A while ago, I got a phone call around 1 AM. This is pretty typical for someone who is friends with comedians. It was an out-of-town area code, which is also typical. Then I heard the voice on the other end.

"Is this Hana Michels?" I shivered. I knew that voice.

"Yes."

"This is Brian. Do you remember me?"

Yes.

Brian (I've changed his name for this story) proceeded to tell me why he was calling. He was an alcoholic. He was in a 12-step program. He told me he knew what he did to me was wrong—that it wasn't OK. But he never went into detail about what he did. So I'll explain: Brian used to be my friend. He was also my rapist.

After his long diatribe about recovery, there was an awkward pause.

"I hope it's OK that I called you."

The words "it's OK" crept out of my mouth. It wasn't OK. But I felt frozen with fear. I'd fantasized about confronting Brian for years, but when the opportunity finally presented itself, I was shocked into silence. I didn't think his voice would affect me like this. I had to get him off the phone immediately.

"I hope you can forgive me."

"It's OK," I said again and hung up before he could say another word. My stomach was churning. I was so upset.

No, not upset. I was livid. I thought about what Brian had said. Yes, he was truly sorry—but for what, he didn't specify. He might not even remember. He didn't call me because he was sorry. He called me out of the obligation to apologize—step nine.

Worst of all: He was calm. Like he arrogantly expected to be forgiven.

Then I thought about what he said and realized I do not forgive him. Not at all. I couldn't abide forgiving him when I wasn't sure he realized that what he did to me was even a big deal. The fact that he called me at all meant he knew he did something wrong. But coercive date rapists don't always know they're rapists; they think rape only comes from strangers in alleyways, not friends in studio apartments. He didn't know the effect he had on me or he wouldn't have dared contact me. He didn't know about my revenge fantasies or the fact that I moved cities because of him. Nor did he know about my recurring rape dreams, which I've been told are a symptom of PTSD. I started packing to drive up to the last place I heard he lived. I didn't know what I was going to do—throw a brick through his window, hit him with a baseball bat, scream—I only knew I was going to hurt him.

A friend talked me out of it. I didn't know if he still lived there, after all, and I could have been arrested or worse. Plus, I was too scared to even confront him over the phone. I looked him up on Google and found out where he worked, but the idea of walking up to some receptionist and saying, "Hi, you have an employee who raped me years ago" and standing there waiting for a reply just didn't make sense. I'd have to talk to him directly.

I checked my phone. His number was saved. I was afraid that if I heard his voice I'd freeze up again, so I texted.

"I do not forgive you," I wrote.

"What you did was unforgivable. You raped me. You knew I was drunk. You knew I was afraid of men because of my ex." With each word, I felt a little bolder.

"After I said no you reached your hand down my pants and told me I was a liar and that I was wet. You got me drunk and scared the SHIT out of me as I kept saying no. THAT'S why we had sex. Not because I wanted you. I never wanted you." Rage filled my fingertips with heat as I pounded the touchscreen.

"I hope if you have daughters you can't look them in the eye. I hope you can't even speak to your mother without remembering what you did and who you are. I don't forgive you. Do not reply to this. Don't ever contact me again."

There was no response.

I felt relief. I'd said my piece. But I didn't get the complete closure I'd always fantasized about. I never drove up to his place and he wasn't fired from his job. He's free to live his life. In the days that followed, I spoke to a relative who has done the 12 steps and who told me that Brian would have been told not to seek forgiveness in cases where it would have done more harm than good—so Brian had gone against the guidelines to clear his guilty conscience, and I didn't let him.

I've been asked why I didn't go directly to the police after what happened, and my response is simple: For years, I refused to acknowledge to myself that I'd been raped. I lived in denial. I also had no evidence—I went to his apartment willingly and he used a condom, which he flushed immediately. I admire rape survivors who do go to the police and I wish I could have had Brian removed from society. But I know that even if I had gone to the cops I'd still dream of being raped at least once a week. I'd still live with fear. Nothing could have changed that.

I don't think closure exists for people who've been truly traumatized, but I'm glad I kept him from getting his.

Closure, an event that allows a person to move on with their life, is extremely powerful if it exists. I don't get to move on, and I don't think he should be allowed to either. He is probably not a sociopath, since he sought forgiveness. He needed that forgiveness because he felt guilty for hurting me.

I want that guilt to bubble up in his throat every time he's on a date with a girl. I want it to flash through his mind on his wedding night. I want him to feel pangs of shame when he drives his daughter and her friends to school. I want him to feel enough pain to show respect for the women in his life and never repeat what he did to me. If closure exists for him, I want it to be at the end of his life—with the knowledge that I was the last woman he victimized.

Follow Hana Michels on Twitter.

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A NSW bush crop. Image Flickr user Pedro fp.

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Back on Easter Sunday in 2008, a 57-year-old Melbourne, Australia man named Warren Meyer went for a six mile hike in the Yarra Ranges. He left his car in the Dom Dom Saddle parking lot and set out for a planned walk in good weather. He hasn't been seen since. After exhaustive searches by police and family turned up nothing, a call to police during Missing Persons Week last year may have provided their first clue. The caller claimed that Warren stumbled upon a marijuana crop and was murdered—a claim which is now under investigation.

Like in the States, Australian pot growers view bush plantations as a cheaper, legally safer alternative to growing indoors. Leading criminologist and assistant professor at Bond University Stephen Goldsworthy told VICE that such plantations "aren't uncommon," and conceded that growers often defend their plants. "They usually involve someone crop sitting," he said. "These people are often armed and they will actually booby-trap the crops." The booby traps commonly consist of pits with spikes at the bottom or barbed wire hidden amongst foliage.

This wouldn't be the first case of a bush crop discovery gone wrong. In 2013 a 40-year-old hiker in Queensland was shot in the stomach after coming across a bush crop. The man was hit with a small calibre round after spotting the illegal operation as he was attempting to hike out of the Deepwater National park.

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The NSW task force busting weed plantations. Image via NSW Police.

Nationally, the central-eastern coast is Australia's most popular area for bush plantations. Subsequently the NSW Police Force runs a specialized Cannabis Eradication Team to target bush growers throughout the north of the state. This team has been in operation since the 1980s and, as they told VICE via an emailed statement, "seize thousands of plants valued in the millions of dollars every year" during the growing season between November and April. As the release explained, they've seen a slight increase this year over last with "the destruction of 9,927 plants with an estimated potential street value of almost $20 million."

The NSW Police Force claims there is no archetype for marijuana growers. "Police have arrested individuals growing crops for sale in the community, through to highly-sophisticated criminal syndicates operating high-level cannabis supply chains," they said. However, they find "the majority of crop sites destroyed by police are unattended at the time of detection."

While searching for Warren Meyer in Victoria, police discovered 32 individual marijuana plants. Although this is a relatively small amount, Warren's wife, Zee Meyer, believes this could be a sign of what happened to her husband. As she told the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), "That's indicative that there was illegal activity. No matter how small the plantation was, it is indicative of illegal activities happening in this area."

Dr. Goldsworthy believes people are rarely attacked after stumbling across pot plantations, but concedes that the chances of harm are higher around illegal activities. "The elements are there for something to occur," he said. "There are drugs, criminals, and weapons."

VICE contacted the Victorian Police for info on bushland plantations in the Yarra Ranges but they were unable to comment.

If you have any information, the campaign to find Warren can be found at warrenmeyer.com.au

Follow Charlie on Twitter

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It was like the aftermath of some universal apocalypse. The dismembered bodies of gods, demons, and men lay strewn across the desert landscape. Standing among them intact, Ulhas Utkar seemed like the war's unlikely winner.

For the past 25 years, the craftsman has built fiberglass gods and other creatures for India's many holy festivals. The animatronic statues are pulled on carts in parades as they scream, flail, jump, dance, and breathe fire.

"My father was an artist, so I learned many skills from him," the 57-year-old explained via translator. "Later, I studied engineering. So, this work was the perfect combination. Now, I am famous, and respected, and I have money. Everybody knows who is Utkar."

When I visited Utkar, a Bollywood producer has driven several hours out from Mumbai to his desert village of Saralgaon. The executive was there to oversee the assembly and delivery of a giant jumping Hanuman. The mechanical monkey-god is set to appear in an upcoming film called Bajrangi Bhaijaan.

The artist does not sell his pieces anymore; he only loans them. The four-day Hanuman rental costs 200,000 rupees, or about $3,200. We stood around talking in the shade as the artist's team combed the scrapyard out back for the god's limbs. If a piece is not being used, it is disassembled, the components dumped wherever there is room. A reassembly like this brings to mind a scavenger hunt in which mounds of bodies can be picked apart, shifted, and reconfigured several times.

This particular Hanuman, the artist noted, was 27 feet tall. That made it one of his smaller creations. Utkar lifted tarps to reveal the face of a 60-foot Hanuman that roars with the sound of wind. Beside it was the face of the 70-foot baby-killing demon called Trinavarta. Uktar demonstrated how its eyes light up and shift back and forth to scan the crowd. Included with every major god or demon rental is a hoard of fiberglass human and humanoid attendants.

At night, on a simple open-sky bed covered in mosquito nests, Utkar sleeps among his gods and monsters. His family sleeps in another home in the village. His daughter is a housewife and his son wants to be a DJ, so the artist knows that his work will die with him. He acknowledged, several times, his strong desire to leave a lasting legacy. I mentioned that I'm working on a project collecting dreams from around the world, and asked about his.

"I rarely sleep," he insisted. "I'm thinking always about what we can do next. More, more. More that the people will like. I dream to make a big theme park. There will be all the Indian culture with automatization. Everything will be there. The God's battles. The battles of Muslim and Hindu. The English will be there. Everything, everything I will make. I dream only of this."

-Roc Morin

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Chez Pierre Cabaret. All photos by Carl Mapes unless otherwise specified

"This is it. This is Barton's old room. This is where he died."

The small maglight grasped in Jesse Cochards' hand shook a little as it illuminated the dark room furnished with the comfy looking La-Z-Boy tucked neatly into the back of the secluded area. This is the place where dancers fake intimacy and men hide their hard ons. This is the place where Jesse's uncle OD'd six years ago.

"We've renovated this area, so it's a lot easier to be here now."

Over the course of our numerous meetings, this was the only time that the laughter has left Jesse's voice. We were upstairs in Chez Pierre Cabaret, more commonly known as Chez Pierre's, Edmonton's oldest strip club. The windows are blacked out and Jesse was giving me a tour by flashlight so we didn't have to wait for the soft red and blue lights to warm up. Jesse cheered up once we left the area and he excitedly started telling me about the group rooms located off to the side.

A babyfaced 25-year-old—we were both ID'd at a bar nearby where we did the interview—Jesse is the youngest strip club owner in Edmonton, and one of the youngest in the country.

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Jesse Cochard. Photo by Mack Lamoureux

He's also the man who turned one of Edmonton's most notorious bars around.

Over the years, Chez Pierre has become synonymous with debauchery. It was a place without a liquor licence, but one where well into the 2000s you could still order "special pops" and get a liquored-up Pepsi. A place where prostitution was talked about in hushed voices on the dark dance floor. It seems like everyone has a story about the club that has been open for more than 40 years.

Jesse's grandfather Pierre Cochard, the club's namesake, opened its doors in the early 1970s. Pierre, a Belgian by birth, came to Canada with his friend and business partner in 1951. He was a big man, a prize fighter going by the name "The Brown Butcher," and a lumberjack for a time. Pierre was not a man to be fucked with. He even fought Sugar Ray Robinson.

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Pierre Cochard with Muhammad Ali

Like many enterprising folks in Canada, Pierre heard the cry of "Go West Young Man" and the Belgian listened. He and a friend climbed into the 1934 Buick they bought solely for the journey and soon found themselves in Edmonton. The two worked numerous jobs, including operating Edmonton's first pseudo food truck, before Pierre went back to Europe for a brief time. He returned to Dirt City to start what would be his legacy.

Chez Pierre was originally opened as a discotheque above a Boston Pizza on Jasper Avenue. Initially, the club featured girls dancing in pasties, and then turned to topless go-go dancing, before finally embracing nudity—it would later become the first place in Edmonton to feature bottomless dancing. At this time, though, spaces like Chez Pierre couldn't get liquor licences in Edmonton. So Pierre came up with the "special pops." If a waitress knew a customer was trustworthy and they ordered one of these, their Pepsi would arrive a whole lot boozier.

These "special pops" quickly became Edmonton's worst-kept secret. While other strip clubs and venues received liquor licences over the years, Chez Pierre never did. As a result, the club had a tense relationship with the police. And even though it was rumoured that cops frequented the club, it was the target of numerous sting operations.

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Shortly after its opening, Chez Pierre moved to the old Eldorado Nuclear building, a place that Pierre and his business partner tried to work in when they first came to Edmonton. The two were denied employment and returned all those years later to buy the building. The vaults that originally kept Eldorado's materials now hold the club's vacuums.

Its new location just so happened to be across the street from Edmonton's First Presbyterian Church, a pairing that the church didn't get a kick out of. They actively worked against the club and prayed for the patrons and Pierre's salvation. At one point they even threatened to nail the door shut.

Walking through that very same door last Saturday night, I didn't find the dark seedy bar that was so vividly described to me. In fact, it was a sharp departure from any other strip club I'd been to. At the typical Edmonton strip club you'll find, without fail, big burly bouncers overlooking young men sucking back tequila and throwing loonies at the dancers' genitals to try and win a poster—which is weird. Honestly if you think about that scenario, like really think about it, it's really fucking weird. Jesse told me that this was something that Chez Pierre actively tries to get away from.

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"Those other clubs will piss off enough people that don't like the big bar feel where there are 200 people—where it is shoulder to shoulder and you can't talk and everyone is getting puking drunk," he said. "There are enough people out there that don't like it, and that is why Chez Pierre is here. That's why we have been around for 45 years.

"That's the genius of my grandfather."

Chez Pierre was quiet and comfortable. The music wasn't too loud and everyone seemed pleased to be there. Not that any customers were making eye contact with each other—it's still a nudie bar. Avoiding the gaze of the trio of businessmen seated in pervert row I found myself a table overlooking the stage and started taking notes.

The first note I made was that the room was damn cold—I felt for the dancers walking around with next to nothing on.The next line in my notes was "maybe it's for nipple aficionados?" but I was cut short pondering this important question when a pretty redheaded dancer sat down next to me and we started chatting.

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Sylvia Linings

She goes by the name Sylvia Linings and she tells me that the furnace had gone out right before work started. (The next day, Jesse assured me that it's a rare occurrence but one that can happen in a building as old Chez Pierre's, and it does, about once a year. "It's not a winter at Chez Pierre's unless you get a lapdance from a stripper with a parka on," he said.)

Wearing only a tight-fitting neon bikini while seated in cold leather chair, Sylvia was a trooper and laughed through her shivers. The talk that ensued was one of the best I've had in a while. She told me that she was a double-major in Anthropology and Sociology and that her master's thesis was on the Branch Davidians in Waco. The conversation eventually rolled its way over to the club, and I asked her if she had been to Chez Pierre before Jesse ran it.

"It was years ago, I was right out of high school and I'm not sure I was even 18 yet," she told me. "I'd heard rumours about the place for years. My favourite one was that there was a stripper with a tail. So with this in mind, a group of us headed down there. We never saw anyone with tail, just a really seedy strip club that sold you booze under the table, and you could get extras with the girls pretty much in the middle of the club. We didn't stay very long."

Shortly after that, Sylvia had to make her way to the stage.

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The era Sylvia and I were discussing was the only one in Chez Pierre history where a Cochard wasn't in charge. Pierre ran the bar until the late '90s, surviving controversy, busts, and a fire that gutted the basement and original club. At the time, Pierre was in his 70s and wanted to take a step back, so three brothers, all friends of Pierre, took over the managerial duties. It was a bad decision, one that resulted in what Jesse refers to as the "dark times."

The "special pops" were but small potatoes compared to what could be found at Chez Pierre during this time. The new owners were partiers, allegedly fond of hard drugs, and extremely lenient. The bar deteriorated without Pierre's stern and tough gaze. The club was lot darker back then, lit only by lamps. And patrons could get "extras."

"Extras," in lay speak, typically involved a customer paying a dancer for a lamp-lit handjob down in perv row. There were also rumoured to be situations where, if you said the right words to the right stripper, one would meet you in your car afterward for a little more.

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The dancers also occasionally doled out another sort of handjob—using their fists.

"These guys would be passed out in the front and a guy would touch a girl and the girls would just gang up and beat the crap out of the guy. The girls did all the policing themselves," Jesse explained. "Apparently it got so bad that girls would be destroying each others mixtapes, spitting in each others shoes."

Around this time, Jesse's uncle Barton had moved back to Edmonton. He took one look at the bar and didn't like what was happening. He pushed the other men out and started cleaning the place up. This involved cleaning house with the strippers and bringing in new girls. (Some of the old dancers were upwards of 55 years old.) The bar started focusing on respect for both the patrons and the strippers. They billed the place as a gentleman's club and they damn well intended on acting like one.

This is when Jesse entered the picture as a fresh-faced 19-year-old. He had moved from his home of Salmon Arm, BC to Edmonton looking for work and planning to take care of his grandmother.

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Pierre with Muhammad Ali

Although he had never been to the club, he knew what his grandfather did for a living and the reputation he had. Jesse gleefully told me a story about when he and his little brother Colton, who also works in the club, were kids and his grandfather rolled up to his family's house in a Ferrari. Pierre exited the vehicle and on his arm was a blonde knockout. She couldn't have been older than 25, whereas his grandfather was in his late 60s or early 70s at this time. One day, shortly after his 19th birthday, Pierre showed up knocking on Jesse's door and asked if he wanted to go to the strippers. Obviously, he said yes.

Jesse started bussing at the club out of boredom while hanging around there with Pierre or his Uncle Barton. It came naturally to him, and all of a sudden he was getting paid. He enrolled in the nearby MacEwan University and got his diploma in business management—the whole time living the dream of paying for school with strip club money.

Around this time, Barton died. He had suffered from Scheuermann's Disease, a debilitating back condition, and used prescription pills to ease the pain. Barton liked to party, and while running Chez Pierre, his addiction spiralled out of control. Barton OD'd in his room a floor above the club on Nov. 23, 2009.

After Barton's death, Pierre wanted to close his cabaret, but Jesse convinced him not to.

"I asked him, 'What are you going to to do?' He kept telling me 'we're going to close it,'" Jesse said. "I remember telling him, 'Is that really how you want your legacy to be? To close on this note?'"

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Sylvia Linings

Pierre gave in and Jesse took over managerial control of the bar, soon becoming the owner at 21. At first, he and the friends he brought in to run it didn't know what they were doing. Chez Pierre still had no liquor licence and Jesse never could shake the Cochard tradition of "special pops." Six months into managing the space, Jesse, like his grandfather before him, was caught blatantly serving liquor without a licence after an undercover officer bought a drink. He was found with a single bottle of Alberta Pure, just the worst vodka imaginable. Jesse plead guilty to the charges and was fined.

He took his medicine stoically, but this was the final straw.

Fed up with the illegalities Jesse set about changing the club once and for all. He had one goal in mind: that goddamn liquor licence that was always out of Chez Pierre's reach. The first thing he did was follow in his uncle's footsteps and treat the girls and customers as well as he could. In our talks he mentioned respect over and over—respect for the girls, respect for the employees, respect for the patrons, respect for the term "gentlemen's club"—respect comes first for Jesse.

"He's a really nice guy who cares about us as people," Sylvia said of her boss. "We aren't just walking bags of money to him, which is more than can be said about some other club owners and agents.

"I've worked for some who simply do not give a shit about you," she went on to say. "They don't care what your name is, they just want you to make them money."

In the ensuing years, Jesse completely overhauled and renovated the Cabaret. He reorganized the main area, built a DJ booth that moonlights as a control room, and revamped the large changing area for the dancers. But by far the biggest and most important project was making a completely separate area for lap dances. He turned his eye on the floor above the main club.

The dancing rooms had originally been built off to the side and were made out of "duct tape and lattice." In the early days, it wasn't a rare sight to see a room collapse while dances were occurring and Jesse and whoever was closest rushing over to fix it. During the renovations, Jesse, his brother Colton, Carl Mapes the bouncer and DJ (as well as the man who took these photos), and close friends Evan McArthur, and Sean Orr would run the bar at half capacity—two would work upstairs building a separate lap dance area while the others ran the bar.

One of the main reasons that the Cochards couldn't get their licence was the fact that they offered table dancing, and in a licensed venue, dancers can't touch the patron when liquor is present. Jesse did his best to remedy this with the new upstairs dancing area.

The group's hard work paid off and on March 12 of this year Chez Pierre saw a day that neither Pierre nor Jesse ever thought would come. After more than 40 years, Chez Pierre Cabaret received its liquor licence. Pierre Cochard came to the bar that afternoon, and at 89-years-old he had the first legal drink in the business he founded.

It was a Stella Artois, a Belgian lager, his favourite beer.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

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From Daniel Podolsky's Facebook post about the incident.

A guy in a shirt that said "Broad Fucking City" on it got kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight in St. Louis on Monday. It's a move the airline is calling an exercise in "common sense and good judgment"—and since the shirt is an advertisement for a TV show, Comedy Central is probably calling it "pennies from heaven."

The guy, a college student named Daniel Podolsky, was on a flight from Dallas to Chicago and only made an unscheduled stop at St. Louis's Lambert Airport because of inclement weather. Podolsky told a Fox TV news crew that a flight attendant asked him to turn his shirt inside out when the plane first landed at Lambert. He declined, then got off the plane to use the bathroom.

"It was only when I got back on the plane when it was going to take of... that I took my jacket off," he said. "And so [the flight attendant] sent someone to remove me from the flight." Podolsky says he would have done something about it but, "it just happened so fast. Within 30 seconds, the flight was already gone. I would've gladly done so."

There's video footage of his initial standoff with a flight attendant, but it's about as riveting as watching a lunch lady tell someone they can only have one scoop of mashed potatoes. However, it does make it apparent that he wasn't as cooperative as he portrayed himself to the local news, considering he flatly says, "I have freedom of speech" when he's asked to put his jacket back on.

And he's right. He does have freedom of speech. After all, I'd be upset if an airline didn't want me wearing my hilarious hat that says "FBI: Female Body Inspector." But with airlines having exercised their right to be a bunch of lame puritans over the years, and not really suffering for it, I personally wouldn't take the gamble.

For instance, in 2004, a guy with an image of an uncovered woman's boob on his shirt got kicked off an American Airlines flight. The passenger, Oscar Arela, along with his girlfriend, took a stand, and held firm—an image of a topless woman was something the people on that flight needed to see. And for their trouble, they got booted from the flight and had their tickets refunded.

Until someone invents a protected group for people who need to display profanity and nudity all the time, taking a stand against an airline on the basis of your first amendment rights isn't going to make much of a splash. But that's not to say the clothes of airline passengers haven't triggered much-needed debates.

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Image via The Today Show

In 2006, a woman named Kyla Ebbert got accosted by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant because she was wearing the outfit you see above, including a cleavage-less top, and skirt that is, I guess, on the short side. Problems really arose when Ebbert turned out not to have any change of wardrobe with her at all, because she was just taking a day trip somewhere to see her doctor.

The flight attendant, identified as "Keith" told Ebbert she'd have to take a different flight because Southwest is a "family airline," whatever that means. "I told him I would hold my sweater close the entire flight," she told Matt Lauer. And as for the skirt, "I would pull it down as far as I possibly could."

They later explained that thanks to all this skirt-tugging, and sweater draping, the flight went without a hitch. They explained that they don't have a dress code, "if she's covered up in all the right spots." The "right spots" apparently being her lower thighs and the flat part of her chest. Ebbert got a lawyer, and when she was on TV, her representatives told NBC they hadn't yet decided whether to sue.

It's a borderline case. Slut-shaming is dumb and wrong, but it's not a slam dunk of a lawsuit. However, in 2003, Hansdip Singh Bindra, had a 360-degree under-the-leg dunk of a lawsuit, because a flight attendant didn't like his turban.

Mr. Singh Bindra, a Sikh from New Jersey, got into that classic post-9/11 scuffle where someone mistook him for a Muslim. In his case, it was a flight attendant working for Atlantic Coast Airlines, a division of Delta. He claimed that the flight attendant, Janet Thomas, came up to him right after he got a magazine out of the overhead compartment and "berated him," according to an AP story. Apparently she told him—probably thinking she was giving him friendly advice—that "because of the situation in the Middle East, you have to keep a low profile."

The following year, Delta settled for an undisclosed sum that was "satisfactory to all parties concerned, including Mr. Bindra."

As for Podolsky, the hero in the shirt with the word "fucking" on it? While his moral stance warmed the hearts of potty mouths everywhere, the case will probably be relegated to the dustbin of history, like the guy in 1989 who was kicked off a plane because he stank.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Last Thursday, unaware that Paris had become "more polluted than Shanghai and London," I went for a jog around the city. I didn't think anything was different, but according to international media the "smog" was so bad it made the Eiffel tower disappear. On Monday, local authorities banned cars with even-numbered plates from operating within the French capital.

The thing is that—like most Parisians—I didn't really care. In fact, if it weren't for the RATP who made riding the subway free on that day, I wouldn't have noticed that we had reached "pollution index 127." In my eyes the "smog" was just the usual Parisian fog, which I guess is part of the sad reality of living in this city.

But what about those who don't live in Paris? Did the tourists notice how polluted our city is? I went for a stroll around the Eiffel tower to ask the tourists if they'd had any trouble finding it.

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Emily, 20, music student. Lives in Chicago.

VICE: Hi, Emily. Have you noticed a difference in pollution between Chicago and Paris?

Emily: No, not really. I didn't think the air in Paris was polluted until I heard that the subway was free. Which was a good thing.

So, you didn't notice the smog?

No, not really. Paris is a city for tourists—there is the Eiffel Tower and many other sights to see. In fact, there are too many things to do here to care about the smog.

Are you not worried about your health?
As long as I can breathe and my lungs don't hurt, I'm fine. It's not like I'm going to stay here forever.

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Eric, do you feel that your lungs are about to liquify?

Eric: Not really. I feel that the air is cooler here than where I come from in the United States.

There is a study that says Paris is the most polluted city in the world.

I don't know anything about that. In any case, I don't feel it. [takes a breath] The air seems clean.

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Hey, Aidan. Did you notice that pollution in Paris reached a peak last week?
Aidan: The sky was clogged. But I come from San Francisco—I'm used to cloudy weather.

Turns out that fog was smog. Some media outlets said that Paris in now the most polluted city in the world.

Weird, I always thought it was Beijing. I realized that Paris was polluted when I heard that public transport was free. "It must be important if they need to keep cars out of the city," I told myself.

Would you still have come to Paris if you'd known about the rate of fine particles in the air? 

Sure. This city is too iconic to not visit when in Europe.

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Hi, Alison. Did you realize pollution in Paris is at a peak at the moment?
Allison: I saw a lot of smog over the city from the plane. But once we landed, everything seemed normal.

So you had no particular problem breathing the Parisian air? 

Not at all, I even went jogging around the Champs de Mars.

Where were you before Paris?

In Italy.

What's the difference in terms of pollution between the two countries?

It's the same thing, except it's colder here.

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VICE: Do you feel like Paris is the most polluted city in the world, Sofia?
Sofia: The city is grayer than usual, perhaps. I was also unable to see last week's solar eclipse.

At the same time, maybe it's an exaggeration to say that it's the most polluted city in the world. If all these studies were true, the human race would already be extinct.

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Andrew, 22, Business student

VICE: What do you think of the quality of the air in Paris, Andrew? 

Andrew: I have been in Paris for three days and pollution hasn't once been a topic of conversation, or a problem. The situation seems better than Los Angeles actually. Sometimes the smog forms a very thick veil over there.

So you did not notice the smog in Paris?

The sky is low, but that's it. As a tourist, I'm more interested in the beauty of the city than its pollution. The locals can worry about that.

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Released in February 2010, during the peak of the Xbox 360 era, Deadly Premonition offered the world a unique window into gaming's delightfully ramshackle and sometimes ugly past at a time when big-box video games could be incredibly conservative.

The obtuse masterpiece was the product of six years of tireless work by a young Japanese auteur named Hidetaka Suehiro, who is commonly referred to as SWERY or Swery65. Production began at Access Games back in 2004 under the title Rainy Woods—an ambitious "cynical urban drama" with a strong focus on forensic science and murder mystery. The game was officially unveiled at Tokyo Game Show in 2007 earning immediate comparisons to David Lynch's classic TV drama Twin Peaks. But production was ceased shortly thereafter due to "technological difficulties." A more educated guess would be that Access risked facing a lawsuit for creative, or copyright theft, despite the end product remaining heavily in debt to Lynch's vision.

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'Rainy Woods' trailer from Tokyo Game Show, 2007

Revived as Deadly Premonition, this deeply bizarre open-world survival horror is widely considered one of the most critically divisive games of all time. Set in the fictional mountain town of Greenvale, the player acts as a stranger in a superstitious community steeped in violent folklore, anxious locals, and pastoral simplicity. The protagonist is detective Francis York Morgan, a troubled but good-natured eccentric living with a strange form of personality disorder. Summoned to Greenvale to investigate the murder of 18-year-old Anna Graham, York teams up with the naive but similarly troubled county sheriff George Woodman and his conscientious deputy Emily Wyatt, who also serves as a later love interest. (And who is, in no way, modeled on Naomi Watts.)

The game begins as a conventional whodunit, but soon turns into a surreal game of cat and mouse between York and a psychopath reliving the horrors of the Raincoat Killer, a murderer who terrified the town some 60 years prior. A core aspect of the game involves piecing together evidence found during nightmarish "Otherworld" sequences, analogues to Silent Hill's creepy parallel universe of the same name, which also plays host to Deadly Premonition's disastrous combat system. It's unclear whether York is mentally ill or actually blessed with a supernatural gift for criminal profiling, as each piece of evidence allows him to replay the event of the crime in clear hindsight. This profiling is almost always informed by conversation with Zach, an unseen entity cohabiting York's mind. You'll never hear or see Zach, but his presence has a significant role in both the story and your understanding of the character's past.

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York, for the love of God, please never smile again

The beauty of Deadly Premonition lies entirely with its cast and setting, which is arguably a character in itself. Greenvale isn't just a mundane rural town bereft of life – it's a diseased victim in dire need of saving. The barbarism inflicted during the 1950s Raincoat Killings still hits hard on daily life, leaving inhabitants slave to an unspoken rule to shut up shop, stay home, and keep your head down during rainfall. This clever plotting gives Greenvale a sense of reality as you explore its community, only to see it descend into an eerie ghost town at the first sign of rain. These little moments transcend the game above its evident technical mediocrity and into something altogether more profound.

Then there's the music and dialogue, and for a game developed on a shoestring budget, the cast clearly gets it. York's distant but lovable inflection is delivered with a pitch-perfect comical sincerity providing just the right balance between cheese and drama. The same can be said of his peers George and Emily, particularly the latter whose growth as a character and love interest provides some of the game's strongest emotional punches. Sure, it all very much resides in B-movie territory, but given the nature of the plot and visuals, it wouldn't have worked any other way.

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The trailer for the game's 2013 "director's cut"

Musically, the game cycles the same inane whistling jingle more times than many will care to count, but for others it's just another part of the peculiarity of this unique game. Other passages include a particularly rousing piece of anti-folk guitar that turns up during sinister moments, while investigations are accompanied by an eerie combination of sax, keys, and synth. The soundtrack is likely as divisive as the game itself, ghastly to some but genius to others. Is that not the sign of effective art?

The character development isn't just left to conventional cutscenes, but also York's wonderfully odd in-game narration. Some of the best moments arise during driving from scene to scene as York reminisces about past cases, love interests, and, best of all, music. As a former punk rocker, the moment he begins rambling to Zach about his preference for "more cerebral" punk like Joy Division and The Buzzcocks over Zach's love of Sham 69 and The Clash is priceless. How this broadening of our protagonist's back-story is communicated lends further validation to the video game format's suitability as a storytelling tool.

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Oh fucking hell, York

The biggest hurdle for most players is no doubt the gameplay itself. Deadly Premonition is a phenomenal experience but, at the same time, a terrible game. Cast your mind to the shooting mechanics of Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space, but take away the ease of movement, stability, and fun. Controlling York in combat is a drag only slightly improved by the ability to move and melee attack in the Director's Cut version, which came out in 2013. Opposition comes from contorted ghost-like humans that bend into all manner of positions to try and grab you and, well, enter your mouth. You'll occasionally be confronted with 24-style split-screen quick time events, but thankfully these work in the game's favor, upping the ante in terms of panic as you wrestle the controls to avoid detection from the Raincoat Killer.

The driving is slow, the inventory is stupid, and the cash perks and penalties system doesn't add up to a whole lot despite the odd chuckle to be had from being declared a "stinky agent" for not washing or changing York's clothes (complete with flies, which follow you everywhere). Still, we're in an era where high-octane first-person shooters and inane, fast-food mobile culture reigns supreme. Gone are the days when oddball titles like Gitaroo Man, Shadow of Memories, or Global Defense Force can get a look in next to a major project from a big publisher. Deadly Premonition is the hangover of a flawed era of creativity, a game that emerged from its cocoon too late. But it's also proof that, even today, gamers are looking for more than graphical prowess. They want something to latch onto, and to love.

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Just forget it

There remain a lot unanswered questions about Suehiro's intentions during the making of what eventually became Deadly Premonition, but such mystery only elevates the purity of its nonconformity. There are more "WTF" moments to be had with this game than an afternoon wasted on 4chan, but as Suehiro has said, again and again: "I made Deadly Premonition the way I wanted it to be." Which is exactly why we've ended up with the most bizarre video game bastardization of Twin Peaks the world could ever hope to see. Forget what the video game police might have said about it sucking on release, because this is gaming with its soul intact.

"Life is fun because of the mysteries. Right, Zach?"

Follow Ben on Twitter.

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If this were the game, Maul would have glitched into a wall by now.

The year is 2000, and somewhere in the bowels of a now-decomposing CRT TV in West Yorkshire, the ultimate battle of good versus evil is about to be waged. On a bridge of purple energy stands Darth Maul, the pineapple-headed, acrobatic thug who's one of the few memorable aspects of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. On a platform nearby are the honorable Jedi Master Mace Windu and myself.

"Come and try it you fucking cunts," bellows the Sith Lord (Maul is voiced in this retelling by Begbie from Trainspotting). Windu and I look at each other. Nothing is said, but knowledge flashes between us like static electricity, like the wind. We leap simultaneously, our lightsabers tracing a double arc of sapphire—but, oh no, what's this? Thanks to a Dark Side-induced error of collision detection, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi has glanced off the bridge and tumbled to his doom.

Everything's fine though, as long as Windu can hold his own against Maul until the next checkpoint. Channeling the Force, he drops to one knee and sends his sword spinning around his bowed head faster than the eye can follow. The whirling blade slices through Maul's foot several times, but he merely yelps in irritation, as though treading on a hairbrush, then retaliates with a cheap, Street Fighterish uppercut that punts poor old Windu into the chasm. Game over, everybody. Darkness reigns. Begbie has won.

It's taken me 14 long years of private reflection to admit that Jedi Power Battles—the PlayStation brawler a friend and I played for well over 100 hours while at school—is not a rough diamond waiting to be dusted off and shelved alongside The Legend of Zelda, but a modestly proportioned crock of shit. It isn't the worst game ever made but it's in the neighborhood, just across the street, and as with middling-to-miserable Jedi sims at large there's really no excuse.

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If you see this in a bargain bin, you have my permission to burn it.

It shouldn't be difficult to make playing as a samurai wizard with a plasma sword entertaining any more than it should be difficult to slide off a well-buttered horse. But it turns out there are plenty of ways you can screw the idea up. Here's one: arrange for enemies to shoot at you while they're not visible on-screen, obliging the player to develop prophetic abilities worthy of an actual Jedi. Or how about this: make it so that foes can block your strikes and, what's more, lay you out for the count using their fists. Their fists. Watching a Separatist droid kung fu punch a lightsaber without melting its own forearms surely ranks as one of humanity's lowest moments, the sort of thing we'd beam to aliens if we genuinely wanted to be invaded.

So why couldn't I put Jedi Power Battles down? It's simple, really: because my friend couldn't either. Dreadful though it undoubtedly is, the game is built around the same principles of competition and cooperation, of role-play and mutual appreciation that make other, better games such a great way of not just forming friendships, but deepening them.

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Game Informer's "Replay" plays 'Jedi Power Battles.'

It feels like this notion has yet to properly dawn upon our collective consciousness—as widely disseminated and enjoyed as games now are, they're still perceived as a loner's pursuit, a barrier to intimacy. There continues to be much anxiety among parents about the extent to which their children shut themselves off from peers when playing games—an anxiety that overlooks or undervalues the social component of online gaming, and the extent to which kids are trading thoughts and sentiments even when they're squatting together in silence, eyes locked on a high-definition screen.

Let me spend a few hundred words correcting these assumptions. To kick off, role-play isn't a substitute for or danger to "real" communication, a way of hiding one's identity, but a social tool. Favoring a character may tacitly reveal to fellow players not simply who you are but how you view yourself, what you're afraid of, who you dream of becoming. My friend was the more outspoken and forward of the group, and also a bit of a martial arts buff, so it made sense for him to choose Mace Windu, whose move-set consists of rapid, highly technical strikes (if you really want to get geeky about this, Windu's a practitioner of Vaapad, the seventh and most savage of the Jedi lightsaber forms). I tend to be quite passive in real life, or "gloriously ambivalent" as my friend would put it, so preferred to focus on blocking and the measured, decisive swipes of a Qui-Gon Jinn.

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Neither of these characterizations is exactly profound—they're played with gaseous gusto by Samuel L. Jackson and Liam Neeson in the movies—but they were a means of representing ourselves to each other that played into how we behaved at school and elsewhere, like choice of haircut or footwear. Years later, speaking aloud the button inputs for our chosen character combos serves as a sort of secret handshake, a reminder of the sweaty bundles of adolescent insecurity we once were. Add in all the characters we've played in various games over the years, and you'd probably end up with a pair of workable biographies. In fact, that sounds like a great Kickstarter pitch. Chuck us $75,000, someone.

Then there's the element of competition. No so-called cooperative game is complete without it. Jedi Power Battles has a primitive leaderboard system, whereby each character earns experience points from battle that are collected and spent on new moves at the end of each level. It's one of the oldest Jedi mind tricks known to game designers (and, indeed, office managers), seeking to portray humdrum activities as glamorous—the easiest way to make somebody care about a task, after all, is to persuade them that their pal is doing it better.

In the thick of combat, this would lead to moments of occasional treachery where one of us might gallop ahead, hoping to lasso a Jedi artifact or nobble a clutch of XP-rich foes while the other expired in a crossfire or, even less forgivably, fell off the edge of the screen. Such oscillations from selflessness to self-interest are fundamental to a team-based shooter like Call of Duty or Battlefield, where everybody has to work together to prevail, but everybody has one eye on their leaderboard ranking or personal Kill-Death ratio.

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All this sounds like it should be anathema to amicability and, when some dickhead's just trapped you in a corner with a bunch of Destroyers while they nab a collectable, feels like it. Actually, it's a way of thrashing out the rivalries that underpin many friendships in a safe environment, a fictional space. I don't think my friend and I ever resented one another more than is usual for kids of a certain age—competing for social prestige, grades, sporting prowess, or what have you—but having an outlet for those feelings was important nonetheless. Perhaps it still is.

Last but not least, video games are good for friendships because both games and friendships are voyages of discovery. Take our eventual, inglorious defeat of Darth Maul, after much trial and error. You fight him in stages across the length of the game's final level, with the boss retreating automatically once a certain level of damage is inflicted. Catch him on the run with a protracted combo, then have your partner follow up immediately with one of his own, and you can ding away at the bastard's health bar uninterrupted as he struggles to disengage.

It's yet another of Jedi Power Battles' broken bits, but I can still recall the elation we shared when Maul went down—the sense of having reached together into a wonky, whirring mechanism and yanked out the clockwork at its core. That even a sim as woeful as this one can prompt such a sense of camaraderie speaks volumes about the medium as a whole. Video games let us venture to places and perform feats we can otherwise only dream of, but more importantly, they let us do it together.

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

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Sugar Vendil, founder and artistic director of the Nouveau Classical Project. Photo by Nina Robinson

It's not hard to find cultural points where lowbrow meets highbrow. Some of my favorite examples are Jeff Koons's porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson, Laurel Nakadate's catalogue of crying selfies, and Beyoncé sampling Chimananda Ngozie Adichi. When this fusion works, it feels wrong to untangle the elements in these pieces as one or the other: the strictly high and profound, meeting something supposedly low and superficial. Instead, everything is interwoven. Seemingly shallow material becomes fair territory for thoughtful art, and vice versa. If high culture refers to the introspection or self-consciousness of a society, then this includes making art about our impulses to take a selfie, to obsess over an outfit, or to share an internet meme.

Blurring the boundaries between fine art and popular culture is nothing new, but classical music is still the last place I'd expect to find references to the internet or experimental fashion. Yet, on April 9 and 10 at the Flamboyán Theater, the Nouveau Classical Project will do just that by presenting Sacred-Profane, a concert that is part fashion show, part performance art, part homage to a viral email.

"I think the cultural zeitgeist right now is to do things with multiple elements," NCP's founder and artistic director Sugar Vendil said when I spoke with her in Midtown last week. Vendil, who is also the pianist for the group, designed the concert around Sororatorio: A Cuntata, a song cycle composed by Vincent Calianno that is based on the deranged Delta Gamma Sorority email that went viral in 2013.[body_image width='581' height='872' path='images/content-images/2015/03/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/25/' filename='cunt-punt-cantata-classical-music-inspired-by-the-maryland-sorority-email-rant-472-body-image-1427293086.png' id='39615']

From 'Sororitorio' (2015), by Vincent Calianno

Calianno said he first discovered the email when a friend, Kivie Cahn-Lipman (who also happens to be NCP's cellist) read it aloud to him, and only a few minutes later he realized he wanted to turn it into music. "I was thinking, what would sorority-girl music sound like? It would be something I could listen to on the radio, something recorded in a studio. It would have all of these associations with the words and her emotions, but how do I abstract that?"

The email was written by one of Delta Gamma's executive board members who claimed, (among other distinctive phrases that helped it go viral) that she would "fucking cunt punt" sorority sisters who didn't fully participate in Greek week activities. The email reads like a comedy monologue that's trying to emulate the most hyperbolic sorority bitch-voice imaginable. She's the 2015 version of Parker Posey's mean-girl drill sergeant from Dazed and Confused, only she's real and uses all caps.

The unhinged rant stayed with Calianno past the initial joke. "I never wanted to make fun of her," he explained. "I guess the music is partly celebrating the email, and just using it for what it is. Borrowing from different parts of Americana leads you to ask, 'Is this the superficial part or the profound part?' But it's so well executed, it's both." He counted the number of times the email says, fuck (41) and divided the text into five movements, (plus a motet) all named after phrases from the text. "Rough Fucking Ride," comes from "Tie yourself down to whatever chair you're sitting in, because this email is going to be a rough fucking ride," while another is called "A Weird Shit That Does Weird Shit," as in, "If you're a weird shit that does weird shit during the day, this following message is for you."

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The transformation from "stately composure to total abandonment," as NCP describes it, is echoed throughout the other musical arrangements, and in the visual elements of the performance. The musicians will be wearing clothes by Jenny Lai's experimental fashion label NOT, which will slowly transform in both color and silhouette throughout the concert. "Fashion has always been viewed as superficial," said Vendil. "I wanted to do two things: First, show that classical musicians are multidimensional—they're not just these stereotypical geeks, because we're not all just one thing. And second, elevate fashion out of the superficial. Even just putting together your own outfit involves proportions and spatial relationships—it's a way to express something."

Vendil incorporates fashion into all of NCP's productions, bringing a refreshing edge to the widely conservative genre. For a classical musician, typical concert attire means simple and black. "The point of the black is not just for uniformity. It's to hide you as much as possible," she said. "They say it's because it's not about you, it's about the sound—whatever. Sound just lives on a piece of paper without you. It is about you. So I thought, We have to wear clothes anyway. Why can't that be part of the performance?"

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Kivie Cahn-Lipman, cellist for the Nouveau Classical Project. Photo credit: Nina Robinson

In other artistic fusions of high and low culture, it's hard not to make something that ends up coming across as a gimmick. On the New York City Opera's Anna Nicole last year one critic said it was more of a spectacle that made fun of Anna Nicole Smith rather than using the medium to find something interesting to say about her life.

So how do you make something profound out of superficial material—something that fully acknowledges both the seriousness of the medium and the campiness of its sources? The arrangement of references and material in Sacred-Profane uses complicated metaphors, and seeks to make less obvious connections. For example, Vendil said at first she thought of having performers tear their clothes, but that she realized this was too literal of a symbol. "It's not just a metaphor for going crazy," she said about the way fashion transforms the performers throughout the show. "There was this beautiful, more subtle symbolism that [Lai] was able to capture with the clothing. It's about transforming and growing; discovering the various hidden sides of yourself."

Her statement fits the overall project. Something classical music and fashion have in common with sorority-girl culture is that all three are easily stereotyped, and NCP's work makes a stage for finding nuance in rigid categories. The program will also feature a "Kyrie" from Johannes Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum reimagined by Marina Kifferstein, and music by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Nina Young. Vendil chose to include these pieces because they each fit the theme in a fluid way. On Nina Young's "The Meditation," for example, which is based on a poem, Vendil says, "Some are more on the sacred side, and then others are more profane. A meditation is sacred, but here the content is profane. You can't lump it all into one."

The Nouveau Classical Project's Sacred-Profane is a Kickstarter Staff Pick and is raising money through April 2 to support composer commissions, artist fees, and other crucial elements. Learn more about their projects at nouveauclassical.org.

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All photos courtesy of the author

My high school boyfriend David* and I tried absolutely everything. Lube, red wine, scented candles, pot, Portishead's Glory Box on repeat, breathing exercises, clitoral stimulation, vicodin, staring into each other's eyes and repeating, "I love you, it's OK." None of it worked. I had a healthy teenage libido, meaning I was horny pretty much 24/7, but my body reacted to penetration like that of a decrepit elderly woman. I would be wet and excited and ready to have sex, but then my lil slip 'n' slide would close for the day, unannounced and without remorse. Besides the defeating nature of not being able to perform coitus, the physical pain and labor was equally grueling. Trying to have sex felt like hot acid being funneled inside of my canal and emotionally manifesting into complete loneliness. It left me feeling isolated, inadequate, and, for lack of a better word, fucked.

I soon learned why it would always be hard to have sex: I had vaginismus, a psychosomatic disorder where the pelvic floor muscles involuntarily tighten when attempting penetration. Symptoms of both vaginismus and erectile dysfunction have been recorded for centuries. Men have been taking a pill to pop their peens for years, but the only two options available for vaginismus are therapy and dilators, both of which are subjective treatments with no given timeline for when penetration will be possible. Telling someone you have this affliction isn't exactly the best icebreaker on a first date, and its venereal-disease-esque name doesn't help matters.

The idea of any foreign object inside of me caused involuntarily spasms. I tried my first tampon when I was 15 and it took 45 minutes, two friends, and a hysterical panic attack until my friend Erica managed to pull it out of me on her bathroom floor.

"It was barely inside of her anyway and she was on the floor screaming!" Erica laughed as she retold the story to our friends and strangers for years to come. Although the story always invited unwelcome strangers to interrogate my vagina, she was the one who pulled a giant piece of bloody cotton out from inside of me. In a "balancing the universe" type of way, I guess we were even.

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The author and her high school boyfriend at Disneyland

Although the disorder isn't well documented, it's actually one of the most common sexual dysfunctions among women. Doctors estimate that approximately 2 in 1000 women will experience vaginismus, but since most women are embarrassed of their built-in chastity belt, they're afraid to ask for help. Some women actually never experience penetrative sex because of their feelings of sexual incompetence. For a few years I thought I would be one of them.

I've repressed most of my failed attempts, but one of the most prominent memories I can't seem to bury occurred on the eve of my 18th birthday. David and I checked into a Disneyland hotel, and although we tried for two years prior, I hoped, like a backward Cinderella story, when the clock stroke 12 my impenetrable pumpkin would turn into a golden rimmed, open carriage. That hour and a half consisted of ten different positions, two panic attacks, and an icepack for my little storm trooper, but nothing changed. The following morning I was given an "It's My Birthday!" pin, which inspired countless impromptu Happy Birthday songs from Disney characters.

I didn't care about sex. I couldn't care about sex. Virginity wasn't anything sacred to me; instead, it was my biggest burden.

I had warning signs throughout my life before I realized my inability to "do it." For instance, I never fingered myself. I still don't. It always hurt whenever I attempted but I shrugged it off as something I "just wasn't into." However, I was sexually satisfied with myself in other ways. When I was eight I accidentally discovered the pleasures of rubbin' and tuggin' my blanket. The premiere of Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century was on the Disney Channel and I experienced my own definition of a supernova girl. I was so ecstatic about my new discovery that I called all of my friends and taught them my new trick. Yes, I was "that girl" at your daughter's fourth grade sleepover party, and to the concerned mothers of Sherman Oaks, California, I'm sorry.

The only information I had on vaginismus in my time of need came from my therapist, WebMD, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and, weirdly enough, my mother. Vaginismus is not genetic, but my mom had also experienced it. The affliction was so under-researched that her doctors, dumbfounded and ill-equipped, thought it would be best to sedate her with a general anesthetic and have a surrogate penis penetrate her. When she told me the story my vagina cringed like a raisin, not only because I had just listened to my mother describe being "penetrated," but because it made me consider that I too might one day have to ask my gyno to drug me up and get me laid. But my mother came of age in Australia in the 80s—things were different back then.

"But how did you get over it?" I would constantly ask my mother, hoping for a different answer. Maybe something involving concrete steps and not a disembodied dick.

"I don't know... I just did."

Similar to my mom, I'm not certain how I overcame it. David and I broke up, our teen love unconsummated. I was 18 and expected to live my life without sex; without understanding what it means to "connect" and without having my own children. Unless I scouted boys with purity rings I considered myself undateable and in a sense, unlovable. However, it took one shitty comment from one shitty boyfriend to help me break down my vaginal walls of defeat and tame the beast.

Sean was my supervisor at work. He was 22 with a Bright Eyes tattoo and a promiscuous history. I was 18 with a Pavement ringtone and an empty black book. He knew about my condition, but most men I told assumed I was lying or took it as the ultimate conquest. At this point, I didn't care about sex. I couldn't care about sex. Virginity wasn't anything sacred to me; instead, it was my biggest burden.

Although he repeatedly told me he didn't care that we couldn't have sex when we first started dating, he grew more frustrated as time passed. "We're not in high school behind the bleachers," he said with scorn after I offered him a pathetic handjob. He rolled over. I cried. David was a young boy when we dated and always remained understanding and patient, but Sean was older, experienced, and resentful.

The next day was Passover. Probably one of the least sexually arousing holidays, but after my Seder with my family, Sean nonchalantly asked if I wanted to "do it." I pulled up my long skirt and kept my shirt on, thinking I could make a run for it after another failed attempt, but it happened. It actually happened. It was the most anticlimactic but life-affirming experience I've had to date. It was never how I envisioned it: 7 PM with my family in the next room and "Bulls on Parade" (his choice) playing loudly after eating boiled eggs and horseradish, but it was everything to me. It wasn't about him, or the time, or the fact that I lost my virginity while listening to Rage Against the Machine. It wasn't anything else other than I finally felt sexually adequate—not for anyone else, but for myself.

I still have difficulty depending on the situation, but most of the time it works. Even in the throes of the act itself, sex can be painful and uncomfortable no matter how much lube and foreplay is involved. Although my mom emotionally supported me throughout the years, there are only so many times a teenage daughter can cry to her mother about not being able to fuck. If vaginismus were something discussed publicly without the fear of shame or judgment, I would have felt less like an anomaly of a woman and a burden of a girlfriend. I would have felt safer and more secure in my disability. No woman, at any age, should fear her vagina.

Jamie is on Twitter.

*Names in this story have been changed.

Beech Creeps is the best noise rock band in New York right now. They just finished up a new album with jack-of-all-trades production wizard Jonathan Schenke—the guy who previously made albums for Parquet Courts, Liturgy, and PC Worship. The album is grimy, triumphant, and it's over way before you've had enough. Today, the band is premiering a music video for their song "Arm of the T-Rex." The video shows off a variety of dementedly-lit toy dinosaurs frolicking in the psychedelic depths.

Stare at some pretty plastic dinosaurs for four minutes and then check out the rest of the album here.

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A civil servant, an international lawyer, and an entrepreneur walk into a café. All three of these individuals are attractive young Muslim women from London. The only joke is the state of their love lives.

Like many other successful Muslim women in the West, they're single, struggling to find a man to marry, and increasingly treated as failures by their communities as they creep closer to 30.

"Muslim men are a disappointment," says Amira, the lawyer. "They're not as accomplished and there tend to be fewer men of the same academic level and career success. I've yet to meet someone from my community who has been better than me."

This may seem like an arrogant statement to make, but it's a sentiment shared by many. Muslim men, these women claim, want a submissive wife—one who will not compete with them and make them feel emasculated.

"We've evolved into this new genre of women that our communities haven't adapted to," says Noura, the civil servant.

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Those belonging to this genre are mostly Oxbridge or Ivy League–educated (or both), independent (too independent for arranged marriages), financially stable, and well-traveled, but also religious. The delicate balance they've cultivated between their Muslim and Western identities is a source of personal pride, but in reality they're pariahs—far too outspoken for their ethnic side and too prude and traditional for the West.

They're minorities within a minority, shunned by most of the men in their own communities "who fall under two categories: losers who want their moms to find them a wife, or idiots who spend their time sleeping with white women before marrying someone from a village in the mother country," says Ayesha, the entrepreneur. "A few years ago I fell in love with a guy I thought was perfect for me. He ended up marrying his cousin from back home. Now, most of the decent Muslim guys I meet are either married or still in the closet. It's hopeless."

Arranged marriages are archaic and offensive to these women. Matrimonial websites such as singlemuslim.com or shaadi.com are seen as a last resort, or, more commonly, a sign of utter desperation.

"I don't want a husband for the sake of being married. I want someone I can connect with and then marry," says Noura, understandably.

Dating is increasingly regarded as the one viable solution, but these women are amateurs. Despite their successes in education and work, their love life isn't quite as developed. They're virgins, abstaining from the world of dating and boyfriends in their teenage years and early 20s, shunning "inappropriate relations" with men so as to avoid any scandal or gossip that would tarnish their reputation. They've kept life halal.

"I would date, to a degree," says Amira. "It is the chance to exercise agency and autonomy and choice, but only within the religious boundaries of abstinence and modesty."

Unfortunately, finding compatible men to date is still an issue. Segregation is customary, particularly among Muslims of Asian heritage, limiting the amount of interaction between the two sexes.

Lucky, then, that two entrepreneurs in the US are releasing their own Muslim-centric versions of Tinder. One imaginatively titled Minder, the other Salaam Swipe. However, instead of happy-hour drinks and a one-night-stand, the focus here is marriage.

"No one asks, 'Where are the good Muslim women?'" says Haroon Mokhtarzada, who is launching Minder at the end of March in the US, before bringing it to the UK in the summer. "The app has been developed with the point of view of the women—they are the ones who are faced with the problem."

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Like Tinder, users can swipe right if they like the look of someone and can start talking if they're a match. Unlike Tinder, both apps allow users to filter results according to race, ethnicity, and level of religiosity.

"While there are traditional means to find someone within the community, those processes seem dated, out of touch, and foreign to our everyday way of doing things," says Canada-based Khalil Jessa, who is launching Salaam Swipe this year. "Why can't we meet Muslims serendipitously, just like we meet everyone else in our lives?"

The girls think these apps are a good idea, but are still a little reluctant.

"I tried Hinge, which seemed like a less slutty version of Tinder, but the guys who were most compatible were all Jewish," says Ayesha. "It's still going to take Muslim men a couple more generations before they realize that we want love, not money."

Names of the women have been changed.

Follow Triska on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK and statistics included are based on UK data.

"All I ever wanted was anonymity and to be almost completely ignored. All I ever wanted was to look no different [than] any other woman around and be able to blend into the crowd," says trans activist Phillippa Scrafton, when I ask her about her transition.

"I think when you stand out as different, in some circles it can be difficult. For me—in the beginning—because I didn't 'look like a woman,' I was very wary of my safety and where I was."

Trans people still find their appearance the subject of intense scrutiny, both in the public and the media. For those transitioning under the attentive gaze of the press, like it's been widely alleged that Bruce Jenner is doing, even the most minor adjustments—a manicure, change of footwear, or new hairstyle—command column inches.

Some people "pass," meaning that they are "read" as a cisgender man or woman, and some don't.

Passing is a controversial topic. The term itself is loaded, tainted with the implication that trans women aren't really women, and trans men aren't really men, but are merely trying to pass off as such and engaging in deception. But despite its questionable etymology, the concept has currency. The reality is that there are those with "passing privilege" and those without—and the difference in quality of life is overwhelming.

Avoiding the disproportionate levels of violence and intimidation trans women experience is probably the biggest benefit of passing. Trans hate crimes are still heavily underreported, yet the UK government's official statistics still registered a year-on-year rise of 54 percent from 2013 to 2014.

"Safety and being able to pass are intrinsically linked," says Phillipa. "I went through a period where all I wanted was to blend into the background and hoped no one would notice." It was only after speaking to other trans people and really listening to some of the abuse she was receiving, however, that Phillipa thought, Why should I live like this?

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The threat of violence facing people like Phillippa transcends geography. The US has already seen at least eight trans women murdered this year, while a recent EU report, published in 2014, paints a dire picture across Europe. Of the 6,579 trans respondents, one third experienced or were threatened with violence during the year preceding the survey, and half of this group indicated this had happened three times or more.

With statistics like these, it's easy to understand the huge emphasis placed on passing.

Suicide rates and mental health problems are higher among trans women, with harassment, violence, unemployment, and body-image apprehensions just some of the likely contributors. The overwhelming desire to pass can often be so potent it becomes a problem in its own right, an obsession exacerbating other issues.

"There's a tendency for trans people to think that the most important thing is to pass: do I pass as a female? Do I pass as a male? Am I able to just hide into the corner and not make so much notice?" says Phillippa. "With the best will in the world, that doesn't happen overnight. It takes hormones, surgeries, and cosmetic surgeries in some cases. The reaction some people get is shock, ridicule, or frustration, and that has a knock on-effect, be it isolation, addiction, anxiety, depression, or suicide."

The issue of passing becomes even more complicated in the workplace. Juno Roche, a trans activist and former teacher, spends her time supporting teachers who wish to transition. "I've seen a real division of people who pass and people who don't in terms of employment and ease of employment," she says. "I went into a school once to support a teacher who was transitioning and one of the very first things that the senior team said to me was, 'Oh well, it's very easy because he's going to pass.' Actually they were right, he was going to pass. But what would the conversation have been if he wasn't?"

Even in countries with legislative protection, it's not uncommon for trans people to take sabbaticals from work, hoping to avoid attention and reduce stress. But securing employment in a competitive job market is a tough ask already, without having to contend with the bigotry and ignorance of interviewers.

"They [employers] are too hung up on the visuals," continues Juno. "Until we've all got access to that job market and there aren't trans people sitting at home, not passing, and not having jobs, then we haven't got equality. And if we continue to put emphasis on passing, then those people who never pass are going to find it even tougher to find employment in straightforward industries, the public sector, teaching, or nursing."

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Passing undoubtedly makes life easier, but there's a rising number within the trans community who are shirking their privilege. Megan Key is currently the only visible trans person across the National Probation Service, where she's been working for ten years. Her transition became company-wide knowledge when she sent an email to all employees informing them of her decision. A skeptic at first, she is now adamant she won't hide her trans history.

"Before I transitioned I thought, 'I need to pass because I'll get abused in the street if I don't,'" she says. "My personal experience is that I'm no longer concerned about passing. People will see who they want—that's their issue. Thankfully, I've not been abused in the street. I'm 6'2" for a start, and I have quite a deep voice, so there are certain situations where I do pass and certain situations where I don't pass. But I've taken the stance that I want to be seen as a woman who is also trans. I'm proud of my trans identity."

It's an issue that resonates among trans men too, who—compared to the concentrated media focus trans women experience—are almost completely invisible.

"The testosterone plays a major part," says Lee Hurley, a freelance writer who covers all things Arsenal FC. "The effects it has when it comes to masculinizing are phenomenal. By six to eight months, you look just like any other guy on the street—for me, just any other short guy on the street."

Such is its potency, testosterone can alter voice pitch, encourage hair growth, build muscle, and change facial structure. Though hormone replacement therapy can soften the effects of testosterone, the process is most effective before puberty. The longer testosterone has had to work its magic unadulterated, the harder reversing the changes become, impeding the ability of older trans women to pass. But for trans men able to access the testosterone, the fear of passing usually fades with time.

"We have a smaller window, I think, especially for those who do take testosterone," says Lee. "From my experience and from talking to some other trans guys, we do seem to have it a lot easier. For me, being trans isn't so much a lifetime thing—it's a period I passed through to get from how I was born to where I feel I should be. I'm definitely at a point now where I don't feel the need to introduce myself as transgender, as I'm passing every day and people are seeing me as the guy that I am."

With the number of trans people making up the UK's population estimated at less than 1 percent, visibility is essential to normalization; to wider acceptance across society and greater understanding.

With the number of trans people making up the UK's population not even known, visibility is essential to increase acceptance and understanding across society. Considering the endemic discrimination, many of those who do pass aren't comfortable with the idea of being visibly trans (and understandably so), but just as gay, lesbian, and bisexual people encouraged others to come out during the 1970s and 80s in spite of rampant persecution, the trans community is experiencing a similar movement now.

"I know of trans women who could quite easily pass—people in the public eye like Paris Lees and Janet Mock—but I respect the fact that they've chosen to stand up and be counted because, unless they're visible, people will never normalize us," says Megan. "I understand why some trans men and women choose to keep their past to themselves, because they just want to be seen as a man or a woman. And that's fine, that's their choice. But I'm a great believer in trans visibility. I don't see how society would normalize trans people unless there are trans people willing to stand up and be counted."

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Paris Lees enjoys passing... the Dutch/Vodka/bifta/parcel/other people's boyfriends/etc.

They don't come much more visible than Paris Lees, who uses her media position to champion trans rights everywhere from Question Time to her column with us on VICE. But while Paris is now a proud, formidable equality activist and one of the most prominent trans personalities in the UK, she's had to overcome the same immense internal struggle with the stigma, fears, and pressures of passing that every trans person faces.

"When I first transitioned, I was really ashamed, and actually the thought that I might not be able to pass successfully terrified me when I was thinking about transitioning, although I knew I had no choice," she recalls. "I spent a lot of time thinking, 'Can I do it, can I pull it off?' I thought I probably could and that was really important, as it is with a lot of people. The lives of those who pass and those who don't are very different. I know that because I've had both."

Passing may make public life easier, but the anxiety still remains, simply shifting from a fear of being visibly read as trans to a fear that people will find out. Passing wasn't too much of an issue for Paris when she was at university, but when one person did suspect she was trans, and brazenly called to confirm it, the panic set in.

"I was absolutely gutted because people didn't know, but obviously this one person had picked up on it. It felt like a leak that I could stop, but I couldn't. I just thought, 'I can't do this anymore it's just too stressful,'" says Paris. "Ultimately, if you meet a thousand people, maybe one of them will pick up on it. And that's kind of fine. I just couldn't deal with worrying about it all the time."

After the call, hiding her trans history was no longer an option. As long as she was keeping it a secret, the internalized shame, stress of passing, and fear of being "uncovered" would persist. While she's now comfortable with her identity and relishes her high profile visibility, the day-to-day desire to pass persists.

"I'm not ashamed of telling people I'm trans," says Paris. "But the fact is, I like being able to get on a train, for example, and not have people stare at me because I'm trans. It's not just vanity, though—it's about safety, and, you know, simply being able to go about your business without people being dickheads. But ever since I took the decision to actually own that aspect of my identity and say, 'Fuck yeah, I'm trans,' my life has gotten exponentially better."

As long as the focus remains on physical appearance, trans people will feel pressured into chasing an outdated, superficial notion of femininity or masculinity, at the expense of money, time, and health. And until the transition itself is celebrated, rather than scrutinized or ridiculed, they'll remain marginalized, locked out of employment, and subjected to violence.

"It shouldn't be an issue," Juno surmises. "The issue should be: what are we passing as? What are we passing for?" She looks on her transition positively now. "I've been on this journey, and that journey has been empowering. I know that I'm stronger than most people because of it and I'm not going to hide my strength away. It's like a birth, a wonderfully open process."

Follow Chris on Twitter.

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Sumaya Dalmar. All photos via Gina Ferrara in the Facebook group In Memory of Sumaya Dalmar

Sunday marked one month since a transwoman of colour from Toronto was found dead, and her community is still waiting for police to give them answers about how she died.

Police say that the investigation is ongoing, and so they're not at liberty to release details of 26-year-old Sumaya Dalmar's death to the public. But they say they don't view her death as suspicious, and they also say they have briefed Dalmar's friends and family on what happened to her. In an interview this week, Toronto Police Detective Constable Kevin Hill reiterated Dalmar's death is not considered suspicious.

But Lali Mohamed, a close friend of Dalmar who helped organize her memorial, disagrees, saying that police have not updated him or others close to Dalmar, and that they have been ignoring his calls. He says that too many questions have been left unanswered.

"I'm disappointed that it's not being treated as suspicious. [I feel that police are] not taking it as seriously because Sumaya was a black transwoman. They're not doing what they should," Mohamed says.

"If Sumaya was a cis blonde woman who was 26, the police would be doing something. It's hideous."

Others in Dalmar's community have also expressed that police aren't investigating her death as closely or as respectfully as they're mandated to do.

Dalmar, also known as Sumaya Ysl, passed away on February 22. Mohamed says no one seems to know for sure what happened. According to an account obtained by Mohamed from an undisclosed source, she was at a party, went home with someone, and was found dead in the morning. One witness said they saw a man chasing a woman who resembled Sumaya down the street near the area where she died.

A week and a half after Dalmar died, Mohamed said police still hadn't called that witness, a claim disputed by police. Lead investigator Detective Tom Imrie, however, declined to shed light on that conversation.

"I don't want to make assumptions or anything like that," he says, adding that the coroner's investigation is still underway. As far as when we can expect that investigation to wrap up? Imrie only says those reports take "a little while."

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But for a community reeling with pain, the investigation has taken longer than a little while. Their pain is compounded by the fact that the killing of transwomen of colour happens far too often: at least seven trans WOC have been killed in the US in 2015 alone. Journalist Muna Mire was friends with Dalmar, and she addresses this in a piece she wrote for VICE just after Sumaya died:

"An out and proud Somali trans woman, [Dalmar] was the sort of person who was so authentically herself she gave others around her permission to do the same. But now Sumaya is one of an alarmingly high number of transwomen of color whose lives have come to a premature end so far in 2015.

"To speak of her beauty in the past tense is painful because like Lamia, Leelah, Ty, Penny, Bri, Yazmin, and so many other transwomen of color who have died just this calendar year, she left us too soon."

As Mohamed reiterates in our conversation, it's not a new idea that tensions between trans folk and police run high just about everywhere. In Vancouver right now, for example, the BC Human Rights Tribunal has found that police in that province operate with "systemic discrimination" against trans people. Officers there called a transwoman by male pronouns, and failed to provide her with proper post-surgery care in jail. The Vancouver Police Board will need to pay Angela Dawson $15,000 for damages to her feelings and self-respect, and the force must also implement new policies for serving trans people within a year. In Ontario, Toby's law is in place to protect trans rights, but Toronto's trans population has had a complicated past with police officers, too.

As police haven't released any information about Dalmar's death, Mohamed and others close to her have been forced to speculate about what may have happened to their friend. Mohamed isn't saying he's sure she was killed; only that he can't rest easy that no foul play occurred. He worries her death may have had something to do with bad party drugs, if not outright physical harm. Last summer, someone gave women shoddy substances at a festival, and a young white woman died. As Mohamed says, you can bet the police did something about that.

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An aspiring model who loved travelling and fashion, Dalmar radiated love and community, according to Mohamed. Hundreds of people turned up for her memorial last month at the 519 Church Street Community Centre—where she was supposed to start a job in the education and training department the Monday after her death. Alongside members of Toronto's black queer community, people traveled from the US and Quebec to pay their respects.

"She always had the best stories to tell. I think that's what I'll miss most about her," he says. "Sumaya was incredibly funny, sweet and had an unbelievably strong vision of who she wanted to be in the world, working indefatigably to achieve it."

Her friends and community decked themselves out in purple and black clothing, heels, and fabulous hats to honour her at her memorial the week after she passed. As Mohamed says, there was "a lot of beauty and pain in that room."

"Somali queers are a tribe, and it seems like everyone in that community knew her," Mire wrote after she passed.

"Black queers show up for one another in times of need," Mohamed says. "Three hundred Black queers came to mourn a loss at the 519 Community Centre, the largest gay centre in the country."

"We are here, we exist, and we are going to show up for one another when we feel abandoned by those in power." Part of that solidarity involves standing up and saying something in the face of police negligence (or perceived police negligence).

Imrie says he acknowledges Dalmar's community's need to know what happened, but that as a detective, he has to balance that need with her family's right to privacy.

Dalmar's family has not been speaking to media.

Where police statements will sometimes describe at least something about the person who died and the details surrounding their death, the statement they sent out about Sumaya was vague.

"It was an attempt to appease the community. What it did was get the community more upset," Mohamed says.

Imrie says he doesn't feel police have prejudice against trans communities of colour,

though he has seen social media critiques saying that police are not taking the case seriously enough. He says, on the flip, there are "biases against police," and that police are handling this case the same way they would handle any other. He adds that they do have an LGBT consultative committee, as well.

Mohamed says one of the most painful aspects of his friend's death is the implications for his community as a whole.

"I don't want the death of my friends to go unsolved," Mohamed says. "The police need to be held accountable."

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

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Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie's mansion

On April 10, 1834, so the story goes, a fire broke out in a mansion in the old French Quarter of New Orleans. According to one version of the tale, when the neighborhood poured out to rubberneck and offer help, they noticed something odd (by 19th century southern elite standards): the woman of the house was trying to save her jewels and furs without the aid of her slaves. When asked where her servants were, she told everyone to mind their own business. Some said this was mysterious enough. Others said they heard faint moans and screams from the attic. Either way, a small brigade took it upon itself to bust into the house and find the woman's slaves. Yet when they opened the door to the attic they stopped dead in their tracks, some vomiting from the stench.

What the interlopers had found was the torture chamber of Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie , consistently ranked as one of the most infamous serial killers in the world—right up there with the blood-drinking, cannibalistic 16th century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory or Lizzie Borden and her alleged 40 whacks. Renowned in New Orleans lore as the Savage Mistress, LaLaurie became famous for the depraved brutalization of her slaves. Legend has it that a 70-year-old slave cook who had been chained to the stove by LaLaurie, yet was slowly starving to death, started the fire. But that was far from her most extreme torture. A brief catalogue of the ever-changing list of horrors people claim the would-be rescuers found in her attic include:

Heaps of corpses, organs, and limbs. Slaves pinned to tables or cramped in small cages. Live bodies with their eyes gouged, fingernails torn out, ears hanging by shreds of skin, or their mouths filled with animal shit and sewn shut. People flayed of skin with festering wounds. Many accounts claim they found one woman whose skin had been peeled off in spirals to make her look like a caterpillar, another with her bones broken and reset so that she looked like a crab, and one more whose intestines had been torn out and knotted around the waist. Many of these victims (some claim there were up to 100) were supposedly still alive—putrid and starving.

Yet many believe rumors of the deaths LaLaurie wrought have been greatly exaggerated. Some historians, eager to contradict portrayals of LaLaurie as inhuman, have tried to fully exonerate her. But the truth lies somewhere in between the fiendish legend and the saintly expungings. LaLaurie was certainly a monster, but she was (probably) not insane, or even incredibly unusual for her time. Like some Lovecraftian god, she was and is terrifying because she was a living fossil—an unabashed emanation of a particularly barbaric form of slavery that was briefly common in parts of Louisiana.

Born in 1787 in then-Spanish-ruled New Orleans as Marie Delphine Macarty, most of LaLaurie's life passed without any real indication of cruelty or evil. Despite (false) rumors that slaves killed her parents, the Mistress actually lived a fairly normal and privileged life. She was a major part of New Orleans high society, and beloved as a kind, gentle, and courteous figure. Revisionists even point out that, on at least two occasions, she had emancipated slaves, the latter just two years before her torture chamber was discovered. (This doesn't prove much, though—the first emancipation was in the will of her widow, and the second may just have been part of local social conventions dictating that older slaves with a good record should be freed.)

Some try to explain LaLaurie's descent into depravity by way of her third husband, Louis LaLaurie (who was not related to her before their marriage), a younger doctor freshly arrived from France. He knocked up the richer LaLaurie, then married her after their child was born in 1826. Soon after their marriage began, stories of her abuse against her slaves started to emerge. Residents filed complaints leading to investigations for cruelty to slaves (New Orleans had unique laws theoretically protecting chattel servants more than in other parts of the Deep South) in 1828, 1829, and 1832. Some say she began beating her daughters when they tried to feed them, although she put on a kind public face.

Those inclined to absolve LaLaurie take this line of logic (that the Mistress was driven to insanity and violence by Louis) to its extreme. They argue that Louis (who some suspect was experimenting with Haitian voodoo potions to create more docile servants) turned away help form the fire, as he was the one mutilating the LaLaurie slaves in cruel half-medical experiments.

Yet Louis wasn't the only force that would have introduced the Mistress to violence. Many suspect that LaLaurie was influenced by the 1771 murder of her uncle by slaves, the violence of the 1791 to 1804 Haitian slave revolt and independence movement, and the direct experience of a slave uprising in New Orleans in 1811. The terror of these events, and the growing consensus amongst local slave owners to exercise increasing violence and oppression (often demonstrated in public and gruesome ways) to prevent recurrences in the aftermath likely had a strong impact on LaLaurie, who would have been exposed to chaos and anti-slave bloodshed regularly.

"The plantation owners [of which LaLaurie was one] were living in terror," explains Daniel Rasmussen, the author of American Uprising, a history of the 1811 slave rebellion. "They were terrified by Haiti. They had read the newspaper reports—once a week or so there's some story about rapes, beheadings, brutality against whites in Haiti. And they think if they don't crack down and keep their slaves under control, what happened in Haiti will happen in New Orleans."

"The forms of punishment were quite extreme. The 1811 revolt saw over 100 slaves beheaded. Their heads were put on poles stretching for 40 miles form the center of New Orleans out into the countryside. You'd see slaves' corpses from the rebellion dangling form the city gates."

This growing sense of panic and unease probably explains why none of the investigators called in to check on LaLaurie's cruelty or ever charged her with anything— until 1833, that is. That year the mistress apparently grew enraged with a 12-year-old slave girl, Lia, who tugged at a snag while brushing the Mistress's hair. She chased the young girl around with a whip, and the tween chose to jump off the roof rather than face a thrashing. Witnesses saw LaLaurie burying the girl's mangled corpse, so they were forced to fine her $300 and make her sell her nine slaves. But they looked the other way ( as they did in most slave cruelty cases) when LaLaurie had her family members buy back her slaves, transfer them to her, and compensated them for their expenses. For all the anti-cruelty laws, a good degree of violence was tolerated. So nobody would have recorded exactly what was going on in the LaLaurie household in the years before the fire, because it all probably just seemed like your standard post-1811 slave punishments.

Then the LaLaurie Mansion fire broke out in 1834. That episode is actually well documented in the newspapers of the day. Folks did get irate at LaLaurie for not opening her attic to free her slaves, and what they found did shock them. But the original accounts are a far cry from crab women and intestine belts, although they're still far from pretty and exonerating stories:

Slaves were found, chained, scarred, and starving. One paper noted that seven were suspended by their necks and badly mutilated, while another mentioned a man with a hole in his head filled with maggots. They had bloody welts, were living on gruel, and wore iron collars with inward-facing spikes, which seems like a tableau pulled from an archetypal medieval torture chamber.

Yet according to Rasmussen, these were fairly typical forms of restraint on the plantations outside of New Orleans, where rural landholders feared that their slaves would grab their field machetes at night and come for them in their sleep. So they exercised extreme brutality regularly.

"They would tie your hands to four stakes, then whip you with a cat-o-nine-tails. And that would leave you bleeding and barely able to move," says Rasmussen. "They also had iron masks to put around your head so you couldn't eat. And they had collars with spikes facing inwards so the slaves couldn't sleep without getting spikes stuck in their necks. Those were common forms of punishment in Louisiana during this period. They believed that without the threat of tremendous violence, slaves wouldn't stay slaves."

Normal or not, a mob of nearly 4,000 people still felt that this violence was egregious enough to ransack LaLaurie's house on the spot, looting and pillaging in disgusted rage as the fire burned. Rasmussen suspects that by this time, over 20 years removed from the violence LaLaurie had grown up with and secure inside the safety of a by now established and well controlled New Orleans, people had started to lose their fear of slaves, distance themselves from the harsh punishments of the countryside, and come closer to the genteel image of protective and soft slavery promoted in things like the local legal code under which LaLaurie had been investigated.

Whatever the source of their shock, they seemed hell bent on punishing LaLaurie for her overzealous application of an already extreme form of punishment. Yet in the fracas, she escaped with her slave driver Bastien to the docks where she fled to Paris. Some believe that she died there in 1842 or 1849, and was disinterred and moved to a cemetery in New Orleans in 1851. Others believe she faked her death in Paris so that she could secretly return to Louisiana and keep on carrying out her cruel life secretly. Others believe she never really left. It's all a mystery.

But many people didn't really care what happened to LaLaurie. She was more useful as a legend than a clearly identified corpse. Her story was picked up in papers in the north, catching the eyes of outsiders like English writer Harriet Martineau who traveled to New Orleans in 1836 to collect stories about the Mistress in an attempt to explain her cruelty. It was this quest that yielded many of the post-facto accounts of her foul temper, including the tale of the death of the 12-year-old slave girl. And from there people further elaborated and embellished their hindsight tales, creating a body of local lore anthologized in horror stories by the end of the century and strung out in even gorier half-truths by tour operators in the past century.

Yet we do know a little bit about LaLaurie's later life thanks to the correspondences kept by her children. The story they tell is of a woman resettled in Paris and living a quiet, harmless life. She apparently never expressed more rage or violence (at least there's no record of it) nor understood why she had been driven out of New Orleans or realized the implications of her violence.

Some have taken this as a sign that LaLaurie was suffering form some sort of mental illness. But there's not a whole lot of actual proof that the Mistress was insane, or even that she was that unusual given the context she grew up in. The really scary truth about the bloody LaLaurie is that she didn't understand that what she did was wrong because for a while on the plantations of Louisiana what she did was mundane and routine. She was a monster, but she was part of a race of monsters who justified their existence to themselves as a logical violent response to a disruption of the natural order of things. She was a demon, but not in the inhuman way some would have you believe. She was the evil almost anyone can become, put into stark contrast and canonized as a witch for openly displaying her tortures past their social and contextual expiration date.