This article appeared originally on VICE Germany.

Last Wednesday, Germany's right-wing coalition government managed to pass a few updates to the German Prostitution Act. One new addition to the law is the requirement that men wear condoms when visiting prostitutes. Which I guess you could argue is a good thing—the only problem being that this kind of measure "is just as enforceable as a ban on peeing in a swimming pool," as the Left Party put it.

A welcome part of this law, on the other hand, is that a regulatory license will now be required for opening new brothels and that operators will have to undergo a reliability check. After all, you also have to go through these procedures when opening a snack bar or a pet shop.

But who are we to judge? The way I see it, the only people who should have a say in this are those directly affected by the new law. I got in touch with a couple of prostitutes—one male and one female—to ask them a few questions.

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This is not Melanie. Photo by Grey Hutton

"Melanie," 26, works Berlin's Oranienburger Straße. (Actually that's not her name—her "friends" who "watch out" for her wouldn't like it if they knew she were chatting with someone from the press. But it was a cold night and customers were sparse, so a short, paid break and a warm drink were welcome.)

VICE: There's a new law that requires male customers to wear condoms. Would you press charges if a customer refused to do that?
Melanie: No, that's bullshit. We don't just live off of tourists; we primarily make our living from regular customers. If you see that it's a nice family man who always comes back, is somehow a little infatuated, and probably doesn't have any other affairs or girls, then you continue to do it without a condom. You also get a bonus when not asking to wear a condom usually.

You probably protect yourself from getting pregnant, but what about STDs?
Of course, I take the pill. And I always try to arrange the sex so that he doesn't come in me. I've never had an STD. I think that has to do with a lot of luck but also insight. If someone's really disgusting, then I don't do it with them. But we're not the cheapest. Most of our customers are pretty well-groomed. I don't even want to know what goes on in Eastern European circles. But Eastern European girls don't work around here. We're all German here.

Are there customers who demand unprotected sex?
A lot of people come to us with "porno ideas," and coming inside a woman isn't even high on their list. But yeah, they all basically want to fuck without a condom. Some people think it's demeaning to us if they come on our faces or anywhere else. I don't care. Money doesn't smell; semen washes off. It's that simple. I think there's a kind of affirmation of masculinity when they see themselves shooting cum. I usually offer them my tits to come on, or to wank on my ass.

Can you explain why they think that's so sexy?
Our main thing is to do everything that the good wife at home doesn't want to do, and coming all over a woman is really high on that list of fantasies. I don't know—I'm a sex worker, not a psychologist.

Do you still try to protect yourself regardless?
A lot of men want to come on my face. I try to find that out before, so I'm ready and then I can close my eyes in time—I think HIV can be transmitted that way too. I also have a pair of big, horn-rimmed porno glasses that I do secretary fantasies with and then my mucus membranes are protected.

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Photo by Grey Hutton

Strichnin worked as a gigolo for years, pleasing hundreds of men and women for money. He's always used condoms because of "common sense."

VICE: What do you think about the new law, saying that men are now legally required to use condoms?
Strichnin: I think it's great for their wives. That's why condoms are necessary. But of course, all sex workers have to decide that for themselves.

The part of the law requiring young prostitutes to get medical check-ups more often is also good, but that should be a given. If you're a responsible adult, you go to the doctor regularly.

And the customers should also get checked if they want to fuck without a condom. Even if they don't feel responsible for themselves, they should do it for their wives' sake. Nobody should be actively and consciously spreading anything.

Over your career as a sex worker, have you ever had sex without a rubber because someone wouldn't have it any other way?
No, never! Everyone likes to be dirty sometimes but the main thing is getting out of the party clean. I always used condoms with both men and women. I've never penetrated someone without one, or came inside someone. And nobody was ever allowed to fuck me without a condom. Health comes first.

Does a law requiring condom use even make sense, if it can't really be enforced?
I actually think it's really good, because people tend to lose their minds in the heat of the moment. So a law may be a good reminder. But on the other hand doing forbidden things is fun—who doesn't like to break the law?

Do you think the law will be enforced in all branches of prostitution?
No, that's bullshit. The really young Eastern Europeans, for example, have no idea what they're doing. All it comes down to is the five-euro bill they get at the end.

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Photo via Flickr user Michelangelo Carrieri

There is an ongoing conversation between the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Canada's banks about allowing Bay Street to get access to classified material about potential cyber threats to Canadian institutions, new documents show.

At a series of meetings between bankers and corporate executives, an unnamed CSE employee explained the inner workings of the CSE and took requests to open up the flow of information from the top-secret spy agency to Canada's moneylenders.

This unnamed employee is a CSE employee tasked with working as a liaison with the private sector. His or her name is withheld under the Access to Information Act, which allows the government to redact information it feels could be "injurious" to Canada's national defence.

But, whoever this person is, one of their jobs is to streamline the relationship between Canada's big banks and the spies who are tasked with both collecting and analyzing signals intelligence as well as predicting and defending against possible cyber attacks.

The three meetings occurred in the fall of 2013, and acted as a summit between the big banks, telecommunications companies and Public Safety Canada. The reunions were scheduled after the CEOs of Canada's "big six" banks—Bank of Montreal, Royal Bank, Scotiabank, TD Bank, CIBC and National Bank—requested more information about cyber attacks that were threatening their infrastructure.

The government was looking to, among other things, "improve the cyber security posture of Canada's business community by enhancing information sharing and collaboration between the Government and private sector companies."

As part of those meetings, CSE was called in to give perspective on its role in combating cyber attacks. As Canada's primary agency tasked with tracking and addressing cyber threats, CSE has a set of directives that deal with how it cooperates with the private sector.

In those meetings, representatives from CSE—including the unnamed employee—ran workshops on matters such as "collaboration between the Government and the Private Sector," which provided "technical advice and assistance provided by the Government to the Private Sector."

The agency's role of mass digital surveillance, which sometimes occurs while it's supposed to be investigating cyber threats, has put the agency under the microscope.

In the course of the conclave between the cyber-spies and the corporate bigwigs, the banks said they would be supportive of "bigger things" on the national level, to bring private industry into the fold of cyber defence.

"Participants expressed a desire to better understand [CSE's] capabilities. An example was given of how the U.S. Government shares classified material with the private sector in certain circumstances," the documents read.

"Recommendation that Canada should look at existing models if we wanted to head down a similar path."

A spokesperson for the Canadian Bankers Association who was present at two of the meetings told VICE that "these were both low-level meetings as part of our ongoing sharing of views and ideas, nothing more."

The conversations were not insignificant, though. Under a "potential issues" subhead in a memo to the Minister of Public Safety, it is noted that "while this inaugural meeting will launch discussions in these areas, we anticipate that CEOs will see value in continued exchange on these topics. As the government begins to consider some of the recommendations coming out of this group, an ongoing dialog with CEOs would be beneficial to seek their advice on how best to implement the initiatives being proposed."

The government has yet to clarify whether CSE went ahead with engaging in US-style information-sharing with Canada's banks.

In 2011, Reuters broke the news that the National Security Agency was opening up a flow of communication with the banks to help prevent and mitigate cyber attacks. Of course, news also broke in September of 2013—two weeks before the meeting between these meetings—that the NSA was engaging in widespread surveillance of Wall Street's banking activities.

As part of the sessions coordinated by Public Safety Canada, there was a debrief from a meeting of the "Cyber Protection Working Group."

While there is no mention of that group on any Government of Canada website or report, the Canadian Bankers Association says it was merely an "ad hoc group" of representatives from the banking and telecommunications sector.

Details on that 20-minute debriefing were redacted.

Cooperation between industry and Canada's intelligence regime is already quite expansive. The Conference Board of Canada, an economic think tank, organizes an organization called the Council of Chief Information Officers. Its membership includes representatives from the oil and gas industry, pipeline companies, the telecommunications industry, universities, power companies, and several government departments. The documents include an information note on one of the meetings of that group, held at CSIS headquarters, in February 2014.

With files from Ben Makuch.

Follow Justin Ling and Ben Makuch on Twitter.

If you live in New York, you might know the Museum of Modern Art stayed open for 56 hours straight—from Friday morning until Sunday night—to accommodate the procrastinators who hadn't managed to make it to the museum's current exhibition, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. When I arrived on Sunday morning at around 2 AM, the crowd was a mix of genuine art buffs and pre- or post-party couples. The PDA—like the crowds at the museum during its normal operating hours, the months of media coverage surrounding and exalting the show, and the adjectives in Jerry Saltz's glowing review in New York magazine—was excessive.

In the lobby the crowd was a combination of bemused novelty and self-satisfaction. We were among the relative few willing and cultured enough to "take advantage" of the opportunity to be there, then. An air of after-hours propriety suffused us, the yawning and over-accessorized. Plus, thankfully, there were no children. I missed the midnight rush, which a security guard told me was "insane," as packed as the museum ever is, with lines extending around the block and the wait over two hours.

I was a little disappointed there wasn't more chaos, actually. I was hoping the opportunity to hang out at arguably the world's best contemporary art museum at an unorthodox hour would have lured out more of New York's bizarre. These cut-outs were, after all, "a new form of poetry that come at us like a flotilla of visionary barges on an imaginary Nile," as Saltz put it last October.

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The line at 5 AM. Photo by Lauren Silberman.

In hindsight, I should have expected a crowd like this. The people I asked to come with me responded with aggressive nos and implied I was crazy for inviting them. Sample replies to my invitations included "WAT!?" "4 am?!?! Not at all" and "There is no way I could be awake at 4 am even if I wanted too [sic]." I waited in line by myself for ten minutes, got in the elevator with a Swedish architecture student and three couples, and together we emerged at the sixth-floor gift shop.

Occasionally people would walk by smelling like beer, and more occasionally I overheard the conversations of those who were clearly drunk. Bursts of cackling over something on someone's cell phone brought the house-party vibe into sharp relief, as did the couples: so many couples, gazing lovingly at each other, kissing like they were reuniting after a long period apart, resting heads and languid arms on each other's shoulders, leaning up against walls and one another. A woman bent forward from her waist to rest her forearms on a vitrine of sketches and studies for the illustrated book Jazz, which was mostly about the circus, and her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was put his hand on her hip, almost ass, and pressed himself against her. Two rooms away, a girl with big hoop earrings was up against a wall, her arms around her boyfriend's shoulders, like high-schoolers up against a locker, but instead of a water fountain, next to them was a formally revolutionary four-foot-by-four-foot blue nude produced by the founder of a major artistic movement.

Installation view of 'The Swimming Pool' (1952) in the exhibition 'Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (October 12, 2014–February 10, 2015). Photo by Jonathan Muzikar. © 2014 The Museum of Modern Art.

Many guests told me they were visiting for the second time, though more for the experience than the art. "I just don't see why it's so important," a woman named Catherine told me as we looked at The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown , an earlier small work in cobalt, magenta, green, and yellow. "It's nice. It's beautiful! I guess it's because it was the first—a precedent." Another guest, Tirosh, was there "100 percent" because it was "a thing." A third, Elizabeth, a 26-year-old wearing some kind of rhinestoned or otherwise sparkly head chain, called it a "wonderful concept."

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Henri Matisse. 'The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown.' 1943/44. Centre Pompidou.

And they were right: It is nice; it is beautiful; it is definitely a thing and concept, not least because it is so nice and beautiful. Walking into the show is nothing but delightful: the colors pop and are probably perfect regardless or because of their ability to fuck with your psychology and wake you up at four in the morning. Even the name of the show is show-like, that bold definite article declaring something culturally and historically significant, that famous and flamboyantly French name positively wielding the colon.

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Henri Matisse. 'Blue Nude II' (Nu bleu II), spring 1952. Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Purchase, 1984. © 2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

I don't mean to suggest that The Cut-Outs wasn't worth seeing. It is a fine show, by which I mean both that there was nothing wrong with it and that it was executed with exquisite precision, fine in the sense of the sulking girlfriend as well as in the sense of the anachronistic and hard-to-please English professor. It really is culturally and historically significant: Matisse came to the cut-out technique as he grew older and lost his ability to paint. What was first a way to try out compositions and colors—you can see this in the works, which have many more pencil marks and jagged edges than the photos make out—became the art itself. The exhibit moves you naturally through this process, which spanned from Matisse's early experiments with cutting paper in the late 1930s to his death in 1954. The richness of the colors and the almost-childlike simplicity of his forms make the whole thing very easy to access, at least on some level.

And that's why it worked as a 56-hour show—a more difficult exhibition would not get people out of Netflix and into Midtown in the middle of the night; WOW! colors and purist forms that can double for décor as well as for fine art can attract the huge audiences that ultimately beget more huge audiences. It would be better if you "got" Matisse, sure, but you don't have to to get this.

MoMA's version of the show was important because it exhibited The Swimming Pool, Matisse's largest cut-out project, as it was intended: The nine panels were displayed not along a hallway, but as they had been designed, to decorate a room. Senior curator Jodi Hauptman told the New York Times that this site-specific mural, which Matisse did to "make his own pool" in his dining room, was "the philosophical and geographical heart of the show."

But there was PDA there, too: a couple sat on a low bench, her knee over his, holding both of each other's hands, laughing about something that I'm sure was not Matisse, who doesn't come off funny so much as cute or male-genius-y, depending on the placard. (Of the large-scale piece The Parakeet and the Mermaid, he said, "I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk. There are leaves, fruit, a bird." Conversely, he also said: "I know it will only be much later that people will realize to what extent the work I am doing today is in step with the future.")

At around 4:30, I sat down across from the blue nude and felt it would probably be best just to stay there, forever, in a stupor kept awake by the colors. I was telling the aforementioned Elizabeth that I had recently moved to New York because my hometown isn't interesting when an older woman with bright red hair interrupted us.

"If you have to live in an interesting city to be an interesting person, you have a problem," the woman, who would later introduce herself as the performance artist Penny Arcade, said. She complained about the current art scene in New York. She did not like that everyone was in heels and dresses; it was "like a cocktail party without the cocktails." I was tired and went to sit down.

As I was googling Penny Arcade, she came rushing into the room.

"I remembered something!" she said. "Do you know who Jack Smith was?"

I didn't. "Well, you should," she said, sitting next to me. He once asked, 'Why can't museums be open all night?'"

A decent enough question, sure, but I also wondered if I didn't already know the answer: People would rather be making out. Or—even more obvious—sleeping.

Depleted, I walked into the lobby, where the security guards were being brought coffee. Ticket stubs and other small pieces of trash littered the ground. Beyond a group of well-dressed students at the front desk and another couple, up against a column, the place, like the streets outside, was deserted. It was definitely a thing, and it was definitely over.

Follow Lauren on Twitter.

Henri Matisse: The Cutouts is on display at MoMA through February 10.

Photos by Cam Kirk and Jerry Ricciotti; Photo Illustration by Joe Burger

Rap music is hood music. In the sense that its lyrics and rhythms evoke the grim realities and fleeting triumphs of quotidian life in the contemporary urban milieu, and also because at least half of all rap songs are about neighborhoods. Be it the hood the rapper is from, the one he sells drugs in, the one he used to sell drugs in, or just one he thinks is particularly rough or particularly fancy, you can't swing a cat in a rap track without scratching a shout-out to some spot or another.

While this is a straightforward affair in cities with distinct internal entities like Compton and the South Side, trying to rep your neighborhood in Atlanta isn't so simple. After Sherman burned the place to the ground, Atlanta was rebuilt by a 100-year succession of carpetbaggers, developers, and politicians on the take, leaving the city's map a baffling, decentralized spidermess that conforms to no known human system of logic. Neighborhoods here are amorphous blobs nobody agrees on the boundaries of, and whose names are only used by realtors to convince buyers they're moving to a nicer part of town than they actually are. Good hoods and bad hoods not only touch each other but sometimes are each other. Only in a city this geographically schizophrenic could you have a lifelong East Atlantan like Gucci Mane say "I'm a East Atlanta nigga" and then IMMEDIATELY follow it with "You an East Atlanta bitch."

Thankfully for the city's rappers and trappers, the Atlanta police divided up this maddening tangle into six patrollable zones. Not only does this provide a concrete place to tell people where you hail from, calling your hood "Zone X" makes Atlanta sound like a Logan's Run–esque dystopia in the not-so-distant future. Which, in terms of what's happening in hip-hop, it actually kinda is.

ZONE 1
Zone 1 is home to Bankhead and the Bluff, the titular drug market of the film Snow on tha Bluff. Apart from inspiring Freaknik-era shoulder-dance craze the "Bankhead Bounce," Bankhead is also T.I.'s old stomping ground and the setting for his 2003 genre-christening album Trap Muzik, which may make it the original trap in trap music. Incidentally, Zone 1 is where FDR built the country's first public housing project, Techwood Homes, arguably the first trap in history.

Back when Atlanta was one of America's most dangerous cities, this is where most of that danger was happening. A gang called the Miami Boys brought the crack war up from Florida, funneling coke from the Caribbean straight up I-75 to the Connector and into Zone 1. The city used the 1996 Olympics as a chance to tear down Techwood and drive the Miami Boys out of town, and those who remained were pushed out when the Black Mafia Family moved down from Detroit and started running West Coast coke in exotic rental cars.

Notable Zone 1ers: T.I., Dem Franchize Boyz, Shawty Lo, Curtis Snow, Maynard Jackson, Gladys Knight and two of the Pips, D-Roc of the Ying Yang Twins (and "Bankhead Bounce" fame)

ZONE 2
North Atlanta, including Buckhead and Lenox, comprises Zone 2 and is essentially an amusement park for ballplayers' wives and rich lawyers. This is the part of town that earned Atlanta its "Black Hollywood" nickname and was an obvious choice for a drug lord cum aspiring rap mogul like Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory, founder of the Black Mafia Family, to make his hub.

After BMF set up shop and consolidated the city's drug industry, it was not uncommon to see 15-car convoys of Day-Glo Lamborghinis commuting (loudly) between Buckhead's myriad bottle-service bars and strip clubs. Nor for those Lambos to cause an hours-long traffic jam as they all tried to stonedly park and unpark in the same lot.

Due to a number of high-profile parking-lot shootings, the City of Atlanta imposed a drinking curfew on Buckhead, and the cops began looking suspiciously at all the guys with quarter-million-dollar cars and chains with the same three letters. Meech didn't help matters by erecting a billboard proclaiming "The World Is BMF's," based on the one from Scarface. Eventually the DEA took down the whole operation and turned off the money faucet that had kept Atlanta hip-hop in diamonds.

Notable Zone 2ers: The Black Lips, Migos (kinda), the current governor

ZONE 3
When we were filming Noisey Atlanta, Trouble from Duct Tape took us to a Zone 3 trap house that was the only building on its block with a roof. It was seriously the set from one of those "after humans" shows. But once we crossed the porch, and waited for a person inside to open the door's bank-vault lock system, some ten guys were sitting in a sumptuously air-conditioned living room playing Xbox and doing bench presses with their guns in their laps. It took me a second to figure out what was going on, but the deal is: That's their job. They were all "at work." And from the finish of their firearms and jewelry, seems like work's going good.

The fact that a single drug spot can maintain a staff the size of a reputable steakhouse is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the Atlanta trap scene. Basically, when BMF collapsed it forced everybody back to the trap house to do it themselves. And not just drug dealing. People DIY everything in their trap houses: They record tracks, shoot videos, and found indie record labels like Gucci Mane's 1017 Brick Squad and Future's Freebandz. Zone 3 is like the Silicon Valley of trap-made rap music.

Of the four trap houses rising trap star Peewee Longway keeps in the various zones ("like Monopoly"), his Zone 3 spot, the Lobby, is the one he always mentions. 2 Chainz's studio probably doesn't count as a trap house considering he has $500 worth of candles on the console, but it's here too. Even iLoveMakonnen and his weird little clique of home recorders are Zone 3 kids. It's the zone where shit gets done.

Notable Zone 3ers: 2 Chainz, Ludacris, Yung Joc, Trinidad James (ancestrally), Monica, Jeff Foxworthy, T.I.'s character in ATL, Rich the Kid

ZONE 4
Zone 4 is the SWATS, which stands for "Southwest Atlanta something something." This is the zone Goodie Mob, Outkast, and all the other Dirty South folks from the late 90s came out of. Although some of them are technically from East Point, which has its own police force sandwiched between Zone 3 and Zone 4. And is, of course, on the west side of town. Fucking Atlanta.

Notable Zone 4ers: Killer Mike, Outkast, CeeLo

ZONE 5
Downtown and midtown Atlanta used to look like The Walking Dead after dark. When Buckhead shut down, the frat crowd headed for East Atlanta while the hip-hop set helped revitalize the intown. Nightmarishly huge clubs like Opera and Harlem Nights opened up featuring flaming champagne bottles, multitiered VIP sections catering to 20-person entourages, and uniformed Atlanta police officers they hire to—I don't know what. Certainly not to stop anyone from doing drugs. It's entirely possible they're hired just so clubgoers can do drugs in front of a cop.

Right across the highway, a colony of recording studios like Patchwerk and Coach K's Quality Sound run all night, and then down next to the Greyhound station you have institutional titty bar Magic City, where producers take their new tracks directly from the booth to DJ Esco to premiere, bypassing the entire record and radio industry in the process. It's probably the only farm-to-table hip-hop distro operation on earth.

Nobody is really from Zone 5 (though Trinidad James does keep a pied-à-terre overlooking the 75/85 connector), but it's such a studio haven that producers here like Mike Will Made-It, Metro Boomin, Sonny Digital, and TM88 are as famous as the rappers they make beats for. They're like the Wrecking Crew or something.

Notable Zone 5ers: Trinidad James, Supreeme, the ATL Twins, the dancers of Magic City

ZONE 6
The zone du jour. The trappest of all possible zones. If you're looking for Gucci Mane, this is the zone he'll be in. Provided he's not in jail (which, presently, he is). Zone 6 is where Young Scooter jugs out them Section 8 houses, where Future drinks like it's Cinco de Mayo, and where all the hoes stare at Rich Homie Quan when he walks through. It's essentially the capital of the "New Atlanta" that magazines like Complex keep going on about. I wanna say it's where Peewee Longway lives, but I have a hard time understanding him through that grill.

The East Side is also a perfect microcosm of Atlanta's development chaos, with ritzy brunch lofts built directly overlooking some of the most dangerous projects in the city and multiple apartment complexes that claim the title "Little Mexico." (Shootings have thankfully come down enough to obviate the old sobriquet of "Little Vietnam.") It's an area in such churning flux the Zone 6 cops are still on the lookout for gangs that disbanded years ago and think new gangs whose members we met in person are just urban legends. Basically, it's the most confusing, fucked-up, interesting trap in America. No wonder God lives here.

Notable Zone 6ers: Gucci, Young Scooter, OJ da Juiceman, Rich Homie Quan (ancestrally), Childish Gambino

Watch Noisey Atlanta on Noisey.VICE.com to learn more about Atlanta's Zones and the trap musicians who call them home.

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Power Glove advertising—turns out the "power of the future" was really hard to control

The latest in TheFineBros' series of "Teens React" videos, "Teens React to (the Nintendo) Power Glove" has accumulated, at the time of writing, close to a million and a half views since publication on February 8. It's the usual format: Young adults get shown something often unrelated to how their demographic is perceived, and they respond with first impressions. Past videos have featured 1980s fashion and Saved by the Bell.

The Power Glove video is interesting for how these kids initially react. The peripheral in question dates from 1989, a third-party developed controller, a product of Mattel, compatible with the Nintendo Entertainment System. It's a precursor of sorts to today's motion-sensor gaming tech, a forerunner to the Wii's breakthrough design. But while it was suitable for use with both its own, specially tailored titles and—with a little programming—just about any game for the NES, the Power Glove had a problem. It didn't work.

But the kids aren't to know that when the black-and-grey glove is thrust upon them. There's an obvious excitement about it. Says Rachel, 18: "This is either a piece of really new technology, or, like, a really old piece of technology." Seth, 16, begins to wonder how such a device might link up with today's emerging virtual reality units: "If you paired this with the Oculus Rift, this is next gen. This is the future, right here. The past future." It's only when they use the Power Glove that the enthusiasm drains.

The teens play Bad Street Brawler, one of only two NES games specifically designed for use with the Power Glove. It doesn't go well. Regarded as one of the very worst releases for the NES before we've even considered the Power Glove's disastrous controls, Bad Street Brawler was a mess of crappy visuals, monotonous gameplay, inaccurate commands, and curious chiptune takes on what feel like Chuck Berry or Little Richard songs processed through crashing satellites. TheFineBros are merciful and switch to Punch-Out!!, the classic boxing game that, surely, the Power Glove fitted perfectly. No such luck: While it's more successful than Bad Street Brawler, the imperfect inputs lead to frustration and, rather more pertinently, absolutely destroying right arms.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/P6xwqkQlJ0M' width='560' height='315']

Teens React to Power Glove (Nintendo)

"This was pretty much useless," concludes 18-year-old Labib. "Oh, this is horrendous... Jesus," exclaims Ethan James, 19. While 100,000 Power Gloves were sold in the US, the kids of today are perfectly in tune with the players of the time: this is a completely useless, irrefutably horrendous peripheral that, while produced with the best intentions and arguably ahead of its time, only soiled the software library of Nintendo's iconic 8-bit console. Even the Nintendo-"sponsored" movie The Wizard, a Fred Savage vehicle of late 1989, called it right: "It's so bad," says the character Lucas Barton, his Michael Jackson-inspired lingo of the time having dated, wonderfully, into a more accurate expression of the Glove's usability.

These teens need to know, though, that gamers of the 1980s and 1990s played through far worse gadgets than the Power Glove. Staying on the NES platform, there was the Konami LaserScope of 1989. A twist on the NES Zapper, this was a laser gun for games like Wild Gunman and Duck Hunt. You wore it on your head, and the device had a little sight that hovered over your right eye, the laser emitting from around your eyebrow. It looked absolutely terrible, so if you had one, you'd probably keep quiet about it. Except, that's the catch: it was voice activated, so you couldn't play quietly. Shouting "fire" into the LaserScope's microphone would do just that, but as tests have shown, "fuck" works fine, too.

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Nintendo Power Pad / Power Set advertisement

Many flawed but inspirational gadgets were released for the NES, like the Bandai-developed Power Pad—a dance mat ancestor—and the U-Force, which used infrared sensors to detect hand movements, like a kind of gaming theremin. The NES also had the Hands Free, a chest-worn unit that allowed physically handicapped gamers to play without the need for pads. It can be seen as a precedent for what the charity SpecialEffect is doing today.

The Roll 'n' Rocker, though, was both cheaply made and completely pointless, forcing the player to balance on a tiny platform that could take only so much weight, their wobbles replacing the controller's D-pad. It allowed the addicted to risk their ankles rather than wearing out thumbs on a lengthy session—though if anyone lasted more than five minutes on it, they'd have surely qualified for the US Olympic team's gymnastic squad for Barcelona 1992. And while he's enjoyed roles in Super Smash Bros. and Star Fox, quite what the point of 1985's R.O.B. was, as a gameplay device, remains unclear. It's a cool-looking toy, but with only two compatible titles, R.O.B. is one of Nintendo's greatest follies.

At least R.O.B. owners could choose between Gyromite and Stack-Up for their entertainment. If you forked out $200 for 2002's Xbox-exclusive Steel Battalion and its intimidating, 40-buttons-and-two-sticks (plus some pedals) controller, you were locked into that game and its expansion-pack-cum-sequel only. And while Nintendo continually endorsed weird and far-from-wonderful peripherals, their deadly rival Sega wasn't without its share of missteps. There was 1992's Action Chair, built for use with select Mega Drive games. Like the Rock 'n' Roller it registered player movements as D-pad inputs, but at least it allowed you to sit down. But the very worst Sega controller was, undoubtedly, the Activator.

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The Sega Activator on ABC, 1993

I called it "inspirational" here, and I stand by that—it's easy to draw a line back from today's motion-sensor interfaces to Sega's attempt to surround the player with breakable light beams. But while it was the first-ever full-body games controller, the Activator was an expensive failure for its makers, and much like the Power Glove it routinely failed to acknowledge the player's movements correctly. It's probably the lamest gaming peripheral, ever, unless we are counting R.O.B. as anything more than a motorized doll.

Nintendo's Wii popularized motion control when it launched in 2006. But it's also home to several tacky pieces of plastic that merely attach to the standard Wii Remotes for, I guess, a more "authentic" experience. Playing golf games? There's this. Fishing? This. Bowling? There's a needless accessory for that, too. It's unlikely that these peripherals have a future beyond collecting dust in the dark, forgotten parts of an owner's wardrobe—but, to bring us back to where we began, the Power Glove has found life long after its NES usefulness expired.

Some games accessories find new reasons to be treasured through inspired repurposing. We highlighted the Rez Trance Vibrator as a private-time plaything last year, our writer explaining that the music-responsive buzzer was "somewhat 'weak' for a sex toy, though nonetheless pleasurable." And, earlier in 2015, the Power Glove became an invaluable Bluetooth controller in the hands of Robot Chicken animator Dillon Markey. Check out the video below to see it in action.

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The Power Glove has no place in the contemporary gaming landscape. Only some kind of complete imbecile would try to make it communicate with today's VR units. (And yet you can bet someone is trying, right now.) It's entirely understandable that teenagers of 2015 would consider it horrendous. But seeing Markey use this supremely tactile peripheral in a way that could never have been envisioned at the time of its launch is pretty inspiring, and it makes you wonder if you were right to throw away that Sega Menacer when you did, all those years ago.

Nah, don't worry about it. You were right.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

We've got a really wonderful and strange collaboration on our hands right here. Legendary German electronic musician Marcel Dettmann, who has been shaping the progression of techno since the 1990s, remixed a track by Slovenian industrial innovators Laibach. Laibach, in case you don't know, founded the influential Slovenian art collective NSK, and thanks to their use of WWII imagery they were accused of being Nazis by the 90s PC crowd.

Dettmann's remix of Laibach's song "Eurovision" layers the group's muttering, militant vocals over some beats that sound like they could score that Christian Bale movie Equilibrium. The song is part of the upcoming Spectremix album, a collection of remixes that will accompany the release of Laibach's bonus version of Spectre, out March 31 on Mute Records. Listen to the remix and imagine you're fighting against an EU police state in the not-so-distant future.

Preorder Spectremix via Mute Records.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Spend too much time on the internet and you'll end up thinking young men today fall into one of two camps: hypersensitive puppy dogs trying to fund-raise their way to true love, or those guys who think flirting means getting shitfaced and screaming rape threats down a traffic cone at girls in the street. While this picture isn't 100 percent accurate, it does seem that too many guys have adopted either the love formula or the Bro Bible as their seduction template, and frankly either of those approaches is as erotic to us as the idea of getting finger-banged in a Jacuzzi by the Elephant Man.

Of course, we know you're not all dumbasses. But the truth is, boys these days have really dropped their flirt game. Finding a woman to love you tender isn't about throwing a burlap sack over her head and tossing her on the back of a truck. It's also not about slithering up with some awful PUA lines and trying to bully-fuck her. We're not asking for Jane Austen; we just want to be wooed, and we want you to be cool about it.

Dating in the post-Tinder age is a romantic, political, and legal mine field, so here's a guide to help you through the painful business of chatting up girls.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND DATING APPS
Don't pretend you haven't spent every last toilet break this month hungrily trawling through girls' Tinder bikini pictures. We know you're not "new" to the whole dating-app game, and the evidence doesn't suggest you find it particularly "weird." The only weird thing about it is the 15 minutes you just spent on a perfect stranger from Happn's LinkedIn page. (Hi! We can see when you do that, by the way!) We're all desperate and shallow and lonely, so let's not pretend otherwise.

Never call yourself a "gin enthusiast" or a "coffee snob" in your bio. Beverages are not a substitute for personality. You don't have to put your height, but thinking girls don't care would be naive, so post a full-body photo of you posing near something for scale, like a "You Must Be This High to Ride" roller-coaster sign, a door, or—if you're really small—a cat.

Consider these topics to be banned from Tinder chat: your epic weekend plans, the undoubtedly epic hangover you're going to have as a result of them, music genres, your SAT or GRE scores, vacations. Playing flirty-uppies with a total stranger is completely unnecessary—just ask her out. It's 2015, half the work is done for you: This is an app that's designed solely to help lonely people have sex with one another. If you're still stuck making Tinder small talk about her "plans for the summer" or the exact location of her office, you're fucked.

TALKING TO US IN REAL LIFE
A lot of you have become so used to copy and pasting "you still up?" to your 47 Tinder matches that you've forgotten how to talk to us in person. Remember, there are some times where girls just don't want to be chatted up—if we look like we are already on a walk of shame, for example, or outside an abortion clinic.

Other than that, we're really fine with getting wooed anywhere. In fact, no matter how cynical the girl, it's a really pleasant to think that someone still wants to bang us when we're applying chapstick to our nose on a subway platform while contemplating a cheesesteak. Approaching a girl in an unlikely situation takes balls. Girls really like balls. Not to look at. Don't show us your balls. Don't text us your balls. Do talk to us (about things other than your balls and the size of your balls).

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HOUSE PARTIES
In an ideal world, us single gals would walk around with a vial of tears of solitude around our necks, or wear our loneliness as a decorative brooch. But unfortunately, you're going to have to go through the exhausting game of bullshit badminton that is finding out whether we're single. House parties are particularly fraught for this reason: There's a good chance you could be trying it on with a girl while sitting next to her boyfriend, on his own bed. It might sound elementary, but the quickest way round that is to just ask her whom she came with.

Everyone knows that house parties tend to run dry at about 4 AM, around the time the last bottle of Cinzano runs out and the angriest roommate is marching around, shouting in her slipper socks. It's your last chance to magnetize those sexy dangerous party girls who wear bangles around the tops of their arms, so you really ought to have held something back. And we're not talking about another line of mephedrone off the microwave—we're talking about an Uber account, a bottle of Glen's vodka, and (the promise of) a better party. If she wants to bang you/is high enough to believe there's a good party going on at 4 AM, she'll go along with this bullshit. Single people are, against the odds and contrary to common sense, always staggeringly optimistic about the night ahead.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

CLUBS AND BARS
As fun as house parties are, once you're past your early 20s they can get a bit dry. This is because you'll have already systematically banged your way through your immediate group of friends ("just to check") and all their semi-attractive friends. You can, however, still pick people up in public, the good old-fashioned way, and that's where clubs, bars, and smoking areas come into their own.

Has anyone ever met on a dance floor? We're not sure, but it seems unlikely. If you, like many, aren't all that good at conversing with the rhythm of your body, then maybe just talk to her at the bar. Don't be put off by her ice-maiden face, or the fact that her back is turned to you, or that she has been trying to get served for five minutes already and doesn't want to break her gaze with the barman: Smile at her. Introduce yourself. Buy her a drink. Feminism might have killed chivalry, but everyone still likes free stuff.

At this point, how can you tell if she's into you?

–Her friends seem a tiny bit annoyed with her
–She's tried to make fun of you a lot
–She's doing the opposite of flaring her nose
–She has not mentioned shit once
–She is not eating a hot dog
–She's touched you on the top of the arm (this is actually a thing)

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SMOKING AREAS
If you're determined to find love IRL, the best place to strike up conversation is a smoking area. Everyone knows that all the good flirty banter takes place when you're being herded around in the dark like cattle, so get puffing. If you don't smoke, you're just going to have to pretend. No one ever banged all the bad bitches babysitting a family of handbags in the corner of the club.

Bumming cigs off girls is no way into a conversation, although—sad as it may sound—having a lighter is. Do you remember someone at school once saying lighting a girl's cigarette was like a third of having sex with her? Well, he was right, if that figurative third is the bit where you prematurely ejaculate into her bellybutton.

Nothing in this world is more awkward than the moment of silence as you try to light a girl's cigarette in a breeze, so just hand us the lighter. And don't carry a Zippo, dude; this isn't the 1920s, and you're not a hardboiled detective.

Feminism might have killed chivalry, but everyone still likes free stuff.

CHARM THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF HER FRIENDS
If, while on your sexual safari, you've managed to isolate the buffest buffalo in the herd, you'd be wise not to underestimate the group's instincts. Her best friend's got you all figured out, and she is not afraid to trample your ass, reason being the sleepover you've got in mind is really fucking with her brunch plans. The wanton lust of your penis is going to leave her one poached egg short of a decent Instagram post tomorrow, and she's not about to let that happen. Here's how to tread carefully with our friends:

–Choose one of us and stick with your choice.
Aside from the fact that no one likes to be a second-stringer, you're going to end up spreading yourself too thin, repeating the same shitty jokes and quickly repelling literally everyone there. Also, don't try to coerce one of us into a threesome; you're not Dan Bilzerian, and suggesting that it might be fun for the girl you've just met to roll around naked with you and one of her childhood friends is (so, so obviously) not a good way to get either of them to like you.

–Be nice to our friends.
We might not want you to flirt with our friends, but we want them to like you enough to be jealous of us. So please, try to engage them in conversation. You probably want to work out early who's the leader of the group/running this whole thing and keep her on your side, because she'll be the bitchy one who says, "Amanda's too drunk, and now we all have to leave to go buy her fries to stop the crying." She'll be the one who mouths "NOW" across the bar at your sweet Juliet and then looks you dead in the eye like some sort of polka-dot Medusa. She'll be the one who has no problem mouthing, "Really, him?" and pointing right at you, while your crush's hand slackens apologetically in yours.

PICKUP LINES, GIMMICKS, NEGGING, AND "TECHNIQUE"
You can't really imagine what it's like to be a woman until you've been informed you're a bad dancer by an overweight man wearing a fedora, told your job is crap because "What value does PR actually bring to the world?" by a man who wrote copy for a yet-to-be developed children's entertainment app, and told you're a loser for wearing a waterproof poncho when it was pouring by a man whose mustache curls up at the ends.

What do all of these assholes have in common? They've all obviously read The Game, or watched The Pickup Artist, or lurked in any of a hundred internet forums that treat interactions with human women like a text-based RPG.

Perhaps you enjoy the idea of having sex with a woman whose confidence is so shatteringly fragile that she actually cares how you feel about the print on her pants. But let's just clear up negging once and for all: It doesn't pique our curiosity, or make you seem intriguing. If you think we're so intimidatingly hot that the only way to get us down to your level is to be rude, maybe we just are out of your league? Plus: We are all wise to this shit now. It's been going on for an actual decade, dude. Most of our very first PUA experiences were smuggling our way into a club with a fake ID just so some Julian Assange–looking weasel-in-a-waistcoat could tell us he can read palms.

HOW TO INTRODUCE THE IDEA THAT WE ARE GOING TO HAVE SEX
That's the tipping point: bringing sex to the table, like hefting your dick onto a side plate. It's all about sensing that delicate balance, that perfect moment. You're smoking at the gas station of a one-night stand, here, and you need to avoid saying something like "I want to get you wet" when you're trying to be suave. Saying sleazy stuff out loud, IRL, can turn a man into decomposing Tinder spam quicker than you can say "rape alarm." There is a really thin line between giving us pangs in our lower abdomens and making us want to call the police.

If you're in doubt about whether to invite her back to your place, sound it out. So often the difference between a creep and potential hookup is that a girl actually likes the latter. Ask yourself the big questions: "Have we kissed? Is she only talking to me because I am standing in the doorway of the girls' bathroom? Is she trapped here because I'm sitting on her coat?" Remember that, unless you're Scandinavian, propositioning a woman will never come naturally to you. This is no time for your jittery metaphors or your "let's-get-outta-here" California drawl. And please, literally never say "nightcap": You're not going for a midnight grappa in the Campo de' Fiori; you're both weighing up the idea of smuggling a road beer onto the subway. Know your limits.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

HOW NOT TO SCREW THINGS UP ONCE YOU'RE BACK AT YOUR PLACE
So this is it. Everybody's down to bang. Go time. Game day. Welcome to Fuck City. Population: You and this girl you've been talking to for less than four hours.

In this situation, ambience is important—until you've had a guy change his sheets in front of you before you get in his bed, you don't know the importance of pre-prepared atmosphere. You are not a real estate agent. She doesn't want a tour of the house. Take her to your room at speed. God knows what happens to you guys—perhaps it's the Dorito-jizz fumes coming from your bedspread—but this is where you are capable of undoing an entire night's worth of decent flirting.

Don't pick up that musical instrument in the corner of your room and begin to play it. Don't warn us that you're emotionally unavailable while unbuttoning your trousers. Choose your sex music wisely: D'Angelo is way too obvious; the XX suggests you seriously watch music award shows. And don't use some nickname or innuendo for condom. We all know what you're talking about. Use a condom, obviously. But you don't need to invent some new triple-entendre to ask if we have one shoved inside a desk drawer.

And there you have it. You're getting laid. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Follow Lucy, Amelia, andRoisin on Twitter.

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Sex workers are experiencing a new kind of public law enforcement. Photo via Flickr user Steven Depolo

The internet has supposedly changed everything about commercial sex. Reporters have discovered (again and again) that "prostitutes" are among the 288 million people using Twitter. Web-based ads, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have all been blamed for making paid sex too easy to find. We can't know for certain if the web has expanded the sex industry, or—more likely—simply made it more visible. But the digitally-networked age of commercial sex has inspired at least one new form of sexual entertainment: the internet escort rescue fantasy video.

Set in the hotel rooms, apartments, and private homes where escorts and other sex workers see legitimate customers, these videos are secretly recorded. The men who stage them—police, pastors, television personalities—together are engaged in something not unlike the men who pay for sex: a fantasy, starring them.

Call it soft-core law enforcement.

Soft-core law enforcement's latest celeb is Kevin Brown, a former detective with the Santa Ana, California, police. Now he operates Side-by-Side Church International and an organization called " Lives Worth Saving." Once you scroll past the "donate" button on his website, you can apply to become a member of his "S.T.R.E.E.T." or "C.S.I." teams, which monitor places where sex workers may hang out or advertise, ostensibly to identify "leads involving trafficking." (Brown appears to refer interchangeably to "trafficking" and to online sex work as advertised on sites like Backpage and Craigslist, and makes no mention of forms of trafficking outside the sex industry.) He describes his mission and the amateur surveillance work as a "unique ministry."

These are volunteer gigs, but Brown's ministry has made him a go-to guy for the media when they need a man to explain what kinds of "girls" get involved in the sex trade. Brown even brings his own B-roll: In February 2014, a local CBS affiliate ran his hidden-camera footage of an attempted rescue on a woman presumed to be engaged in sex work, with Brown posing as a customer to get her to talk to him, recording her secretly. "Brown says many of the girls that he contacts are not what you might think," the on-screen reporter intoned. "Many are educated and they have families. He says what he finds is that they are simply manipulated by their traffickers."

Brown's own numerous deceptions—misrepresenting himself as a customer, bringing a camera, broadcasting the footage—are presented without comment.

For his efforts, Brown has been rewarded with his own reality show. From the producer behind Catfish, Gigolos, and Cellblock 6: Female Lockup comes 8 Minutes, starring Brown and another former cop, Greg Reese. The title refers to the time the hosts have given themselves to confront sex workers and convince them to quit on the spot. This is, as the pilot's logline puts it so honestly, "one of the most dangerous, voyeuristic missions in the country." (When I contacted Brown for comment, he directed me to the show's publicist at A&E.)

Audiences should ask whether these former police are not also acting as manipulators, seeking women out for their own gain. Or can most people not recognize the power trip involved in such a public and aggressive exercise in shame? For me, it calls to mind the long-lost term for a woman who sells sex: "a public woman." Sex workers' sin was once understood as an improper display of what was presumed available to all men, and for what the laws of the day referred to as "ill-gain"—her own.

Maybe there's no longer stocks set up for sex workers in the town square—if there even is such a thing as a modern town square—but there are hundreds of channels and clips through which the public can skip the shaming in the town square bit entirely. At night, or on demand, we can peer at bodies in bedrooms and pass our own judgments.

It would be easy to call this show a kind of pornography, clothed lightly in good intentions. A stronger comparison, given Brown and Reese's own histories, would be a real-life cop drama. Eight minutes is enough, the promo materials boast, to convince a woman to escape with these strange men to some promised better life. Flip through a prostitution arrest record, or sit an actual courtroom, and you'll see women there are given barely that much consideration.

In busy "trafficking courts," like the ones in New York, about which I've reported for some time, women arrested for prostitution are all presumed to be in need of such a rescue. Prosecutors decide if they will be offered diversion in the form of court-mandated therapy sessions. Judges can move women's cases along in just a few minutes—half the time Brown and Reese allow themselves. They all rely on the same pop-psych notions: what a woman who has sold sex needs is self-esteem, someone who truly cares for her. They don't deviate much from the sexist stereotypes about why women sell sex—they do it, the narrative goes, because of some personal failing, whether they love it or not, and certainly not for the money. Lines blur between all these fantasies. Even after women have been "rescued" or arrested, they are still expected to play out their role.

In December, 8 Minutes was greenlit for eight episodes. When I asked the show's publicist to explain how women are chosen, she refused to comment, "as we are still in production." How many women will be targeted by Brown? Who will have their work and lives disrupted by strangers and cameras and fears of exposure?

8 Minutes has already faced criticism. The Daily Beast's Samantha Allen called the production "To Catch a Sex Worker"; sex worker blog Tits and Sass likened the show to an ambush, putting even sex workers who want out in harm's way. Besides, writer Lane Champagne points out, "They've already been told to quit... many times." Though the show may sound shocking, there's not much new to see here, except maybe the size of the stage.

"This is one of those great shows that was actually happening whether anybody was shooting it or not," executive producer Tom Forman told Entertainment Weekly, like it was just an incredible coincidence a television crew was on hand.

Soft-core law enforcement shows and stunts are far from sordid. They are an all-American fantasy. They're from an America where young women are presumed to be doing absolutely okay until the moment they cross the threshold of selling sex—the act their rescuers move in to reverse. They're set in an America where behind any hotel room door, any woman might face a similar fate, waiting for the same solution.

This fantasy America has no streets where women are harassed, unsafe homes, overpriced and over-policed schools, jobs that barely cover the expense of getting there shift after shift, or jails or shelters they've already been sentenced to or escaped from. In this fantasy America, all these women need is some guy to come in and talk them out of their decisions. But that fantasy itself is what sex workers might be working to escape.

Follow Melissa Gira Grant on Twitter.

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So many Canadians clamoured for copies of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo—the one with the Prophet Muhammad on the cover—that stores ordered yet another batch of them again this week. But already, Canadians seem to have stopped caring about the satirical French paper.

After 12 of the paper's staffers were killed by terrorists about a month ago, Canadian shops that don't usually carry Charlie stocked up on copies to serve the demand. Worldwide, subscriptions went from 10,000 to 200,000. In Canada, which used to receive only 100 copies, 1,500 copies sold out immediately, and 5,000 more were distributed here to meet the demand.

I spent Friday afternoon In Toronto's Deer Park neighbourhood, at Yonge Street and St. Clair Avenue. There stands a Gateway Newstands that's usually the only shop in Toronto to stock Charlie. They were receiving their fourth shipment of the Prophet issue, because the calls haven't stopped. They sold 40 copies immediately, then another 200, then another 200. Because of the hype, I expected another, albeit short, lineup of people waiting to claim one of the 20 copies for "historical" purposes, or whatever.

But the shop is crickets.

Ron de Guzman works at Gateway, and he said the demand has been more than the shop could handle up until now. They had to stop taking reservations for copies because they couldn't keep up with customers' requests. But interest died down abruptly, and they now receive calls from "one random person per day asking for it." About two people call each day looking for the next issue, which won't be released until February 25. Gateway has ordered 50 copies of that issue.

Other spots in the city, like International News at Bloor and Bathurst, have simply decided not to sell the paper any longer. Peter Song, who works at International News downtown Toronto on Front Street, says they're sold out of the latest edition. As for whether they'll stock future issues, he's "not sure yet."

In Montreal, Maison de la Presse Internationale on Sainte Catherine Street received 100 more copies on Friday. While I couldn't get a specific number, they said had plenty left over in mid-afternoon. Staff at a Moncton, NB Read's location, the only spot in the province to sell Charlie after the murders, couldn't say whether they planned to order in any future issues.

So why did Charlie get bumped to back-of-house news so quickly? I phone Ann Rauhala, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University with a long career in the business, including a five-year stint as the Globe and Mail's foreign editor. In her view, the problem is two-fold: The market is so over-saturated with various tidbits of news; and because our minds are rushing so quickly to keep up with it, we're hesitant to have more nuanced discussions on the would-be compelling topics behind that news.

"It's another sign of our woefully inadequate attention spans and the degree to which we make something terribly important and noteworthy for 2.5 days, and then forget all about it as soon as the next thing comes along," she said. But, once people "sat up and took notice" about the kind of material Charlie publishes, Rauhala said, she thinks they realized it's "a sort of notably juvenile publication."

"When people thought about it a little more clearly," she added, "perhaps they became a little less comfortable raising their fists and talking about freedom of speech."

Part of the reason people have moved back from the paper, she says, may be that the conversation is much more nuanced than it may have seemed in the beginning. The conversation departs from a simple argument over free speech vs. raging tyranny at the hands of religious fanatics, and wades into questioning whether freedom of speech should be a boundless right. And if it has bounds, what should they be? Moving into this territory takes effort, and news cycles don't necessarily allow people to make room for that effort anymore.

"It's like we're running up and down the grocery aisle of journalism, trying to choose what to put in our baskets."

She says that because we can only make a finite number of decisions per day, and we spend those decisions on "ridiculous stuff," we won't have enough space to think through important decisions like these.

In other words, we're thinking about whether a cartoon of Muhammad is funny or appropriate, but not necessarily about freedom of speech as an unlimited right, and how we go about "finding limits that are acceptable to the functioning of a democracy for well-meaning people."

Alternately, she says, maybe people simply realized Charlie Hebdo just isn't such a fascinating publication, after all.

Despite the waning interest, I did find some people who were looking to get their hands on a copy. They mostly appeared to be artists. A middle-aged woman wearing a floor-length leopard print coat, artfully sculpted wire rim glasses, and a knit hat with a giant pearl-embellished bow jauntily fastened to its side marches over to the counter beside me at the Toronto Gateway.

"$7.35 for this crap!?" she exclaimed, after requesting to view a copy. "What they did was wrong."

My head snapped up from my creepy position behind the (bridal?) magazine I was pretend-reading. I asked to hear her thoughts, and found out she's from France.

"I'm not hiding anything, believe you me," said the woman, who refused to give her last name or have her photo taken. But she provided her first name: Anne-Marie. "A lot of what is in there is not necessary. [Those who support the paper say] they're respecting liberty and democracy. But they're trashing democracy. They're trashing liberty." She said the only reason she bothered to purchase her two copies is that her brother is an artist, and he was curious to see them.

Similarly, Beth Cross is an illustrator in Montreal. She said that though she supports Muslims in their right to practice their religion, and to be respected in doing so, she thinks it's important to stand behind the paper's right to free speech no matter what.

"Being someone who went to school for animation, and being an artist that draws cartoons among other things, I was very affected by the mass slaughter of the staff there," she said. She thinks it's fully possible to support both rights simultaneously: "I can support the magazine and still believe in the rights of those from any religion, to practice their beliefs as they see appropriate within the confines of the law of the country they live in."

Others seem to want a copy for investment purposes, or simply as a conversation piece. One person I spoke with planned to pick up a copy a couple of weeks ago when it was first released in order to learn more about the paper, but he lost interest once the buzz died down.

As for the future of Charlie? While interest has flagged in Canada, the paper now has more money than ever before. Formerly bankrupt, the wave of interest has resulted in millions of euro for the publication. Reacting to the sudden influx of money, surviving cartoonist Luz—the one behind the Prophet drawing—told VICE:

"It's not only fundamentalism that kills people. Money kills people."

The paper is lying low until February 25, when "what's next" will be revealed.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

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In 2010, Jade Cantwell spent several months traveling through Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt with a friend. In the months leading up to the Arab Spring they took Arabic lessons and tried to immerse themselves in local politics and culture as much as two white women could. It was a calm and peaceful trip for the Australian photographer, who documented the daily lives of the people she met.

After she returned home, the area erupted and has been volatile ever since. The photographs eventually became her series, Peace Times. With the new context that hindsight provides, her still and tranquil photos take on a new form. They are reminders of the people behind the news reports, and of a time before the area was not besieged with unrest and violence.

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VICE: This series was shot throughout the Middle East in 2010 and has become about the calm in people's lives. Did you feel any tension when you were there?
Jade Cantwell: It's hard to say. It's hard to judge things in an environment so different from what you're used to. We definitely felt tensions in Egypt. We felt least safe there. They'd had a few incidents, there'd been attacks on foreigners. But there were other times, particularly in Syria, where we did feel really safe—or at least it seemed normal.

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That's the feeling you get from the shots, as well as how comforting the mundane can be.
Yeah, it's about the everyday lives people lead there as a contrast to what we think the region is about. Everything we see is about turmoil: war, attacks, and violence—it's a very different image to what people were living. Obviously that picture is different now, but what was interesting was the quietness and beauty to the areas we went to. People were just trying to live their lives.

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When you shot it, did you have a series in mind? Or did it take on meaning in the following the outbreak of violence?
It picked up meaning afterwards. When I shoot I'm just shooting what I like, the things I see, the areas I'm visiting, and trying to capture the feel of a place. It came together afterwards because the images from the next months and onwards have been so violent.

I thought about the fact we see a lot of photography out of that area, and there are a lot of photographers who are attracted to documenting a war torn place. They shoot these incredibly powerful images, but they're of violence and sadness. I think that can desensitize us, and it overlooks the day-to-day lives of people in the region.

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Obviously a lot of young Western photographers are drawn to these areas, but when you're there are you aware of not falling into that trap of cultural tourism?
Oh definitely. I have a degree in communications so I think a lot about what I'm trying to say and the relationship I have with the subject. In some ways it takes the enjoyment out of of shooting. Sometimes I wonder if I overthink it. You don't want to make it seem exotic. Obviously it is to you, but I don't want to take something from someone.

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Does that affect what you decide to shoot?
Yeah, it's like when you look at people taking pictures of homeless people in the street and they think it's really raw or edgy; there may not be a lot of consideration for what you're reducing that person's life to.

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Exactly, it's not only in relation to shooting conflict zones.
It's something we see a lot with the saturation we have of images. There are lots of people picking up photography, shooting all the time, and trying to get their work out there. I think often people go for whatever they think is really high-impact, and that sometimes takes away from the photograph or makes it all feel very same-y.

Words by Wendy Syfret. Follow her on Twitter.

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A screenshot from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's multiplayer mode

It says a lot about video games that Call of Duty is our middle of the road. Despite the kind of worldview that, in any other medium, would spawn dozens of hand-wringing op-eds—exhibit A: American Sniper—its pro-gun, pro-war, "America, fuck yeah!" politics attract less opprobrium than its adherence to genre convention and risk-averse design. It's safe, bland, formulaic fare for the masses, peddling the same old shit year after year to steadily diminishing returns. Yep, Call of Duty is our Coldplay. Drink that in.

Not that Activision is particularly bothered. Its recent financial results revealed that CoD has generated a metric dick-ton of cash: more than $11 billion from global retail sales since 2003, with last year's Advanced Warfare earning $1 billion. That shouldn't come as a surprise: If the world has taught us anything in recent years it's that there's money to be earned from fictional wars centered on killing people who don't speak American.

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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's campaign story trailer

Just as predictable was the news that we're getting another entry in November this year, with the publisher's Dennis Durkin telling investors it was going to be "exciting"—a tacit suggestion, you might argue, that last year's game was thunderously boring—and, more intriguingly, "loaded with innovation." The use of military terminology is telling; perhaps next year's game will be "explosively intense," or "more devastating than an unmanned drone strike."

But I digress: it's the latter claim I'm particularly interested in. Calling this year's game "exciting" isn't about chucking Advanced Warfare under the bus—not with six months' worth of map packs still to sell, at any rate—so much as an easy way to keep investors happy without really having to explain any further. There's a new entry, it's exciting, let's move on. Except a phrase like "loaded with innovation," when applied to a long-running series like CoD, makes you sit up and take notice—not least because it's a promise that developer Treyarch is going to struggle to deliver on. Not only is it operating from a position of relative stasis, it's doing so from within a series that's designed to be disposable. Can a new Call of Duty really afford to be "loaded with innovation" when it's only meant to last a year at most?

It's wise to treat that statement with some suspicion, then, though that's not to say that CoD isn't capable of producing minor surprises—and it's worth remembering that the original Modern Warfare established the contemporary multiplayer template, such that almost every shooter since has borrowed ideas from it. But it made me wonder what kind of meaningful improvements we could potentially see in a new Call of Duty.

Last year's game was widely mocked for its infamous funeral scene, as we were told to hold the square button to solemnly pay our respects to a fallen comrade (or X, depending on your system). Maybe this year we'll jab triangle to weep openly, or mash circle to leap onto the casket as it's lowered into the ground, thumping the lid while wailing, "Why, God, WHY?" (Even then, it's never going to top THQ's Homefront for weapons-grade crassness; one scene invited players to "press X to jump in mass grave.")

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Homefront's mass grave scene

How else could CoD shake things up? Maybe, in a stunning reversal of convention, the game's villain won't turn out to be the guy you're told is the best thing since sliced Twinkies, but who has a disturbing glint in his eyes every time war and/or money is mentioned. Treyarch might just opt to skip the bit where you crawl dutifully through the grass, crouched in tight formation behind two other dudes like the back end of a militarized human centipede. Or maybe—and I realize I'm getting dangerously radical here—you'll get to play as a woman.

I'm being glib, of course, and a little unfair. There's no doubt that Call of Duty continues to serve and satisfy a substantial audience. Video games are expensive—particularly so these days, with publishers' voracious desire to squeeze money from customers with microtransactions and season passes meaning you rarely get an entire game for your initial outlay—and people like to know what they're getting. In that light, you can forgive some players for embracing the comfort of the familiar. And while the breakneck pace of its multiplayer isn't to everyone's tastes, it maintains the interest of its players simply by being good at what it does.

In the interests of balance, then, let's consider what kind of progress we can reasonably expect from a new Call of Duty. Whispers suggest Treyarch is building another Black Ops game, though in light of the controversy that understandably greeted EA's Battlefield: Hardline (which felt misjudged even before Ferguson) a return to real-world war might not be the wisest idea. Then again, CoD has recently—and perhaps deliberately—moved away from realism. This may be a series that uses authentic military hardware and aims for a degree of verisimilitude, but while, say, Advanced Warfare's future tech may be meticulously researched, it's in service of a game that bears more of a resemblance to Michael Bay's Transformers than it does to contemporary conflict.

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Could 'The Vanishing of Ethan Carter' be an influence on the next CoD?

And when considering what a new Call of Duty can bring to the table, we're not just talking about this one series, but the entire FPS genre. It's been a while since we saw something really new, after all: it says something when games like Titanfall (CoD with mechs) and Destiny (a Halo MMO with mobile game hooks) are considered innovators. Even in a series whose heyday might have passed, it's hard to see Activision willing to take too many risks when it's still earning big bucks, so an open-world CoD is almost certainly out.

So we might just see Treyarch take a few cues from the recent spate of so-called "walking simulators." The rise of the first-person experience—or FPX, as appears to be the accepted acronym—is likely to be one of 2015's prevailing trends, as indie games like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter inspire more thoughtful, contemplative ways of exploring digital spaces. Later this year we're getting a bucolic vision of the apocalypse in the Shropshire-set Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, while Adr1ft is basically Gravity minus Sandra Bullock gasping for breath every two seconds. That these games should all feel strange and new has much to do with the fact that they don't force us to look at the world down iron sights.

Sure, all that might seem at odds with CoD's traditional everything-go-boom milieu, but then a bit of downtime could potentially offer a more emotionally satisfying way of engaging with the narrative than "press this button to do an emotion." Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Call of Duty could do this year is to call a temporary ceasefire: to ask you to put the guns down, and think about what you've done. Hey, if nothing else, it'd be a more convincing take on the consequences of war than watching Bradley Cooper staring into the middle-distance while using his little finger to lift the dead arm of a fake plastic baby.

Follow Chris on Twitter.

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Photo by Leslie Sachs

I am a 31-year-old woman who has never been on a date. Well, not a proper one, anyhow. The closest I came was in high school, when I asked a unibrowed record store employee out solely because he wore archaic clothes to and, on the afternoon I entered his store, was listening to a Cheap Suit Serenaders LP. Our "date" was little more than the public consumption of whiskey; it culminated in the two of us drunkenly falling asleep on his twin-sized mattress.

My second closest brush with a date was with a man I had met earlier that evening. At 1 AM, he took me to the waterfall featured in the opening credits of Twin Peaks. As we stared from the darkness of our isolated perch at its illuminated, undulating flow, he quipped that he could, in this moment, very easily kill me and get away with it. I went home with him and didn't leave for two years.

When it comes to dating women, I have even less experience. And by "less experience," I mean, "absolutely no experience." But, consarn it, I want some—I am ready, 30-plus years into the game, to explore the bisexuality I was bequeathed at birth. So when a friend suggested I try lesbian speed dating, I figured, Fuck it. If anything, it was an opportunity to make up for lost time.

Abject confusion was the norm from launch. An exclamation point–riddled email from the event's organizers informed me that the suggested attire was "dressy casual," a.k.a. a total oxymoron. I had no idea how to dress appropriately—I wanted to look like I belonged, but not so much that I looked like a narc. I settled on an oxford buttoned all the way up and an unreasonable amount of makeup. I wanted to cover all my bases.

The evening took place in a dimly lit Hollywood bar, the kind of place that, under normal circumstances, i would never set foot in. I was later told, by one of my fellow attendees, that said bar was allegedly owned by the actress Eva Longoria. (I say "allegedly" because I cannot be bothered to google it, because I do not care.)

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Upon arrival, I mistakenly wandered upstairs, where I found myself surrounded by bloated white men who were talking, presumably, about how great it is to run the fucking world while eating appetizers. I overheard one tell another, "Y'know, on Tuesdays, there's lesbian speed dating downstairs." His companion burst into hysterics upon receipt of this information. I could feel my face turn beet red, like in a teen film, as I ran back down the stairs and into the loving arms of my new coven.

Once I checked in, I was given a nametag, a number (Dater #10, baby!), and a sheet of paper to make my choices on. If I liked a woman romantically, I was to circle the word "date." If I did not but still could still tolerate her existence, I was to circle "friend." Doing neither was the analog equivalent of swiping left.

There was a definitive line in the sand drawn between butch and femme participants; each woman organically gravitated toward her own kind. I was dressed in a more butch than femme fashion, but didn't join my group—frankly, I didn't know which one, if either, I belonged to. Instead, I self-consciously looked at my phone. I felt like I was back in high school.

Alone in the corner, I wrote an email to a guy I have an idiotic, impossible crush on. I visualized wearing his class ring and dry humping at Makeout Point and all that other shit bobby-socked, pie-eyed teen girls are supposed to dream about. But how was I gonna get any gash if I was so gosh-darn boy crazy? I had to put my head in the game.

Two women to my right talked about the Super Bowl. One had missed it because she was having "so much fun on the slopes." The other loved sports—"watching them, playing them." I quickly realized I had as little in common with them as I did with members of the more aggressive sex. This was going to be a trial.

The sports fan finished her conversation with the ski bum and focused her attention on me. Her name was, let's say, Diane. She worked in accounting, but hated it—she was a "businessperson" at heart. She stopped talking at me mid-sentence in order to set her sights on a better dressed, more chipper woman. "San Diego is really chill," she told her new companion. "I love it down there." She then declared that she was of the mindset that "Long Beach has the hottest clubs." I was happy she had chosen to reject me.

There was no order to the conversations taking place around me. At ten minutes past the event's designated start time, women were still talking among themselves. I am not naturally outgoing—if you couldn't tell that already—and wasn't about to throw myself at these strangers. I was paying for an icebreaker, for fuck's sake!

Finally, the night began. My cherry popper, Sandra, told me she been to a speed dating event before, but "a straight one." Her actions were stiff and military-like; she resembled a more butch Ellen Degeneres. In the "notes" section of my sheet, I wrote "N/A" next to her name. I didn't remember a single thing we talked about, other than the act of speed dating itself.

What followed next was a dizzying cavalcade of dames—Eleanor, a personality-deficient nurse from the Philippines; Jenny, who was from Columbus, Ohio (it showed); Jessica, who worked in "disruptive technology." I had never heard of disruptive technology before our conversation—thankfully, she expounded on it in great detail while making little eye contact. She was decent enough looking, but insufferable. I had no desire to make her paradigm shift.

Jessica II (I'm already running out of fake names) was a dietitian who had filed two of her teeth to a point, making them resemble vampire fangs. Rebecca was a satellite engineer who had written a screenplay about dating. Mindy was a banker who, in her spare time, wrote "dark-ass poetry." Maggie was a financial manager (I fear this was her sole defining characteristic).

Jessica III was a social worker who, when I informed her I was a writer, assumed I was going to write something snarky about our evening (sorry, babe). If she could have any career in an alternate universe, she told me, it would be a rabbi or a scientist. I said I'd still be a writer, but a more successful one.

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And so on, and so on. Two hours later, we were done. My mouth hurt. My head hurt. And yet, everyone around me was still anxious to socialize. Obsessed with finding something and somewhere to eat, they could not stop talking about it. They could not stop talking, period. I was out of my element; having spent most of the day beforehand in complete, vacuous silence, my mouth was not used to being used this much. I left while they were still debating where to eat, no closer to love or cunnilingus than when I arrived.

I had, however, learned a valuable lesson: The one thing that unites us all as a people—gay, straight, trans, and beyond—is the inanity of the conversations we have with potential sexual partners. I did not care what these women did for a living. Yet I asked the question to all 20 of them.

I am too much of a misanthrope to date a financial manager; the idea of having to listen to her work anecdotes makes me want to put a gun in my mouth. I am too uptight, too difficult, too judgmental—these are the main criticisms lobbed at me by my "haters." These criticisms of my criticisms are wholly valid. There is nothing inherently wrong with being a financial manager. There is, however, something wrong with needlessly judging one. The group around me didn't find any fault in one another. Hell, they continued talking long after their obligation to had expired. The problem I had with them was squarely on my shoulders.

As I rode the subway home, I surveyed my surroundings. Everyone—male, female—looked like shit. A grown man stood in front of me wearing a backpack in which he had written the words "Killer Disco" in permanent marker. Staring at it, I realized that, unless I stopped being such a judgmental prick, I was going to be, no matter what sex I desired, fucked. Figuratively, of course. Not literally.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

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Craig Hamilton

This post first appeared on VICE UK.

"I'm always worried people will come 'round and think, 'They've got big sofas,' or, 'He even has a TV.' We actually got the couches from Freecycle."

Craig Hamilton is 39, lives in Manchester with his wife, and has plenty to worry about. According to figures published by The Methodist Church, every day between January 2009 and March 2014, an average of 100 claimants with proven psychological disorders received benefit sanctions, issued by Job Centre Plus. In other words, mentally ill people had their benefit money stopped in punishment for making mistakes. Craig is one, introduced to me by the mental health charity MIND.

When I visited his apartment, he cleared a little space for me to sit, in a room he self-consciously admitted to being, "cluttered, a bit like my mind ." It quickly became obvious why he was slightly nervous. "The thing I'm scared about, in doing this interview, is that's it's going to go out there and people are going to read it and think, 'Look at him, he hasn't done X,Y, Z in ages.' I'd honestly love to get back to paying taxes, and get into work."

In 1996, just after his 21st birthday, Craig's then girlfriend took him to the hospital. Admitted for a three-day observation, it was another six months before he left, having been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. His problems remain profound, with symptoms like depression and anxiety affecting his motivation and organization.

Despite being unable to work due to the severity of his condition, welfare payments stopped for six weeks in November 2012 because he failed to attend a medical appointment. While the system is supposed to help people like Craig, the bureaucracy surrounding it wasn 't sympathetic to his condition. People with mental health difficulties are far more likely to receive sanctions that those with injuries or physical disabilities.

"Having mental health problems, at times I function well, but it can be hard to build up any routine," he told me. "When the letter came asking me to attend, I was living on my own, and it's easy to lose letters, dates – forget things. With a disjointed life I was unable to organize myself even to get support to attend a meeting. Some people would say it's my fault, but that organization is difficult for me."

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The sanction left him desperate and penniless during winter. To make matters worse it happened shortly before his wedding. "The form they sent was really, really horrible. I've actually started to help out at a food bank, because I didn't even know about food banks when I was sanctioned. I lived off a credit card, which is not good in the long run. In the end I actually got the money paid and backdated, but by then I was in debt on my credit card. "

The stress felt by Craig at the time is obvious as he recounts the lengths he went to to get the sanction overturned. "I remember phoning them up, begging. This was after the wedding. My mum was going for cancer treatment, my wife was still living in London, caring for her mum with alzheimer's, and had begun self-harming, which she had never done before. It was awful, a really bad time. I was literally begging them, explaining I needed money to travel. It took many calls, including someone from MIND getting on the phone, who helped me get re-assessed and get my benefits re-instated."

Last year, a series of reports showed that care and support for mental health is chronically underfunded and under-resourced in England. 22 of 34 adult acute mental health trusts that responded to requests for information from Channel 4 News, said they had seen funding cut in the last two years, with 16 paring back crisis team budgets, and 18 reducing funding to community mental health teams. In November, MIND released statistics showing that local authorities spend just 1.36 percent of their public health budgets on mental healthcare.

The government has recently announced an increase in mental health investment for 2015 to 2016. But, conflictingly, this pledge comes at a time when local authorities are being asked to make cuts that may impact on the provision of some mental health care and support.

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"It's just becoming so much more difficult to get appointments ," said Craig. "You hear Nick Clegg and Jeremy Hunt talking about improving mental health services... But I just don't know how they are going to do it whilst they are cutting. It doesn't seem to add up."

Craig told me that if he gets sanctioned again, he 'll be prepared. He has a stash of tinned food, a constantly replenished stock of frozen meals he made earlier, and a clean credit card, so he wouldn't go hungry straight away. Nevertheless, you can 't help but feel like mental health patients shouldn 't have to hoard things like they 're preparing for a nuclear winter.

Kirsty McDonald from Stockport, just south of Manchester, had a similar experience to Craig's. She has her own house to show for ten years in a job where she ended up on £40,000—a career that was ended by mental health problems. Extreme mood swings and difficulties controlling emotions meant that, after nine months of sick leave, she failed to return to work. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Disciplinary action began, and she lost her job in November 2011.

Last November she had her benefits sanctioned for non-attendance of an appointment. "I received £80 instead of £220, " she told me. "My feeling is even if I didn't attend an appointment, I'm going to college three days a week, I'm in therapy one day a week, and was volunteering around four to five hours a week at a local football team. But if I hadn't attended one 15-minute appointment, they could still sanction me. "

She insisted she was never informed about the appointment in writing, and following a lengthy battle, Kirsty finally managed to get the decision overturned and the money paid back. But she was left hanging in the mean time. "Luckily, I was able to prove they never gave me the appointment," she said. "Everything seems to have taken forever. From when I was sanctioned, it has taken them six weeks to pay the money they owed me, and they didn't seem to be taking much action on that until they saw I had spoken to the media. Everything was dragging. "

That wasn't the only time she's had to fight against the system that's supposed to support her. After taking the DWP to a tribunal in 2013 to prove she was unfit to work—a case settled in her favour outside court—Kirsty was told she wouldn't need to return to work for at least 12 months, and has yet to be reassessed. Nevertheless, she has been placed in a Work Related Activities Group, designed to get people into employment quickly.

"They're basically putting people in that social workers and psychiatrists are dealing with, " she said. "From a mental health perspective, for instance, I've been in daycare today for my condition. I go a full day a week and I'm with trained social workers who have experience. The people at the work programme have no knowledge of mental health, so even if you explain to them what your condition is they are still clueless, unless they have dealt with it in their personal lives."

Now five months into a treatment program that should last for around another 19, doctors have already stated there's little chance she will be well enough to return to any job during that time, although there is some hope afterwards.

But she still needs to engage in pointless Work Related Activities, or face heavy penalties. "It was considered a work related activity when I was sent by the work program on a six week NVQ Level 1 course in Health & Social Care, even though I don't want to do anything related and want to study towards social work. I still went, to make sure I ticked the boxes and wouldn't be sanctioned."

Kirsty's own efforts at self-improvement, meanwhile, are discounted. "At the moment, I am studying an access to higher eduction course and I've applied to do a social work degree in September, but that's not considered to be a work related activity, whereas the six week course that was never going to get me a job was."

Kirsty sees the situation as a "one size fits all process ." But one size clearly does not fit all. With the stress of further sancitons looming if they slip up, what can be said for both Kirsty and Craig is that the toll taken on their mental health is as damaging as it is sadly ironic. "I know the services will be inundated, so what happens if I get sanctioned again?," asked Craig.

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Would you fuck the inside of a foot?

Some people would, apparently, because the Vajankle—a sex toy in the shape of a foot with a vagina attached (as seen in our Valentine's Day Gift Guide)—has been bankrolled. Last month, the item caused an international furor when news websites started reporting on it in a state of torrid incredulity. But now that the media frenzy has died down, what lies in store for the Vajankle?

What many don't know, as Bronwen Keller of Sinthetics—the company that makes the Vajankle—informs me, is that the Vajankle was in fact created in 2013 when a repeat buyer contacted the company and asked if he could put a vagina on one of the feet they'd already manufactured. "He explained he wanted to be able to see and massage the foot while having sex with it," Keller says, "and so the Vajankle was born."

Why, then, wasn't it until 2015 that the Vajankle shot to fame? Keller thinks the foot may have piqued the interest of the internet because an individual named Dixie De La Tour, founder of sex storytelling show Bawdy Storytelling, began talking about the product on Twitter. And yet, despite the ensuing media attention, Sinthetics has probably sold fewer than 100 Vajankles to date.

This is partly because the company doesn't advertise, says Keller. "But our foot guys do manage to find us. We've sold hundreds of pairs of feet over the years." If this sounds like a small figure, consider that each foot takes quite a long time for Keller's husband Matt and his production team to make. "Everything we do is individually handmade," she says. "We use medical-grade platinum silicone, which is an expensive and finicky product. The molds we produce from are made in our studio, from sculpts and life casts that we also do in-house. Each Vajankle has two different silicone parts. Then it has to be trimmed by hand, painted, sealed, finished, and, finally, given toenails."

"Each Vajankle has two different silicone parts. Then it has to be trimmed by hand, painted, sealed, finished, and, finally, given toenails."

Sinthetics don't just make vagina feet. No one could make a living thus. They specialize in a variety of alarmingly lifelike manikins (they prefer not to use the term "dolls," though many of their customers are comfortable doing so), and the Vajankle becomes less creepy the more time you spend on the website. This is in part because it isn't a faithful replica of an actual body part; people don't, in other words, tend to have vaginas growing out of their feet, nor does a severed limb often resemble a vagina at the wound.

Keller is so unfazed by the whole thing, she could be selling bathroom furniture. She must have seen so many Vajankles by now that she is sick of them, right? "No way!" she says. "That thing is hilarious!"

The section of the Sinthetics website in which the aforementioned "foot guys" ask questions about the Vajankle is a remarkable insight into human behavior. Here are five queries, all of which seem perfectly sincere and have been diligently answered by a spokesperson for the company:

1. Are the toes strong enough to hold bees?

2. Would you consider putting a butthole on the other food [ sic] that doesn't have a vagina?

3. Would you consider putting some teeth inside?

4. Hi, are you considering a Vajarmpit at all?

5. Is the foot small enough to put in my anus?

[body_image width='720' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/02/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/10/' filename='vajankle-ralph-jones-body-image-1423580794.jpg' id='26063']
Photos courtesy of Sinthetics

Despite the fact that the Vajankle has yet to fly off the shelves (and who can expect it to, at $175), what it has done is render foot fetishes tabloid-worthy, where they have previously been deemed a relatively innocuous blip on a vast, Technicolor fetish spectrum.

What the coverage of the Vajankle seemed to do, in pushing the fetish into mainstream media, was exaggerate its weirdness, and imply that if you were turned on by feet, then why wouldn't you be turned on by a foot that had a bonus vagina? But there are, of course, plenty foot fetishists who don't have a desire to actually pound one made of silicone.

Graham*, 19, from North Carolina, is one of these people. I ask him about this particular turn-on. "I used to feel pretty badly about it," he says, "until I found out that a lot of people have it, even if it's suppressed in their subconscious."

"The fetish for me is more online than in real life," adds Graham, who goes by "Toes in My Mouth" on Twitter. "Mainly because in real life you may run into issues (i.e., a woman may not share your fetish). I'm very private about it, because most people simply don't feel the same way."

It's the toes that arouse Graham the most, and he therefore doesn't think he will be a convert to the Vajankle. Though he admits that the toy is "innovative," he objects to the vagina being at the top of the foot, as opposed to by the toes themselves. A huge fan of the footjob, Graham prefers it when a woman's toes mimic the effect of a vagina. "Some people like soles, and I can appreciate them too," he says, "but not as much as the toes."

How do these foot fetishes start, you wonder? Graham knows he can trace his obsession with feet back to when he was three. "I just remember my aunt had really nice feet," he says, "and when you're three you're a busybody, always curious. One time she came to our house and I remember her toes just glistened. And I was shy, but I still loved her toes. So I threw a cover over myself like Shaggy and Scooby and went to her while she was on the phone and just inhaled her toes. It was amazing. Not sexual, but I just loved her feet. My mama pulled me off her, though, and I realized then that it wasn't going to be acceptable or cool to be into feet. That's kinda why I keep it suppressed."

Graham thinks that foot fetishists are still perceived as oddballs, but that the situation is "getting better." Perhaps if his fetish can be accepted, so can a desire to use the Vajankle. The affectionate way in which Keller speaks about her clients indicates that she is perfectly at ease with their wondrously varied fetishes, and that the company aims to keep a dedicated demographic very happy.

The Vajankle exists because a man was comfortable enough to ring Sinthetics up and ask that his specific sexual fantasy be brought to life just for him. In doing so he wasn't hurting anyone, nor was he imposing anything on anyone, and he has likely enjoyed the fruits of his decision since. If you, too, like the idea of fucking a foot but felt too shy about ordering a Vajankle during the media storm, the time might be ripe to buy one.

*Name has been changed.

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