An Icelandic opinion poll revealed on Thursday that the nation's most popular political party is Píratar, or in English: the Pirate Party. This young and iconoclastic cadre of technorati usually get single digit results in such polls, but it appears that 23.9 percent of the nation would vote for them if a parliamentary election were held today. That's a massive figure, considering that the center-right Independence Party, which has dominated Icelandic politics since independence in 1944 and is the lead partner of the ruling coalition, only scored 23.4 percent support in the same poll.

"You must be joking," Brigitta Jónsdóttir, a Pirate Member of Parliament and the leader of the Party, blurted out to mbl.is when they told her about the results of the poll that morning.

"To be completely honest," she elaborated to Visir later in the day, "I don't know why we enjoy so much trust. We are all just as surprised, thankful and take this as a sign of mistrust towards conventional politics."

"It is good that people are rejecting corruption and hubris. We take this with humility. This must be a clear message to the government, especially to the Independence party and their arbitrary government."

Supporting Jónsdóttir's anti-establishment hypothesis, the poll also saw a drop in support for the Progressive Party, the Independence Party's coalition partner, from 15 percent in February to 11 percent today. Popular support for the ruling coalition has also fallen to 33.4 percent recently. Meanwhile support for alternative parties like the Green Party and the antinomian Bright Future (itself formed in 2012 as a non-partisan, populist protest to existing parties) also rose from 10.8 percent and 10.3 percent in February to 12.9 percent and 15 percent this week, respectively.

Iceland's Pirate Party is part of an international political movement that originated in Sweden in 2006 under the leadership of Rickard Falkvinge. Along with many folks who worked on the torrent site The Pirate Bay, from which the movement derives its name, the Swedish techie-turned-activist started stumping for technologically facilitated direct democracy, anti-corruption efforts, net neutrality, and a liberal freedom of information policy. Likeminded individuals throughout the world, but especially in Western Europe and North America, have since formed their own Pirate Parties along the same lines, 22 of which coordinate their platforms with the help of Pirate Parties International, a non-governmental organization formed in Belgium in 2010.

In most of Europe, the Pirates' homeland, they've gained little real political power. In 2009, Sweden managed to send two Pirates to the European Parliament, but in 2014 support in the nation dropped from 7.1 percent to 2.2 percent of the vote. That year's European Parliamentary elections saw just one Pirate elected, representing Germany to the EU. (That EUMP, Julia Reda, has had a powerful impact on the continent, writing a draft proposal on a new harmonized and liberalized European copyright regime this January for consideration this spring.) Elsewhere, Pirates have only been elected to a few municipal or provincial offices, but none outside of Iceland have made it to national legislative seats. For the most part they make their name off stunts like the one pulled this January by Swedish Pirate Gustav Nipe, who tricked top national politicians, military officers, and journalists into logging into an unsecured Wi-Fi connection he was running at a security conference to protest surveillance programs.

Yet somehow the party took off more rapidly and effectively in Iceland than anywhere else. The local party was founded in November 2012 by Jónsdóttir (a poet-turned-politician who was at the time a WikiLeaks volunteer and member of Parliament) and a few other Icelanders famous for their support of internet freedoms and direct democracy. Within five months, in the April 2013 parliamentary elections, they'd won three seats for Jónsdóttir, a computer programmer named Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson, and a college student named Jón Þór Ólafsson—the first and, to date, only national legislative win for any Pirate Party. Currently the sixth largest member of the national government, sitting in the opposition, they also hold one of 15 councilor seats in the government of the capital and local metropolis of Reykjavik.

Within the past two years, the sitting Pirate representatives have made a name for themselves by promoting crowd sourced governance initiatives and a vision of Iceland as a digital data haven. In July 2013, just a few months into their first term, Gunnarsson and Ólafsson drew international attention by proposing that the parliament grant Edward Snowden, then hiding in the Moscow airport, Icelandic citizenship so that he could arrive and seek refuge in the nation without fear of extradition. A symbolic gesture, it had no chance of passing, but it was great press for the cadre.

However even given their impressive track record, this was a huge jump for the Pirate Party. In the 2013 elections, they scored just 5.1 percent of the national vote. Over two years they slowly climbed to 12.8 percent (versus 25.5 percent for the Independence Party) in the February 2015 MMR opinion polls. Then suddenly they climbed last Friday (according to a poll conducted by the major Icelandic newspaper Fréttablaðið) to 22 percent support, putting them in second place relative to the Independence Party. And within days they've hit first place.

"I didn't really expect this to happen within a decade of the first party founding," Falkvinge said of this rapid rise in a recent Reddit post, expressing the general bemusement of observers in Iceland and abroad. "That's kind of cool. No actually, it's bloody awesome."

Despite the steady increase in Pirate approval since 2012, this sudden jump could be a knee jerk reaction to local politics (maybe misgivings over the manner of the current regime's revocation of Iceland's EU membership application, but no one's sure) that will cool down in a few weeks. But Iceland is the nation that, almost by instinct, elected an absurdist comedian as mayor of Reykjavik in 2009 and kept him around until 2014—so they just kind of roll with their guts these days, rapidly overturning old norms, meaning the Pirate Party's numbers could hold. And if they do, they could claim up to 16 seats in the 63-seat Alþingi (parliament) when the next elections come around in 2017. That'll give them the leverage to possibly join a ruling coalition, putting Pirates in charge of an entire nation, which would just be a fascinating experiment in outsiders-turned-insiders and open democracy to watch, making it an outcome worth rooting for. Go Pirates, go!

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Our third season ofVICE is currently airing Fridays on HBO, and you should all obviously be watching. We just aired a new episode where host Gianna Toboni explored the growing number of Americans joining patriot groups to take up arms along the border. Then we sat down with Toboni to debrief the episode and reflect on her time reporting on the American right-wing militias who say they're protecting and defending the Constitution. Check it out above.

Watch VICE Fridays at on HBO at 11PM, 10PM Central.

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Gray (center) with her Divas. All photos courtesy of Sandra Gray

In 1994, a young woman walked into a Marietta, Georgia fabric shop looking for someone to make a last-minute costume for her boyfriend. Two years later, that young woman would become Sable, WWE Diva, wrestling fashion icon, and all-around babe. Her boyfriend (now ex-husband) was Johnny B. Badd aka Marc Mero, and he needed something to wear for the Pay-Per-View event he was wrestling in that week in North Carolina.

The woman in the Marietta fabric shop was Sandra Gray. Although it was the middle of a busy prom season and she had never sewed on spandex before, this woman was begging her, so Gray told Sable to come by her house later and she'd get it done. That chance encounter led Gray to a new career as a seamstress and designer for the WWE, a job she still holds today, over 20 years later.

When she first began, Gray wasn't familiar with pro wrestling, but her two young sons were.

"They knew all about who [Johnny B. Badd] was," she remembers. "They were super excited. So I took on this job, never having sewn on spandex before, and I made him a pair of trunks. I didn't know the technique, and I didn't have anyone to ask. I just did the best I could, and I was going to get the chance to see my work on TV. My whole family was excited."

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Wrestling brothers Stardust and Golddust in Gray's creations

Her family watched the match and kept screaming "Put him down!" at the television as Johnny B. Badd was repeatedly yanked up and put on the turnbuckle. Much to her relief, his trunks stayed up and, after the show, Marc Mero called and thanked her for the outfit.

"That just meant so much to me that he took the time to [call]," she said. "He did and that's how I got my start in professional wrestling. I must have done a good job because he started telling people where he got his trunks from, and people started to call me. I basically just taught myself."

Gray has been a self-taught seamstress ever since her mom won a sewing machine in a women's club bingo raffle on an army base. She and her siblings all messed around with the machine that summer, but it stuck with her. By the time school had started that year, she was already making herself clothes.

Her ability to quickly pick up a technique and create something beautiful, functional, and, nowadays with a lot of rhinestones, has served her well. Many people, especially those unfamiliar with the world of pro wrestling, underestimate what a crazy thing it is that this huge production, Monday Night Raw, is put on each week around the country with no off-season.

"It's like a family," Gray explains. "I look at us like gypsies. We all come together and then we roll into this city and put this huge show together. Then it's over and we move on to the next city. But we love what we do, and it takes so many people to make this thing work. It's a beautiful product."

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A young director named Max Landis describes the beauty of WWE in his short film Wrestling Isn't Wrestling. He calls Monday Night Raw "the best soap opera on television" and articulates the feelings of so many wrestling fans when they try to describe their fandom: it can be cheesy, but when it's good, it's great. Gray is a core part of creating the costumes that are capable of making grown people wish they could play pretend again.

Twenty years into the gig, she still thrives on the last-minute stresses and spontaneous collaborations that happen when creating an entire wardrobe for a cast of characters each week. She makes many of the Divas' outfits and works with a team of two other seamstresses. At this point in her career, the higher-ups don't need to tell her much more than "We need this costume for Monday night."

The wrestlers might give her a color or an idea of the sort of look they'd like, and she runs with it from there, translating it into an embellished version of what they describe. She pays a lot of attention to the personalities of the wrestlers, as a seamstress making individual gear for six different women. Whether it's the sexy-athletic look of Nikki Bella or neon disco queen outfits for Alicia Fox and Cameron, a look has to be created that both defines a character and supports them as they dive off the top rope.

"The costumes really take a beating, so there's just a certain technique for stitching on spandex," she explains. "It has to be tight-fitting to the body; they have to feel it. If I see them in the ring and they pull on their outfit or tug at it, then I haven't done my job because something's not fitting right."

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On March 29, WrestleMania, pro wrestling's Super Bowl, will take place at the Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Comparing it to Christmas, Gray says that no matter how prepared they are, there will always be the last minute things that come up on the road. Right now, she's staying up late nights to finish the costumes for one of the weirder wrestling teams: real-life brothers Stardust and Goldust.

WrestleMania craziness is how Gray wound up on E!'s Total Divas. On her first episode, Gray dealt with the stress of having the wrong feathers delivered, something that resembled chicken feathers more than Vegas showgirl feathers. The panic resulted in some hilarious scenes of Gray snapping at the girls to "get out of her face for a few minutes" as she hustled to get things ready.

The team members get on each other's nerves like any group of people who travel together each week, but Gray describes working with them the way parents talk about their children. Gray explains that she was practically unaware of being filmed for Total Divas because she was working extra hard to make sure the women looked beautiful for their families as they made their WrestleMania debut. The company and the wrestlers support her in return.

When she's not designing wrestling outfits, Gray works with her other love, vintage clothing, in her Tampa Bay home. She has a vintage shop on Etsy, SGO Vintage, and recently put on a fashion show that benefitted a nearby domestic violence shelter. WWE talent like Cesaro and Roman Reigns modeled for her. "They wear spandex all the time, so they love to dress up," she says. "They get the chance to put on the tuxedo or gown, and they're all over that. The guys like it as much as the ladies do. They're so awesome. They come out there and they're like 'What do you need me to do? Where do you need me to stand?'"

Gray's love for the wrestlers has kept her going through years on the road, whether creating black and gold latex suits for Goldust or Dolph Ziggler's spring breaker shorts with "Show Off" stitched on the rear. "I get to do what I love to do and travel with this amazing company," she says. "The cool thing is when I create something from this wad of fabric, there are people all over the world who really enjoy seeing it. It's a good feeling."

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Every day for nearly a week straight at the start of last December, Vincent and a group of volunteers traveled to a friend's printing shop in Kampala, Uganda right before it closed at 6:00 PM. They'd wait from a close distance as the last group of customers trickled out and disappeared down the street. Once clear, they'd file in. The shopkeeper would hand off the keys and leave. The shutters would be drawn, and for the next 12 hours they'd work to print thousands of copies of what is now one of the most important pieces of literature in Uganda's LGBTI* history.

"The friend who runs that shop risked his business to help us," said Vincent, who did not give his last name. "But it was important that we did it at night, because no one could see us. We didn't want anything to happen."

It's called Bombastic magazine, and within its pages are dozens of stories from Uganda's socially, legally, and often violently oppressed sexual minority communities. In one story, a woman recalled concerns that surfaced in her office that she might be a lesbian because she declined sexual advances from her boss. Shortly after she saw her name printed in an anti-gay tabloid, she was fired. On another page, a transgender lesbian describes the onset of a deep depression when her body started to grow breasts.

But while Bombastic showcases a fair number of dark stories, it is mostly a document of resilience. Sexual revelations, news reports on LGBTI issues, and editorials against Uganda's infamous anti-homosexual culture give the zine a communiqué-meets-confessional feel. Vincent says this is because the publication is meant to educate those outside of the gay community.

We wanted to create something in print for the farmer at work in his field near Kampala, or the taxi driver who doesn't have a radio.

"We wanted to reclaim our media space, as there is not a platform for us on TV or the radio," he said. "There is also little access to internet across Africa, so we wanted to create something in print for the farmer at work in his field near Kampala, or the taxi driver who doesn't have a radio."

"Homophobia is created from a distance. But we are the people you live with," he continued. "We are the people you work with. We are the people you go out at night with. These stories show that."

While same sex relations are discriminated against by law in more than 70 countries worldwide, Uganda's push to make them punishable by death in 2009 became a lightning rod for international attention, particularly after it was revealed that three American Evangelical Christians may have influenced its drafting.

In March of that year, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Schmierer, outspoken pastors who contended that same-sex attraction is curable and that the "gay movement" is evil, traveled to Kampala to lead a three-day conference on societal threats posed by "the gay agenda." According to the New York Times, these talks were a highlight event, attracting the country's political figures along with thousands of civilians.

Months later, the Anti Homosexuality Bill debuted in Uganda's parliament. While two of the pastors denounced the bill's capital punishment clause as excessive, it eventually came to light that the third, Scott Lively, had consulted lawmakers on its formulation behind closed doors. Three years after the conference, Lively was sued by a Ugandan NGO for crimes against humanity.

An iteration of the bill passed in 2013 but was annulled by a constitutional court in 2014 due to a lack of quorum when the law was passed. But Ambrose, who helped organize Uganda's first pride parade and acted as a volunteer coordinator during Bombastic's production, said that while the law only existed for a few months, the years around it have been marked by high anti-gay sentiment in the nation.

"There have been a lot of outings since the law was introduced," Ambrose said, referring to a common practice where national tabloids print the names and faces of suspected LGBTI community members, sometimes as cover stories, and sometimes with demands of violence. He says he's had his name printed a few times.

But when he spoke about his community's struggle, his voice was remarkably at ease. Ambrose shrugged off my question of whether he and others have sought political asylum. "Maybe some people leave because they can't handle the pressure," he said, before breaking into a belly laugh. "This is a battlefield. Some fight on, some flee, some die. We are fighting for a free country. For the future."

One of the biggest indications of Bombastic's impact is the flood of emails Vincent and others receive every day at their primary media site, Kuchu Times. Since printing and distributing all 15,000 copies of the magazine's first run ("Even I don't have a copy, the demand is so high," Ambrose noted), international support has continued to pour in, overwhelming their small editorial troupe with expressions of gratitude, donation offers, and media requests.

This is a battlefield. Some fight on, some flee, some die. We are fighting for a free country. For the future.

"People need this publication," Vincent told me. He noted how Ugandan parents make up a significant portion of that incoming correspondence. Largely educated on gay or transgender issues by the country's demonizing media campaigns, many parents reached out to Bombastic to thank them for broadcasting stories that felt similar to what their sons and daughters had gone through, and which they would have struggled to understand without reading Bombastic's accounts.

"They read these stories and see that this is happening in their house, and then they reach out because they want to know how to talk to their children," he said.

Another measure of impact came when Bombastic's editor and human rights activist Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera was called for a visit by Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Simon Lokodo. Lokodo is often considered a staunch enemy of the LGBTI community, due to national crusades like his 2012 campaign to ban 38 non-governmental organizations in the country that he believed were promoting homosexuality.

"All he did was ask her some basic questions about the magazine," said Vincent. Some time after Nabagesera left, according to Vincent, Lokodo ordered police to collect any copies of Bombastic they found in public. "But the message was already out," continued Vincent. "People had already read it, including the minister. That is what matters."

The magazine has been burnt in public and its volunteers and editors have been accosted with threats of violence. But Nabagesera, Ambrose, Vincent, and their crew of more than 100 volunteers are already planning a second edition of 15,000 copies, with an ambitious distribution plan that aims to get an issue into every pair of Ugandan hands.

"When you look at the media's perception of [the LGBTI community], so much is focused on AIDS, human rights, types of advocacy," said Ambrose. "But there is a gap between these things and the voices of the people they affect."

"We heard the call for these stories," he concluded, "So we responded to the call. We responded with Bombastic."

*The Ugandan queer community explicitly includes "I" for "intersex" in their acronym.

Follow Johnny Magdaleno on Twitter.

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William Marston, the psychologist and comic author who created Wonder Woman, believed that the only way to save the world from war was for women to rule the world and for men to become more like women. Marston was, among other things, a noted psychological researcher and an enthusiastic bondage fetishist; he believed comic books were a great form for educational, anti-patriarchy propaganda. Wonder Woman was designed to bring the world to matriarchy through confronting abuse and modeling girl power, genderfucking, bondage play, and erotic mind control. Writer, comics expert, and editor of the Hooded Utilitarian blog Noah Berlatsky explores the badass genesis of Wonder Woman in his latest book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. VICE recently spoke with Berlatsky about misandry, lesbianism, and Marston's radical feminist agenda.

VICE: I never thought that comics were purposely written to change the world before I read your book. You say Marston was a radical feminist psychologist who invented Wonder Woman as bondage-filled "psychological propaganda" for world peace. Is this kind of agenda common in comics? How did you make the discovery?
Berlatsky: I don't think this agenda is very common in comics! At least not in the corporate superhero comics of the 1940s that Marston was working on. Most of the creators at that time were working class, often Jewish, and were coming out of a pulp milieu; they were mostly interested in making money and providing entertaining product.

Marston on the other hand was a WASP and a former academic... and a big old crank, too. His vision of a matriarchal utopia is pretty well-known among folks who read those comics—he isn't exactly subtle about it—so I knew more or less going in. Reading more of his psychological theories and his academic work, I was surprised at how directly he believed comics could be propaganda. There's one great story where Wonder Woman's scientist friend Paul von Gunther projects images of Wonder Woman into the brains of iniquitous industrialists in order to get them to submit and become good supporters of the war effort. So the idea that images of Wonder Woman could make men (and women too!) submit to an erotic matriarchal utopia is something Marston promotes very directly in the comics.

I loved the parts where you talked about the lasso of truth, mind control, and stamping eroticized images of Wonder Woman on evil men's minds to turn them into Reformandos who fight patriarchy. I used to do erotic hypnosis—fem dom mind control—for a living. Sometimes I thought I was changing the world by brainwashing these men to be better people, but other times that seemed like an insanely lofty goal for phone sex. Do you think fem dom mind control can just inherently be something that disrupts patriarchy?

Marston would be beside himself with joy to hear that you had ambitions to change the world with erotic hypnosis. He would kiss your feet (as it were).

I talk a bit in the book about whether women [acting] as dominatrixes is feminist, or can disrupt patriarchy. The conclusion I came to was, "it depends." There have been a number of feminist theorists—like Tania Modleski, for example—who are really skeptical of the way people like [Georges] Bataille and Sascher Masoch [the Austrian writer for whom masochism was named] use masochism. Masoch loves the idea of strong women, but his love seems connected to the idea that strong women subvert or parody the Patriarch, not the Patriarchy.

Men hate men; misandry is one of the main modes of the patriarchy. Guys love the idea of overthrowing other more powerful guys and putting themselves in their place. So, for Masoch, there's no feminist agenda; the dominatrix is about subverting the male law in the name of some other guy, basically. And in fact at the end of Venus in Furs, Masoch talks about how he plans now to pick up the rod and is ready to put aside childish things and (the implication is) to beat women.

But Marston has a real feminist agenda, I think, not just in the sense that he wants to put women in power, but in the sense that he wants to overturn the patriarchal idea that power should rule, or that the strongest should rule. Marston sees erotic submission as important not because it puts men down but because submission is actually for him a virtue. Erotic submission is about releasing control to the one you love, for him. So, yes, I think that is opposed to the values patriarchy tells us are important, and I think it has feminist implications, or can have feminist implications when coupled to a belief in women's power, and women's right to power, as in Marston's worldview.

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Your book discusses how some of the comics show symbolic incest, the denial of the mother figure, and then Wonder Woman and the Holliday girls come to the rescue and there is some pretty sophisticated symbolic healing and re-integration. Can reading the comics be healing?
I don't know that I'd thought about the comics in terms of healing directly. Marston intended the comics to be inspiring and reassuring for girls. He has a lot of sequences where he says directly: women can do anything! Women are better at sports than boys! Here, Wonder Woman will show all you girls how to perform fantastic feats while wearing chains, because you are all awesome (especially when wearing chains)!

There's one issue where it's about how people resist the idea of women contributing to the war effort, and Marston explains that women working in the war effort is actually awesome and vital. I think he was making a very deliberate effort to encourage girls to see themselves as strong and capable and awesome. Gloria Steinem, for instance, took that to heart, and said it inspired her.

So there's that sense in which you could say he was healing, or counteracting, some of the negative stereotypes or messages girls get. I think that's the more comfortable feminist message. But, you know, there are those chains too. One of the messages he was trying to counteract was the idea that girls shouldn't be sexual, or should be afraid of sexuality, or should be ashamed of a sexual desire to submit, or to dominate, or both at once. The comics present sexuality and bondage play as something that's fun for girls and for children of all ages.

At the same time, I think Wonder Woman #16, and some of the other comics, also present sexual abuse and violence as clearly evil—something that should be fought and condemned—while at the same time not condemning children's sexuality, and acknowledging that sexual control is something that people often enjoy, without it being evil or wrong. That's a really difficult line to walk. Marston's take on those issues, and his acknowledgement of both children's sexuality and of sexual abuse, could be important for our culture.

Marston was also addressing boys; he thought boys could love strong female heroes too, both in the sense that they could see them as desirable, and identify with them or want to be them. So, if there's healing, it's for boys as well as girls, and part of the healing is the idea that boys can be girls; that everyone, of every gender, can be sisters.

So when you talked about the necessity of integrating with one's shadow self, that wasn't about healing from trauma?
No, of course that was about healing from trauma and from sexual violence and reintegration. I think the comic was talking about the necessity or power of female/female relationships, and mother/daughter relationships, in healing from trauma. I'm just hesitant to say that the comics themselves would heal people. People's response to art is so individual. I'm sure Marston would like to think that the sympathetic representation of trauma could be healing.

Would you say that the comics are meant to be instructional?
To some degree. It's certainly supposed to demonstrate the seriousness of sexual assault. It very much insists that listening to children when they say they've been assaulted is vital. And he absolutely wanted people to look to mothers as love leaders who would lead them on to utopia and healing.

I mean, Marston's comics are always meant to be instructional. He called them propaganda.

It's awkward to mix the kinky propaganda and the serious propaganda against child abuse, but that was one of Marston's gifts. And that mixture was reflected in his life as a therapist and a sex radical polyamorous kinkster...
He didn't actually work as a therapist,which may well have been for the best! He was a psychological researcher—and yes, his theories about how dominance and submission were "normal emotions" were definitely reflected in the comics. He was also a huckster; he worked on inventing the lie detector (which never actually worked, of course) and he'd then use the lie detector in ads for Gillette, I think. And he did stage performances with the lie detector. He was a big old kinky carny.

As you say, he was polyamorous. He lived with his wife Elizabeth and Olive Byrne, who was his lover and almost certainly Elizabeth's as well. Living with two bisexual women definitely seems like it was important to his theories and his comics. In his psychological work he wrote about how lesbianism made women better mothers, better sexual partners, and just better all around; basically he thought that lesbianism made the world a better place for everyone, of every gender and age range. And his comics are filled with lesbian bondage play, often modeled on his (idiosyncratic) academic work on sorority initiation rituals.

At one point, you quote Marston saying that lesbianism benefits all people. What do you think? Is lesbian sexuality good for everyone?
I would say that Marston's particular lesbian utopianism is... somewhat hard for non-cranks to credit. I do think that the stigmatization of homosexual desire, lesbian or gay, is bad for everyone though, whether heterosexual or homosexual. Marston especially felt that female/female friendships and female communities were important for society, both in supporting women and as an alternative to patriarchy. I think that that's true, and that acknowledging the homoerotic bonds in those communities as a potential source of pleasure is better than living in a state of paranoia and shame.

Do you think comics can be effective propaganda? Did Wonder Woman "work"?
It's always hard to know what effect art has or doesn't have, isn't it? There are feminists, like Steinem and Trina Robbins, who talk about the way that Wonder Woman has inspired them. And I know another dominatrix or two who has said that they found the comic inspiring and titillating when they were young—so I think Marston would consider that a success.

Marston would be at least provisionally pleased with the advances in women's rights and gay rights, and glad that Wonder Woman is still around and still a touchstone for feminism and for sex and sexuality too. We don't have the matriarchal utopia he wished for, but maybe he moved us a little closer to it than we would otherwise have been. I like to think so, anyway.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. On March 23, he'll be giving a talk on Wonder Woman at the Institute for Public Knowledge in New York City.

Follow Noah Berlatsky and Tara Burns on Twitter.

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All photos Bobby Viteri

I was eight when 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Trying came out and G-Unit's reign over hip-hop began. 50 and his cohorts—Young Buck, Lloyd Banks, and Tony Yayo—helped bring the streets back to hip-hop at a time when MCs like Ja Rule had resorted to crooning over R&B tracks to climb the pop charts. In the early to mid-2000s, my world was consumed by all things Guerilla Unit. I followed them as they released their double platinum group album—Beg for Mercy, a slew of classic solo mixtapes and albums, a practically unplayable video game, and a seminal clothing line with Marc Ecko.

But it's been more than a decade since 50 Cent was hip-hop's dictator and G-Unit served as his ruling party. In recent years, members of G-Unit have had run-ins with the law and have either faced middling record sales or released no new music of note at all. The group has also suffered its share of infighting, with 50 excommunicating Young Buck in 2008 and clowning founding G-Unit members Yayo and Banks in interviews as recent as spring of last year. In light of all the barbs tossed back and forth and the group's dwindling relevancy, it seemed like we'd never get another track like "Poppin' Them Thangs" or another chance to buy one of those weirdly-cut G-Unit tank tops.

However, the core group surprised everyone and reunited at Hot 97's Summer Jam concert last June. Since then, they've added a new member to the fold named Kidd Kidd. They released a mixtape in August titled The Beauty of Independence. And earlier this month they dropped The Beast Is G-Unit EP, which was gritty and hungry enough to conjure up memories of what made G-Unit indomitable back in 2003.

Considering we're in the midst of a full blown G-Unit a comeback, it seemed like the perfect time to hit up Young Buck, Lloyd Banks, and Tony Yayo for a chat. I met the G-Unit rappers at the New York Yankee Steakhouse in Midtown. In between eating extravagant steak and seafood and fans interrupting our meal to get pictures, we had an incredible conversation that explored their journey to and from the highest echelons of hip-hop and the trials and tribulations that came with it. Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo were especially unguarded. They spoke with an openness that was cognizant of their former glory and their mortality. Here's what they had to say.

VICE: Yayo and Banks, you guys grew up together?
Tony Yayo: Yeah. It's no regular relationship. [Points at Banks] I knew him my whole life. Say this is my mother house [draws a map on the table], then this is Banks's house. I could see him go to the store. And 50 is right here. So it's like, I come outside, I see him every day. Banks was way younger than [me and 50], but I knew he could rap since 12.

Loyd Banks: They used to see me rapping in front of the barbershop and on the corner. 50 performed at my first show. It was the first talent show that I had the heart to go do, me and a couple of my friends, at my junior high school. 50 closed out the show. I was 12, he was 19. He was with Jam Master Jay at the time. He had a few records with him.

I took a few things from that show to this day. Just how to do crowd participation and crowd control. Yayo ended up bringing me to 50 after he'd already seen me in the streets. After he introduced me, I was on a mixtape, two mixtapes, three mixtapes, then it was a million dollar deal [with G-Unit Records].

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What were you all like as kids?
Yayo: We all was in the streets. But we all was doing different things. When I was hustling, [Banks] was playing ball with his friends cause he was so young. But music was our passion. We used to go to our friends' basement—nobody got nothing to do in the hood—and just hang out and listen to music. And that to me is where G-Unit started. That's when we started getting into freestyling. I remember hearing Banks first freestyle, I remember 50's first freestyle. I remember Fif's joint was, "The sale went stale / quarter-mill bail / Fresh out the jail / Shit is really real / Niggas is locked up man, I pray they don't tell / 20-man indictment / My lawyer got to fight this..."

Young Buck, what about you? Weren't you riding with Cash Money as a teenager?
Buck: Right. I was already in the streets man, when I was 13, 14. I was really in the streets getting money at that age. I met Baby and Wayne at around 14, 15.

They were really young then?
Wayne was real young. He was like 12. I used to pick up Wayne with Baby... When time went on and I became a part of Cash Money, I was supposed to be in school back in Nashville, Tennessee. But I left Nashville and went to go live in New Orleans. I would ride around New Orleans with Baby all day and get the game from him. And we'd go and drop Lil Wayne and Turk off at school.

As far as my childhood goes, it's no different than Banks and Yayo. We all come from the hood, we all come from nothing. So it's more of a situation like, different places, same thing. I had experiences in the independent music business at a very, very young age.

Because at the time I met Baby, I was already in the process of independently pushing my own music throughout the city. So at 14, 15, I was already paying $300 for a 1,000 CDs and selling them for $10 a piece. You do the math. I used to sell my dope and sell my CDs at the same time. I would put my phone number on the CD and have a separate phone for that. And then it got to the point where the phone that sold CDs started ringing more than the phone that sold dope. Then I knew what to do.

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G-Unit came from a really strong street background. Street credibility isn't as important in hip-hop anymore. How do you feel about that?
Yayo: I feel like we came from a time when a lot of rappers was getting extorted. I remember we were doing the "In Da Club" video shoot and Suge Knight showed up, that's the first time I seen him. It was like, real stuff happening.

Yeah, stuff was real. It could pop off any minute. All the beef we'd been through, you know how it is. You had to be real careful. Banks was talking about that earlier. He was young when he got shot. It was the day before 9/11.

[Lloyd Banks was shot in 2001 outside of a club in South Jamaica, Queens in a situation he has since describes as a "random act of violence."]

Banks: I woke up in the hospital watching the buildings fall down. I thought I was watching Independence Day or some shit. I didn't know what it was until the commotion started happening. The second day I was in there, they were actually helicoptering victims to that hospital.

What it was like getting shot?
Banks: It's not like what you see in the movies. In the movie, you see someone get shot and die. I got shot and actually ran 25 blocks to the nearest hospital. If I would have stayed there or panicked, I don't know if I'd be talking to you today.

But I used to ask 50 questions like that, because [he] got shot nine times. He got bullet holes in his face. I used to ask him, "How did you stay calm? What did you do?" And he was like, "I was more mad that I couldn't fire back. I kept that in mind. Because I knew what we were about do was something epic. At that time, the first mixtape, 50 Cent Is the Future, had just come out. So that day I got hit, I was more mad. I ran to the hospital. I was like, fix me up, so I can get the fuck back on tour.

But I was lucky. Every artist doesn't come in the game with somebody that's 10 years older than them. And 50 was watching Jam Master Jay and other icons in the game to know what was right and how to do things.

50 told me I was gonna be a solo artist from our first few meetings. He was like, "Listen, you got at least five albums in you." He's telling me this when I was 19, just off the few verses he heard. We go to the next meeting, He's like, "Yo, this is my artist, Lloyd Banks." Once he introduced me like that, I was like, I am.

Buck: The success of G-Unit, all of it happened so fast. People tend to forget that we really got only two to three solo albums. I got Straight Outta Cashville and Buck the World. So like, in a sense, we all still haven't got our just due by far. We are still fresh artists, bro. Brand new artists. Platinum artists at that, because I'm gonna tell you about something about this thing. The game ain't built on numbers no more, and we know that. But the fact remains that there's yet to be another rap group in which every artist is platinum. Not even N.W.A has accomplished what we've accomplished out of this thing.

As far as me, now it's my time. It's been such a long time, a generation now, and some people get worse as time goes. Especially when you go through what I went through. I went through adversity at its highest. You understand? In my situation, the average individual would probably kill himself or jump off a bridge. I went to prison bitter, and made a decision in prison real quick to become better. That's not good for me, my kids, and nobody else. I got my GED in prison. So it's like for me, I used my prison time to go down a whole different lane. So stay tuned when it comes to Young Buck.

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Did you guys think G-Unit would get as big as it did?
Yayo: I never saw it happen.

Banks: I did. To be completely honest. I was a loner, even my friends didn't know I was nice until I felt I was nice. They didn't hear the weak rap. I didn't waste my time with that shit. I feel like you just will it. The energy you put in it is what you get out of it.

What was it like when you guys were on top?
Yayo: I think it was a high you can never explain. I remember getting out of jail, having a jail suit, and then we did Summer Jam. That was one of my first times out, doing the biggest show. It's like, how do you even explain it? Eminem is on your first album. I'm on Rikers Island, Eminem is wearing a "Free Yayo" shirt. Everyone's saying "Free Yayo." It was crazy. And we went all around the world.

At the end of the day, look. The pictures could come and go, cars could come and go, the fans could come and go, but you can never take no traveling away from us. I been to Dubai. You know the really tall hotel there? We stayed in that. A girl need a passport to get in your room. We been to Amsterdam. I walked in the cell Nelson Mandela was in. We went to Robin's Island. Right, Banks? At the end of the day, I been to Mumbai, Gold Coast, Sydney, Brazil, Venezuela, Canary Islands. Canary Islands was ill for me because the sand was black because of the volcanoes. We been everywhere, man. And I had never left New York City up until that point.

You never left New York?
The first place out of New York I ever went was when 50 had the record "Rowdy, Rowdy." I don't know if you remember that record, but that's when he was in the Columbia system. 50 took me to Cancun. That was my first time ever leaving New York City. The day he got shot, he was supposed to do a record with Beyonce, "Thug's World."

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What was it like when 50 got shot?
I'll be honest. When he got shot, I thought he was dead. Because when I ran to the block, all [I saw was] homicide out there. I thought he was dead. I didn't know. And then what's strange to me is when I went to the hospital, he didn't want me to see him. And I said, "Why didn't you want me to see you?" And he said, "Cause it might have changed how you would have thought about standing next to me."

He didn't want me to see him in a weak state. It was strange to me, cause I was like, "You my man." But he didn't want me to see him shot like that. Cause he was shot the fuck up. He was in bad condition.

You know what's crazy, with all that shit, how far we got in life, is still amazing to me, because you not supposed to make it this far. But I look at it as God's plan. All we been through? But it's not like you're down with a regular rapper. G-Unit is a whole other beast. We had issues from the go.

You guys had a lot of beef.
Yayo: Yeah. I feel like when you on top, you always going to be a target.

You think it's worth it?
Yeah, of course. You just get used to it. You're going to get attacked. You look at Iggy Azalea, she's got hot records out and it is what it is. G-Unit? Everybody got at us, and they said we was the bad guys.

We got our beefs all through the industry. Once you make a bed, you got to lay in it. But I don't think we started a lot of beefs.

Honestly, I think the beef took away from the hits that we had. "So Seductive," "In Da Club," "On Fire." The records we had with Dr. Dre, Eminem. The beef took away from them fucking hit records we put out. And everyone was like, "Oh they start beef to sell records?" And it's like, "No! We make fucking good records! And had fucking beef!"

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What are your favorite rap albums?
Ready to Die, All Eyez On Me... You gonna make me pick between Illmatic, The Blueprint, and Get Rich Or Die Trying? Illmatic. Fuck it.

Banks: Life After Death, It Was Written, Infamous.

Buck: Number three would be The Last Meal by Snoop, two would be The Diary by Scarface, number one is Me Against the World.

What new artists do you guys really feel these days?
Yayo: There's a lot. You got Drake, you got Joey Badass.

Banks: It's crazy, because on every one of my projects, I work with a new artist. I worked with Schoolboy Q early on, I worked with Jay Rock, I got a few songs with Nipsey Hussle, I put A$AP Rocky on "Cold Corner 2." That's when my fans didn't really know who he was.

How did that work out with Rocky?
I listened to his joints. When I got to the third one, "Wassup," I picked up the phone and called him. I did for him what no one did for me. I just gave him a call from and gave him some knowledge. I just started talking to him about shows, experiences that I went through. When my first album came out, I got a call from [Fabolous]. And that was it. When I was shot, The Blueprint and Fab's album came out. Those were the two albums I had in the hospital. Songs like "Ain't No Love" are my soundtrack.

But with younger artists... even when I met Bobby Shmurda, he ran to me, like "Yo!" And that shit feels good, because that's a respect thing. I love that. That's what hip-hop is about. Because we was them at one point—19, 20, wildin' the fuck out.

Yayo: Yup. And we made it this far, thank the Lord.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

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Image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

One of the opening scenes in Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó's new film White God is every child's worst nightmare: a pack of 250 wild dogs, jowls quivering and spit flying, tear-ass after a young girl frantically pedaling her bicycle down an empty street. The moment is a perfect symbol for the film itself: beautiful, frightening, and more than a little surreal.

White God follows Lili (Zsofia Psotta), an eight-year-old girl, and Hagen, her beloved mutt dog. City ordinances in their hometown have made it illegal to own non-purebred dogs. Street mutts are rounded up and put in shelters until they are killed, as part of a nationalist purity movement. After Lili's father forces her to abandon Hagen on the outskirts of the city, we watch Hagen desperately try to make his way back home, fighting other dogs, evading dog catchers, and tricking vicious humans, before eventually being sold to a man who trains dogs for illegal fights. It is, in epic terms, a hero's journey, and Hagen is our four-legged Odysseus. But Lili is no droopy princess waiting in the wings: while Hagen battles physically, she stubbornly resists the growing nationalist movement with the kind of petulant fortitude that only a kid can muster.

The result is a tense but quiet meditation on the inhumanity of man, state-sanctioned violence, and our perpetual hope that the next generation will be the one that gets things right. Already, White God has impressed critics around the world—it captured the Prize Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and was Hungary's selection for the 87th Academy Awards. With the film set for release in the US on March 27, VICE sat down with Mundruczo to ask him how it felt to fly in the face of W. C. Fields's infamous recommendation to never work with animals or children.

VICE: White God is obviously a parable about nationalism, but can you tell us a little bit more about the context and why you made it now?
Kornél Mundruczó: Eastern Europe has completely changed in the last five, eight years. It was true once that we were timeless, melancholic, slow. Almost the opposite is true now. [Europe] is very fast, rough, and extreme. The range between the rich and the poor is bigger, and the whole society is loaded with fear. The economic crisis is gone, but the moral crisis stays.

The society elected people out of fear, and the politicians in power reflect that fear back very well. They're against refugees, they're against minorities, they are against anything. It is not open and there's no freedom. We're still a democracy, not a dictatorship, but there's not as much freedom inside.

Those elements—racism, chauvinism—they really came up with the economic crisis. And it's very sad for me, as a person of a generation with a huge belief in solidarity and democracy. I wanted to reflect on the crisis, and those elements that rise up with the crisis as well.

There's a piece of music repeated throughout the film. It's both the thing that Lili plays to calm Hagen, and the thing that her conservative teacher forces students to practice. What is it and why did you choose it?
That is the "Hungarian Rhapsody" by Franz Liszt. It's really iconic in Hungary. The nationalists are using him quite a lot, but in a very empty way. He was a revolutionary guy; he believed in freedom. He was a romantic. The real meaning of this music is to fight for your freedom. So the meaning of this music and how the hard ultranationalists use it is a contradiction, a huge contradiction.

Did you really use 200 dogs?
No, 250! Two hundred were from the pound, and 50 were the elite group. In the beginning when we started to work with them I thought maybe it was never going to happen, because there were dominance fights between them, and so on. The two trainers, they were genius, they started to use a new method where somehow they socialized them together. That did it. And these were unhappy, aggressive dogs coming out of the dog pound with lots of fear, and at the end they were a really proud, nice batch of dogs.

During the shooting we started an adoption program, and they are all with families now. I was not a huge animal rights fighter before this movie. I wasn't facing the problem. Now I am. I would like to be in a society where animals have rights. We all live on the same planet and we all have the same right to live on it.

What kind of reception has the film gotten, both in Hungary and all over the world?
This really criticizes our society, so Hungary was really the most fragile territory, but it went very well. We had audiences and lots of discussions, so it was really good.

As for all over, it's divided into two [reactions]. Mexico, Turkey, Greece: they identify with the dogs. But in France or in Germany, they are the majority, so they are like "Ach! We are the one's creating these problems." I think it's a question of what perspective you watch the story from. I'm very interested to see what will happen in the US.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

On Wednesday, at a town hall in Cleveland, President Obama very gently floated the idea of making voting compulsory in the United States. "Other countries have mandatory voting," he said in response to a question about money's influence in politics. "It would be transformative if everybody voted—that would counteract money more than anything," he added.

And, as you might expect, conservatives spent the next day attacking him for it. The right wing blogosphere certainly exceeded its yearly allotment of scare quotes in headlines. All my favorite Twitter conservatives had a field day.

[tweet text="Hey, Obama, in addition to mandatory VOTING, how about you propose mandatory WORKING? http://t.co/aUHqItg0xC" byline="— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza)" user_id="DineshDSouza" tweet_id="578693849331068928" tweet_visual_time="March 19, 2015"]

Even the Obama administration backed down from the president's comment, clarifying that it wasn't a policy proposal, just something he kinda liked. But was the backpedaling necessary? Most of the criticisms seemed to lack any data to back them up.

This may sound dumb to anyone who loves freedom, but 11 countries enforce mandatory voting laws, or 13, depending on how you count it. I'm excluding Switzerland because it's not mandatory in the whole country, and North Korea, because the status of democracy there is, let's say, shaky. Another 11 have laws that aren't enforced, so for the time being, let's focus on 11 dystopias where mandatory voting is enforced: Australia, Argentina,Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Cyprus,Singapore,and the tiny island nation of Nauru.

Each of these voting laws went into effect in the early-to-mid 20th century, so looking at how these countries have done since then should give us a snapshot of whether forcing people to vote actually makes shit better.

Voter Turnout:
The obvious thing that happens when you make not voting illegal is that more people show up to pull the levers. This works to varying degrees. In the US—where the punishment for not voting is not getting a sticker—the voter turnout is usually around 60 percent in general elections. In countries where the punishments for not voting include fines, permanent disenfranchisement, and difficulty getting a government job, voter turnout can shoot up to 97 percent.

To be fair, that 97 percent is in Nauru, where the population is only 9,322. (Many of the countries that require voting are also among the world's tiniest). Across the 11 countries, though, voter turnout hovers around 80 percent. In Singapore, where about 95 percent of the population votes, the high turnout is no surprise; The city-state has a baffling form of government, mixing democracy and mild totalitarianism, which is obviously the worst-case scenario envisioned by Obama's libertarian-leaning critics. Brazil, much less of a nanny state, has less impressive turnout rate, about 78 percent in the last election.

But all in all, more people vote when it's the law. Which is, of course, the point.

Development:
In terms of human development—a measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and living standards—countries with mandatory voting aren't doing too bad. All of them rank "high" to "very high" in the United Nation's Human Development Report, with the exception of Nauru. Formerly the richest country in the world per capita, Nauru now has epidemic obesity and poverty, due largely to the crash of the island's single-resource economy at the end of the last century, which most likely had nothing to do with too much voting, but who knows?

Australia, on the other hand, ranks No. 2 in the world for human development, behind Norway (which does not have compulsory voting). Singapore, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein are also ranked in the top 25. The US comes in at No. 5 on the list.

Even Peru and Brazil are doing reasonably well, despite struggles among the poor and indigenous populations in those countries. Sure, things aren't great in Brazil, and the economy is suffering, but human development is improving, thanks to increased life expectancy, and a steep decline in extreme poverty in the last two decades. In Peru, urban prosperity has historically contrasted with harsh living conditions for those living in rural and indigenous communities, but those groups have seen rapid improvement there as well.

Corruption:
A lack of corruption in countries where voting is mandatory would be a powerful argument for adopting such a policy. An organization called Transparency International keeps tabs on the perception of corruption in 175 countries, and ranks them accordingly, from best to worst. Among the countries with mandatory voting, Australia is the highest-ranked, coming in at No. 11.

Brazil once again works as a handy counterexample, though. The country has long been rife with corruption, and its president is currently embroiled in a bribery scandal. Argentina has an even worse corruption rating—107th out 175—and seems to be constantly caught up in political scandal. The trends aren't clear, but while mandatory voting may be able to "counteract money" in campaigns, as Obama suggested, that money may find its way into politics through other, more illicit channels.

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In a 2013 study of elections in Australia, Anthony Fowler of the government department at Harvard University observed an advantage for leftist parties in elections with mandatory voting. He found that "the policy increased voter turnout by 24 percentage points which in turn increased the vote shares and seat shares of the Labor Party by 7–10 percentage points." And not to state the obvious, but Obama is in a leftist party, and his critics are probably aware that the one measurable effect mandatory voting would likely have is that more Democrats would get elected.

But it almost certainly wouldn't be the salvation, nor the destruction of America.

Still there's a First Amendment point to be made: What separates the US from most of these countries is a constitution that guarantees a right to free speech. The contingent of, proud, thinkpiece-writing American non-voters deserves at least a little consideration. Your ability to "express yourself" by not voting—not just submitting an empty ballot, damn it—might not be a form of free expression many romanticize, but it's arguably just another weird part of the American experiment, and a freedom these other countries lack.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

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Photos courtesy of Chase Iron Eyes

Last month, a group of men at a minor league hockey game in South Dakota allegedly dumped beer on a group of Native American school children and harassed them with racial slurs. A few weeks later, in Seattle, several historical Native American murals were vandalized in what the artist Andrew Morrison argued is also a hate crime. "The images that are painted are Native American warrior chiefs," said Morrison. "Any kind of desecration falls in the genre of hate, just like going up and breaking a statue of Mother Theresa."

While discrimination against Native Americans most recently came into the national spotlight with the Redskins controversy, there is a sobering lack of media attention paid to hate crimes against indigenous people. Migizi Pensoneau, member of the stage comedy group the 1491s, explained why he believes most hate crimes go largely ignored. "The idea of 'Kill the Indian; Save the Man' is still alive today, in a subtler way. If you can't see Native American people as human, we sort of don't exist. And if we don't exist, then it doesn't matter what happens to us." Last year Migizi and the 1491s appeared on the Daily Show in a segment on the Redskins mascot controversy. Migizi says much of the footage was so volatile that it was unfit for comedy, and the majority of the segment went unaired.

The 1491s aren't the only Native American group trying to change the way wider media views Native lives. Last Real Indians describes itself as a "media movement" for "the new indigenous millennium." To learn more about Native media, I reached out to Last Real Indians's co-founder, Chase Iron Eyes. The story of modern day hate crimes and Native American media coverage is his to tell, not mine. We talked about the abhorrent statistics on violence against Native American women, difficulties in local media reporting on such crimes, and how the blossoming Native media community is working to undo centuries of colonization.

VICE: What inspired the formation of Last Real Indians?
Chase Iron Eyes: We saw a lack in Native media, and we saw a lack of popular reception to Indigenous scholarship. I grabbed a bunch of nerd friends who were writers. We're trying to push through a couple hundred years of colonization. Last Real Indians has become a platform for bridge building between Native nations and our indigenous people, and those non-indigenous to the Western hemisphere, the nations that have evolved over time.

Can you give me a broad overview of the type of hate crimes that still exist against Natives today?
There are a couple of ways that hate crimes still affect us. The most recent hate crime was, of course, the pouring of alcohol on 57 Native American children in Rapid City, South Dakota. As part of the Native Lives Matters Reports, we've detailed the incidences of police shootings of Native American men in Rapid City. Now those aren't hate crimes by the legal definition of a hate crime, but it's important to know those statistics because Native American people in Rapid City make up about 15% of the population, and they comprise 54% of the inmates population. There's been about 25 or 30 found dead, all native Americans, in a river that runs right through Rapid City called Rapids Creek, and we don't know how they're dying. Most of them are homeless and die of exposure. It's a dire human rights situation. Native American children comprise about 12% of the total children population in South Dakota and they comprise about 50% of the children that are taken from their parents and placed in foster institutions. They're being placed in non-Indian homes and institutions, which is a violation of federal law, the Indian Child Welfare Act.

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Chase Iron Eyes

Are Native women also facing a crisis?
Native women are in a crisis across the US and Canada. They're at risk for sexual assault, domestic violence, rape, and murder. The human rights statistic is that one in three Native women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. There are a lot of factors that go into why things are the way they are. One of them is, of course, the economic destruction that we've had perpetrated against us. Native Americans face what all other woman face, and they also face a fetishization that is based on their identity. This also [affects] men, but there's a dehumanization that takes place in respect to Native American women by the mainstream patriarchy. But it doesn't stop there. Native American men have lost our role as providers and as warriors; couple that with poverty and we're still abusing women. We're acting like Western men, on a large scale. Broad strokes here.

Hate crimes against Native Americans seem to be underreported by the mass media. Why do you think this is the case?
Hate crimes are sometimes low-level. They're taking place in high school bathrooms on children. That's why you don't hear about it a lot. All the media out here [in South Dakota] is controlled by a couple of corporations. And they cover what they want to cover. There's no VICE out here, you know what I mean. There was a situation in [1999]; a guy called Boo Many Horses who was killed in a border town next to the reservation I live on now, Standing Rock Nation. They found him dead stuffed in a trash can. He had some sort of [developmental] condition. It turns out he was stuffed in there and killed by these four young white kids. None of them did any time whatsoever. Things like this happen all the time.

Native people are not part of the normal discourse. You don't learn about Indians in American school unless it's Thanksgiving or Native Heritage month or there's some movie that Disney puts out that has some other misinformed representation of Native people. Whether or not there's a deliberate attempt to dehumanize us doesn't matter anymore. The fact is, by and large, the media, the legal institutions, the economic and political institutions; they all dehumanize and oppress indigenous people just by their own force and existence. There is no criminal intent, but the impact is criminal. There is dehumanization when you have all this misinformation. They're teaching us in school that we ourselves are primitive.

That's why platforms like 1491 and Last Real Indians are important. And others, like Indian Country Today Media Network. We are trying to reclaim our birthright to determine our own destiny. We expected CNN or the Washington Post or New York Times or even local media to provide fair coverage and we lamented the lack of positive or unbiased coverage at highlighting our issues and successes. Now, with Native media, I don't really give a damn if they provide fair coverage because we can provide it ourselves.

How is Native media working to fight modern hate crimes?
We are seeking justice for victims of modern day what we could perceive as hate crimes or have a definite racial angle. We started #NativeLivesMatter, it was a spinoff of #BlackLivesMatter. We bridge with [mainstream media] organizations. We do it anyway that we can. We have a good network of people that are forward-thinking. And then, of course, we have demonstrations and direct actions. Rallies, protests. We [are working to] address that root, economic problem. We're also doing scholarships and research, to give us data. Data is what speaks to Congressional committees.

For more, check out Last Real Indians.

Follow Chase Iron Eyes and Sophie Saint Thomas on Twitter.

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Photos courtesy of Brent Ray Fraser

In the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock faced extensive criticism from the art establishment after presenting his now-famous drip paintings, where his paintbrush never touched the surface of the canvas.

"It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said," Pollock commented at the time.

It's a sentiment that painter and performance artist Brent Ray Fraser has taken to heart. In 2009, the Vancouver-based artist began imprinting his penis on a canvas. Today he uses his genitals as artistic tools to create colorful paintings as large as 12-feet wide.

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"If I'm doing a large-scale painting, having my dick be flaccid is better from a technical point of view," Fraser said. When used as an imprint stamp or ballpoint pen, his penis paints better when fully erect. "The paint is cold so it's hard to stay hard, so I tie it off. And working on the art gets me aroused," he explained.

"It's like the Warhol Factory, but with my dick," Fraser chuckled.

The artist's dick has painted versions of Shepard Fairey's Obama HOPE poster, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe portrait, and the Mona Lisa. He has also tea-bagged the canvas to create a "ballsy homage" to Damien Hirst's Dot Paintings. "It's like the Warhol Factory, but with my dick," Fraser chuckled.

Fraser is not the first male painter to be stuck in the phallic phase. Australian artist Tim Patch is known in the quirky art world as "Pricasso," and the Dane Uwe Max Jensen garnered attention late last year when he used his junk to paint a portrait of Kim Kardashian.

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It's not just that the 36-year-old Fraser is using his bait and tackle to subvert traditional notions of how to make art that's gained him attention in the NSFW art scene. He also creates these penis paintings while completely naked during live events, most recently at the 2014 Taboo Sex Show in Vancouver. The exhibitionist element gives his work the patina of kinky performance art. And Fraser has taken the performance online, too, setting up live webcam sessions where upwards of 1,000 viewers tune in to watch him make art while getting off.

"I use the paint to masturbate and finish off by coming on the painting," Fraser said. "Signing it with my DNA."

You'd think an artist this comfortable sharing every inch of his body would be confident and social in other aspects of his life, but Fraser claims to be an introvert. "I lead a rather ironic life," he said. "When I was a little boy I liked making drawings of He-Man, Conan the Barbarian, and Rambo, but I hated the attention that it brought me."

A timid student in high school, Fraser began working out as a way to combat bullies and gain self-confidence. It was his way of putting on a "superhero mask," inspired by the strong fictional men he admired growing up. He went on to study fine art at Vancouver's Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he focused on human anatomical art.

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Fraser's muscled physique and interest in the arts led him to perform at an art gallery for the first time, on Valentine's Day in 2006, presenting his body as a moving sculpture. The exhibit at Vancouver's White Ocean Gallery featured striptease, self-objectification, and the male physique as valid forms of art, similar to conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres's go-go boy on a platform installation.

The euphoria and liberation of performing on a stage led Fraser to become a male exotic dancer for private shows. But despite having a stripper-perfect bod, Fraser was not entirely comfortable with the profession. "This was before Magic Mike," he said. "I was ashamed and afraid that getting naked on stage would cast a shadow on my fine arts career."

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Three years later, Fraser finally found a way to acquiesce his fears and pursue his passion for exploring the human body as a tool for creating art. A private collector, one of Fraser's earliest admirers, commissioned the artist to create an original painting made up entirely of imprints of Fraser's penis, one phallic imprint for every year of Fraser's life.

A doctor reassured Fraser that smoking cigarettes is more harmful than putting paint on your penis.

"I was hooked. It was like creating a timeline of my body," Fraser said. "It combined everything that I had been doing: stripping on stage and using paint on my body." When painting with his dick, Fraser uses acrylic, water-based paint because the skin on the penis is thinner and absorbs faster. He knew an art professor who died from paint chemicals, so he is aware of the risks.

"I talked to a doctor about it. He reassured me that smoking cigarettes is more harmful than putting paint on your penis," Fraser said.

When Fraser started making NSFW videos, posted on Vimeo, his worldwide fan base expanded considerably. His videos and art have been featured mostly by gay blogs with horny readers. Fraser says he appreciates the compliments from gay men but has never been intimate with another man.

"I get a lot of emails everyday, mostly from gay men trying to hook up with me," Fraser said. "I tell them I'm artsexual. My work is highly erotic so I get all my sexual satisfaction from it."

For an introvert, the attention that Fraser's erotic webcam shows and videos have brought him can be a bit much. He says that he sometimes needs time to recharge. During these phases, he paints alone in his studio, fully clothed, with no webcam on, using his hands.

Fraser does not fear that his kinky performance art might overshadow the actual artwork, as he once did when he started stripping.

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"For three years, I was commissioned by Louis Vuitton to draw women wearing shoes," Fraser said. "I was so scared that I would be pigeon-holed as the 'shoe fetish guy,' but no one even recalls that. That's what's great about being an artist: you can always reinvent."

Fraser's erotic videos and penis paintings have garnered him a less-than-stellar response, especially from Facebook moderators. "I've been banned from Facebook a dozen times," Fraser said. "Their algorithm can't distinguish between what's art and what's porn."

To circumvent this, Fraser has conceded to censoring his artwork on social networks, cropping and blurring his images so they don't get banned.

"Sex is the ultimate subject," he added. "Without it, none of us would be here. I don't get what the fuss is all about."

Follow Oscar Raymundo on Twitter.

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Telltale's 'Game of Thrones' is midway through its six-episode first season

We're supposedly in a new golden age for television drama. As our multiplexes increasingly play it safe with the comforting glow of franchise spectacle, television has snapped up the neglected adult audience. Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Game of Thrones et al. give comfort to cineastes bemoaning the death knell of multi-layered adult storytelling in mainstream filmmaking.

The episodic distribution model has also become an increasingly appealing prospect for video games over the last few years, breathing new life into the once-unfashionable adventure genre in particular. Like a good TV drama, episodic releases give developers breathing room to create expansive plots, cliffhangers, and nuanced characterizations over multi-season arcs.

In an interview with Wired last year, Norwegian designer Ragnar Tørnquist opened up regarding the benefit of the episodic approach when discussing its use in Dreamfall Chapters, the long-awaited third installment in his adventure series The Longest Journey. "With an episodic release, [we] love to see people talking and theorizing, wondering what's going to happen next," he explained, while adding that the episodic model had added practical benefits for the Kickstarter-funded project, as the developers "can spend time polishing and really focusing on each individual episode as it's released."

Telltale Games have been the most successful proponents of the episodic format so far, setting out in 2004 under auspicious CEO Dan Connors's twin tenets that they should "never stray from story" and "never stray from small chunks of content released over time." It is a philosophy that has paid off in particular following the critical success of Telltale's take on comic books The Walking Dead, which will soon have a third season, and Fables, adapted as The Wolf Among Us.

The Californian company's penchant for licensed adaptations, most recently Game of Thrones, gives it an advantage in this arena, with a wealth of material to draw upon from pre-existing properties. In this regard, Telltale's newly announced project Minecraft: Story Mode should provide an interesting narrative challenge for the company in much the same way that, say, the writers of The Lego Movie probably faced as an adaptation of an unlikely IP with no real storyline to draw from.

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'The Walking Dead' has been a commercial and critical hit for Telltale Games

Though episodic gaming has been around for years, the combination of Telltale's success and the rise of digital distribution have been the primary catalysts that have really allowed this approach to thrive financially. Now, even large publishers such as Capcom and Square Enix are getting in on the market with the recent releases of Resident Evil Revelations 2 and Life Is Strange, respectively.

It will be interesting to see if such releases from triple-A publishers can influence a future where episodic gaming becomes as popular as TV shows compared to movies, particularly with the increasing prevalence of cloud-based game streaming.

Consumers may not have been completely ready for a game-streaming service such as the experience OnLive tried to provide when it launched stateside back in 2010, followed by a UK rollout in 2011. But as broadband speeds improve it is likely that this means of games content consumption becomes commonplace, with episodically released titles played in a similar fashion to how you watch shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant. The recent full release of the Gaikai-based PlayStation Now represents something of a prototypical "Netflix for fames," and other companies are likely to follow suit.

Nvidia are banking their entire console strategy on viable streaming support, with their announcement of the SHIELD console at the Game Developers Conference earlier in March, a sleek black box promising instant blockbuster gaming via the wonders of a low-latency piece of voodoo called the GRID. GRID game streaming via the SHIELD will offer two tiers of subscription, a basic one for 720p and 30fps streaming, and a premium GRID PLUS service at 1080p and 60fps.

Like Netflix or HBO, cloud-based services such as GRID and PS Now could kick-start interest in exclusive game series to bolster subscription rates and exclusivity. Imagine if Sony or Microsoft had subscription-based episodic game equivalents to shows like Orange Is the New Black, True Detective or Transparent. With Playstation Plus and Xbox Live already offering exclusive live-action shows in the form of Powers and Halo: Nightfall, as well as the converse example of Amazon dipping its toes into the gaming market following its acquisition of companies such as Double Helix (Killer Instinct, Strider), it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.

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The multi-award-winning 'Alien: Isolation' was one of 2014's best games – but could it have been better as an episodic title?

There is further scope for episodic gaming outside of Telltale's brand of TV show-like scheduled releases, too. Netflix releases all the episodes of its own shows at the same time, allowing viewers to watch them at their own pace. A similar approach to certain games could be attractive to busy gamers who might want to prioritise when and how they play without constraint. For example, if last year's lengthy Alien: Isolation had made its 18 chapters available from the start of play, perhaps more gamers might have seen it through to its conclusion. According to the game's current PSN trophy page on PS4, the number of players who completed the game, at any difficulty level, stands at only 16.7 percent.

The similarly lengthy survival horror title The Evil Within, which has 15 chapters and was released around the same time as Alien: Isolation, shows similar statistics: 17.3 percent of players completed the game on casual difficulty, while only 10.5 percent managed it at survival (normal) level.

Alien: Isolation is an excellent game, and The Evil Within a good one, but both possess a fairly high barrier to entry at times, even on their easier settings. It seems a shame for both free time-restricted gamers and hardworking developers that so many playthroughs remain incomplete. For plenty of players, of course, overcoming a challenge is still the primary draw of tackling any new title, but as the medium gets bigger and gamers get older, the accessibility that a "gaming box set" offers could become increasingly appealing.

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Dara O'Briain considers games' difficulty problem (at 2:40)

Comedian Dara O'Briain touched on this point during an appearance on Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe in 2009, where he lamented gaming's status as the only art form that denies consumers access to their content for not being good enough at them. "Rarely will a book stop you and go, 'Are you understanding the book?' [And] if you buy a [CD] it doesn't go: 'Your dancing isn't good enough, dance again! Only then can you hear the rest of the album.'"

The Xbox 360 release Alone in the Dark (known as Alone in the Dark: Inferno on PS3) did give this a go back in 2008. O'Briain may have skipped it as it was pretty poor, but it did take a novel approach to level progression—players were able to skip difficult or uninteresting chapters of the game at any time, with unplayed portions summed up by a TV-style "Previously on..." recap. This box set approach was brave, but failed to take off elsewhere, perhaps in part due to the game's crippling technical issues. This unusual approach to level unlocking has rarely been revisited by big-budget boxed titles since.

The episodic approach doesn't always work out, of course. Quirky Xbox One-exclusive mystery D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, while well-received critically, is currently hanging in stasis as something of a failed "pilot" given its lack of commercial success, selling only around 10,000 copies during its first month of release last year. The game's director, Hidetaka Suehiro—also known for 2010's Twin Peaks-influenced survival horror Deadly Premonition—has stated that the game's future would be in the hands of the fans, but at present it has stalled languorously after the release of two episodes of an advertised three-episode season.

It would be interesting to think of how D4 would have fared had it been released as part of a streaming service deal in a similar fashion to Netflix and Amazon shows, rather than as a Microsoft exclusive. Chances are the "Save D4" hashtag on Twitter might not have become necessary in this scenario, as all the episodes would had been available simultaneously, rather than following a broadcast-style timed-release model that seems outmoded in the digital sphere.

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Microsoft's 'D4' has experienced a troubled release

Telltale wasn't not exempt to the dangers of "cancellation," either: The company's first adventure game Bone: Out of Boneville, adapted from the wonderful Jeff Smith comic series, suffered from a similarly incomplete state, and only saw the release of two episodes in 2005 and 2006.

Episodic gaming has seen its ups and downs, but has also proven in the last few years its potential as more than just a broadcast-aping gimmick, offering exciting opportunities for both big-budget publishers willing to test out new franchises and shake up old ones that may have gone stale. Indie developers, meanwhile, are given increased scope on lower budgets through episodic distribution, focusing on quality initial episodes that effectively test the waters of public interest, while also freeing up the deadline and budget pressures that come with releasing a lengthier standalone product.

One way or another, the episodic model is only going to grow: be that through today's delivery methods, or the rise in on-demand gameplay via devices like the SHIELD. Potentially, the games industry will see its very own version of Netflix appear, and once it does you can bet competitors won't be far behind.

Follow Ewen on Twitter.

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Heather Lighton isn't technically a "Dog Photographer" but she may as well be. The Melbourne-based shooter has developed a reputation for being able to make pets look far more dignified than their usual butthole-licking selves. A long time-dog fan herself, her off-the-clock street shots of cool animals chilling on the weekend turned into a bona fide dog portraiture service called Dog Photog.

In honor of National Puppy Day, we asked Heather to share some of her favouite shots and give us a glimpse into life at the top of the dog-photo pile.

VICE: Hey Heather, so you didn't start out photographing dogs, how did it become a focus?
Heather Lighton: In my personal work I've always been photographing dogs. If there is a dog near me and I have a camera, it's probably going to get its photo taken.

When I get my film back from the developer, I'm still surprised at how many frames are of dogs—so I suppose it can be a little subconscious.

Why are people so obsessed with dogs?
Dogs are the best people. They are there for you, they love you, they're cute and they never say anything mean. I could never date someone who didn't love dogs because I don't think I could trust them.

Do you have any animal photographer heroes?
Lots of my favourite photographers loved dogs and incorporated them into their work, Elliot Erwitt and Helmet Newton are two that come to mind. I'm also a fan of William Wegman and his work using his Weimaraners.

Your animal photos are actually really beautiful, but do you ever feel people take you less seriously because they're like, Oh she's that girl who is just obsessed with cute animals?
I've never thought about it, but maybe they do. Humans in general have a tendency to take themselves really seriously and dismiss animals. I hope that my photos of dogs, particularly street dogs, have enough feeling in them to be taken seriously.

You really are great with animals, do you have any tips to get a good shot of one?
I think if you really love animals they can tell and will feel better around you straight away. I also have a naturally high-pitched voice which dogs respond well to. In terms of tips, get down to their level and bring a treat.

How do you always make the dogs look so dignified?
Many dogs already look dignified. Some people think dogs are silly slobbery creatures, but if you sit them still you see they are all very different looking and often rather regal. Dogs don't have a "photo face" to hide behind. You see all of them in their faces which is both powerful and endearing.

Isn't it tiring working with animals for long periods of time?
It's extremely tiring. It's such a physical job, you use your body in ways you don't in day-to-day life. It's like doing a never ending yoga class. The dogs are so great to be around and give me so much joy that it mostly takes the pain away.

Have you always loved dogs?
Yes I've always loved animals, but especially dogs. I was always rescuing things from mouths of cats and saving bugs from pools as a kid. One of my first big dreams as a child was to one day have a dog sanctuary where I could look after all the dogs that needed homes—I still dream about that.

Interviewed by Wendy Syfret. Follow her on Twitter: @wendywends