[tweet text="#selfie4siauw cc: @felixsiauw ustad, lipstick + kutek akuh sama nih warnanya! Gemez gak? pic.twitter.com/i6q0QfdkAW" byline="— Ega. (@mpokgaga)" user_id="mpokgaga" tweet_id="558559806005321728" tweet_visual_time="January 23, 2015"]

A woman taking a #selfie4siauw

Last Sunday Indonesian author and Islamic cleric Felix Siauw tweeted a 17-point manifesto decrying selfies as a sin—especially for women. According to Siauw, taking a photo of oneself is prideful, ostentatious, and arrogant. Usually such a bitter, personal screed wouldn't count for much, but because Siauw is a respected young cleric with a massive Twitter following, his rant has severely pissed off many in Indonesia, a selfie-obsessed country whose Muslim population makes up roughly 88 percent of its citizens.

"[Three.] If we take a selfie, sift through and choose our best pose, and then we're awed and impressed by ourselves—worryingly, that's called PRIDE," wrote Siauw, as translated by Coconuts Jakarta, which reposted the cleric's most widely discussed Tweets last Tuesday.

"[Four.] If we take a selfie and upload it on social media, desperately hoping for view, likes, comments or whatever—we've fallen into the OSTENTATIOUS trap [sic]."

"[Five.] If we take a selfie and we feel cooler and better than others—we've fallen into the worst sin of all, ARROGANCE."

"[Nine.] These days many Muslim women are taking selfies without shame. There are usually nine frames in one photo with facial poses that are just—my goodness—where's the purity in women?"

Siauw isn't the first Islamic religious leader to hold forth on selfies. Scholars and average believers have debated how to interpret the trend in light of Islamic theology for some time now.

As early as 2013, one major Indonesian seminary weighed in, saying that all photography was unlawful under Islam, which generally opposes personal pride. But the issue really blew up in the fall of 2014 when Saudi Arabia eased its ban on bringing smart phones into the holy pilgrimage sites of Mecca, leading to a spate of selfies by pilgrims in front of holy sites like the Ka'aba, and earning the ire of countless clerics who saw this as a boastful, touristy, and selfish perversion of what they deemed a serious, contemplative, and selfless rite.

Through all this hubbub, most Islamic scholars seem to have converged on the opinion that selfies are fine, so long as they are taken sparingly as a memento rather than a brag.

"If photographs are only for personal memory ... then no problem," an anonymous Saudi professor of Islamic law told AFP during the Hajj selfie debate. "But if they are for the purpose of showing off, then they are prohibited."

"When 'selfie' becomes a habit, where one wants to selfie anywhere and anytime," Malaysian cleric Dr. Muhammad Lukman Ibrahim told the local Bernama in 2014, "then this is an act that does not benefit one in anyway and thus strongly opposed in Islam [sic]."

Siauw seems to be of the opinion that taking selfies is an inherently prideful, boastful, and outwardly focused act—that there can be no other, ethical intention. That apparently puts him in a more conservative and reactionary headspace than even some conservative Saudi clerics.

In response to Siauw's tweets, Indonesians have started a selfie-taking campaign across the nation's broad and active social media platforms, inspiring (probably to the cleric's chagrin) a host of first-time selfies out of spite. For days, the hashtag #selfie4siauw trended in Jakarta. Activists have also crawled out of the woodwork to accuse Siauw of hypocrisy, saying he recently judged a selfie contest—an allegation Siauw vehemently denies, saying he was instead giving a lecture on self-introspection. He's provided little other comment on his initial tweets or the disproportionately massive campaign that's risen up against them.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Photos courtesy of K. Gates/the Wave

New Orleans rapper K. Gates (born Kwame Gates) hustled for years before getting his first taste of mainstream success in 2009 with the song "Black and Gold (Who Dat)," the unofficial theme song of the Saints football franchise as they headed to their first and only Super Bowl win.

During that same year, fledgling Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates (born Kevin Gilyard) was on his way back to prison—coincidentally around the same that Baton Rouge's favorite son Lil Boosie (who rhymed with Kevin Gates on the 2008 single "Get in the Way") was also incarcerated on drug charges. Following his release from jail in 2011, Kevin Gates signed to Young Money, and then with Atlantic Records in 2013.

Kevin Gates has since gone on to far more national acclaim than K. Gates. He has also become notorious on the internet for owning up to some kinky sexual preferences. Most recently, when he found out the woman he was dating was a cousin of his, he unapologetically announced that he would continue fucking her.

All of this Kevin Gates drama has made New Orleans's original K. Gates very tough to google. I got in touch with him—now going by the equally ungoogleable stage name the Wave—to talk about how the rise of pervy Kevin Gates has affected his own life and career. (Unfortunately, neither Kevin Gates or his management replied to my interview requests.)

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VICE: Is it safe to say that being mistaken for Kevin Gates has caused you some problems?
K. Gates: Correct. That's why I actually had to change my name to the Wave. But Kevin Gates is actually inspired by me. He's named after me—he's a fan of mine and he took the name. His name is Kevin Gilyard, and over the years he's always been in contact with me. I just recently found out "Gates" wasn't his government name.

How do you know he took your name?
Well, he used to always tap me and quote my lyrics and whatnot. I don't listen to his music, but when we see each other he'll rap my lyrics to me. When we first met, he asked if we were related—because he was trying to see if we were related, I was assuming "Gates" was his government name. When I found out it wasn't, years later, it's like, Why would you even ask that, knowing it's a name you took? It was crazy. He's a weird guy.

When did you change your name to the Wave?
Some time in 2014, around the time of his first scandal, when he came out as a proud ass eater. People first started knowing him in the mainstream when he admitted to eating booty, and saying that was gangsta, and that real men eat booty, and all that.

When he was recently called out about dating his cousin his response was just, "Well, the pussy's good. Why stop?"
He's definitely a character. He will do whatever. The morality line doesn't exist. When he came out and said, "I eat ass" I was just like, "golly."

"Golly, I gotta change my name"?
Right. But really, I just didn't want the confusion, not with the accolades or the negativity. I would get run up on in the street, people thinking that his song is my song, or that his negative publicity was attributed to me. I didn't want the positive attributions nor the negative ones. I wanted all the accolades that came with my talents, and my gifts, with the message I am trying to put across.

Even though I built the name of Gates off my area, I just had to separate myself from that and rebrand myself, because he branded himself with that name and got a major label deal. That's really why I did it—not because of the ass eating or any of that. I changed the name because he signed a major deal with Atlantic, and in my aspirations to sign a major label deal, I thought the record corporations wouldn't attach themselves to two of the same name because it would be brand confusion. It would take too much energy to differentiate when we trying to sell T-shirts and tickets to shows. I didn't want to confuse the consumer.

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I would think after your huge "Black and Gold" song it would be hard for you to let go of that name.
Not at all. I have plenty of names. K Gates is an alias I made up before I started rapping. People know me as the Wave, as Hurricane Gator, as Shake Gates. But right now I am using the Wave as my stage name, and I got co-signed by the original Wave, Max B—I got Max B on my new project stamping me as the Wave. My website is embracethewave.com. I'm on Instagram as IAmTheWave and on Twitter I'm @EmbraceTheWave.

So what are your career plans with your new name and fresh start?
The project I put out last year under the Wave, Million Dollar Day, won album of the year at the New Orleans hip-hop awards. I'm also a filmmaker and I'm about to put out a film called Florida Keys, which is about the street culture of Florida. We got Rick Ross on there, Young Jeezy, Meek Mill, Iceberg—we went through every city in Florida and showed the diversity of the music and the party scenes.

I put out another film called Murda Capital about New Orleans, which is a ghetto classic down here. We released them digitally in the streets, independently, through mom-and-pop shops, and to the bootleggers. Now we're releasing them through iTunes. I'm also about to release a project in 2015 called A Hundred Million Dollar Day, which remixes songs from Million Dollar Day plus with a bunch of new songs.

Did you make any attempts to get Kevin Gates to change his name? Couldn't you sue him or something?
Nah, I ain't about all that. And at the time I thought that was his government name. How you gonna sue someone out their government name? I just thought it was a weird coincidence. And he's from right up the street in Baton Rouge, though he started telling people he was from New Orleans, and he had my neighborhood tatted on his arm like he was from there. Then I started thinking it was a case of identity theft, but I didn't put any energy toward it after that.

I definitely have a sense of humor about it. God planned everything and I trust God. Maybe I wasn't supposed to be K. Gates—that ain't even my name. I'm not tripping. I'm glad I could inspire him to flourish and bring attention to Louisiana. I been around way worse characters than Kevin Gates. He's just entertaining. It's entertainment, it's funny. I heard it and I laughed.

The thing with his cousin might not even be true! He's grasped the concept of entertainment real good with his music, his performances, his side antics to get media attention. I am happy that he's grasped that and he's creating opportunities for New Orleanians. He's employed many New Orleanians. A lot of people on his staff I know personally, and I am glad he's given them the opportunity to see the world and make some money.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Illustrations by Chris Harward.

Like a lot of Asian families coming to the UK in the 1970s, mine opened a newsagent. I've spent a great deal of my life working in the shop, and I like to think it's helped me to develop as a person, insomuch as numerous strangers calling you a cunt for wildly insignificant reasons can aid someone in their personal development.

In any case, here are some of the things I've learned from my time behind the till.

IT'S NICE THAT NOBODY WANTS YOU TO BE DEPORTED
Casual racism can be great, but often white people actively trying not to be racist is even better. Often—usually following a glance over a Daily Express headline proclaiming Muslims to be the root cause for the decline of the Great British Pub, or whatever—this comes in the form of the prefix: "Obviously not people like you."


Variations include:

"These immigrants coming over here and claiming money and housing—they shouldn't allow them! I mean, people like you are different 'cos you work hard, but them..."

And:

"If all immigrants were like you we wouldn't have none of this problems we got here."

(I'm still trying to figure out what that means, too.)

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The author behind the till


PEOPLE STILL LOVE THAT APU ONE-LINER FROM THE SIMPSONS
I began working in the shop during the early 2000s, an era in which literally every British person with a Sky 1 subscription discovered The Simpsons, because it was on all the fucking time. With that discovery came a phrase that haunts Asian kids the Western world over: "Thank you, come again."

I'd hear that sentence on an almost daily basis, from at least one customer who genuinely believed it was hilarious. And when you called them up on their dodgy faux-Indian accent: "Nah, don't worry, mate—it's a joke; it's on The Simpsons! You've never seen The Simpsons?"

The Simpsons is a clever cartoon, and I'd like to believe Apu actually represents a vision of the American dream—a highly educated Indian immigrant managing to build a successful business for himself in the face of yellow oppression and a guy with a rockabilly quiff constantly robbing him at gunpoint.

Instead, the show's most prominent ethnic minority remains—to this day—a thorn in the side of all Asian shopkeepers. Thanks, Matt Groening, for providing the kind of people who buy tickets to Dapper Laughs gigs with an eternal source of terrible banter.

YOU GET CALLED A CUNT BY MORE 12-YEAR-OLDS THAN YOU'D THINK
The first time I was called a cunt at work was when I refused to sell a 13-year-old a packet of cigarettes. It stung on that occasion, of course—nobody enjoys being called a vagina by a child. However, that experience was actually quite a light indoctrination into what was to come.

Catch a kid stealing a packet of Hubba Bubba? "Allow it, you cunt."

When you won't let someone off a $6 magazine because they don't have the cash on them? "Seriously, there's no reason to be such a cunt about it."

I'm still not certain what's so cunty about sticking to a method of commerce that's existed since ancient Mesopotamia. Regardless, I've heard the word so often from so many schoolchildren that it's now almost kind of odd if a whole week goes by without a prepubescent kid in a Nike backpack getting overly sweary for little-to-no reason at all.

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WARM CHANGE IS THE WORST
A fact anyone in retail knows to be true: warm coins, heated via the sweaty palms of a customer, are the low point of any day. More so when said customer decides they want to pay for their Snickers bar by dumping a load of hot, moist copper on the till.

It always feels weirdly intimate, a bit like a complete stranger has just handed you some of their freshly excreted kidney stones to sift through.

BIG BRANDS HAVE TURNED CORNER SHOPS INTO TRAP HOUSES
Newsagents tend to make profits on everyday basics and confectionaries. So with the relentless spawning of big name stores selling milk and eggs and bread and all that basic sustenance on the cheap, most independent shops have just become repositories of legal vices—notably cigarettes, alcohol, and lottery tickets.

In fact, I'm willing to bet that the majority of London's corner shops find themselves predominantly selling fags and scratch cards, in the hope that somebody might impulse-buy a Lucozade in the process. So when you consider that a decent portion of your customers come knocking for either tobacco, sugar, taurine, or dopamine, it becomes very clear that your situation is less Open All Hours and more just a really tame version of Top Boy.


SOMEBODY WILL BE OUTRAGED BY TITS EVERY SINGLE MORNING
The best thing about your early morning customers—by which I mean those who regularly show up at 5.30 AM, despite the fact we don't open until 7 AM—is that they're always the first to have insightful comments about the day's news.

Only, from my experience, those comments are usually about boobs, and how they're outraged by them.

"Can that woman not put her bangers away for just one day?" a customer said last week, in reaction to a Celebrity Big Brother headline. "I don't want to be looking at those balloons while I eat my breakfast," said another, who potentially hadn't grasped the concept of turning a page.

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NEVER LET CUSTOMERS USE YOUR TOILETS

The golden rule for anyone working in a shop. In the course of the business's lifetime, we've seen customers miss the toilet bowl by a considerable distance, cause actually quite serious flooding and—on one occasion—actually manage to shit up the wall.

How do you do that accidentally? I'm assuming it wasn't deliberate because, as I mentioned, the most aggro we tend to get is from children who've recently learned how to swear. So my question remains: how does one sit down to take a shit, before that shit ends up smeared down a vertical wall?

Mind you, none of that was as bad as what my friend Raj had to go through when a delivery guy made a quick trip to the bathroom and left a used condom behind.

Why exactly he used a condom by himself remains a mystery, and one I'm glad I never had to investigate.

Follow Hussein on Twitter.

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Oldham's Athleticos supporters group react to the petition to stop the Ched Evans signing

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

The post-industrial town of Oldham, on the outskirts of Manchester, isn't particularly used to being the focus of national outrage. But that's exactly what happened earlier this year, when the local football team, Oldham Athletic, underwent talks to sign former pro footballer and convicted rapistChed Evans.

Before long, a huge national debate was smothering a club with a long and eventful history and a small but passionate fan base. The fact that Oldham had even deigned to enter into discussions with Evans drew condemnation from many, and a number of the club's sponsors threatened to pull their funding. A petition with over 70,000 signatures called for the club to abandon the deal, and, following reported death threats made to staff and their families, that's what Oldham did.

Where does that leave the Latics and their fans now? While the Evans furor caused much debate among non-supporters, many fans felt it was the club's business and that the petition was the work of meddling outsiders.

Whatever their opinions, the fans are dedicated and regularly battle through tough weather to support the team, despite the club's struggles both on and off the pitch. Here are some photos of them.

Follow David Shaw on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='gay-oil-field-workers-north-dakota-body-image-1422538453.jpg' id='22441']^{A conversation on Grindr in Williston, ND}

My one and only liaison in the oil fields of western North Dakota was with a 23-year-old truck driver. Like most such encounters in the oil patch, ours originated on Grindr, the mobile hookup app for gay, bisexual, and curious men. He sent me a photo, and we traded some biographical details. A few hours later, he was in my room at the Williston Super 8.

After our rendezvous, as the November night air dipped below ten degrees, we took shelter in his car to smoke cigarettes. I was only going to be in the state for 48 more hours, but we made tentative plans to go shooting the next day. I was less interested in exercising my Second Amendment rights for the first time than in extending our easy fling. He just needed to see whether he could get off work that day—no small task for someone accustomed to 16-hour shifts, six days a week.

I'll never really know whether he was able to get time off or not, but when he told me he had to work, it seemed plausible enough. This is a sacrifice made by nearly all those who have flocked to find jobs in North Dakota's booming Bakken shale formation. When you're working in the fast-paced, physically exhausting oil economy, there's little time for romance.

"You make money up here and you leave," another gay worker, a 23-year-old who works for a company that rents and sells motors to drill wells, told me. "That kind of puts a damper on relationships."

And it leaves little time for gay men to build a community. Attitudes are shifting, but the state's socially conservative heritage still looms large. Same-sex relationships are often intensely private—if not wholly covert—affairs, and LGBT-friendly spaces remain exasperatingly limited. Online platforms like Grindr provide a means for some gay workers in the area to connect with one another. But the sorts of fleeting and—for the most part—one-on-one interactions they enable don't do much to break the overall sense of solitude.

Homophobia never lingers far from the surface. "I was at a bar the other night, when this guy started calling me a 'fucking queer,'" Jon Kelly, a burly 29-year-old real estate developer who moved to Williston four years ago, told me. "I've been out for ten years, and nobody's ever said that to me."

Kelly tried to defuse the situation. But when the drunken taunting wouldn't stop, he was left with no other option: "I punched him in the face, knocked him down to the ground," Kelly told me. "And I told him, 'You just got your ass beat by a fucking queer.'"

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A view of Lignite from the road

At Outlaws' Bar & Grill, a steakhouse in Williston, I met Jim, a 52-year-old twice-divorced Wisconsin native with two sons. Jim used to run his own advertising business, but it fell apart in the 2008 recession. After struggling to pay off his debt, he decided to move to North Dakota to take a job in what's euphemistically called saltwater disposal, the process of pumping water-like fracking waste deep underground.

"I'm pretty much in the closet," Jim told me. "I just don't want to have to deal with all that comes with it—you know, with all the questions. I think, for me, it's all about meeting Mr. Right. If I met Mr. Right, then I'd be more open."

The closet is still a major institution in the Bakken. Over the course of a week in North Dakota, I spoke to more than a dozen workers in a similar situation. Some are in the closet for fear of losing their jobs. Others figure the risk of creating friction at the workplace isn't worth their peace of mind.

Like the vast majority of employers in the state, most companies in the oil patch do not provide discrimination protections for gay and trans workers. That means, if you're a roughneck who's out on the job—or a truck driver, or a welder, or a pipe fitter—your boss can probably fire you for being gay, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Protections exist at some of the bigger international companies that have set up shop—Halliburton and the Norwegian oil giant Statoil, for instance. But this often means little in practical terms, since the industry relies so heavily on subcontracted labor. "You might be working for Statoil, but you're actually an employee of another company, so those protections may not be there through your employer," said Joshua Boschee, a state legislator who's working to pass a ban on employment and housing discrimination against LGBT people.

During the day, Jim often cruises Grindr, looking for other "masculine" types. There's no shortage of them: the guys who sport beards and tattoos—some heavy-set, some more fit—and self-identify with the app's "rugged" tribe or insist on "masc only." Other than scouring social apps—and if you can't bear the small talk, there's always Craigslist—there aren't a whole lot of ways for Jim to meet Mr. Right.

There are no gay bars in North Dakota. From the oil fields, the nearest one is seven hours away, in Winnipeg. The state's three biggest cities, Bismarck, Grand Forks, and Fargo, offer the occasional drag show, but they, too, are hours away from the Bakken.

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The Starlite Club, one of the region's few LGBT-friendly bars

Minot, a growing city of 46,000 on the eastern edge of the patch, is the closest there is to a gay mecca in these parts. A few years ago, James Lowe, a 36-year-old Minot native, and his friend James Falcon helped organize a series of quarterly LGBT dances and weekly meet-ups, but internal disagreements brought them to a halt. Last year, the group Pride Minot held weekly viewing parties for the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race, and it plans to do the same for the show's upcoming season.Today, there are a couple of Minot bars that are known for attracting a sizable gay male clientele—a mix of locals, airmen, and oil hands willing to make the trek.

Compared with Williston, the Magic City—as Minot is known—has a cosmopolitan feel. At the Starlite Club, a karaoke bar in a strip mall next to the local airport, I hung out with several gay men, a bi woman, and a self-described "fag hag." An otherwise straight crowd, decked out in the state's familiar modern cowboy aesthetic, grooved to country-rock anthems from Kellie Pickler, Alabama, and the Zac Brown Band. When the bar closed, at one, I was introduced to Essy Parizek, an owner of Starlite who doubles as its karaoke emcee.

"We don't care," Parizek told me when I asked what made her spot one of the few LGBT beacons of the Dakotas. "We just want everyone to have fun—that's what it's all about."

There is something of a growing community in Williston at the center of the oil industry as well. Jon Kelly throws occasional house parties for his queer friends. The gatherings are small, but Kelly sees them as evidence of broader progress.

"There are the beginnings of a scene here," Kelly said. "Over the last few years, more and more people are willing to be open about it."

^{[body_image width='1000' height='1501' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='gay-oil-field-workers-north-dakota-body-image-1422539660.jpg' id='22459']Jason Marshall and Cody in Lignite, North Dakota. Jason and Cody are one of the area's few openly gay couples.}

Jason Marshall, a 36-year-old roustabout, or oil-rig handyman, recently accepted an offer to operate a natural-gas-processing plant in Lignite, a sleepy town of 150 near the Canadian border. In a rare move for the area, his new employer offers benefits to him and his partner, Cody, who is considering adopting a more androgynous gender identity. Cody said he's not too worried about the reception in his new town. "It's just better not to mention that stuff," he said.

Countless others—poor, alone, and horny—struggle to find comfort in the Bakken. "I just really don't know what to think of these people," said a gay 22-year old who recently moved to Williston from Las Vegas. "It's a weird city, man. If there was no money here, I wouldn't live here."

I was inside the dermatologist's office, resting my chin on my hand, trying to look as casual as possible while being examined. My wristwatch was equipped with a hidden camera, which I hoped would capture a "gotcha" moment. The men who had hired me actually thought the hidden camera footage might make it onto 60 Minutes as part of a grand expose on how "Big Pharma" was trying to squash the poor, misunderstood indoor tanning industry.

I felt dirty as I sat with my shirt off on an examination table, pointing at moles on my body and asking the doctor if she thought they were cancerous. I hoped she would say they weren't but would report them as such, and then I could capture this on my ill-functioning hidden camera watch. Gotcha! The men who had hired me would be very pleased.

But that's not what happened. "If you want to get things removed for cosmetic reasons, I don't know if your insurance will balk at that," the dermatologist told me. "I've had patients come in and remove seven moles at once, and they were all for cosmetic reasons, and the insurance said we're not paying for any of that and she got a huge bill."

Oh. I was sent on my way with a gift bag of sample skin moisturizers and sunscreen while my mind tried to spin how some sort of point was just made.

This happened in 2010, when I was a hired shill for the tanning industry. The company that hired me represented the largest network of indoor tanning salons in America. Their job was to mobilize tanning salon employees against industry critics, and they had set up a nonprofit that promoted the merits of vitamin D, to spin the health risks of indoor tanning. My job was to go undercover into dermatologists' offices and try and show that these medical professions were only after profit in scaring the general public about the dangers of tanning.

I was broke and needed any gig possible. So I put on the hidden camera watch.

The tanning industry was dealing with some seriously bad PR, since excessive tanning causes, you know, cancer. To survive as an industry, they needed to go into serious PR mode and spin the story to make themselves look good, the same way old-timey cigarette ads claimed that doctors thought smoking was healthy.

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In their minds, Big Pharma was trying to shut down their industry. The tanning guys called my undercover plight a "sting operation." I called it "completely selling out all my integrity for a paycheck."

Last year, a study reviewed the scientific evidence against tanning beds and suggested that the devices account for as many as 400,000 cases of skin cancer each year in the US, including 6,000 cases of melanoma. The problem, researchers say, is that those who use tanning beds use them a lot. That's likely due to the relatively recent phenomenon of tans being sexy. Until the 1920s, being pale was the definition of beauty; it meant you weren't out toiling in the sun like some kind of common worker. Now making people less pale is a $5 billion industry.

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A recent New York Times article highlighted how drastically times have changed since 2010, when I was sneaking around with the hidden camera watch. Last year, the Surgeon General called on Americans to reduce exposure to tanning beds to prevent skin cancer. The FDA invoked its most serious risk warning, lifting tanning beds to the category of potentially harmful medical devices, and 41 states set restrictions on tanning salon use by minors thanks to internet sensation "Tan Mom," who horrified viewers when she took her five-year-old daughter to tanning sessions. Tanning is on the verge of falling out of fashion.

But back in 2010, the tanning industry was still desperately trying to stay in vogue despite the World Health Organization's classification of tanning beds as "carcinogenic to humans." Tanning-based businesses were scrambling to discredit critics—mainly dermatologists and the American Cancer Society—by calling them the "Sun Scare" industry.

Their conspiracy theory went something like this: Dermatologists benefited by frightening people into their offices, and the American Cancer Society benefited through donations. These groups, it was claimed, were possibly killing more people than tobacco by causing a deadly epidemic of vitamin D deficiency—and doctors were dangerously trying to cut off our access to it. The tanning industry implemented Big Tobacco–style marketing tactics to make medical professions look like the evil villains. The key, like all conspiracy theories, was to find isolated incidents, connect the dots, and create a broad generalization to conveniently fit their argument. People of the sun unite!

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Photo by Flickr user Miran Rijavec

Of course, I didn't believe any of this bullshit. But I needed money. So I signed on and was provided a briefing sheet entitled "Undercover Sting" that posed numerous questions in the same way Creationists pose questions when confronted about the world being more than 2,000 years old. The US has 4.5 percent of the world's population, yet if you compare the American Cancer Society's melanoma estimates to those of the World Health Organization, we have 47 percent of the world's melanoma cases. How can you explain this?

I was supposed to lean on a handful of cases where dermatologists have been convicted of fraud for misdiagnosing patients with skin cancer for the purpose of collecting insurance dollars. What the tanning guys wanted me to do was make it appear like this was an industry norm, and therefore the reason for increasing incidences of American melanoma. I had to show that harmless moles were being removed, insurance companies were paying the doctors, and false skin cancer information was being added to the melanoma statistics.

It turned out that every dermatologist I encountered was pretty goddamn ethical.

"Start by finding several moles that are obviously not skin cancer and that you would want removed for strictly cosmetic reasons," the tanning guys suggested. "You want to make it clear that you know this isn't skin cancer and you want the doctor to confirm that it isn't as well. We want to prove that this is blatant fraud by removing what is known by all parties to be a benign mole and billing the insurance company as a skin cancer."

After being examined, I was supposed to try and get the doctor to turn the procedure into my insurance as a "pre-cancerous lesion" or some form of skin cancer. This would prove that derms were lying for money and part of a rogue network responsible for fraudulently boosting the US's melanoma numbers. Gotcha Big Pharma!

So I made appointments at several dermatologist offices and loosely followed the script: "Hi Dr. X. I have this mole that I wanted to have checked out. I've been reading a lot about melanoma recently, and I'd really like to get this removed."

But you know what? It turned out that every dermatologist I encountered was pretty goddamn ethical. "I'm sorry, but your insurance doesn't cover it," the first doctor told me. "You could go to some derm offices that would lie and say that it's irritated. I can't do that. It's something I don't want to do—start lying on charts. They might do that for you. But I just like to do things how they are done."

"Has anyone else in your family been diagnosed with skin cancer?" another dermatologist asked during my examination.

"Yes, my dad," I said, concerned. He recently had skin cancer surgery, putting me on edge since familial melanoma is a genetic condition. (Or does Big Pharma just want us to believe it is?)

Most dermatologists said things like, "Just be responsible. We do need sun to produce vitamin D. Be responsible. If you know you're going to go to the beach for two hours, then use sunblock. Just be reasonable."

One particular dermatologist pointed out veins on my nose that were a direct result of damage from excessive sun exposure without sunscreen. This actually got me into applying more sunscreen in my daily life. Gotcha Big Pharma!

I ended up writing two undercover stories for the tanning industry. They were both accurate representations of what happened during my encounters with dermatologists, but they were spun to suit the tanning industry narrative. It was an ethical dilemma—if people believed this misinformation I was helping to spread, it's possible their health and safety could be on the line—but I was broke, so I did it anyway.

When my initial story ran on the Huffington Post, it got picked up by almost every tanning site on the web—sites like MegaTan, Get Brown, and Tan World, who displayed titles like: Undercover Dermatology Sting Exposes Sun-Scare Tactics. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post article was raked with comments from legitimate dermatologists that began with words like "crackpot," "irresponsible," and "crazy."

If people believed this misinformation I was helping to spread, it's possible their health and safety could be on the line—but I was broke, so I did it anyway.

In the end, the indoor tanning guys wanted me to write one last article. What would it be this time—more pestering of dermatologists? Would I go to a sunscreen factory and catch them taking kickbacks from Big Pharma in large bags with dollar signs on them?

With low expectations, I jumped on a call with the tanning guys. It was worse than I imagined: They wanted me to call the mother of a young woman who died from melanoma brought on by excessive indoor tanning. I was supposed to pose as a reporter wanting to do a story on her daughter's life—and get her mom to admit that her deceased daughter's skin cancer condition started long before she became addicted to indoor tanning. Gotcha!

Her mother, an outspoken advocate against the tanning industry, wrote this on her a website:

My precious baby girl was my best friend, my hero, and the light of my life. I will do everything I can to continue her fight against melanoma because I know that is what she would have wanted.

I miss you, SweetiePea, and love you with all my heart.

"So what do you think?" they asked.

I felt like vomiting. Or crying. They wanted me to use tabloid tactics to make a grieving mother disgrace the memory of her beloved dead daughter for the sole purpose of selling more tanning beds.

I never spoke to the tanning guys ever again. Still, people will continue to tan, browning their bodies like rotisserie chicken, much like people continue to smoke cigarettes even though everyone knows they cause cancer. Gotcha?

Follow Harmon Leon on Twitter.

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Pandora Blake being spanked. All photos courtesy of Pandora Blake

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You may already know about the new laws for British Video on Demand (VoD) porn. The ones that forbid squirting vaginas but allow ejaculating dicks. You might have seen news of the face-sitting protest outside Westminster in response to these laws, where people in riding gear were swamped by half of the UK press. Now, brace yourself for sponsored protest spanking.

Porn producer and performer Pandora Blake and her friend, fellow producer Nimue Allen, are about to close their Indiegogo campaign in which they promise, "For every £10 [$15] raised, we will take one HARD cane stroke."

Blake will be baring her butt to protest against the UK's new porn law, under which her livelihood—and that of many other independent UK producers—is threatened. Blake specializes in spanking porn, and her website, Dreams of Spanking (NSFW, obv), is a slap-filled Shangri-La for those who like their corporal punishment not only hard and hurty, but also feminist, ethical, and gender egalitarian.

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Blake and Nimue's fundraiser has already smashed its targets; at present, the pair have raised more than $3,000 for Backlash UK, an organization which provides legal resources to defend freedom of sexual expression. A self-imposed 50-stroke limit means that the filmed caning will now be shared among the asses of other willing performers, including Rosie Bottomley and Ariel Anderssen.

Technically, these women will be breaking the law. Under the new ATVOD (the Authority for regulating Television On Demand) ruling, a random list of acts are now off-limits. Among them are face-sitting if the primary purpose is breath play, most circumstances of female ejaculation, bondage which doesn't leave a limb or mouth unbound, and—importantly for Blake—spanking or caning which leaves marks more than "trifling and transient."

The fundraising caning, says Blake, will absolutely go beyond the transient and trifling. I caught up with her to ask her about spanking, the law, and why work like hers is important.

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VICE: Are you expecting to be put out of business by the new porn law?
Pandora Blake: Well, I got a notification yesterday saying that Pete Johnson, [the chief executive] of ATVOD, has joined my site. I've got data tracking installed so I could see what scenes they were looking at. They picked two videos which didn't have behind-the-scenes footage, which is where I usually show enthusiastic consent by the performers. I thought, Shit, that's bad luck! Then they looked at two nude photo-sets, which weren't even kinky, and haven't logged in since then.

So what will their next move be?
If they decide I'm producing a VoD site and what I'm doing doesn't comply with the regulations, they'll send me a letter saying, "You have not registered with us, which means you are operating illegally." Then, if I say, "No, because as soon as I register with you, you have a right to control what I publish," I'll have to challenge their contention that I'm operating a VoD service and appeal to Ofcom. I'll get in touch with the lawyers at Backlash and just do whatever they tell me!

I'm definitely a target.

What pisses you off most about the new law?
It's sexist and it marginalizes already marginalized sexualities. ATVOD have said it's not their fault; that they just copied and pasted the BBFC regulations, but this is really disingenuous—to apply those decades-old regulations to a completely new medium.

The disproportionate emphasis on acts of female orgasm and sexual dominance—while allowing equivalent male acts involving male ejaculation and deep-throating—sends a damaging message that female sexual pleasure is considered more "disgusting" or "unnatural" than male sexual pleasure.

Your business does well because Brits, more than any other nation, get off to a bit of spanking. Why do you think this is?
I think a predilection to BDSM—humiliation pain, power play—is fairly universal. There are people in every society who are inclined to eroticize feelings of fear, embarrassment, pain sensations, or domination and submission. But what activities you find sexy depends on what you're exposed to in your formative years, so it's very cultural.

Spanking is in our recent cultural heritage. I grew up reading Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, and Dickens, and they're full of references to getting a hard thrashing with a belt. I was fascinated; it just absolutely ticked all my boxes.

At what point did it become a sexual fascination?
I don't know if that's a clear line you can draw. It always turned me on. I don't know if I was getting wet when I was six years old, because my body wasn't at that stage of development—but it was a secret, hot, shivery, private, guilty kind of feeling. I knew I could never tell anyone about it because I thought I was the only one on the planet.

Female sexual submission to male dominance is the more common trope. Does this need some un-picking?
It's so hard to get clean data on this, but look at the sex industry: There are far more women working as professional dominants than professional submissives. It's the same in porn. Femdom is a huge industry.

But because we live in a patriarchy, images of female submission are more socially approved. If you look at mainstream depictions of kink, like 50 Shades, they are mostly male dom, female sub. It's much rarer to find a representation of female domination, unless it's played for laughs.

When I was 20 I would have said I was a submissive. I'd only seen depictions of kink that glamorized female submission. When I did see female domination, the woman was like a goddess in high heels and corsets, really uncomfortable clothes. She's got this ice queen persona and the man she's playing with is depicted as unattractive and pathetic.

When I got older I realized those media representations are just manifestations of the patriarchal society we live in. I realized you can be a female dominant in your pajamas, and you can be nurturing and affectionate and fun and playful and silly, and you don't have to maintain this weird persona. And male subs can be gorgeous!

That's why the porn I make is gender egalitarian. I want to show an affirming, sexy image of masculine submission for the female gaze to counteract this imbalance we've got in media representation of what kind of kink is sexy.

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Pandora giving David Weston a spanking

You've said that it's naïve to think that not wanting to sleep with anyone who is, say, fat or trans or genderqueer, is "just personal taste." But people claim that all the time.
That's why I think diversity of representation in porn is so important; to give people more options of what could be sexy and to open their minds to things they haven't seen before. I've got chubby models, hairy bears, big girls, and non-binary people on my site, and lots of my mostly–straight male audience has written to me and said, "I didn't know I was going to find that sexy, but I did!" You can totally broaden people's horizons and sexualities.

Tell me about what you describe as the "mindfuck" of BDSM.
There's an incredible intimacy in making yourself vulnerable. You're going on a secret adventure together—like you're running away in the middle of the night and not telling anyone where you're going. You're getting into trouble and climbing over fences, and you might get caught, but it's exciting.

It's like if one of you is holding a rope and the other one is climbing up a tower, then the person holding the rope is responsible for the safety of the other person; you're playing different roles but you're both on the same adventure.

The new law implies that BDSM porn doesn't have its shit together when it comes to consent. This clearly isn't the case, but what are your wider thoughts on consent?
Consent is important not just for BDSM play, but with all sex and, in fact, with all physical interaction. Whether it's being tickled by your dad when you're nine when you're actually uncomfortable about it, or messing around in the pool with your male friends and they keep splashing you when you've said to stop.

We need a language for talking about how we respect each other's personal boundaries and how we police our own boundaries. For all interactions, not just sex. This is something we fail at across the board, and a failure to have conversations about consent in sex is a symptom.

Go here to sponsor Blake here (perks include free website subscription, personalized spanking fiction, and a copy of her latest film).

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

Last week my mom told me that she had, in her words, "gone viral."

"I was on the internet," she lamented, as though she'd just found out her number had been scrawled in a truck stop bathroom stall. "They were talking about me on Facebook."

"Who's 'they'?" I asked, genuinely concerned. My mom does not have Facebook.

"Three different people. They told me at work." She was whispering, paranoid. "They were saying I was a good teacher or something." And there it was: The undeniable reality I had been avoiding for years was now inescapable. My mom had lost all grasp of contemporary communication. It was time to get her an iPhone.

I'm not sure why I expected her to be excited. It took me two years to get her to respond to "those envelope things" (text messages), which she claimed to have "hung up on" because she "thought they were ads." Still, it was uncalled for when she responded to the Verizon guy's mention of the App Store by squawking, "I don't have time for this!" Before I could apologize for her, said Verizon guy, apparently well versed in such nonsense, saw his in. "You should take our iPhone class," he said.

"I can't. I'm still learning how to use my new car, and—"

"She would love to." I took a schedule, and told my mom she better behave if she wanted to go to Souplantation after this.

In the days leading up to my mom's first (and, hopefully only) day of iPhone school, I was as nervous as I assumed she was. I hoped the teacher would be nice. My nerves turned to fear, however, when the big day was approaching and she still hadn't returned any of my calls or texts. Did she even remember she had an iPhone? Was she OK? Was this what she'd meant on those countless midnights when I'd slipped quietly in through the back door after having ignored her pages to find her pacing frantically in her nightgown, assuring me that someday I'd know how she felt?

The fact that I didn't know whether she was going to iPhone school was exactly why I needed to know that she was going to iPhone school, and so, after three days of radio silence from her, I resorted to the only sensible action: waking up at 6 AM on a Sunday to drive 45 miles to my hometown so that I could kidnap the woman who made me and ensure that she took advantage of the education being offered to her at the Verizon store across from the Walmart.

"What are you doing here?! I'm not going!" She had apparently forgetten the six years when those same sentences, screamed by me and occasionally accompanied by thrown shoes, had left her unconvinced that I should not have to go to school.

"Get dressed. You're going to be late."

"I don't want to go to that stupid class."

"I'll be in the car. Don't make me honk."

Jesus. Did she think I wanted to go to to that stupid class? Daughtering is a thankless profession. Eventually, though, she got in the car.

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My mom, en route to her first day of iPhone school

The first surprising thing about the class was that it was actually happening. There were three rows of mostly filled chairs. Even though it was only 8 AM, "Great Balls of Fire" blared over Bluetooth speakers, free coffee was served in styrofoam cups, and a fresh box of donuts had been laid out. They had perfected their old people bait.

Karla, one of the teachers, greeted us at our seats. She eyed me suspiciously. "Two of you?"

"Oh, oh, no. Just her. I'm just here with her."

Immediately after saying this, I realized that my mother was a solid 20 years younger than everyone else in the class, and the only one who had arrived with an aide-slash-kidnapper.

After commencing class with a playful, "All right kids," Karla and her partner Joanna tackled the first item on the agenda: the control screen. They stressed the importance of making sure the "Do not disturb" button wasn't pressed, and explained that this was likely the culprit when "Your family has been trying to get a hold of you for three days and you had no idea." I chuckled knowingly and half expected an "amen" to ring out from the students before remembering that I was a stranger in a strange land.

I was disappointed, when we moved onto texting, to find that my mom's eyes had already glazed over. "Pay attention. This is important," I hissed. After a few misguided attempts to properly hold the message icon long enough, however, she was able to successfully send her first picture message: a photo of me, sans makeup, with her finger partially covering the lens. She's capable of so much when she applies herself.

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Up next was a 15-minute lesson on using AirDrop, which was where the class went off the rails. Karla and Joanna droned on about sending electronic business cards via The Cloud, without once explaining what The Cloud was. Despite the fact that their students were responding to questions with statements like, "It just left my phone for no reason," they soldiered on with their predetermined lesson plan.

"I stopped paying attention," my mom confided, unnecessarily. I should have told her and the flustered elderly that all of this was like Algebra 2—you never actually use it in real life. But Karla and Joanna had already moved onto Bluetooth, and every old person was left behind.

When asked if they knew what Bluetooth was, one student raised his hand and volunteered, cryptically, "Someone's controlling it." This seemed to be a clear indicator that Bluetooth should have been saved for the intermediate class, but Karla and Joanna were bound to the Verizon store's educational standards, and plowed full speed ahead.

What came next was a litany of products that these people didn't know better than to know that they didn't need: headsets, remote security cameras, the "Great Balls of Fire" speakers—all available at a special "in class" discount. I could not believe that my hard-earned Verizon bill dollars were paying for this exploitative claptrap.

Class was finally over, and, as my mom meandered back out into the real world, it seemed from the way that she stared, puzzled, her home screen, that she at least knew enough to know what she didn't know, and perhaps this is the most you can expect from a public Verizon education. Now I understand why some kids choose to homeschool their parents.

I wanted to get going on my long Sunday run before it got too warm, but I still wasn't satisfied that the class had taught my mom the importance of spending her life perpetually glued to her tiny computer.

So, realizing the importance of making learning fun, we used FaceTime to talk to my niece, who is three, and recently posted a picture of herself on Facebook.

I told my mom that her homework, while I was on my run, was to log in to the Words with Friends account that my brother had created for her. She asked me if I was wearing sunscreen.

I had put on sunscreen—my mom had taught me well. What I hadn't done was remember to properly hydrate. It was also now high noon and the Santa Ana winds siphoned the moisture out of me in 85-degree gusts. It was like taking a leisurely jog through a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. I powered through 11 miles of what I intended to be an 18-mile run, jogging on the side of farm roads as tractors and cars swerved to avoid me and getting just far enough away from town to ensure that there would be no viable water source in sight. I became lightheaded and faint. I checked my phone. It was about to die. I considered that a swampy drainage ditch might be an OK place to take a quick mid-run nap, and then admitted that it was probably time for a mission abort. I used the last minute of my phone's battery life to call my mom and tell her to come get me.

I'm glad she picked up.

Follow Tess Barker on Twitter.

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All images by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"The first time I did it, it was supposed to be a one off—I was 23 and pretty desperate for rent. But I remember coming out of the room and thinking, Why do I not feel bad about it?" says Melina, one of the 13 cast members of the critically acclaimed Sex Workers' Opera—a production scripted by professionals of the sex industry and their supporters.

"We will not be silenced," is the tag line of the cast of women and men who have chosen to put their bodies on sale. They take the stage to share their experiences and shatter the expectations of those who assume that all there is to prostitution is PVC and deprivation. To the sound of everything from baroque arias to hip-hop beats, they speak out against the criminalization of their trade and tell the other side of the sex industry story.

Sitting backstage at London's Arcola Theater, Melina tells me that, after that first experience, she toyed with the idea of becoming an escort. But for a long time the risks outweighed the benefits. She worked as a webcam performer for a few years, but found the job satisfaction simply wasn't the same. Eventually, she took the plunge. "I was so excited about it that I took on three clients in my first day," she says. "By the end of it I was exhausted, but also happy that I had money and felt independent."

"What many people don't understand is that this job empowers me," says Charlotte Rose, 34, who began her career in the sex industry posing as a dominatrix at the age of 17. She is now one of the UK's most successful escorts and won "Sex Worker of the Year" at last year's Sexual Freedom Awards.

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Charlotte Rose

UK legislation doesn't currently recognize that sex for cash can be a free choice. Policies are, instead, geared toward rescuing "sex slaves" as prostitution becomes a synonym for the exploitation of vulnerable women. But for the sex workers I meet, there is nothing more terrifying than the idea of "being rescued."

From tributes to last year's police raids in Soho to re-enactments of the Anti- Pornography Bill that was recently introduced in the UK, the theme of regulation runs through the core of the production, as most members of the cast find themselves living in a legally gray area.

"This Sunday I was in a hotel and a member of staff said he would kick me out if I didn't give him a blow job. I refused, but he felt he could treat me that way because he knew I would never press charges," said Melina. "He knew that, when it comes to the law, sex workers are vulnerable and that we are afraid of going to the police."

The near absence of a legal framework also makes sex workers more vulnerable to financial exploitation. "I have always been a stripper, but within a burlesque context," says Miss Cairo, a 23-year-old drag artist and stripper who, despite her young age, is one of London's top go-go dancers and is regularly flown around the world to perform. "I would like to do it in a strip club, but it's risky. Just yesterday I had to threaten someone with a lawsuit because they were late on a payment. As a stripper [at a strip club] you can't do that."

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Miss Cairo

In its latest edition, the play features an explicit reference to the so-called Swedish model, a legal framework which criminalizes the purchase of sex. In one skit, the cast compares policy makers to naïve fishermen, who tell others to go and fish in safer seas where there are, in fact, no fish.

"It would simply tear apart the industry," says Rose, who, after years of political activism, is now running as an independent candidate for Brighton in the elections. "The only clients that would come to us would be the ones who have no problems with breaking the law, and standards would drop as sex workers compete to secure a decreasing number of clients."

The measure has recently been passed into law in Northern Ireland, with policy makers saying there could be a real push for it in England and Wales following this year's general elections. London MEP Mary Honeyball, who would like to see the Swedish model implemented across Europe, has argued that the measure will drastically cut trafficking and offer further legal framework for sex workers.

Many of the women feel the model is out of touch, though. "All of these laws are passed by politicians who just don't get it," said Miss Cairo. "If you want to make sex workers safer, then come and talk to us. I think our last song 'Listen to Me' sums it up perfectly."

"Listen to me, I am so many things you cannot see / mothers and brothers, sisters, and lovers, listen to me."

Since Sweden became the first country to criminalize the purchase of sex in 1999, the country has gone a long way in curbing trafficking offenses, but it has also failed in bringing sex workers out of the shadows of illegality, leaving many of the women more vulnerable to harassment. What also risks being lost in the midst of this concerted campaign to protect vulnerable women, and what the stars of the Sex Workers' Opera are arguing for, is the freedom to choose—without the fear of consequences or persecution.

Follow Flaminia on Twitter.

The Sex Worker's Opera runs until tomorrow evening at The Arcola Theater in London.

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Golden Dawn supporters protest the arrest of GD leader Nikos Michaloliakos—Athens, September 2013. Photo by Alexandros Katsis

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece.

It's the night of January 25, and in front of Syriza's cramped election kiosk on Klathmonos Square in the center of Athens, an elated crowd is anxiously waiting for the first exit poll results. Soon enough the crowd breaks in delirious celebration: Greece has elected the first ever radical left-wing party in its history. It seems unlikely that anything could bring Greeks down tonight—but somehow everyone manages to also feel extremely distressed.

According to the exit polls, Golden Dawn has come in third. The far-right organization has managed to preserve a solid core of voter support, even with about half of its MPs in facing charges for belonging to a criminal organization.

On Monday morning, the official election results confirmed my fears. To be fair, compared to 2012—when the last general election was held in Greece—Golden Dawn is slightly less popular: Three years ago, 426,025 Greeks voted for Nikos Michaloliakos's fascist organization, while about 388,000 voted for them this time. GD lost one of the 18 seats it previously held in the Greek Parliament.

Why does the specter of neo-Nazism continue to hover over Greek democracy? And what dangers could Golden Dawn's enduring presence in the Greek Parliament—faced both with a volatile political scene and an economic crisis—harbor for the country's future?

George Tsiakalos is a professor of education at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and one of few academics talking openly about Golden Dawn's Nazi ideology and its damaging effects on Greek society. I ask him whether a potential blow to the fascist organization's electoral percentage could be dependent on the success of the newly formed government or whether its failure could possibly lead to a solidification of the party's support.

"The truth is that Golden Dawn is very consciously Nazi: It is guided by an ideology that denies human equality—it believes equality is against nature." –Professor George Tsiakalos

"Let's examine the negative scenario..." he says. "Basically, Greek citizens are the only ones with the capacity of offsetting a government's 'failures' with their actions. I believe the real danger is elsewhere. During the economic crisis, a 'binary line' was drawn that limits the significance of ideological differences. It divides 'austerity' and 'anti-austerity' parties. That line didn't exist in the past. Essentially, during the crisis, identifying yourself on a political or ideological level with a party or agreeing on basic things like education, human rights, immigration, state-church relations, etc., became less important than a party's position on the issue of austerity.

"This shows why Syriza and Independent Greeks were able to form a coalition government. If this remains the parties' dominant approach, then should the new government fail to meet voters' expectations with regards to dealing with austerity, there will eventually only be two parliamentary parties left to claim the anti-austerity identity: the Communist Party and Golden Dawn. Golden Dawn has made big efforts in preparing to exploit such an opportunity should it arise. I am sure that its efforts will be thwarted promptly."

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Syriza supporters celebrating in Athens on Sunday. Photo by Dimitris Michalakis

I ask him how Golden Dawn managed to keep its numbers up even though most of its key executives are in jail.

"Personally, I didn't think there would be a dramatic reduction in their numbers this time around. This, is not related with the organization's members' popularity and capabilities, but, it is, I think, a direct result of the other parties' unwillingness to set as their clear and main goal the disappearance of Nazism from the political life of the country. If they even slightly adhered to this cause, it would be made clear in their everyday speeches on any matter. I don't believe this is the case though.

"The biggest mistake is that they deal with Golden Dawn as though they were a right-wing populist organization that merely happens to use Nazi symbols and deny the existence of the Holocaust. The truth is that Golden Dawn is very consciously Nazi: It is guided by an ideology that denies human equality—it believes equality is against nature. It evangelizes that there is a racial basis to civilization, that culture is a biological characteristic of the races, and that there is a hierarchy between the races and to that end, between cultures.

"At the same time it 'preaches' that cultures are destroyed because of miscegenation—that is the belief that if you propagate with a person of a different race, the race will become dirtied or deteriorate.

"These are the fundamentals of Golden Dawn's political program and action. It is openly against immigrants and minorities because of the risk of miscegenation; it is against the disabled because it considers them a biological burden and a risk for the continued perseverance of the race; it is against democracy because democracy is based on the principle of human equality.

"In 1946, the Nuremberg court ruled that 'the Nazi party would be, from the moment of its formation, due its ideology and program, considered a criminal organization.' In Greece, the percentage of the traditional nationalist and right-wing voters (which always hovered around 6 or 7 percent) has increased and due to the ideological workings of Golden Dawn, it has managed to create a space of its own that openly embraces the Nazi ideology.

"Many are under the impression that if we stop talking about Golden Dawn, the problem will somehow disappear. That is not the case." –Lawyer Thanasis Kampagiannis

"Can anything be done to change this sad fact? I believe it can change, if we begin by deconstructing their ideology. But unfortunately, no party or any other institution in the election period attempted to do so. I hope that the new government will be clear and unambiguous in addressing Golden Dawn as a criminal organization."

Thanasis Kampagiannis is a lawyer working with the initiative Prison for Golden Dawn and, having been part of the antifascist movement's prosecution team during the trial of Golden Dawn, is familiar with the organization's activity. I met him at his office in downtown Athens, where he was awaiting the final indictment of the the detained GD members.

"For years, Greek Justice has been uninterested in associating the dozens of allegations against Golden Dawn members that together formulated a voluminous file on the overall activity of the organization," he says. "In that sense, I don't have absolute confidence in the institutions—a personal estimation is that the outcome of the upcoming trial, when it takes place, will very much depend on the sociopolitical situation of the period."

I ask Thanasis what he thought of the election result and the percentages of Golden Dawn. "I think that at this stage of the political crisis, Golden Dawn did not have any substantive wins," he replies. "In fact, I believe that there was a positive outcome, in that it suffered losses in major urban centers. Of course, their threat is very real and GD will not be defeated if we simply put our heads in the sand.

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Golden Dawn members on vacation

"Many are under the impression that if we stop talking about Golden Dawn, the problem will somehow disappear. That is not the case. The economic crisis has burnished the Nazi organization, but there are other causes that contributed to its existence and prominence, such as the intensification of state repression and the institutionalization of racism by the dominant parties."

I ask him if the new government's potential failed policies and decisions in the near future could end up strengthening the fascist organization. "Golden Dawn was created for exactly the political period we are living in—to act as a counterweight to the radicalization of Greek society, which is clearly expressed by the rise of Syriza," he says.

"If you listen carefully to the messages and rhetoric of Golden Dawn's leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, you will see that he speaks clearly of an organization that has 'soldiers' on the streets to confront 'the left threat.' Golden Dawn places itself at the service of those distressed and agitated by radical decisions, and I am, especially referring here, to bank and marine interests.

"To answer your question then, it is clear that Golden Dawn sees itself as having a role to play in the 'day after.' Therefore, care and vigilance are of utmost importance right now."

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Photo by Tom Johnson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Every closed pub is the gravestone of a dead community. For each boarded up local with a washed out Sky Sports banner flapping in the wind, there are a group of barflies who used to drink together, now broken up and watching TV alone at home. The British Beer and Pub Association says net numbers went down by 20,000 between 1982 and 2013. But nobody agrees why.

Depending on which "save the pub" campaign you follow on Facebook, the cause of pub closures is either beer tax making pints too expensive, the smoking ban, rising property prices, or the fault of the big pub-owning companies—the now notorious "pubcos" who somehow want to drive pub landlords out of business despite relying on them for income. Or do we just not like going to pubs any more? Increasingly, the local pub is an empty looking building that you peer out of a bus window at, perhaps with a can of beer in hand on the way to a house party elsewhere. Let's weigh up all those factors and figure out once and for all: Who or what is killing the UK's pubs?

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Photo by Tom Johnson

The Tobacco Smokescreen

The Campaign for Real Ale, which lobbies for keeping proper pubs open, is ambivalent about it. "I think it's probably too soon to know the effect it's had," Tom Stainer, CAMRA's head of communications, says. "It depends massively on who you're talking to... there's anecdotal evidence all over the place."

Anecdotal evidence isn't hard to find. "The smoking ban has had zero impact on my pub," Dave Mountford, a pub landlord in Derbyshire, says without hesitation. "I've run two pubs, and they've both achieved greater sales during the smoking ban than they did before it came into effect."

One reason might be that Dave Mountford's pubs get half their revenue from food—typically, these "gastro-pubs" are the ones that have benefited from the ban. "The backstreet boozers—the 'wet-led' [drinks only] boozers—are the ones that will have been hit," Dave concedes. So if people are no longer having their after-work pints in their local backstreet boozers, where have they gone?

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A 'spoons. Photo by Jake Lewis

Did the High Street Kill the Backstreet?

In the 1990s and early 2000s—as alcopops took hold and the pub industry looked for a way to appeal to the cast of Coupling rather than the Men Behaving Badly crowd—the high street pub exploded onto the scene. Brands like All Bar One and O'Neill's emerged to cater for legal teenagers and people in their twenties. They opened airy, well-lit pubs with room for hundreds of drinkers to draw in young people turned off by the cramped old boozer down the road.

And then—going after a slightly different crowd but still identikit—there's the big daddy of them all, JD Wetherspoon, which has more than 900 pubs across the UK and is growing faster all the time. It took 15 years for Wetherspoon to open its first hundred pubs; the latest hundred, by contrast, have been opened in the last four years. Surely this unstoppable rise must have come at the expense of the traditional pub?

Not quite. Comparing old and new maps proves that most of these new pubs opened in places unserved by pubs before—and besides, despite the impression we have of there being three Wetherspoon's in every town center, they still only account for less than 2.5 percent of all British pubs. Tom Stainer of CAMRA calls the new breed of pubs a "small drop in the ocean." The idea that drinking has shifted over to cloned, managed outlets is tempting, but not backed up by the facts. We need to look further.

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Photo by Nick Meares

Enter the Pubco

Paul's story has been repeated to me up and down the country over the five years I've been writing about the pub industry. Landlord after landlord has come forward to tell me that their pubco owner is charging them extortionate amounts for beer, refusing to invest in the pub and playing hardball, or dirty, in negotiations.

Take The Three Tuns in Tamworth, also owned by Enterprise Inns—the back wall of the pub fell into a canal; Enterprise allegedly refused a rent reduction but "offered us some posters and banners."

Or The Hyneholt in Chigwell—whose pubco sent a bailiff without warning who tried to get the police to help him raid the pub.

Or the Groeslon Hotel on Anglesey—the roof leaked and the fire alarm didn't work, but Punch Taverns leased it anyway, and then demanded an above-market price when the desperate publican tried to buy it.

Or The Foresters Arms in East Sussex... well, you get the idea.

Both the pubcos and the pub-owning brewers, who together own about 60 percent of Britain's 48,000 pubs, prefer to lease them out to landlords through the "beer tie," under which the pub landlord has to buy his beer through the pubco at massively inflated prices. One brewer I know sells their beer to Enterprise for £68 [$103] a cask, who whack on two-thirds margin and sell it for £110 [$166]. The same beer costs about £80 [$120] from a wholesaler.

In theory, this means publicans get lower rent and help running their pub in return. In practice, there's widespread evidence that pubcos have often, if not consistently, ignored their side of the bargain. In a 2010 survey by the GMB trade union, over half of tied pub landlords said they lost money from their pubs and had to subsidize them through a secondary income. The beer tie has made these pubs unviable.

I did ask Punch Tavern and Enterprise Inns to comment on this, but they didn't respond.

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Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy

Our Pubs Are Turning into Flats
Things have gotten worse since the 2008 financial crisis. When money was cheap, big pub owners borrowed billions of pounds to expand their empires. When the crisis struck, however, their businesses were on a downturn and new money to replace their existing debt was much harder to come by.

Instead of buying pubs, pubcos are now dumping them as fast as they can—Punch is currently aiming to sell 1,000 to pay off its debts. Since pubs go for more money if they're billed as ripe for redevelopment into flats or shops, that's exactly what many of them have become.

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Click to enlarge. Photo by Tom Johnson.

The Admiral Mann was once a traditional, simple and friendly North London Victorian pub with darts teams, good reviews, and its own cat. It's now (following a memorable last night) closed and boarded up, having been sold to a property developer. "We thought it would be spared," Richard Lewis, who led a campaign to save the pub, told me, "because it was a profitable place... it goes to show that pubs can close at any time." Not profitable enough for the owners, McMullans brewery, to reject the rumored £1 million [$1.5 million] sale price. "You could've had people lining up round the block buying pints of beer all day, every day, and it would never be worth as much as if it were sold for flats." The pub cat became homeless and had to be put down.

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Photo by Tom Johnson

Spare Some Change?
If the critics are right and pubcos are driving pubs into the ground, why the suicidal business model? Aren't changing social and market conditions more to blame?

Cost of a pint in a pub: £3.50 [$5.30], give or take, depending which part of the country you're in. Cost of a tin from the corner shop: approx £1. At home you can play FIFA. In the pub you can watch Sky Sports News go round and round with the sound off.

Everyone agrees it's been getting harder and harder to persuade people to step outside their homes in the first place. "[Pubs] have got to work even harder to keep the customers they have, persuade customers to leave their homes, leave their very big TVs, the very cheap booze, and walk down the road or a bit further to the pub, and spend two or three times as much," says CAMRA's Tom Stainer.

Yet nobody I spoke to believed that the pub is necessarily dead—just the unimaginative way that pub owners, both pubcos and the so-called "family brewers" (Greene King, Marston's, Young's—actually all on the stock market and not particularly "family")—have been running them. "You've got to change, you've got to do things," says Dave Roberts, a brewer from Surrey. "While small brewers can change quickly, bigger companies have continued carrying on doing what they did last year."

Pub landlord Dave Mountford goes further. The pub owning industry, he says, "has no thought for what it should be doing to change the way it operates. I've worked in catering all my life... I've only worked in the brewing industry since 2007 and I have never worked in such a complacent, arrogant industry." Judging by the rave reviews his pub gets, he may have a point.

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Photo by Andrew Perry

Instead of changing their game, pubcos and brewers have continued down the same road. The price gap between pubs and supermarkets grew even faster after the Labor government introduced a beer duty escalator in 2008, raising beer duty by above inflation each year. Yet instead of using their bargaining power to lower beer prices, pubcos simply passed the cost on to landlords. Last year, the beer duty escalator was scrapped and beer duty cut by 1p a pint. Did the cost of pub beer go down? It did not.

The result, predictably, is slow death for those pubs that never made huge profits, haven't been renovated, and aren't able to deliver enough "shareholder value." Tenant landlords trapped in these pubs by their lease contracts get squeezed—and once dry—evicted so the pubco can sell the pub.

"It is cheaper and easier to screw over tenants than it is to sell beer and go and recruit the right people to do it for you," Dave Mountford says. "Because it's harder and harder to do it well... because of the smoking ban, increase in prices... All of those things make the pub companies seek an easier way of making money." Many more pubs could survive, he believes, if it weren't for the pubco business model.

There's still hope. Last year, under pressure from campaigners like Mountford, MPs finally forced the government to change the rules, requiring pubcos to offer their landlords an option to pay market-rate rent instead of the beer tie. Pubcos, and their PR lapdog the British Beer and Pub Association, threw their pints against the wall, and could yet lobby to get the measure changed before it becomes law.

Social change has weakened the British pub, but it's arguably the outdated ownership model that needs to get with the times. This can only stop if closure-threatened pubs are run in a way that's fairer and responsive to change—probably under newer, more community-focused owners. If the British pub is to survive, publicans need to get smarter and their owners need to change up—or get out.

Follow Rene on Twitter.

While his parents were out working four jobs, Cambo spent his time learning how to survive in the rough backwoods of Alabama. When they went through a brutal divorce, he naturally fled to the woods to be alone. No traffic, no people, no responsibility—just pure survival.

The plan was to wait out his adolescence there until he could legally live life without his parents. He ended up spending two years alone in the wild. This episode of Profiles by VICE, from director Harmony Korine, tells Cambo's story.

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This article first appeared on VICE France.

I am a woman living in Istanbul and lately, I've been coming across a lot of articles titled "Why I left Turkey," or some variation of that, in the local press. And since I moved here from Paris, every single person I know keeps asking me why the hell I did that. Oh, and did I mention I like girls?

According to the people I meet and hang out with in Istanbul, Turkey is currently sinking into a reactionary state thanks to the AKP—the conservative ruling party. In recent years, the rights of women, homosexuals, and basically anyone who doesn't fit Tayyip Erdogan's Ottoman fantasy have waned significantly. This is evident if you follow local politics, but also when you just walk on the street.

Since I moved to Istanbul in 2013, I have been followed in the street at least three times—both in a busy street in the afternoon as well as on a emptier one at night. A few times I have been insulted, and a few more times people have laid their hands on me. But the context of these misfortunes doesn't really matter. The point is I haven't spent one day in Istanbul without feeling objectified.

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My Turkish friends are angry women. They send away the assholes who disturb them with a virtuosity that inspires a lot of respect in me. For my part, I'm still learning. I actually developed several super-powers—like walking without bothering to look around me. At least, without bothering to look at the men around me, which often means not looking at anything at all. As one friend put it: "This city is wonderful—you can do everything you want here. But whatever you do, there will always be a guy looking at you while you do it."

To get a better understanding of what is going on in the streets of Istanbul, you only need to open a newspaper. In the past year, various political leaders have told the citizens of Turkey that laughing in public is not dignified female behavior, that unemployment is higher because women are allowed to work, and of course that "a rapist is more innocent than a woman who decides to get an abortion." Between 2002 and 2011, the number of honor killings rose by 1400 percent."

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So, to answer everyone's question—why in the hell did you move to Istanbul—I'm not sure anymore. Maybe it was because, among Europeans, the clubbing scene in Istanbul is quite renowned. I've even heard several people say that "Istanbul is the new Berlin," and that sentence makes me smile.

When I party in Taksim square, I enjoy a fraternity and a diversity that I have never seen in Paris—or Berlin for that matter. But things are different when you are a tourist. You can visit Istanbul a hundred times and not notice the social and sexual violence prevailing. Even when you settle in Istanbul, you don't immediately realize how big the city is; that the neighborhoods you live or go out for drinks in—Taksim, Beşiktaş, Kadıköy—tend to be the exception to the rule.

When I first arrived, I chose to live in a conservative part of town I'd rather not specify—much to the dismay of my gay Turkish roommate. He wanted to live in Cihangir, a progressive district loved by expats. But because expats tend to be lame, I brushed that idea aside. And so we lived there for several months, tricking the neighbors into thinking we were married because that seemed to be the easiest way to go about things. About one year ago, when Erdoğan threatened to ban the cohabitation between men and women who weren't married, we went through a stressful time.

[body_image width='800' height='584' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='french-lesbian-in-istanbul-876-body-image-1422541615.jpg' id='22477']The author and her girlfriend during the last Gay Pride in Istanbul in 2014

Today, my girlfriend and I live in Cihangir. Next summer, we will get married in France but our union will mean nothing in Turkey. I never believed that much in marriage, but not a day goes by without me wondering how long we can stay in Istanbul before things get too weird.

According to the UN, Turkey is ranked 123rd on a list of 130 countries when it comes to gender equality. Here, declaring your homosexuality is enough to lose your job, get evicted from your apartment, and have your family turn their backs on you. But this is a country that granted women the right of vote in 1934—more than a decade earlier than France—and where the most successful pop stars are transsexual. Turkey is infinitely paradoxical, if not schizophrenic.

I am a privileged woman. I have a passport that allows me to leave whenever I want, when at the same time my Turkish friends must move heaven and earth and spend considerable sums of money to obtain a three day-long Schengen Visa. Sometimes, I tell myself that I will only be completely integrated when I decide to do the most Turkish thing and leave this country.

But why did I decide to move to Istanbul in the first place? Despite my steady progress in the art of dodging questions, I still don't know how to answer that one. This is the only honest answer I can provide so far: I fell in love with this city, and you don't always fall in love with the right people or places.

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The author stands in front of the Hangover Club's bus. All photos by Taji Ameen

On a cold January Sunday in Manhattan, a block-spanning black bus with yellow details squatted outside the Royal, a sports bar near Union Square on Fourth Avenue. It was 11 AM, that ugly late-morning period when the city's hungover would be skulking down the street to get an egg sandwich, a smoothie, another beer, or whatever could stop the pounding in their heads. And that's what the bus was offering—for prices starting at $129, you could walk in and get a licensed doctor to pump you full of vitamins and medication through an IV, presumably enabling you to pop into the bar for a pint in time for the impending NFL playoff game.

The inside of the bus resembled a cross between a Wall Street bro's man cave and a clinic waiting room: leather couches and a TV at the front, a treatment area discreetly tucked behind a curtain in the back. Three women with IVs in their arms sat in silence, absentmindedly clicking through Instagram the way people do when there's nothing else going on.

The bus belongs to a company called the Hangover Club, which was founded by Asa Kitfield, the son of a doctor who knows his way around a morning-after headache. Kitfield told me that when he was a kid he'd get IVs or B-12 shots from his father whenever he was sick. As an adult, he heard about getting saline drips for hangovers, and during a trip to Miami for his bachelor party, he received one himself.

"We had a friend who was a nurse who came to my party and hooked us up with some bags," he said. "Within an hour I was feeling amazing, and thought, Wow, there's definitely something here. The first time was just a bag of saline, and I thought this was really cool, but we could improve on this."

So last year he partnered with Dr. Joshua Beer (his actual name), to set up an on-demand IV service for treating hangovers and offering "health and wellness drips." People who are skeptical of the enterprise might scoff at the idea that IV treatments can mend you any faster than a diner breakfast and coffee, or they might balk at the absurd price tag. Or you might just see a service offering a hangover cure that's endorsed by a doctor, feel the echo of last night pulse through your entire body, and go, OK, I'll pay it, whatever it is, just make it stop.

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While hangovers have presumably been around as long as alcohol, scientists have never officially determined what causes them. In a 2014 story for Wired called "Everything Science Knows About Hangovers—And How to Cure Them," writer Adam Rogers explained that it "wasn't until the past decade or so that researchers even agreed to define hangover with a common group of symptoms." Obviously, that hasn't stopped humans from inventing various folk remedies over the millennia—one, from tenth-century Baghdad, involves sipping water and eating a hearty stew. In other words, the ideas behind hangover cures haven't changed much.

But the 21st century demands that the old ways of doing things are "disrupted," or at least rendered sleek and expensive. In recent years "hangover therapy" has become a trend, with a variety of companies selling mobile treatment packages where a doctor or nurse comes to your home, hotel, or office with an intravenous pick-me-up. The New York Times recently published a feature on this kind of hangover solution, noting that it's become "increasingly common in spas, specialty clinics, doctors' offices, and now house-call services... all that's required is a vein, an hour, and a few hundred dollars."

New York's most popular hangover-cure business is probably the I.V. Doctor, which was started in 2014 by surgeon Adam Nadelson and his urologist father and has now expanded to the Hamptons, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The company's hangover solution includes at least 1,000 milliliters of lactated ringers—the stuff in IV bags that rehydrates you—along with vitamins B and C, though you can get packages with medications that fight heartburn, nausea, or pain.

As the Times story pointed out, the formula is almost identical to the Myers' Cocktail, the intravenous nutrient deficiency and dehydration cure created by Dr. John Myers in the 60s.

"It's not a new tool," Nadelson told me over the phone, "It's just a way of providing it." Or rather, imbuing the tool with enough glamour that work-hard-play-hard types are willing to spend hundreds of dollars (after probably spending hundreds more on booze the night before) on something that doesn't sound any more sophisticated than a coconut water.

The Hangover Club relies on similar branding—the company's Instagram account is filled with the types of drinking and hangover jokes you'd find on Bro Bible or Total Frat Move—though it has one thing the I.V. Doctor doesn't: the bus, which lets hungover people commiserate while their feeble, liquor-ridden bodies suck up vitamins.

When I asked what sets his business apart from the competition, however, Kitfield emphasized the science-y side of things: "It's probably our protocols—we're the only ones who offer the vitamins we offer, such as a Glutathione detox push, which is a very cool, master antioxidant to clean the free radicals out of your body that build up after a night of heavy drinking."

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Not that the company encourages alcohol consumption, of course. "We don't really want to support more drinking," said Kitfield. "We look at this therapy like a whoops button. Maybe you didn't eat dinner last night, went out with friends, three vodka sodas turned into too many, and you have something to do today where you can't be hung over, then we're that whoops button that brings you back and lets you continue on with your day."

(It's worth noting that the Hangover Club isn't in the business of helping to cure the aches and pains resulting from coke or ecstasy use. "This is strictly for dehydration and those other symptoms," said Kitfield. "We don't service people under the influence of illegal drugs because there are too many risks associated with that.")

Kitfield's competitors have criticized his lack of medical experience and see his bus as a risky attention-grabbing gimmick. "Having a bus outside a bar is dangerous," said Nadelson. "If someone comes out from the bar drunk and just gets on the bus, you don't know their blood alcohol content levels. You don't know how they will react to the IV."

Entrepreneurs offering hangovers cures have plenty of incentive to resort to publicity stunts and badmouthing one another in the press—most of what they do comes down to marketing. None of the companies offering literal shots in the arm or IV drips for hangovers have patented any products, and there's no such thing as an FDA-endorsed hangover cure.

Dr. Damaris Rohsenow, an alcohol and drug abuse researcher at Brown University, who also co-founded the Alcohol Hangover Research Group, doubts that these businesses are really providing any useful service. "In all the years I have been conducting hangover research, I have seen no studies validating any commercial products," she told me over email. "There is no evidence to support the use of vitamins as a hangover remedy, and there is no evidence at all that electrolytes would have any role in reducing hangover by any mechanisms." She added that a there is "no need for a costly IV drip, since you are perfectly able to drink water" to counteract your dehydration.

In other words, lying around in bed and nursing yourself back to some semblance of health is about as effective as getting a medical professional to pump you full of fancy water.

[body_image width='1024' height='1544' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='i-tried-to-cure-my-hangover-with-an-iv-drip-on-a-party-bus-666-body-image-1422551145.jpg' id='22566']

The author with an IV in his arm on the Hangover Club bus

I was allowed to try the Hangover Club's most expensive service, the Mega Package, which is $249 if they come to your house and $169 on the bus. It's chock full of prescription-grade nausea and headache pain medication, "Super B's Vitamin Booster," the Glutathion detox push, liquid magnesium, and a high dose of vitamin C. Plus, they offered me a beer—"two beers for the price of one," someone said in reference to Dr. Beer.

I filled out a medical history form, like at any doctor's office, and the staff nurse was professional and friendly as she brought me to the treatment area and stuck a tube into my arm. At first, I was overwhelmed by the smell of plastic coming off the hypodermic needle, then after a few minutes my face flushed with warmth as my veins began gulping down that sweet, sweet saline. The nurse commented on how I was absorbing the treatment particularly fast, then told me a story about a customer who got nauseous at the beginning of the drip and vomited all over the bus. She didn't say if she was able to remove the needle first.

The women getting the treatment said it worked for them, and I couldn't deny I felt better, but I wasn't all the way restored to health. I was a bit too alert, slightly jittery, blurry around the edges. Then again, maybe that's the perfect mood to walk into a bar with and start partying again.

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.