law," he added.

Beyond the nationally mandated Z visa, all foreign teachers in China must obtain a work permit issued by provincial offices of the State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs (SAFEA). Requirements vary by province, though cities like Beijing and Shanghai require a bachelor's degree and either two years of work experience or a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate.

US Consulate Information Officer Wylita Bell told us she didn't have information on the requirements for obtaining legal work visas. While the US Embassy in Beijing publishes an online warning about working without a Z visa, its link to instructions on applying for a visa is broken. The text that one can read repeatedly emphasizes the embassy's inability to provide legal advice to US citizens.

Due to the prevalence of deception, even qualified foreign teachers find themselves in vulnerable positions every year.

Coaxing out numeric estimates can be tricky, but lawyer Dan Harris says he hears "all the time" about foreigners teaching in illegal positions.

David came to China unaware that he was working illegally on an F visa, and that he was unqualified to work at his originally assigned school because he lacked a college degree. But due to the prevalence of deception, even qualified foreign teachers find themselves in vulnerable positions every year.

Fairley Nickerson was one such promising recruit. A Chicago native, she had a Stanford degree, excellent Mandarin, and a desire to make teaching her life's work. Teach for China (TFC)—a nonprofit focused on reducing educational inequality in rural China affiliated with the Teach for All network run by Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp—seemed like a perfect match. But upon her arrival in China, she discovered a harsh discrepancy between circumstances on the ground and the words on her contract.

According to Fairley and other TFC alumni, one of the program's largest donors had asked the organization to expand into Guangdong, but TFC had not yet received governmental approval to send new teachers there in 2012. The organization hired Nickerson and allowed her to finance her own relocation to China, all without a job waiting.

"At first they didn't tell us a thing," Nickerson said. "We just didn't have schools and we didn't know why. Finally, they told us they were waiting on a document to be signed by a local official, and he'd sign it any day now.

"The next update," she added, "was that the official had gone on vacation."

Three weeks into the school year, the document had yet to materialize. The teachers could neither legally teach nor, without Z visas, receive a salary.

"The leaders asked us to remember that this is China, and this kind of thing happens all the time," said Nickerson.

After over three months in China without a day in front of students, Nickerson found a new job in Shanghai. The experience left her "disillusioned," she said. "I came to China to teach and I wasn't even in a classroom."

In a written statement, Vice President of Teach for China Linh Carpenter said the failure to promptly place teachers in 2012 was caused by a "bureaucratic miscommunication," and acknowledged that 20 percent of that year's fellows left before completing their contracts.

In yet another example of conflicting information provided to foreign teachers, Carpenter emphasized that "Teach for China does not employ our Fellows and we do not pay them a salary"—despite the fellows' contract from that year, which states that TFC provides fellows with both "employment" and "salary."

Those teachers who do reach classrooms often find themselves in similarly troubling situations. Though many agencies promise some sort of teacher training, few offer any orientation.

"There wasn't even a textbook," said Caroline, a recent Boston University graduate who taught for six months in Shenzhen. "People were like, 'Oh, that's so cool, you can do whatever you want,' but I would have loved to have something to follow."

Teachers reported agencies shuffling them between multiple schools within a single day, forcing them to adapt on the spot to different student ages, skill levels, and class sizes, and isolating them from school administrators. This maximizes profit for the agencies, which can collect separate fees from each school.

Of course, increases in profit do not necessarily lead to higher teacher pay. As middlemen, agencies are able to take large and unrecorded cuts from the money the schools pay out before packaging the remainder as teachers' salaries. Several teachers we interviewed first came to China with third-party companies, but managed to negotiate their way into full-time positions with schools after one or two semesters. Only once they'd twisted out of the agencies' grips did they realize how much money they had lost—all reported massive pay increases once they began receiving salaries directly. One American said his pay quadrupled.

"I'm just a machine to them," said Lisa.

Agencies often hire from countries such as France, Germany, or Cuba, and then pressure those teachers to lie to schools about their origins.

Some teachers also discovered that though their schools offer paid sick days and paid vacation, agencies intercept that money and do not pay for those days.

Due to their illegal status, foreign teachers have few options for recourse, attorney Gary Chodorow explained.

"Last year, the Supreme People's Court decided that foreigners working illegally in China have no 'labor relationship' with the employer," he said. "With no labor relationship, the foreign national working illegally has no access to arbitration."

Beyond the financial and legal struggles, foreign teachers—many of whom do not speak Chinese—find themselves struggling with isolation. Though in certain provinces ESL teachers must be native English speakers, agencies often hire from countries such as France, Germany, or Cuba, and then pressure those teachers to lie to schools about their origins.

"In one school we have to be American, in another Canadian," said Nadia, a South African who has taught illegally in China for four years. "Our identity gets taken away from us."

"In order to work as a teacher in China you need certain documents... I didn't have either, so [the agency] helped me to make it up. It was fake, of course," wrote Arthur, a Russian who teachers at several public schools in Shanghai. "I'm not a native English speaker, so I have to pretend that I am."

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Rooney says his company employed only two native speakers out of approximately 20 people on staff—and the agencies often force even native English speakers to lie, to fill the gap between the type of teacher the company promised it would provide and the less-qualified teacher who shows up. Nadia's boss forged a college diploma for her without her knowledge, and Doug, the Canadian teacher, said that his agency boss made him tell the school he had a linguistics degree. Doug, who had never taught before a company placed him in a Shanghai elementary school, was also instructed to tell the school that he had extensive experience teaching high schoolers, "so that would explain why I wasn't as good" at teaching in his first-grade classroom.

Pitted against the mechanisms of third-party companies on a daily basis, many foreign teachers report psychological stress. They lose faith, and describe nervous habits, health issues, and widening mental swamps of anger and distrust.

Eventually, they reach breaking points.

"I [told the agency], 'I'm going to come in on Saturday, and if you don't have [my money] I'm going to bring a hammer and I'm going to smash down your glass door and break every computer you have,'" an American teacher named Jacob told us. The agency had delayed issuing his final paycheck for three weeks, he said, and the school year was nearly over.

"I'm normally not aggressive [but] I feel they forced my hand," Jacob said. After weeks of failed diplomatic efforts, the threat finally got him his money.

Another teacher reported coworkers setting contracts on fire in the middle of company offices, or tipping over desks.

Many foreigners facing these pressures simply pack up and leave, writing off lost wages and wasted time as the price of getting home safely. But these agencies don't limit their exploitation to those with exit opportunities. Several Chinese employees we interviewed described similar environments of fraud and frustration. Rooney, the Shanghai native, said that while he dreams of becoming an "excellent English teacher," the agency provided him with no training and even refused to pay his federally mandated housing/retirement fund.

Despite their negative impact on teacher quality and stability, third-party agencies continue to gain contracts with schools around China. Those in the field say schools' aversion to dealing with foreigners, unwillingness to apply for the right to sponsor visas, and general power of the status quo all contribute to the system's inertia.

"Schools have a vested financial and administration interest in not complying," Devonshire-Ellis, the expert in Chinese law, wrote us. "The system is badly monitored and regulated and private schools abuse this as a result."

Sharon, a Chinese teaching assistant, put things a bit more bluntly: "The principal, she doesn't care so much about teaching quality."

* Several names in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of teachers who remain in China.

Zoe Leavitt is a recent Stanford graduate who worked in finance in Shanghai for two years and currently lives and works in New York City. Aaron Lee spent over three years teaching in Chinese and International schools in Shanghai.

Female Comedians Tell Their Best (and Worst) Period Stories

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Nothing is certain in this world except that every menstruating woman has a horrifying period story. If we're lucky, we can look back at them and laugh. If we're unlucky, we can't do that because we drowned in our own menstrual blood and are dead.

I asked a bunch of non-dead lady comedians to tell me their funniest period stories. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, unless otherwise specified.

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Vanessa: In seventh grade, I had just gotten my period and still wasn't used to how heavy the flow was. My mom had given me pantyliners, but they weren't enough. The school had this embarrassing rule where you couldn't go to the bathroom during class unless you were a girl on her period, but that obviously meant admitting to the teacher that you had your period. One day in class, I could feel that my pad wasn't enough, but we were in the middle of reading Johnny Tremain and I didn't want to interrupt to admit that I had to go to the bathroom. I ended up leaking through my pants and onto the chair—which is embarrassing enough—but then I couldn't get the blood off the chair, so at the end of class I just left. From then on it was known as "the gross chair" that kids would always try to pass off to other kids.

Ashley: When I got my first "cycle," my mom told me we were going to the grocery store. Instead, she drove me two hours outside of town to a foggy bluff in the North Georgia mountains, read me poetry about Womanhood and gave me talismans all wrapped in silk. I was honestly convinced that she was going to kill me afterwards, but was more terrified that somehow someone from my school would find out what she had done. But I still wear my "Puberty Pin" whenever I feel like I need some luck.

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Belinda: I was taking a tampon out at a Dave Matthews Band concert (it was a very long time ago) and as I was getting ready to wrap it up, I dropped it on my white T-shirt. So I told everyone I saw that night, including people who didn't even ask me, that I dropped a hot dog with ketchup on my shirt. I hate Dave Matthews.

Christine: I started my period at age 14, the day before a big family beach trip. I called my mom, and she brought me home some giant pads, then threw me a box of tampons and said, "You'll probably want to use these instead." With no explanation. The next day, we were about to leave for the beach, and my mom and my stepdad hovered outside the bathroom waiting for me to figure out how to use a tampon. I couldn't get it in. My mom and stepdad were saying "Just relax! It's fine!" Finally I got it in—or so I thought. It wasn't in all the way and fell out while I was running on the beach.

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Stephanie: My period started for the first time when I was 13 and happened to be at home. My mom was also home, but I was too embarrassed to go tell her, so I emailed her. While we were both home.

Erica: When I got my first period, my mom was out of town for work, so I had to tell my dad, who in turn told my neighbor, Rita. Rita was a Boy Scout leader and I was supposed to buy mosquito netting from her for summer camp that day, but Rita gave it to me for free as a congratulations. Or maybe she was worried the blood would attract more mosquitoes?

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Matilda: I was 15, in Hawaii with my family. We woke up early to take a boat out three hours to a diving spot off the coast. My parents and I all forgot how seasick I get, but that was something we were quickly reminded of. After a dreadful hour of blowing chunks in front of hunky Hawaiian sailors and terrified tourists, I fell asleep on a bench on the deck. I awoke to in a pool of my own period blood. It stained the white deck of the boat, and somehow a good amount of it got on my dad. While I was crying in the bathroom, the hunky Hawaiian boys took a hose to my devastating visit from mother nature.

Angela: When I got my first period, my mom got me a basset hound Bobblehead doll.

Laura: Back in the day, I had a habit of not wearing underwear when I was wearing dresses. One time when I was on my period, I decided it would be a good idea to use a tampon, not wear underwear, and wear a dress. I was shopping in Whole Foods with a friend when I realized my tampon had fallen out... at some point. We tried to retrace some of our steps, but it was never heard from again. I bet someone found it in Whole Foods and paid like 30 bucks for it.

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Danielle: When I was 17, I was playing indoor dodgeball with a group of 30 or so people. I was heavily on my period, and toward the end of the game I could feel I needed to change my tampon like, super badly. BUT THIS WAS DODGEBALL. Everyone on my team except me got out, and it was the final match. I was the only person on my side of the court. I got hit really hard in the stomach, and boop, my tampon fell out. In front of everyone. I stood there mortified as the room fell silent. I slowly picked it up off the ground, and just walked away. I never played dodgeball again.

Kelly: I got my period the summer going into my freshmen year of high school. I was a pretty solid cross-country runner, but when I got my period, I gained weight and my time took a severe hit. So at one of my practices, my male coach told everyone to go run, but kept me back and took me on a walk. He spent the entire time trying to find the right words to say, "Did you get your period over the summer? Because you run a lot slower than a year ago." And when I finally admitted I had, we spent the rest of the two-mile walk in silence.

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Sophie Carter-Kahn: Like the third time I got my period, in seventh grade, I was in a new school and didn't know anybody very well. All the girls were about to go to gym class, and I realized I didn't have enough feminine plugs to get me through the day. I asked the girl next to me for a tampon, and then thought about it, and asked for another one, explaining I was "going to run out." She gave me a weird look and handed over the goods. Everyone in gym was whispering when I walked in, and I didn't know why. Later, I found out that she told everyone that I needed two tampons TO PUT IN AT ONCE because I was "going to bleed out." Go ahead and use my real name, because fuck you Alex Favier, NOBODY should betray someone who needs a tampon. That's the ONLY rule of womanhood that I truly believe in.

Illustrations by Penelope Gazin

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

Spies Know What You're Downloading on File-Sharing Sites, New Snowden Docs Show

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Spies Know What You're Downloading on File-Sharing Sites, New Snowden Docs Show

Hanging with Sylvester Stallone's Superfans at His Expensive Meet and Greet in Britain

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Photos by Natasha Bright

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Sylvester Stallone, interviewed by Mike Read. On paper, it's an odd setup. In reality, it was one of the weirdest events I've ever been to: Rocky, sitting in Sheffield City Hall, chatting to a man whose most recent headlines came via a slightly offensive, cod-calypso, pro-UKIP song. In attendance were hundreds of Sly mega-fans who'd traveled in from all over Europe and paid £50 [$75]—or £500 [$750] for the meet-n-greet—to celebrate the life and work of the Italian Stallion from their plush velvet seats.

Arriving at the venue, we were met by a group protesting Israeli attacks on Palestine. Which seemed a little incongruous at first. However, they were quick to explain that they were there to rally against Stallone's involvement with the Israeli Defense Forces, an organization he's helped to raise money for. It was all very peaceful; candles were lit, songs were sung, and leaflets were given out to bemused Rambo fans who were clearly just there to find out how many pushups Sly can do IRL.

Before meeting any of the fans, I spoke to Angela—one of the protesters, who didn't want to be photographed—about their cause.

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Some of the anti-Stallone protesters

VICE: Hi Angela. What have you come here to do this evening?
Angela: What we've come here to do is talk about—through our leaflet—Sylvester Stallone and his involvement with Israel. He attended a fundraising event for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Force—the force Israel sent over to Gaza in the summer who killed 2,139 Palestinians, including 490 children. We're addressing the fans because we want them to know that this is what their star has been doing, and he's also signed a letter that's in support of Israel's right to defend itself. Everybody has a right to defend themselves, but it's very disproportionate. We came to have a peaceful protest—no shouting or speeches; just to give out the leaflets.

How has the response been from the fans?
Perfectly friendly, inasmuch as people have taken the leaflets and not thrown them back at us or anything. It's been a quiet response.

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In the queue we met people who'd made the trip from places as far as France and Norway to watch Mr. Expendables have a chat with the DJ who once stopped playing "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood halfway through on live radio once he realized the lyrics had something to do with ejaculating dicks.

The line stretched about half a mile, so we had a walk up and down, and chatted with some fans.

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From left to right: Dee, Nic, and Dave

Hi guys. Why are you here?
Dee: Big fan of Sylvester Stallone.

As an actor or a person?
Both an actor and a person. I think he's quite an iconic person.

Do you have regular tickets, or tickets to the meet and greet?
Just regular tonight, but I met him in Manchester and did a meet and greet. I can't afford it tonight.

Wouldn't you have the same kind of conversation if you were to do it again anyway?
I've not even thought about it—I don't care. I just want to be in the same room as him. I've waited at the stage door for him for six hours just to see his hand. I've been a fan for 18 years.

What is it you love so much about him to justify standing six hours in the cold?
I think because of the character Rocky and him as an iconic person. What he's gone through in life, he transpires that on screen through Rocky. It's life, isn't it? It symbolizes life. So that for me is it.

Without meaning to get too personal, is that element of there being a struggle in life something you can relate to?
Yeah, definitely. I've had cancer. I'm three years in remission from cancer, so yeah.

So you looked to Sly and Rocky during those times for strength?
Yeah, I looked at things in his life and things that happened in Rocky, and that helped me. The speech in it—that helped me through it, definitely.

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Adam (left) and Matt

Hi guys. Why are you here?
Matt: Love his films—grew up watching Rambo and Rocky.
Adam: I've just come because he wanted to come.

What is it about his films you like so much that you want to come and hear him be interviewed?
Matt: They were just captivating when you were a kid. They're always about someone from the bottom going up to the top, and that's quite an inspiring thing.

It seems a few people appreciate the underdog element in his films. Is that something you can relate to?
Not so much the underdog, but it's just good to see that it's not always the best looking guy or the guy with the most money who comes out on top. And for people in this kind of area, it's something they can relate to in that sense.

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Jane (left) and Barry

What is it specifically that's brought you here tonight?
Barry: Well, obviously I've liked his films over the years, but I like the way he trains. Basically, I want to know about his training regime and what he's done over the years and how he's got to where he is today.

So you're more interested in his personal fitness?
Exactly, yeah. I've got a few books on Sylvester and I've read them, so hopefully I'll be able to ask a few questions.

If you get the opportunity, what will you ask him?
In his midlife, from his forties, what would he do [in his training] that he hasn't done if he were to do it again—you know, based on his knowledge and experience.

Did you pay any attention to the people protesting outside?
No, not really. I'm not really interested. Everyone's got their own opinions; what he stands for, he stands for.

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(From left to right) Ben, Mark and Matt

Hi there. Why are you guys fans?
Mark: Lifetime hero.

You all grew up with him as kids?
Ben: We're all just big kids now. That's all it is—we've just never grown up.
Mark: We've spent the horrendous £500 [$750] to get a photo with him.

£500?! That's how much it costs for a photo?
Ben: Shhh—don't tell anyone, he'll get fucking killed.
Mark: My wife would leave me.

So £500 for a group photo?
All: No, each!
Mark: If he doesn't sign something, he's [Ben] going to chin him.

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Sorry about the quality of these photos—we were in the cheap seats

Inside, the stage was made up to look like a bit like a Habitat display window: leather couches, some nice lamps, a Union Jack rug, and a stars and stripes cushion. Either side of the chairs were framed photos of Sylvester.

The pre-approved questions began to flow, and we learned a few Sly facts: He likes rugby because it's manly, he owns Pomeranian dogs (a sign of sensitivity because they're small and cute) and he'll be starring in a new series of ads for Warburtons bread. Cue some puns about needing the dough (his Expendables series has earned over half a billion pounds worldwide) and earning some bread.

Then the audience questions started. These, unsurprisingly, ranged from the banal to the insane.

One woman began a soliloquy about how she has a signed picture of Stallone and Carl Weathers above her bed, how much she loves him and how she respects his dedication, which she can relate to because she's a vegetarian. However, before long, she was cut short by boos and hissing from all the irked fans waiting for their turn.

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Two guys who'd come over from Germany used the Q&A to pitch a film, to which Stallone replied: "Are you pitching me, you shameless bastard?" He too was bored into silence by the rowdy and impatient crowd, all keen to find out every last detail about Stallone, including a detailed breakdown of his daily bowel movements on the set of Judge Dredd. Weirdly, there wasn't one mention of the Israel-Palestine conflict that greeted us at the door.

"I'm so honored to be here," came the start of one question, from a quivering wreck of a woman who'd paid through the nose for the premium seats. "Can I ask you one thing: can you say the line, 'You're the disease, I'm the cure' from Cobra?"

Stallone did, and the sobbing continued.

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One woman announced she'd named her child after Sly, another got on stage to arm wrestle him.

As the event came to an end, the last question came in the form of a marriage proposal. "He said to me, 'I'll only marry you if Sylvester Stallone asks,'" said a woman, excitedly, raising a question in my mind of whether this man really wanted to marry her. The reverend Stallone then brought them up on stage (amid loud shouts of "Don't do it!") and gave them his blessing.

The woman then said, "No, can you ask him if he wants to marry me?"

Stallone did as asked. The fiancee said yes. The woman ignored him and gave Sly a hug instead.

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It was almost time to leave the stage, but not before a ceremonial knife-giving. Something to do with sponsorship resulted in Sly being presented with an official Sheffield steel Bowie knife, which was presented to him onstage by a guy in his eighties who was clearly humbled and a little bewildered by the experience. He made a point of introducing his life-long wife onstage, which was actually a really touching moment, before explaining—off microphone—how the knife was made.

Soon after, UKIP Mike said "Now that's a knife!" in an Australian accent, I died a bit inside, the Rocky exit music came on and everyone rushed to the front for hugs and high-fives, with the lucky few staying on to get their £500 worth of one-on-one Sly photos.

On the way out, we caught a young woman doing the Rocky steps thing and stopped her for a chat.

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So you're a bit speechless, are you?
India: Yeah, he's literally—I know they all say he's their biggest idol, but I cannot describe the words of actually seeing him live.

What is it about him you like so much?
He's just so inspiring—I've learned a lot from Rocky and he's got me through a lot in life. It's a massive privilege that I've even been able to see him tonight, because I never thought I would. I'm just speechless. I can't get my words out. Absolutely incredible—the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life.

So the character Rocky is why you love him so much?
Yeah. I was seven years old when my grandpa first showed me him, and since then I've literally watched him every single day.

Every day?
Literally every day, yeah. My favorite is number four.

Did you get to ask him a question in there?
I didn't, no, because I was that scared I thought was going to faint.

If you had been able to ask him a question, what would it have been?
I would have asked him to sign me so I could have got his name tattooed. I didn't want to ask him anything; I just would have liked a signature so I could get it tattooed, but I'm still going to do that anyway.

You're going to get his name tattooed on you?
Yeah, probably on my back. Probably something out of Rocky, or what he's just said in there about having thick skin and that.

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It was a very strange evening, and while I'm utterly bemused as to how someone who charges their fans £500 for a single photo can command so much respect and impart so much inspiration, it's clear that he does. Someone getting through cancer via watching Rocky is not something I ever expected to hear—so fair enough, Sly.

"An Evening with Sylvester Stallone": it brought political protests, bouts of crying, arm wrestling, a marriage proposal and a ceremonial knife-giving, yet I still don't have a fucking clue what that whole three seashells thing was all about.

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

I Slept with My School Teacher, and It Was Great—but the Aftermath Was Terrible

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Image by Cei Willis

On Monday, we posted an article detailing a male student's sexual encounter with his female teacher. Today, we're publishing a piece from the opposite perspective, that of a female student who was taken advantage of by her male teacher. This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I still clearly remember the first time I set eyes on him, across a crowded assembly hall. He had pale skin, pink cheeks, and big yellow eyes like a cat. He seemed both amused and embarrassed, as if it were an episode of Quantum Leap, and he had ended up there quite by accident. He was unlike anyone I'd ever met before. He wore Armani suits and quoted poetry. I was totally and utterly smitten from the very beginning. I changed subjects after a term of A-levels just so I could be in his class.

While I was still at school, our relationship got into weird territory. It started out with him lending me modern American novels and foreign movies. I'm from the pedestrian suburbs of London—you have no idea how grown-up and sophisticated watching Danish Dogme 95 cinema made me feel at 16; like Grace Kelly collecting her pension in elbow-length gloves. After this fairly innocuous start came the mixtapes, with handwritten cassette covers. This was my introduction to the Jesus and Mary Chain, Jane's Addiction, and Bowie. It wasn't just me he made them for. There was a select group of us, his little fans. We felt very special. I wonder now why other teachers weren't more concerned. He was in his mid-20s and had a long-term girlfriend, so maybe they thought they had no reason to be worried.

Back then I used to write poetry. I'd even won some competitions and everything. Somehow, I came to read him one and he told me that "to write poetry as a teenager that is not teenage poetry, is a gift" and my heart melted inside of me, infusing through me like syrup through a sponge pudding. Now, I cringe—how desperate I was to be loved, how easily he manipulated me.

He became my editor. We would sit in a small room at the school and go through my poems. He would cut them mercilessly, every stroke of his pen making him more powerful. In my mind he was Ezra Pound to my Eliot. And if he hadn't quite scaled the heights of creepiness and pretentiousness, he would read me "The Wasteland" aloud, all the while doing a subtle pelvic thrust in his chair, like he was breathing through his balls.

I have never had a crush of this intensity before or in the many years since. I went to sleep every night thinking about what it would be like to kiss him. I wasn't very sexually experienced and I still didn't really know how to masturbate. I didn't know what sex was like either, so it was enough just to imagine the kiss, over and over again.

I never confessed to him how much I loved him. I never even really flirted with him in an explicit way. I did, and still do, see showing someone that you like them as a sign of great weakness. But I remember us bickering like a couple, sometimes having full-blown fights where one of us would storm out. That's not a normal teacher-pupil relationship. Despite my stiff upper lip, he knew I was head over heels for him, of course he did.

When I left school we kept in touch. That wasn't that odd at my school. A few of my friends stayed in touch with various teachers. Then, of course, I so desperately wanted it to be out of the ordinary, but it wasn't. I met up with him a few times for some dinner or a coffee, but he didn't cross the line.

During the Christmas holidays after my first term at university, he called me and asked me to come and meet him in the pub that evening. I hurriedly showered and shaved my legs. For someone so lacking in sexual experience, I was very optimistic. I set off to meet him. I was excited. I was nervous. I had an unsettling sense of foreboding. He had recently split up with his girlfriend and was already in the pub— a Wetherspoons—when he called. Somewhere in my naïve, fantasy-riddled teenage brain I sort of knew that this wasn't going to end well. Nobody makes their best decisions in a Wetherspoons.

When I arrived, he was drunk. He said that he had something to tell me, but he couldn't until I was as drunk as he was. He went to the bar and came back with four double tequilas. I sipped the tequila tentatively, and promised him I wouldn't tell anyone what he told me. As he edged toward me, I edged away, unwilling to discard either my coat or my sobriety. Eventually, he gave me snapshots of what had happened. After his recent break-up, something had occurred with another ex-student. She was younger than me but had left to go to a different sixth-form. This was a girl he'd been form tutor to, while she was in year 10 and 11 and still in school uniform. Her boyfriend was there in the pub, spoiling for a fight. Maybe she was too, and I was her punishment.

Then he kissed me. By this point I was drunk, and even though I'd yearned for this very thing for such a long time, I was still aware enough to be embarrassed that I was kissing my teacher in a brightly lit Wetherspoons.

We got a taxi back to his. It was so cold inside his house that I could see my own breath forming little clouds of condensation, it felt colder than outside. We got into bed, and it was the first time in my life that I ever really enjoyed a sexual experience. I suddenly understood what the fuss was about. Teenage boys were never really my thing.

In the morning, it was a rush to reach the front door before his mother saw me. He lived with his mother at 27, and this was before the recession. We walked to the station together and he said, "I'll pass on your regards in the staff room." He said it so casually. I was quietly horrified. I couldn't understand why he would want to give them even a hint of what had happened.

When I got home, I was elated. I'd achieved my goal. I'd gotten what I wanted. I felt validated—the chemistry I had felt between us was real, I'd been right. Then very slowly, over the next few days, the picture I'd painted of him and our relationship began to slip, to slide down, revealing a much more unwholesome reality underneath. I kept trying to pull it back up, to make it stick fast, and pretend I hadn't seen what was underneath.

A few days later we texted and he agreed to meet me in another pub. I was less excited and more anxious this time, worried my picture of him was going to disintegrate entirely. He swept in wearing a long coat, which this time he chose not to remove. We talked for a few minutes, just small talk. He gazed into my eyes earnestly, "Why don't you stop being so miserable and get yourself a boyfriend?" he asked. He left, and that was the last time I ever saw him. I spent the rest of the evening drinking as much as I could physically consume and suddenly finding profound meaning in Boyzone lyrics.

The biggest problem with fulfilling the fantasy of sleeping with your teacher is that the kind of teacher who would sleep with their student is almost inevitably going to be the kind that is a complete asshole. The kind of teacher who would ever be worthy of such attention would never take advantage of the position of power they have over students in their care. Even though I had left school, the massive power imbalance remained. The Teacher Crush is therefore a moral paradox, in which you will either be eternally frustrated because the object of your affection is worthy and will therefore never sleep with you, or you will be taken advantage of by an old pervert, and your fantasy will be ripped away from you. You will feel betrayed in a way you didn't even understand possible before it happened.

Looking back now, his behavior seems calculating and predatory. He waited until I'd left, so he never broke the law. But he knew I would be there, ready and willing. He used me to make himself feel better, despite the consequences for me. I suspect he's done it more than once, too. I suspect he's done it many times.

For the next term at university I drank at least half a bottle of vodka every day. If I felt even a fleeting moment of shame, it was like a trip switch that made a reel of film play in my brain: the cold house, my own breath forming little clouds of condensation, the rush to get to the door before his mother saw me, the sentence "stop being so miserable and get yourself a boyfriend" playing over and over again.

Fidel Castro Breaks His Silence Over Relations with the United States

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Fidel Castro Breaks His Silence Over Relations with the United States

Inside Miracle Village, Florida's Isolated Community of Sex Offenders

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All images © Sofia Valiente

In January of 2013, photographer Sofia Valiente took residency at Miracle Village, an isolated community that houses convicted sex offenders in Florida.

For those living in Miracle Village, reentering society is extremely difficult. They are publicly defined by their mistakes, stripped of emotional acceptance, and living in shared quarters of mutual sufferance. For many of them, this will be the rest of their life, living in a state of perpetual punishment.

As soon as someone is convicted of a sex crime, they are registered, labeled, and tarred by the brush of every offender that came before them. We don't expect rehabilitation and don't really want it—we just want them to go away. As far away as possible.

Valiente began with regular visits to Miracle Village and eventually came to spend five weeks living there. In December, she returned for six weeks to document its residents. What she found was a tranquil community and strong relationships forged through isolation from the rest of the world. Valiente gained the community's trust and, through her candid portraits, conveys how the most ostracized people in Western society live.

VICE: Can you give me a walkthrough of your approach? What were your preconceptions?
Sofia Valiente: It was a delicate process. I had no idea what to expect and assumed the worst. Anytime a sex offender is mentioned in the news there is that general fear. But after speaking with some of the residents, I saw that they weren't monsters. They weren't different from you and I, which compelled me to make the work.

I knew there were cases that could potentially be serious, so I always had an open mind when approaching each individual. I soon found out that they were more afraid of being with me alone than I was with them, though.

How did you get access to Miracle Village?
A friend of mine who works at the local newspaper in the town where Miracle Village is told me about the community. I was overcome with curiosity and, one day, just decided to drive there. I came to them with the idea of doing the project and asked each person one by one. They almost always said yes.

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What was the nature of their crimes?
It varied a lot. There were young guys who were convicted for being in consensual teenage relationships—one guy was 18 and his girlfriend 16. Then there was someone convicted of possessing child pornography, which is illegal regardless of how the file ends up on the person's computer. There were some men who had physically molested a minor, although no one in the village was a "diagnosed" pedophile—they don't accept serial rapists, pedophiles, or people that have committed violent crimes.

What was the strangest case?
The most absurd case was the man who urinated in public. A child had seen him, and her mother called in the police.

How does he process that?
When I talk to him, I ask, "Aren't you angry?" But he's confident and doesn't care what people think. He just lets it be. He is very involved with the Methodist church in the town of Pahokee—he's their chef, attends all the Bible studies, and has pretty much found a place there. He used to drink a lot before and was drunk when he was caught urinating in public. But the experience of going to prison and being convicted made him find a new purpose.

There were a few cases like that that didn't make any sense. The story of the only woman there, Rose, really affected me. She came from an abusive background and was very poor. She lived in trailers and worked at Taco Bell. Her husband used to beat and rape her, and it's something she can barely talk about, even with me. She was trying to leave, and he told her she was never gonna take the kids. He made accusations and, in these circumstances, there is no proof required.

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Christ.
She hasn't seen her children since that time. She can barely write and simply wasn't able to defend herself. This made me really sad, and I think about it a lot. It's the worst thing that could happen to a woman, to take away her children.

That's a tragic story.
Here's a diary entry I wrote about Rose when I was in the village:

Then I went and saw Rose... to ask her to write something. She always avoids me, hates that I take pictures of her. But I wanted her to write it from her own words what happened. I want to defend her, I believe in her.

She was putting me off... and I lost it. I told her, "I'm so tired of this. I'm not like everyone else that has come here, there's things I've got to say. I would never hurt you."

She said, "Honey... It's not about you. I just can't talk about this stuff... I just block it out because I just can't... my uncle, my brother, my husband they all raped me and I hate talking about it and I won't. I love you, though."

I feel stupid, selfish... why didn't I think that of her... there are things I don't understand.

Is the village as tranquil as it looks?
Absolutely. The thing about the village is that they all share a label. There really is no hierarchy like in the rest of society. Something happens to a man when his ego is taken away. Everything is at face value in the village.

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In stripping all ego and purpose, with no real chance of society giving it back, are these people just existing? Do they see themselves as solely defined by their mistakes?
They don't have the option to have an ego. In our society we are defined by our jobs, where we live, and what we look like. These things don't exist in the village. There is no pretending, even if they wanted to. And so there is this serene environment where they are accepted among each other, without the judgment the rest of the world has already cast on them. The village is a huge support system—they all count on each other.

Do you think they want to reintegrate into society?
I imagine being acknowledged as human beings with stories would be massive for them. They really respected the fact that I was out there, taking the time to listen to what they have to say. Few people ever do.

How do they fill their days?
They each carry out their days differently. Some manage to get a job—many of the young guys do hands-on work around the properties. But they'd like to eventually move on. Many of them look forward to getting off probation, when there'll be less restrictions on them.

What's the likelihood of that happening?
It's tough, because they come to realize that their restrictions aren't just physical. One man in my book spent a lot of time going to this one bar to try and meet someone. He hit it off with one of the waitresses, and she agreed to a date. He told her about his conviction, and she quit her job soon after and changed her phone number.

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Nobody wants to take that chance.
I guess I can sort of understand that reaction. As soon as you hear the words "convicted sex offender," you think the worst.

Do you think social attitudes surrounding sex offenders are ever likely to change?
Yes, they've got to. Especially when it comes to dealing with the younger guys who made mistakes when downloading files, because it's a life sentence. They shouldn't have to suffer their entire lives, especially after serving their time.

Follow Marcus on Twitter.

Miracle Village is a book produced and published by Benetton's communication research center, Fabrica.


Watch Run the Jewels' New Video for 'Lie, Cheat, Steal'

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Watch Run the Jewels' New Video for 'Lie, Cheat, Steal'

The Ex-Canadian Soldier Fighting the Islamic State Is Back Home

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Dillon Hillier, on the far right, driving home from the airport. Photo via Facebook

The same Canadian combat veteran who jumped on a plane from Calgary to fight alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga against the Islamic State has returned home, according to a Facebook post from his father.

Randy Hillier, a Conservative Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) in Ontario for Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, says his son Dillon Hillier flew back from Kurdistan and is "safely home" in Canada.

"We are proud and relieved that Dillon has returned safely home from the middle-east," read Hillier's statement. "Jane and I would like to express our deep appreciation to all those who contacted us, offering their thoughtful and generous support to our son Dillon while he was engaged alongside the Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan against the Islamic State (ISIL)."

Dillon Hillier made headlines last November after suddenly joining Kurdish forces battling ISIS at a time when the front lines of northern Iraq were not only fluid, but among the most brutal in the world.

Beheadings, kidnappings, and mass executions were regular occurrences in the region Dillon chose to deploy to with the fledgling Kurdish security forces that, at the time, were barely holding off the advances of Islamic State forces.

Since then, the Islamic State has been frozen in northern Iraq while Kurdish YPG forces, allied with the Peshmerga, fought off a massive ISIS assault in the northern Syrian town of Kobane—a battlefield characterized as a veritable modern-day Stalingrad for its brutality and street-to-street fighting.

First video of Hillier shooting.

When Hillier first joined, he was believed to be the first known Canadian veteran attached to Peshmerga forces. In videos from the front lines, Hillier was seen firing rounds of his assault rifle at ISIS forces during a battle in November.

Former Canadian Forces soldier Dillon Hillier. Photo via Facebook

In December, the Hillier family launched an audacious crowdsourcing project to buy Dillon night-vision goggles in time for Christmas. Now, just a month later, Dillon is back home with no need for tactical military equipment.

At the same time, Hillier isn't the only Canadian who wanted to join the Kurds fighting Islamic State forces—a war faction that also counts Canadians within its ranks.

The 1st North American Expeditionary Force, a group of ex-NATO soldiers (led by a Canadian veteran), is attempting to join the Peshmerga cause. Gil Rosenberg, a woman from British Columbia, fought in Kobane with YPG forces, but has recently been away from the front lines. Rosenberg also did a stint in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).

Even though some eager Canadians look to the battlefields of Kurdistan as a desirable destination, the Canadian department of Foreign Affairs discourages Canadians from joining foreign militaries in the fight against ISIS.

"The Government of Canada has long advised against all travel to Syria and Iraq," a Foreign Affairs spokesperson told VICE in early January. "Canadians traveling to Syria and Iraq, including those who travel there to join local campaigns in the fight against ISIL [ISIS], must do so at their own personal risk and must be aware that rescue missions in this dangerous area will not be conducted."

Instead of the YPG or Peshmerga, the spokesperson encouraged Canadians to "join the Canadian Armed Forces" if they want to help with the fight against ISIS.

While Dillon Hillier shot at ISIS militants, Canadian Special Forces soldiers were busy exchanging gunfire with the militant organization during their own, official mission in Iraq. So far Canada is the only known western military to fight ISIS on the ground. At the same time, Canadian CF-18 fighters are dropping laser-guided bombs on ISIS targets all over Iraq.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of LucasArts’ Adventure Classics

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Just a couple of girls cosplaying as (Day of the) Tentacles. Photo via ACParadise

The Secret of Monkey Island. Star Wars: X-Wing. Full Throttle. Grim Fandango. The history of LucasArts (originally Lucasfilm Games) is a list of legends and fond memories that can't take full credit for the 1990s' reputation as the golden age of gaming but certainly deserves its share. In its prime, the company's iconic logo on a box was a mark of quality in a way the likes of Nintendo's gold seal of licensing could only dream of. Even now, after what may as well have been a concentrated effort to piss all that good will down the drain, it's the good times people remember.

Lucasfilm Games was started in 1982, midway through the first Star Wars trilogy. It was an odd project, set up partly to explore the possibilities of computer gaming—but mostly to soak up the profits of Star Wars and Indiana Jones instead of paying mountains of taxes. At this point, George Lucas largely stepped away, with former studio head Peter Langston describing the studio's official mandate as "Stay small, be the best, and don't lose any money."

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Lucasfilm Games' 'Habitat' promotional video

The small team immediately set to work creating games with names like Rescue on Fractalus! and Ballblazer and Koronis Rift—and if a certain movie franchise is notable by its absence there, it's deliberate. Early on, Star Wars was officially off-limits, with the arcade games actually being made by Atari. Instead, Lucasfilm Games set about creating its own properties, exploring complex 3-D technologies for Fractalus, even creating a revolutionary MMO/virtual world called Habitat for the Commodore 64. This was a huge achievement in 1985.

The first defining release, though, came in 1987 with the launch of 1980s horror pastiche Maniac Mansion, created by programmer Ron Gilbert and artist Gary Winnick—both currently working on a spiritual successor, Thimbleweed Park. It wasn't the first graphic adventure, but it established the pattern that most continue to follow—as well as inventing the term "cutscene" and popularizing the idea of interactions through verbs.

Maniac Mansion is still a staggeringly complex game by modern standards, with multiple paths, the mansion's inhabitants able to move around, and seven characters (of which you get to pick three) with their own skills. Punkette Razor could use her music skills to help a tentacle dreaming of being a rock star, while geek Bernard could repair, and surfer Jeff could—well, there were six characters with skills; you can look the rest of them up.

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Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion opened the door for The Secret of Monkey Island, also headed up by Gilbert, along with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which many fans still consider Indy's unofficial fourth adventure, intricate time-travel puzzle-box Day of the Tentacle, and of course Tim Schafer's Grim Fandango, re-released in remastered form on January 27.

LucasArts (for now it had become that) adventures are still held up as the pinnacle of the genre. They've held up extremely well, too, with Full Throttle arguably better now than it was at its release in 1995. Modern gaming tastes are far more in sync with its short but cinematic approach to biking adventure.

Every one of the adventures would raise the bar in some way. Fate of Atlantis offered three paths, for whether you preferred your Indy to use his wits, fists, or team up with medium Sophia Hapgood. Monkey Island established the Three Trials puzzle structure that adventures still rely on to keep players interested when stuck somewhere. Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road were living cartoons. In addition, the company's roots in moviemaking pushed it to innovations that may seem obvious now but weren't at the time, such as getting real actors to voice game characters instead of just casting around the office.

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Full Throttle

While this was going on, of course, the company finally embraced Star Wars, starting with 1993's X-Wing—notable for being the work of flight-simulator designers. It worked because it treated the famous spaceships as much as craft that took skill to fly as wish-fulfilment fantasies, wrapping the experience into military campaigns any Star Wars fan would be proud to serve in. LucasArts would follow on in style for the next few years, treating their access to the license as a rare opportunity to play in such a beloved world, not just a license to print money. TIE Fighter. Jedi Knight. Even Rebel Assault (though that one didn't go down as well).

However, by the end of the 1990s, that was changing. As beloved as most of LucasArts games were, sales didn't always go hand in hand with popularity. The Secret of Monkey Island itself was no huge success, and Grim Fandango isn't believed to have cracked half a million. Star Wars games, however, routinely did big business, even the less-good ones like Rebel Assault.

Finally, it happened. Around the launch of The Phantom Menace in 1999, LucasArts embraced the dark side and began churning out lesser-quality Star Wars crap. Force Commander. Episode One. Racer. Obi-Wan. There were some highlights, including Star Wars Galaxies (which didn't quite work out, but was a solid attempt), and Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, but no longer was the LucasArts logo a reason to buy anything. Especially promises.

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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

Stories of bad blood from this era are not hard to find, from inside and outside, while beyond the walls of LucasArts new studios and franchises like Uncharted were routinely eating the company's lunch. The old guard was long gone, leaving the the glory days of LA a distant memory.

Things finally got so bad that even LucasArts had to admit it. In 2011, President Paul Meegan (one of four in just ten years) declared: "In recent years, LucasArts hasn't always done a good job of making games. We should be making games that define our medium, that are competitive with the best of our industry, but we're not. That has to change."

But in the end, it didn't. Just two years later, Disney purchased the Lucas empire. As of April 2013, LucasArts was shut down, with what remained of it charged solely to license Star Wars properties to other developers. At this point, it wasn't so much execution as euthanasia.

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Grim Fandango remastered for the PlayStation 4

The irony is that—for adventure gamers, at least—this has an upside. Previously, LucasArts had canned an allegedly 80 percent complete remake of Day of the Tentacle, in the style of the (crap, beset with production difficulties) The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, and its far, far better sequel. Under Disney, it's actually happening: Once Tim Schafer's Double Fine Studios has released the Grim Fandango remaster, it's going to see this newDay of the Tentacle through to completion.

It seems unlikely that Disney will throw any money behind any brand-new games or sequels in the style of these LucasArts originals, but even Schafer has described getting this much as "a miracle."

"There were just some people at Disney, Sony, and Lucasfilm that care about these games," he said to Polygon at December 2014's PlayStation Experience event. "They're old enough that some of these people who are executives played them when they were kids."

If they do well enough, at least they've got potential friends in high places. We'll just have to see whether nostalgia is enough to squeeze another Full Throttle into existence. Whatever happens, it's a tribute to LucasArts that fans still choose to remember them at their best, not for their slow and painful fall from grace and gaming royalty. Very few companies deserve that favor, or have created as many memories worth holding onto forever.

Follow Richard on Twitter.

The 'Rent Is Too Damn High' Guy Says He's Being Evicted Because He's Black

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Fans of spectacle and outlandish facial hair were crestfallen when Jimmy McMillan, founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High party, lost to Bill de Blasio in the 2013 New York City mayoral election. But with Monday's unfortunate news that he's undergoing an eviction from his Manhattan apartment, Jimmy is back in the press.

According to the New York Daily News, this particular rent-controlled unit wasn't being used as a primary residence, which violates the terms of staying in a rent-controlled apartment. McMillan disputes the claim, and isn't taking it lying down. He's seemingly ready to turn this personal problem into yet another battle for the hearts and minds of New Yorkers.

When I asked him if the eviction was tied to the issue of rents being too damn high, he said his eviction "is about a nigger, living on a piece of property owned by a rich guy, who doesn't want a nigger living on his property."

"They think I'm playing with them? I'm not fucking around and playing games," he told me.

Despite making a name for himself by saying "damn" on TV a lot, McMillan was a little torn about using foul language on the phone with me. "That kind of language is not what the Rent Is Too Damn High Party represents," he said. But he's adamant in this case that high rents are just a small part of the story. "It's not about me paying lower rent!" he told me, before correcting himself: "No, maybe that's an understatement. It is about me paying low rent. But also because I'm the only negro in the building."

I tried to hammer out the somewhat confusing details of the story on the phone. The dispute is about not being allowed to have a key, according to McMillan, but it's about not actually living in the building, according to the property owner. Trying to get him to tell me flat out if he was residing in the apartment wasn't easy.

First, he skirted around the issue of whether he had been living in the unit prior to a court case filed by his landlord in 2011. At that time, he says his son was living there. To hear him tell it, Lisco Holdings, which owns his building, was acting pretty strange, and whoever was acting as his landlord was in defiance of a court order. "The judge ordered him to give me a key, and he refused to give me a key," he told me. That's something that, if true, would almost certainly sway a judge if this ended up going to court.

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His building, via Google Street View

But his son apparently had a key all along. "I used to wait for him to go to the front door, and have him hold the door for me, and that is how I was able to get into my apartment, because he locked me out of the building, not my apartment." He claims the apartment has been his primary residence for about three years, and he told the Daily News that his other apartment in Brooklyn is strictly an office. "My son went into the army on February 27, 2012. I'm able to come and go freely because I have his key."

McMillan's version of the story suggests that lawyers and judges are colluding to kick him out. "[Lisco's] law firm, Borah Goldstein, and a judge called Laurie Lau are working together to try and get me out of this apartment, and there's nothing wrong with me."

The law firm representing Lisco Holdings didn't return calls for comment.

"I have until February 5 to get out," McMillan said. But he plans to fight it, claiming he's been performing an undercover investigation into this particular issue. "As an undercover investigator, my job was to catch them doing wrong," he told me, adding, "my job is to stop them, because people are getting hurt."

He says that to protect himself, he's tried to contact the city council, the governor, the state's attorney, state senators, and the borough president. But he claims that "they're not even trying, because they didn't get elected trying to fight for lower rent, or trying to fight corruption in housing like I am. It's a problem, but I'm not going to quit fighting."

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Real Sex Education Means Teaching Kids the Power of 'No'

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My sex education consisted of a 280-pound nun denouncing abortion.

She handed out tiny gold casts of feet to illustrate the size a baby would be if you terminated a pregnancy at ten weeks. Prior to that, my biology teacher stuck on some video about sperm before segueing gracelessly into a chat about periods. I asked this question then and I ask it now: Is there any woman in the world who has actually cocked her leg up on the bathtub to insert a tampon?

Sex education—or Personal, Social, and Health Education (PSHE) as it's now known in the UK—has come a long way since. But not nearly far enough.

Last weekend, Labor's formidable MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, chaired the conference " Our Bodies Our Future," as part of her push to make PSHE a statutory part of the national curriculum that begins in elementary school. It was an ambitious event, and edifying to hear young women able to discuss everything from street harassment to forced marriages at an age where I'm 100 percent sure I was carving my crush's initials into my knee with a geometry compass.

Every issue discussed on the day, for me, could be brought back to one focal point: learning about consent. Teaching children the very basics of respecting each other's bodies and boundaries, long before they find themselves in any intimate situation, seems like a no-brainer.

So why is it still not happening?

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Stella Creasy MP. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Last weekend wasn't Creasy's first public push to make PSHE compulsory. In 2013, she used the global One Billion Rising campaign to open parliament up for debate, because the fact is, sex education in the UK is stagnant. That up to a quarter of students in some parts of the UK receive no formal sex education whatsoever is staggering. This is before you consider that one in three gay men diagnosed with HIV in 2012 were in their teens or early 20s, yet more than three-quarters of gay and bisexual young people receive no information or teaching at school about same-sex relationships or safe gay sex, according to the 2014 report, Youth Chances.

Our lack of adequate sex education in this country has, over time, led to a culture of firefighting—we bombard young people with contraceptive information, which is an obvious imperative, but we're not focusing enough on teaching young people the power of "no"—how important that word is, and how, when it comes to sex, we must get used to saying and hearing it. It's all pretty bleak when you consider that Britain has maintained some of the worst teen pregnancy and STI rates in Europe.

Creasy's passionate involvement with this issue is promising. She says she'll take the conversation as high as it can go, and, hearing her speak, I believe her. But there are communities loudly opposing the pledge for compulsory PSHE—some because of obvious religious and cultural grievances, but also parents who don't feel it's a teacher's place to talk to their kids about what is, admittedly, the most sensitive subject in the world.

Though making PSHE statutory wouldn't ensure every child in Britain couldn't just be removed from the lessons entirely, it would stop parents dictating what is taught. One mother at the conference described how a video about the onset of puberty was allowed to be vetted before it was shown to children. A portion gently explaining male touching was left in, but all references to female touching were completely removed. If there was ever a better example of us enforcing our own anxieties onto our children, it's not being allowed to have a matter-of-fact chat with girls about what their clitoris is for. If we want young women to know that sex is for their pleasure, too, removing references to female masturbation is a problem.

A need for frank, emotionally-lead sex education in schools shouldn't be viewed as control being snatched away from parents. Rather, it's admitting that the pressures of growing up are different for every generation and it's likely that, as a parent, you won't ever get a true picture of "how their day went" when they come home from school.

In 2012 a YouGov poll showed that almost a third of 16- to 18-year-old girls had already been subjected to some form of unwanted sexual touching or bullying at school, with the NSPCC adding that a third of 13 to 17-year-old girls in relationships had experienced physical or sexual violence. These are dangerous numbers.

Differentiating young men from the rare breed of Big Bad Rapist is paramount. The vast majority of sexual assault isn't predatory strangers snatching women into alleyways—it's people in our everyday lives. In the everyday lives of teenagers in their first, fraught relationships.

One of my first relationships disintegrated after a drunken night out. I was woken up mid-snore to my skirt being hitched up and, when I continued to pretend I was asleep, my wrist was clutched and I was forced onto my back to be clumsily dry-humped. Were it not for passing out in some pretty industrial control-top stockings, I'm certain the situation would have played out differently.

Every generation will inevitably come up against new and imaginative ways to be fucked up about sex. But we can at least try and give them a base understanding of what a healthy relationship should be.

The next day, it was like nothing untoward had happened. I questioned myself again and again over whether I'd overreacted, whether it was OK for a man—who I had believed respected me—to leave hand prints on my body from where he'd tried force my legs open. The experience was one of many shitty incidents that punctuated my youth that I, like so many of my female friends in similar circumstances, brushed off at the time as just "something that happens." This kind of sexual assault—that often happens within otherwise decent relationships—is thought by many to be a murky area. It's the kind of thing I know some of my male friends would pull the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ face at, and say, "It's not that bad."

Only, it is that bad. With hindsight, I know these experiences were profoundly wrong. But with no foundations built before and throughout the shit-storm of puberty, it's unrealistic to expect both boys and girls to be able navigate the nuances of sexual situations once they're young adults. Without formative, measured intervention, there may come a time in someone's life when there's too many forces at play to get the message through—whether that's alcohol and drug use, low self-esteem, or confusion over your sexuality.

The push-back on implementing compulsory PSHE also begs the question, where else should we learn about this stuff, if not school? The place where you'll spend five days a week fumbling through textbooks about algebra and World War II, but won't learn a fucking thing about how to handle life-engulfing mood swings, how to make proper sense of your body as it transitions into one ready for sex, and, ultimately, how to enjoy sex—particularly as a woman.

The poverty around understanding consent today lies in what we learn, or don't learn, from those around us. It doesn't lie in the invention of Snapchat nudes. Every generation will inevitably come up against new and imaginative ways to be fucked up about sex. But we can at least try and give them a base understanding of what a healthy relationship should be. Without that we're sending young adults into a world that can be, at best, horribly confusing, and, at worst, detrimental to their personal safety.

Follow Joanna on Twitter.

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