Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I can't understand people who don't feel like they are dying or losing their minds every day. Death and insanity are always imminent. We are so close to death (our bodies are so fragile) and so close to losing it (just one wrong turn down the wrong mental corridor and uh oh) that any weird sensation in the body or mind could easily be "the big one." When these extremes are always a possibility, how is everyone not just waiting for that other shoe to drop?

Some places are deathier and more insane than others. For me, it's places where I've had panic attacks before: classrooms, offices, restaurants, bars, clubs, coffee shops, movie theaters, other people's homes, any situation where it would seem "weird" if I just left. One might think it makes sense to avoid revisiting these places. I have a friend who says, "Go where it's warm," meaning only hang out where you are comfortable. But with panic disorders, this isn't really possible. No room in my house is safe. My body isn't even safe. I'd have to live in a black hole with wifi.

Sometimes I wish I lived in a black hole with wifi. A disembodied life devoid of other human beings sounds like a fucking dream. But there is another part of me that must really want to live, to absorb the human experience on this Earth, as uncomfortable as it is, because I haven't fled my body or transcended it yet. And despite past experiences, I haven't ruled out any one place from my life entirely (except for movie theaters).

Sometimes I even find it necessary to really test the waters and revisit an exact spot where I've had my worst panic attacks. I don't know that I do this for a courageous reason, like "getting back on the horse." I think I do this from a place of catastrophe and what-if thinking. Like, I'll think about a place where I've had the most paralyzing panic. Then I'll say to myself, What if you never go back there again? What if you start eliminating other places you can go, and eventually you can never go anywhere again? What if you are becoming unfit for society? What is happening to you?

This is why I find myself returning to the California desert, Palm Springs, the scene of my last major existential dissolve . You might think that I'm lucky to get to go to Palm Springs. It means that I have the time, resources, and means of transportation to travel—even if it's just a two-hour drive from my city. But the truth is, I fucking hate vacation. Vacation for me is no vacation. Vacation means that I have to be still with myself for more than five seconds. It means there is pressure to relax, enjoy, have fun and feel good. Those are way too many expectations, too many realms in which there is the potential to feel deficient. It's difficult enough to just be OK.

In the car on the way to Palm Springs, riding shotgun with my friend, I feel scared and sad. I am homesick. I'm not homesick for a place, but for my solitude: the ability to not have to perform for anyone. When I'm by myself I get way less panic attacks. If they do happen, on occasion, they are actually the scariest of the bunch, because it's not a situation I can flee. Like, I am the situation. But these instances are rare.

What's strange about social panic attacks is they are largely catalyzed and compounded by the fear of what others will think of me, yet the panic attacks themselves resemble dying. What kind of dying person would be worried about how she appears to others? I don't know. Yet somehow, the dying seems scarier to me when I am with others than when I'm alone making small noises to "test" if I'm still breathing.

I am glad, at least, that I'm not the one driving to Palm Springs. I've had many a panic attack in the driver's seat while transporting another person, when the feelings of fear and suffocation overwhelmed me. When this happens, the road begins to resemble a video game and I doubt we will make it to the end. Yet only once in my 15 years of panic attacks have I pulled over to the side of the road and said "oh my god I think I'm dying." When you're dying every day, you soldier on.

One of the things I make myself do in Palm Springs is eat at a restaurant where my last existential breakdown reached its horrific climax—a climax with no denouement for several weeks. At the time I was transitioning on my medication. Not only was I getting trippy feelings and sensations, but I was also seeing visuals. At this particular restaurant, there's a painting of Marilyn Monroe. In it she is supposed to be smiling and entertaining, but to my eyes it looked like she was cackling horrifically about a rotten American dream.

This time I make sure to sit with my back facing Marilyn. Yet I still feel her: in the weird tourists and business people, and their overpriced food. They all have somewhat of a wax-y, distorted look, as though the American poisons that killed her are showing on their faces. I don't know if it's capitalism, privilege, or what, but in this restaurant I feel guilty, mournful, and terrified for the state of the world. I feel we are all, myself especially, complicit. It's like a mad mushroom trip, when you feel that you are responsible for all the evil—that the weight of the world rests entirely on you—but you can't put it into words. It's grandiose and nauseating.

At the table beside me are a man and woman—he a corporate blur in his late 50s, and she a fox in her mid-20s: bleach blonde hair, huge tits, a pretty face and a giant rock on her finger. They are having a business meeting, eating some kind of disgusting salads with ham, deviled eggs and mayonnaise. He is only talking to her tits. He asks her tits if he can drive her to her car. She says she will take an Uber and he looks disappointed, but they continue speaking. I hear the words brand and content strategy repeatedly. I don't understand how she is able to sit there under her business face and not die. It makes me feel like we have a different constitution, like everyone is comprised of different material. It makes me feel like an alien.

The place I stay in Palm Springs is the same place I stayed last time: a beautiful, simple little cluster of Moroccan-style cottages. There is a pool, orange trees, fire pits. With the chocolate brown mountains behind it, the place looks like what Eden could have looked like. But I don't think anxiety knows beauty. In fact, I think that beauty can sometimes be a catalyst for anxiety, because you wonder what's wrong with you to not feel blissful.

Such was the case last trip, when I woke up at 3 AM, fragrant with oranges, and stepped onto the cool Moroccan tile and thought, I'm dying, help, get me out of here. This time, I wake up with anxiety two nights in a row: again at exactly 3 AM. It's as though the anxiety knows I am trying to prove something to myself and wants to show me that it knows more than I do. It's smarter than me. It's beyond consciousness and knows how to fuck with linear time.

But this trip, the texture of the anxiety is different. The fear is less visceral, less physical. It is more an anticipatory fear: me watching myself, waiting for the panic to set in, ready to freeze, fight, or fly. I watch myself go into the pool. Suffocating sensation? I watch myself read a little book of poems in the sun. Can I breathe? At times I am able to let go a little, to enjoy the beauty around me: the hydrangea, birds, and palm trees that look like pineapples. But then I catch myself in pleasure. I catch myself not thinking about anxiety and say, "Oh look, you're not anxious right now." Then I get anxious.

The three days pass and I survive, but I worry that this isn't how a person is supposed to live her life. Is the dichotomy between dread and relief really something to live for? I also don't really know which is better: to power through uncomfortable things or to just stay where it's "warm," even if that means seclusion. In considering this, I get the same feeling I do when someone who is suicidal asks me why she shouldn't do it.

Like, I can't say it's going to get better and then it will stay better forever and that is a reason to live. I can't say that. I can't say that if you push yourself out of your comfort zone your anxiety will heal itself forever and that is a reason to push yourself. I can only continue to live, myself, and share these experiences with others. There is something powerful and oddly life-affirming in saying, "Oh, you're fucked up in that exact way too? Same." I wouldn't say this makes it all worth it. But there always seems to be a surprising amount of hope and goodness there.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

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Bruce Robinson on the set of 'Withnail and I'

"Why is it that all the writers one admires are always arseholed?"

Bruce Robinson and I are already a bottle of wine each in when he asks this, which sort of proves his point. Since writing Withnail and I, Robinson has had plenty of admirers – not least Johnny Depp, who painted the oil portrait of Keith Richards smoking a joint hanging above us on Robinson's living room wall. The canvas is made – and hopefully you can see the subtle motif here – entirely from Rizla papers.

There are, as Robinson points out, "no books in booze", although that never stopped him looking. "I've been so drunk working I've typed with my nose," he says. "But the point is, if you're typing something worth reading, no one knows you typed it with your nose."

When it works, it works. As well as Withnail, Robinson is best known for writing the BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated The Killing Fields in 1984, and for writing and directing – at Depp's insistence – The Rum Diary in 2011. What's less well known is that he's spent much of the last 15 years on the trail of the true identity of Jack the Ripper – and he reckons he's finally got his man.

Robinson's farmhouse

We're in Robinson's 16th century farmhouse, half a mile from the arse-end of nowhere, Herefordshire. He's a generous host with a lupine grin, lighting up rants about Tony Blair, Jimmy Savile and an array of other modern criminals. Down the hall is his old writing room, with an IBM typewriter on the desk and Ralph Steadman's original artwork for Withnail and I – done for £200 – on the wall. There's also a yellowed copy of that picture of Vinnie Jones grabbing Gazza by the balls. "That's one of the funniest photos ever taken," he says. "If someone's got you by the knackers, you're fucked."

In another building opposite the farmhouse is a second writing room, with another typewriter, where he moved to accommodate the hundreds of books required in his search for the Ripper. "And the thing is," he points out wearily, "you've got to read all these cocksuckers."

The result is They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, 801 pages of meticulously argued investigation delivered in Robinson's lurid vernacular. One reviewer wrote that it reads as if written by Withnail after he'd sobered up, which makes Robinson laugh: "Withnail – i.e. me – will never sober up."

The book is less of a departure than it might appear. Robinson is no stranger to rigorous historical research, having written both The Killing Fields, about the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Fat Man and Little Boy about Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the nuclear bomb (released in the UK as Shadow Makers). Director Roland Joffé rewrote the script for the latter film against Robinson's will, then realised he needed to get his hands on Robinson's original research. His reply was a curt fax: "You've stolen my car. Don't expect me to buy the fucking petrol as well."

Having bet a friend he could find the Ripper, once Robinson began his search it soon became clear he was looking at a cover up. "There was this constant reiteration from the police that he never left a clue. He came out of the fog, murdered these women and disappeared," he says. "That's the myth of the Ripper and it's patent nonsense. Anyone who's conducting a series of murders in a ritualistic way is leaving clues. If they're ritualistic, what's the ritual? The day you ask that you're going down Freemason street."

Robinson's conclusion – persuasively laid out in They All Love Jack – is that Jack the Ripper was a musician and prominent Freemason named Michael Maybrick. He argues that Maybrick was protected by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Charles Warren, a fellow Mason who wished to avoid a scandal. After assembling his case against Maybrick, Robinson noted that although he had composed "The Holy City", one of the most popular songs in England, he had been expunged from contemporary books like the exhaustive Grove Dictionary of Music.

"This guy was as famous as it got, so how come he's nowhere?" asks Robinson. "How come he's been Jimmy Saviled out of history?"

Having studied the murderer for so long, Robinson is disgusted by the Jack the Ripper museum that recently opened on Cable Street in east London. "It's an outrageous and revolting proposition," he says. "It's like having a Bundy museum in Washington."

Robinson and Depp on the set of 'The Rum Diaries'

Robinson has no time for the quasi-veneration of the Ripper's misogyny and misopedia indulged in by some "Ripperologists". "The thing I hate about Ripperology is that they want to keep the myth," he says. "This guy is almost a heroic character in some of their books: 'Who was he, the amazing Jack the Ripper?' The truth is he was a nasty piece of work. Had he not been in a symbiotic relationship with the authorities he would have lasted ten seconds. That's the whole point of my book. That's why I'm angry. He's not Robin Hood, he's a piece of shit."

Robinson has carried a distrust of authority with him since his childhood, which he novelised in 1998 as The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. Born in 1946 in London before growing up in the seaside town of Broadstairs, Kent, Robinson was unloved and brutally beaten by the man he thought was his father. He would learn later that he was in fact the son of an unnamed American serviceman, and thus living evidence of his mother's affair.

It wasn't until last year that Robinson learnt his father's identity. He'd just written the penultimate paragraph of his Ripper book, in which he reveals that Maybrick's family crest bears the legend: "Tempus Omnia Revelat" . Minutes later, his agent called from Los Angeles to say a woman had contacted him claiming to be Robinson's half-sister. "I was 68 years old before I saw a photograph of my dad. That's pretty weird," he says. "Penman is full of rage and humour to try and exorcise some of my anger about it all. I have a motor drive to get to truth because I thought I never had it as a child. That's why I write about victims."

One way or another, all of Robinson's work is about victims. The Killing Fields and the Oppenheimer film are about victims; 1989's underrated How to Get Ahead in Advertising, about an advertising exec who spouts a talking boil on his neck, is a satire of Thatcher victimising Britain. "That could be George Osborne now," he says. "Yacking away and going: 'Fuck the lot of you.'"

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His Ripper book is motivated by sympathy for the murder victims, but also by the fact that "the whole of society were victims of these liars on his behalf. It incensed me. How dare anyone lie on behalf of Jack the Ripper?" Modern parallels run rampant. "In the same way, how dare anyone lie on the behalf of the Iraq war?"

Withnail too is about victims – initially the "I" character, and then later Withnail himself becomes the victim. Robinson originally wrote it as a novel, before being convinced to translate it into a screenplay. "What's fucking weird is that the most joyful piece of writing I've ever had was Withnail and I when it was a novel," he says. "And the most difficult piece of writing I've ever had was the screenplay. I constantly tried to abandon it. I sent letters in saying 'I can't do it. I can't make it work.'"

The story is based on Robinson's time living as a struggling actor in Camden with his friend Vivian MacKerrell, who died of throat cancer in 1995. The novel originally ended with Withnail returning home, filling a shotgun with the Chateau Margaux 53 he'd stolen from Uncle Monty and blowing his brains out. For the film, Robinson replaced Withnail's suicide with Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man..." soliloquy, which Richard E Grant performed to a pack of wolves at London Zoo.

"It's sadder to let him go on with that horrible life," says Robinson. "When the 'I' character leaves him, he's alone. You know he's fucked. That was quite true, in a way, with poor Viv. A complete total fucking disaster life he had. We worked hard on the ending: the build up to when Fatty Grant pulled off, did he not, that Shakespeare at the end? It still blows me away. He just had that right rage. What a magnificent fucking train of words is that? Oh, god damn! That's as good as writing can ever be."

Robinson is a little surprised by how Withnail has burned itself into our shared national consciousness. "It was a long time ago, and it was a tiny film, but for some weird reason – nothing to do with me – it's become one of England's reference points," he says. "I heard someone on the radio the other day say: 'Oh, it's very Withnail-esque.'"

I tell him my housemate and I have a very Withnail-esque kitchen.

"Of course you do! That's why Withnail has had that lasting effect. Everyone recognises what it's like to be in an aspirant situation without a fucking penny to your name. 'Where am I gonna get my next pack of fags from?' When I wrote that I was in the bowels of despair for my life. The game was up. Because I believed that, it became an honest expression. There's two ways of looking at your life when you're in your early twenties: poor and broke. I was broke, but I was never poor, because I could read Dostoyevsky. I was lucky to meet people like Viv who were educated and turned me on to literature and things I'd never dreamt of."

It was Withnail that led Depp to recruit Robinson as writer-director for The Rum Diary. Depp screened it for Hunter Thompson and they agreed he was the man to bring Thompson's novel to the screen. In one of those strange coincidences that can mark a life, it was the real-life Withnail who'd first introduced Robinson to Thompson's work.

"Many years ago, I remember Vivian, God rest his soul, throwing a book across the room," says Robinson. "I was in bed with a terrible fucking hangover in Camden Town. He said: 'You should read this, this bloke writes like you.' It was Fear and Loathing. I wish I could have written like that! I read this thing and thought: 'Yeah, I'm like an English version of this, in a way, because of the aggression and the humour of the approach.' That was the first time I'd heard of Hunter Thompson. He really was an important writer of the 20th Century. He had some real magic about what he could do, and that's all you fucking need. And the rage. You've got to be angry. You've got to be pissed off by these people as a motor drive to writing."

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There's also a neat symmetry to the fact that, while making The Rum Diary, Robinson was able to play out one of Withnail's best lines on Depp's tab: "Both of us are very fond of good red wine, and he drinks the best on the planet. 'We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!' And that's what we used to get. Fucking Haut-Brion, twelve-hundred bucks a bottle, and as many of them as you want."

Having "nailed that fucker" the Ripper, Robinson has three jobs he wants to finish. There's a "Withnail-esque" script called The Block, an adaptation of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman and a book of short stories. "If I could do those I'd sort of drift off," he says. "I wouldn't mind then. Cast anchor one night. Few hours outside on the roof shagging each other and then drift into eternity."

But he's not ready for the void just yet. "I still want to rage," he says. "I'm supposed to be quite a well off old cunt. I am a cunt, and I am relatively well off, and I'm certainly quite old, but I don't feel like that. I'm nearly 70, but I don't want a diminution of that feeling. I'd rather rage than sit there with a gutful of beer in front of Eastenders. Where has rage gone? We've become so bloody anodyne, and so acquiescent."

So he'll return, when I leave, to the typewriter and the booze and the truth. "It's bloody difficult writing, isn't it?" he says. "Smoking and drinking my life away because I thought if I get that wasted maybe I'll be able to get what I want. It's not really true, although so many great writers were piss artists. It's hard work. What I want out of a fucking typewriter is the truth, as good as I can make it. When you don't know where the fuck that line's come from but fuck it makes you laugh. If you can get those two things in a line, the truth and a laugh, then that justifies the whole fucking show to me."

@KevinEGPerry

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AGS patrol vehicles in front of Frinton's famous toilets. All photos by Jake Lewis

Stephen Beardsley has the handshake of a bouncer and the CV of a mercenary. He served in a tank crew in the first Gulf War, fought off Kalashnikov-toting Somali pirates as they raided transporter ships in the Indian Ocean, and was dubbed "Big Steve" by tabloid paps as a bodyguard for Wonderbra model Sophie Anderton.

Now, he's bringing that experience to the mean streets of Frinton-on-Sea, forming a private police force to protect the terrified residents in a seaside town that the regular police have virtually left at the mercy of crime.

Before Steve and his private security team turned up there was only the thinnest of blue lines protecting Frinton. With police cuts taking their toll, the town's nearest police station is set to close. Frintonians are not taking any chances on the tsunami of criminality that could hypothetically hit at any moment. Araura Global Solutions (AGS) is stepping into the vacuum.

It may be a sensible decision under budgetary stress for the police not to concentrate resources on an area with as little crime as Frinton. In September of this year there were only 34 reported crimes, while nearby Clacton witnessed nearly ten times that number. But the relative absence of crime hasn't stopped a few hundred of Frinton's residents paying AGS £2 a week to patrol the neighbourhood in their battenberg 4x4s.

Steve in his office

When I visited Steve to join one of his nightly patrols, he was sure to bat off suggestions that he runs an unaccountable racket of hired vigilantes. "There's only one law out there and that's the police," he said, adding that the cuts to the UK's police forces are "tragic".

He said he opts for a calm, consensual policing style – maintaining a preventative presence and talking sense into trouble makers rather than beating it into them. "If you go in there thinking you're Charlie Big Bananas, you're in for a world of shit," he told me. As such, "it can be pretty boring", he admitted. Really? So not like The Bill then? "It's more like Last of the Summer Wine."

AGS are hoping to get accredited by the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme, which will mean the Home Office granting them some pseudo-police powers like confiscating fags from kids or taking the name and address of someone acting in an anti-social manner. For now, they're limited to citizen's arrests and trying to look as much like real cops as possible.

Many communities would be delighted to see the back of the police – the criminal community, for one. But also young people from ethnic minorities communities sick of stop and searches; young people who like congregating in public spaces; the friends and families of over 1,500 people who have died in police custody since 1990; protesters who don't like being hospitalised; or just people who don't like getting beaten up.

So what kind of community would be so horrified by the absence of police that they would pay to bolster them with their own private A-Team?

On the way to Steve's office, a taxi driver had offered a clue: "Frinton? It's OK if you don't mind walking around with your nose in the air. If you're not from Frinton, they think you're a different class." He then told me a story about a driver who got pulled over by the police without insurance. Apparently her response was, "I'm a Frintonian" and that said she never left the area anyway, so why bother with insurance? "They think they're above the law."

Driving along Frinton's Second Avenue – all faux Tudor mansions with massive driveways and a golf club at the end – where Steve has a lot of customers, it's not hard to see how the place could earn a reputation for snobbery. It's the well-to-do neighbour of the somewhat down-at-heel Clacton-on-Sea, and there's an us-and-them feel between the two. The Mail put the desire for private police down to Frinton being "too old and white for our politicians to care about".

Last year when I visited nearby Jaywick, the kind of place Channel 5 makes poverty porn about, it was a source of outrage that £500,000 had been spent on state of the art public toilets in Frinton. A proposal to open a kebab shop caused a storm of protest, which sounds a lot like something out of Keeping Up Appearances. Aldi was met with a similar reception.

Jay

At a convenience shop I asked a customer, local business owner Nicola O'Brian, for her thoughts. She was less than happy. "I think it's taking money from the old population and feeding on their fears," she said. "A friend of mine, who's an elderly neighbour, came round and told me over a cup of tea that these guys had knocked on the door saying, 'Would you like to pay £2 a week on the security vans?' She said, 'How do we know who's paying towards this? I pay my taxes – why should I pay an extra £2 a week in one of the safest towns in the country?'"

When she said they don't have any real power anyway, shop worker Jay interjected. "But if you pay for them, they give you a special number," he said. "You can ring them up and they'll be here in five minutes. I had a break-in, two guys. In two minutes, they was here."

David

Down the road, David – the owner of Jade, a Chinese restaurant – was equally impressed. He recounted an altercation: "A young fellow came in after hours – about 12-ish – and demanded a few drinks." He got chucked out. "He was having none of it so he went outside and picked up a cast iron trough, picked it up..."

Did it go through the window?

"No, it bounced off and cut his leg. Then Steve turned up. Steve turned up in two minutes. Literally two minutes – three cars turned up. You can't beat that, can you?" The guy was citizen's arrested until the real cops showed.

Despite the hero-stories at shops that Steve guided us to, I couldn't help thinking that what I was really seeing was the commodification of fear. Nationally, crime has been in a long-term decline for 20 years, and Steve reckons Frinton is "probably the lowest crime area in Essex". It's a point the AGS boss was clearly aware of; as we talked, he would often insist that he's not whipping up fear, and that what AGS does is giving "peace of mind" to local residents.

Most of all, Steve was keen to hype the community aspect of his operation. They'll knock on your door to let you know if you left your lights running. They help confused old people find where they parked their car, whether or not they're customers. They plan to bring people UHT milk if it snows.

"I enjoy helping people," said Steve, sounding pretty genuine. When the regular police was formed in the 19th Century – against significant opposition – the community aspect of their work was highlighted to obscure their true function: protecting the scared rich from the angry plebs.

Every so often, I'd catch a glimpse of what appeared to be a sincere belief that we live in a very dark and scary world. "You can't have too many ears to the ground, can you? You'll never have enough," said Steve. He told me about one of his customers who has a lock on every single door in her house. "She locks them every night, like a ritual." I asked if she had been a victim of crime. "Erm, I don't think she had, actually."

It's worth pointing out here that I don't think Steve is full of shit. He was hospitable throughout and seemed to believe what he was saying. He kind of reminded me from Mike Watt in Spaced.

Gary Roberts

On the seafront, a couple were getting a blast of wind and checking out the newly landscaped beach, which runs from Clacton to Frinton (which is nicely done, by the way). I asked Gary Roberts what he thought of the scheme. "People are fed fear on a daily basis, because they read the local newspapers," he said. "A lot of it's self-inflicted. It's a good service and it is needed, because people do have that fear, because they're old and they're meant to have it. Old people are never secure. They live in fear. At the end of the day, it will do the public a world of good anyway."

It would be easy to write off this early foray into private policing in the UK as a fad for the old and the afraid. But with AGS planning to expand – from nearby Holland-on-Sea, to London, to Carlisle – it's probably more accurate to see the people of Frinton as the early adopters, normalising the idea for everyone else. £2 a week may seem small fry, but this little town in Essex is dipping its toe into a booming global industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

In South Africa, private security forces, sometimes armed with dogs and automatic rifles, are more numerous than the army and police combined. In an unequal, crime fearing society, how long is it until every curtain-twitching town has its own squad of hired goons occupying the streets? Maybe the world is scarier than I thought.

@SimonChilds13 / @Jake_Photo

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All photos via Serpentine Sackler gallery

To steal marketing material from the NSA, download architectural drawings from GCHQ, sneak into hacker conferences and then present your findings in a former gunpowder store just metres from Buckingham Palace is either the work of a maverick or a maniac. As I sit at a table waiting for Simon Denny to arrive, I'm intrigued to find out which one he is.

Born in 1982 in New Zealand – a country so cut off that my uncle used to beg air stewards to smuggle him in Levi's and David Bowie records up until the 1980s – Denny is already being talked about as an important figure in the contemporary art world. His "Secret Power" show at the Venice Biennale this year saw him decorate the Marco Polo airport and Marciana Library with images used by the NSA's internal marketing team, while his 2013 show, "Simon Denny and the Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom", recreated the entire inventory of confiscated items taken by New Zealand police during a raid on the notorious file hosting criminal's home.

Denny's latest show, "Products for Organisation" at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, is similarly absorbed with the uneasy alliance of technology and authority. Splitting the gallery into two distinct but interwoven narratives, the exhibition maps out the organisational models of hackers and large corporate and governmental organisations like Apple and GCHQ. It is the poacher and the gamekeeper, made art.

But what's behind his work? Is Denny the new face of oppositional art, or is he simply on a nihilistic mission to piss off the most powerful people in the world? I met him to find out.

Hi Simon. "Products for Organising" is a brilliantly nebulous, corporate, Silicon Valley-style title. Did you want this exhibition to feel like something from that world?
Simon Denny: Yes. The show explores this very hip organisational model called "holacracy", which is a supposed horizontal, self-management style used at Zappos, an American shoe store. One of their taglines is "holacracy is not anarchy"; they're trying to harvest the productiveness of a haphazard, non-hierarchical authority, but without the risk of total anarchy.

It sounds like that old European notion of Bacchanalia, the festival during which a child or fool or pig was elected Lord of Misrule for a day in order to more successfully reimpose authority afterwards. It's like they've understood that every organisation needs a valve for discontent.
Yes, it's like a homeopathic approach to anarchy and mischief. A friend of mine just wrote a really interesting text on holacracy; he identified that everyone is treated like an entrepreneur and given agency, but without the actual, real investment of owning a piece of the company. You don't own anything, but you have the heavy burden of self-management.

You collaborated with a couple of other artists and researchers for this show. How did that relationship work?
Matt Goerzen and I met after my Kim Dotcom show. We decided to go to a few hacker conferences and hackathons together, just to get a glimpse into that world. We went to a hackathon held between Deutsche Telekom and Evernote, where we told them we wanted to do something called KickMeNote, which was an app for anonymously bitching about your friends. They told us it might promote cyberbullying. Then, a couple of months later, an app was announced that was almost identical to our product, called Secret. Of course it ended with people cyberbullying and the company collapsing. But the founder exited with a couple of million dollars.

Hackathons remind me of that reverse-colonisation narrative in Dracula – the thrill of getting penetrated.
Exactly. It's basically security testing, where these companies invite people to bombard their vulnerabilities.

It's funny, because we really don't do that in the creative industries. I never ask people to bombard me with my failings as a writer. Although they do it anyway.
I have a lot of people in the studio telling me that my ideas are shit. Having space for that in the creative process is one of the things that has made my last few projects more enjoyable.

How do you feel about holding the show in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, which is an old gunpowder store?
It's great, especially as the show has a bit of an architectural undercurrent because we've tried to represent these two management models, visually, in the space. On one side you have products for emergent organisations, the hacker side, which you walk up and around and over and under. And on the other side you have the products for formalised organisations, that are these architectural drawings and models that you look down on.

I knew that the building would fit the sort of physical experience I wanted the show to have – one of moving through the exhibits, looking down on diagramatic models, exploring a space from two different vantage points. Also, the fact that this has been used to store weapons, and the technology I'm talking about has come to be weaponised recently; that certainly appealed to me. To put management models from GCHQ in a former arms store, I think is an interesting thing.

GCHQ are pretty serious people, you know. Are you worried?
I mean, I'm not unworried. But I don't like to go into situations where nothing's at stake, either.

For your last exhibition, you commissioned the former NSA creative director David Darchicourt to produce fresh works for you without telling him they were going on display. You then showed them alongside works he'd had leaked by Edward Snowden. Do you want your visitor to have a sense of peril?
Certainly in "Secret Power", the fact that people knew David Darchicourt had had his images leaked by Edward Snowden – that they'd been put in this position without him knowing – made it feel like you were prying. "Products for Organising" is about management – about how we organise people. If anything, I suppose it's about taking very chaotic processes and trying to turn them into products.

So this show is about how we codify and commodify the very way people get organised?
Exactly. Looking at the GCHQ building, I focus on this guy who works as a head developer and was tasked with redefining the way they used the office. He went to a conference called "Spark the Change", and one of the pieces in my show is based on an amazing diagram he produced there of how he wanted to improve the physical space of the office. Those architectural designs were just published online. I also found his Twitter account. It's amazing what you can just find on Google.

You know Google have that thing about not being evil, do you think they're evil?
They haven't actually uttered that phrase for quite a long time. I think they have the potential to be whatever they want. And if that's evil, then they could be evil. I'm more concerned that they have the potential to be anything, without them even wanting it.

When I think about this stuff – when I get worried in the middle of the night – I have to remember that even Google is just people in an office and a shed full of servers whirring away somewhere in the desert.
That's interesting. I've been talking to a guy about the cable network of the internet. He's been doing these deep sea dives where he goes down to choke points in the infrastructure and actually finds the internet running along the bottom of the sea. He's been taking photos of it. The divers who he's with will pick up a cable, and he's like, "Yes, that's the internet." One of the main things to come out of the Snowden thing, actually, was the realisation that GCHQ don't see the internet as a cloud, but as hardware and cables and points of access.

This exhibition is divided into two halves; you now live, part of the time, in Berlin. Do you think that context has informed the way you work?
I work in a former communist building full of Socialist symbolism, but often work in the West; most of the German gallerists are from the West. I'm actually planning a project in one of the former governmental buildings. When the wall came down the building was heavily restored by a huge management school. But they only had budget to restore three quarters of it, so the final quarter hasn't changed since 1990. We've secured that space for summer next year. There's this huge mural of a dove rising out of a nuclear power plant. It's such an amazing dichotomy. You'll walk into this beautiful lobby and if you go left it'll be this management school, and if you go right you'll come into my exhibition space. It's going to be great.

"Products for Organising by Simon Denny" is at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery from 25 November 2015 to 14 February 2016.

@NellFrizzell

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Beautiful Thunder Bay. Photo via Flickr user Jeremiah John McBride

Thunder Bay, Ontario had a dramatic spike in its murder rate last year despite the nationwide murder rate remaining at a five-decade low, according to new data from Stats Canada.

Released yesterday, the annual Stats Canada report on nationwide murders showed only a slight increase from 2013's total murders of 513 compared to 516 in 2014. This continues a trend of Canada's murder rate being its lowest since 1966.

However, the northern Ontario city of Thunder Bay had a sharp rise in murders, up from just three in 2013 to 11 in 2014. In 2013, the city with the highest number of homicides was Regina, Saskatchewan, with nine murders and a murder rate of 3.84 percent per capita.

One of the most disturbing statistics in the report is in regards to Aboriginal people. Despite making up just five percent of the total population in Canada, Aboriginal people accounted for nearly a quarter of all murder victims last year, making up 117 of the total.

"Aboriginal people were victims of homicide in 2014 at a rate that was about six times higher than that of non-Aboriginal people," the report reads, noting that there were 7.20 victims per 100,000 Aboriginal people versus 1.13 victims per 100,000 non-Aboriginal people.

Aboriginal men were seven times more likely to be murdered than their non-Aboriginal counterparts, and three times more likely to be murdered than Aboriginal females. The most murders of Aboriginal people comes in at 13.29 per 100,000 in Manitoba, which also scored the highest for overall murders nationwide.

It should be noted, however, that while Aboriginal murders were largely solved according to the Stats Can report—coming at an 87 percent solved rate compared to 71 percent for non-Aboriginals—the rate of murders against Aboriginal women has stayed unchanged since 1984, despite there being a decline in murders against non-Aboriginal women.

Most murders against Aboriginal people were committed by someone they knew, oftentimes their spouse, and the Stats Canada report found that a third of those accused of murder were Aboriginal.

After Manitoba, the province with the next highest number of murder per capita rate is Alberta, coming in at a 2.52 percent compared to Manitoba's 3.43. Nunavut is still the region with the highest murder rate, sitting at almost 11 percent. This is largely due to Nunavut's smaller population in comparison to the amount of homicides, with only four murders occurring in a population of roughly 32,000.

The number of murders in Ontario (population roughly 13-million, roughly three times that of Alberta and 10 times that of Manitoba) stayed on the decline, went down to 155 from 168 in 2013, and the overall murder rate is a mere 1.13 per capita. Toronto in particular made up 80 of the province's total murders, which is a hard statistic to justify when Toronto's population is 26 times higher than that of Thunder Bay, yet has a murder rate per capita eight times lower.

As Canada's largest city, Toronto's 1.38 per capita ratio looks particularly impressive (way to not murder each other, guys) when compared to US cities such as Chicago (15.1 murder ratio) and even the relatively peaceful New York (3.9).

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Photo via Flickr user Alex Guibord

In a rare display of cockiness, Justin Trudeau threw shade at Stephen Harper and the United States of America during an interview with the BBC.

Asked by Evan Davis, host of BBC Newsnight, if he thought he owed his election win to nepotism (aka Papa Pierre), Trudeau said "there's an awful lot of people who sort of shrugged and said, 'He has nothing but a name to go on,' and found themselves slightly bewildered as I left them in the dust." In fairness, the guy did take his party from third place to forming a majority government, so he's probably entitled to be a little smug.

But the subtle burns didn't stop there.

When asked a grade-school-style question of who Canada likes better, the UK or the US, Trudeau claimed we're less desperate for "external recognition or external definitions."

"Obviously, you're not going to join the US and become the next half dozen states?" interjected Davis, who evidently thinks the world works like a game of Risk. (Always start by taking over Australia)

"No, but if they ever want to join us as provinces, we could probably talk about that," replied Trudeau. Har Har.

Trudeau also lumped the Harper government in with Rob Ford and Donald Trump while speaking about divisive politics.

"In pluralistic societies we have, it becomes very difficult to sustain the hatred or the fear of the shopkeeper you see down the street every day or your colleague from two cubicles over, and that dynamic is what is really a source of optimism for me."

Of course no interview with Trudeau would be complete without a nod to his "fresh-faced" good looks.

To his credit, Trudeau didn't try to deny that his hotness is A Thing, but instead said, "The fact that I'm friendly and like people shouldn't count against me when I'm hoping to represent them on the world stage."

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Paul Walker, pictured here in the seminal 2000s film The Fast and the Furious. Photo via Flickr user dfirecop

The father of deceased movie star Paul Walker is suing Porsche over alleged negligence and wrongful death in the high-speed crash that killed the Fast & Furious actor in 2013.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the lawsuit draws upon other cases against the car company over allegedly unsafe features of the Porsche Carrera GT—the model of car Walker was a passenger in when he died.

Aspects such as the car's stability control system and reinforced side doors have been called into question by a number of lawsuits against the car company. Walker's father, who's the executive of his son's estate, launched the lawsuit following a similar one in September from the actor's sister, Meadow Walker.

Walker, who died at age 40, was riding in the car driven by friend Roger Rodas, 38. At some point in the ride in Santa Clarita, California, the car lost control and spun out before careening off a tree and hitting a lamppost. Both men died following impact.

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The September lawsuit from Walker's sister claimed wrongful death on the grounds that the seat belts were improperly designed and prevented Walker from escaping the burning wreckage of the Carrera GT. The suit denies claims from the police that the car was travelling over the legal speed limit of 45 MPH at 93 MPH.

Porsche Cars North America (PCNA) responded to the lawsuit earlier this month by dismissing the sister's claims, arguing that car had been "abused and altered," which resulted in Rodas' loss of control.

"PCNA alleges that Mr Walker knowingly and voluntarily assumed all risk, perils and danger in respect to the use of the subject 2005 Carrera GT, that the perils, risk and danger were open and obvious and known to him, and that he chose to conduct himself in a manner so as to expose himself to such perils, dangers and risks, thus assuming all the risks involved in using the vehicle," the Guardian reports.

Walker's father is suing for an unspecified amount in damages.

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The Whitehorse Correctional Centre. Photo via Yukon Department of Justice.

In prisons all across Canada, there are inmates using methadone—an opiate that satisfies the cravings of those with opioid addictions without providing the signature high that comes along with drugs like heroin or oxycodone. It is considered one of the most effective treatments available to stop extreme withdrawals and curb addiction, but not every inmate has access to it, and some have even been pulled off it.

In 2014, Mike Bland, a man charged with trafficking drugs in the Yukon, filed a human rights complaint after he was denied methadone treatment during his remand while waiting for trial. Bland was on the drug consistently before being imprisoned, and was eventually put back on it after a court ordered Whitehorse Correctional Centre (WCC) that they had to restart his methadone treatment.

Photo via Flickr user Dank Depot

Well, that was fun while it lasted.

Just 24 hours after announcing it would allow medical marijuana users to blaze in public, the Ontario government is doing an about-face.

Yesterday, Dipika Damerla, the province's associate health minister said the move to allow patients to smoke or vape weed wherever they needed was about "balancing the rights."

Today, however, Damerla told reporters the policy still needed some fine tuning.

"We've heard about the concerns around this regulation and we're going to take this feedback and see if this regulation is the best way to move forward."

The concerns likely came from non-smoking members of the public who questioned whether or not medical marijuana users would be able to smoke at restaurants, playgrounds, church, movie theatres, etc. Technically, as of yesterday, the answer was yes, though Damerla said business owners were allowed to ban people from smoking up on private property.

Under Ontario's current laws, smoking and vaping is prohibited in any enclosed public space, the workplace, and designated outdoor spaces.

The debate certainly makes a strong case for keeping edibles around. Hope you're listening, Vancouver.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via RCMP

The RCMP held a press conference today to tell media they are looking for two men who were "exhibiting suspicious behaviour" outside Toronto's Rogers Centre, and that the public is encouraged to provide any information we may have. Of the many odd aspects to this request, perhaps the most immediately apparent is that the men in question were being "suspicious" nearly three months ago, on August 31.

Fear not, though: the RCMP said there is no immediate threat to the safety of Torontonians! No immediate threat today, on the 26 of November, from two men (brown-skinned, which may be irrelevant but so often isn't) who might have done something weird on August 31. You can breathe easy once again.

It is perhaps worth noting that then-prime minister Stephen Harper was attending the Blue Jays game underway at the time. Then again, Supt. Lise Crouch said at today's press conference that there was no connection between the two events, and law enforcement is not exactly known for minimizing potential threats to national figures.

Penny Hermann, a sergeant with the Ontario RCMP, told VICE they are looking for the two men because a bystander filed a "serious incident report" that same day after seeing something they considered abnormal and investigators followed up, deciding that there was enough to warrant a look into the two men.

When asked if characterizing the men's behaviour as "suspicious activity" meant they hadn't been breaking any laws, Hermann admitted she "would say that's a fair assessment."

"The way I would look at something suspicious," she said, "you're somewhere doing something that, Why are they doing that there? You know what I mean? That's how I would look at it. It's obviously something that caught somebody's attention, you know what I mean, and that was like, Hmm, that's kind of different. And that's why they reported it."

But what, exactly, were the two men doing? And more importantly, if it wasn't illegal, why is the RCMP involved at all? The RCMP won't elaborate any further on why the men were reported beyond calling their behaviour "suspicious." Hermann did say there were a number of other incident reports from that day (which perhaps makes sense, given that the area surrounding the Rogers Centre was a clusterfuck in the hours before, during, and after any Jays game during the last half of this past season), and that illegal activity had all been satisfactorily ruled out in all other cases.

One of the examples Hermann cited was a man who was reported for parking his car on a set of train tracks. Weird? Perhaps. Dangerous? Potentially. Illegal? Not really! Upon investigation—by the RCMP, Canada's national police force—it was revealed that the man was a train enthusiast, and may or may not have been taking pictures (Hermann wasn't sure about that last part).

Another blow to criminal masterminds everywhere!

What the RCMP is looking to do, according to reports from today's press conference, is rule out whether the men had any "criminal intention." Intentions being different from actions, of course, and actions being the things that are actually criminalized. That is to say, it's not illegal to have an "intention;" it is illegal to act on that intention.

But because they were acting strangely, according to one person who saw them, these two men are being sought by the RCMP in order to explain their actions.

"We want to know what they were doing," Hermann said. "Basically, we would want to find out, talk to them, say 'Hey, what were you guys doing on this day? You were seen here, and what were you doing? Can you explain it?'"

Except that the RCMP does know what the two men were doing: they know the men weren't breaking the law. And as a law-enforcement agency that should be concerned with actual, specific instances of laws being broken, that should be all they need to know.

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Screenshot via YouTube

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is denying that he mocked a reporter with a rare musculoskeletal disorder at a campaign rally earlier this week.

Trump said in a statement today that he has "no idea who" the reporter is, making a strange comparison between pro athletes as a way of showing his alleged lack of knowledge about the reporter.

"I have no idea who this reporter, Serge Kovlaski, is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence," the statement reads. "I don't know if he is J.J. Watt or Muhammad Ali in his prime—or somebody of less athletic or physical ability."

Trump and Kovaleski have a history that stretches back to 1987 when Kovaleski was a reporter for NY Daily News. Kovaleski often wrote pieces critical of Trump and continued the trend while a reporter for the Times.

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(Illustration by Dan Evans)

You could be forgiven if your first reaction upon hearing about the Southbank Centre's second annual 'Being A Man' festival – an entire weekend of talks, discussions, performances and debates aimed squarely at getting blokes to reflect on the challenges they face in 2015 – is to throw your laptop into the nearest skip and pray for an asteroid to wipe out 50% of the population. A festival for men to talk about men stuff. The very concept of it sounds like something that should never have been allowed to snowball into reality. It's reminiscent of an ill-fated idea punted in the dying moments of an Apprentice brainstorm, or worse, the sort of thing Danny Wallace might write a book about.

Simply put, 'Men's Issues' seem like such a luxury problem that even conceding it's a real thing leaves you open to accusations of being a whiney meninist. To be a man who complains about his identity feels roughly equivalent to being a millionaire tax-avoider who complains about his lawyer fees. Men face no real existential threat. Men have enjoyed an entire civilisations' worth of largely unchecked economic, governmental and institutional power. 'A Festival For Men' is already an accurate summation of 98% of the world. And yet, there's a growing volume of evidence which suggests that for all our de facto privilege, blokes are circling the drain – doomed to an encroaching fate of near-total obsolescence.

'The End of Men', 'Are Men Obsolete?', 'Are Men Necessary?' are all books released in the last few years which ruminate on the idea that hegemonic masculinity as we know it is dead. But this is far from just an academic concern. A look through CALM's 2014 report into the mental health of males in the country paints a grim picture. It underlines the fact that suicide is the single biggest killer for males under 30, while giving clear evidence that men who are in thrall to those familiar masculine ideals of stoicism, strength and independence are endangering their own health. "Pressure to be the breadwinner, to be responsible for financial and legal issues, to be strong and practical..." the report says, are leading to men channeling their frustrations into "risk-taking behaviour such as getting drunk, taking drugs and gambling".

'Men's Issues' seem like such a luxury problem that even conceding it's a real thing leaves you open to accusations of being a whiney meninist

This problem is far from a modern endemic. As far back as 1981, Joseph Pleck published a report called 'The Myth of Masculinity.' Here, Pleck laid out his ideas of the 'sex role strain paradigm', explaining the multi-faceted issues which arise when men attempt to live up to what is little more than a mirage of masculinity. He discusses the profound dysfunctionality of men who feel that to 'toughen up' is better than to share their problems, and links his ideas to financial and familial collapse, depression and, once again – suicide. What seems clear is that whilst men might not be an oppressed group, the background assumption that they're immune to social pressures combined with either a reluctance or an outright inability to discuss their issues is leading to an unignorable crisis of masculinity.

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Taken as a whole, there is a weight of research concluding that many men lack the tools needed to negotiate through a complex and anxiety-inducing world. The dominance of a restrictive ideology which equates vulnerability with weakness has left men without a road-map to navigate through their problems with anything more than a grunt and a shrug. Whereas it could be argued that feminism has enriched women with the ability to delineate, refine, discuss and sharpen their sense of identity and social position – men are often left with weak or unavailable role models, trapped in their own skin with no idea of how they should behave or what is expected of them. Beyond the frothing waves of dullard meninists on Twitter, there lies a genuine issue, and one that has been brewing for decades. So how does this festival aim to fix it?

"I want men to feel they have permission to discuss what masculinity is, and to give them an opportunity to realise that there's so many different ways you can be a man," says Jude Kelly, founder of the Being A Man Festival and artistic director of the Southbank Centre. "There's rigid ideas as to what makes a proper bloke, and I don't know if they're helpful to men of any age," she says.

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These rigid stereotypes permeate through every layer of society, but the idea is perhaps best illustrated in the dingy world of gendered advertisements. Imagine, if you will, that you've been charged with the responsibility to corner the male-market with a new range of scented candles – how are you going to do it? Candles, as is well known, are the exclusive preserve of women and Nicky Clarke. You stride over to the front of the room and draw what looks like a crude vertical car exhaust on the flipboard. Soon, others start to join in. "It's a raging inferno-shaft" says Ian, loosening his tie and leaning across the conference table. "Cock? Wax cock?" says Linda, scribbling out her other ideas and drawing a firm circle the phrase. Then Rob bangs down his pencil and interrupts the whole thing. Rob, so close to being fired last week, knowing he's on his last leg, seizing the moment in a last-ditch effort to preserve himself, rises from his chair and points directly at the flipboard – "This isn't a candle," he says, confidence swelling over into an unprompted Jeremy Clarkson impression. "This" he says, "IS A MANDLE."

And yet, this is not a fantasy scenario, but an entire industry. The #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag that's been doing the rounds over the last few months collected examples of male-targeted products and now forms a sad gallery of misplaced identity. There are loofahs shaped like hand-grenades, 'Dude Wipes', compendiums of BROetry, and, perhaps the most forlorn object of all, a 'Man Tin.' These are people whose entire jobs rely on their expertise in pinpointing demographics, and yet they are collectively unable to conjure an idea of masculinity that's any more fleshed out than a character from a WKD advert. In 2015, 'male interest' is limited to Moylsey on Radio X, banter merchants on Labrokes ads, and, at the upper end, fantastist James Bond aspirants who drop £500 on cufflinks and have a close personal relationship with their tailor. There is a huge sighing gap where reality should be, and in the face of this, the breadth and depth of Being A Man festival is hugely promising. As Jude Kelly says, "If you want to be a fully functioning human being, then you have to build your identity on who you are, not what you get told you ought to be."

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A quick tour around the events going on over the weekend include documentaries such as Jennifer Newsom's acclaimed work 'The Mask You Live In' – a feature profiling young men's efforts to navigate society's narrow scope of masculinity; guest speakers with a width of expertise in the fields of journalism, psychotherapy, broadcasting, medicine, activism and beyond; and open forum discussions about topics as diverse as fatherhood, gangs, prison, ageing, extremism, education and body image. The most resounding message of these various events is the promotion of communication. Embedded in our language are ideas which implicitly suggest that part of 'manning up' (or, if you like, not 'acting like a girl') involves keeping a stiff upper lip, maintaining the illusion of dominance and strength, and taking life's setbacks on the chin – until the bitter end if needs be. With this in mind, it's not hard to picture an entire sea of blokes stewing in front of an endless loop of porn and video games, their inner emotions alien even to themselves, spewing forth the sort of maladaptive behaviours – the unsolicited dick pic bullies, the crying GamerGate infants, the rape-joke-apologist Archbishop of Banterburys who prop up Lad Bible's online store etc – that constitute seemingly 90% of your daily newsfeed. For men, the act of admitting they're not infallible and having the platform and opportunity to talk about it is half the battle.

Photo via Wiki

The festival doesn't only turn its gaze inwards, but also looks towards how relationships between men can lack emotional transparency and availability. Fatherhood is a big topic here, and one that many males in their mid to late twenties simply have no idea about. How do you be a father? What's the male equivalent of Mumsnet? What does a good dad look like? Aside from the withering 'put-upon male' trope familiar to anyone who's been to a shit local comedy night, it's yet another male-issue that's conspicuously absent from everyday discourse. Instead, we have the mentality that men should simultaneously shut their mouth and sweep their issues under the carpet to preserve the image of being 100% in control of their shit, 100% of the time. This is the Roy Keane effect. Roy Keane – a man who would cock a rifle to the base of your skull if he even suspected you'd once worn gloves – was on camera at the start of the month talking about Robbie Keane's playing chances after his wife had just had a baby. "Well he didn't have the baby did he?" he said, a nervous laughter rippling around the press conference. "Unless he's breastfeeding he should be alright." And there have it. Parenting For Blokes 101 – Man The Fuck Up.

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The unfortunate fact remains that many men do not where to turn to advice. Whilst the media landscape is full of progressive and relevant female-centric offshoots – Broadly, The Pool, Women's Hour, The Hairpin, The Debrief etc – the men's market is stuck in the Triassic era of tits and imported lager. This contributes to what Jude Kelly describes as a 'caricature identity', evident throughout all kinds of male representations. For many marketers it's as though blokes are little more than Mr Men characters, defined by one or two adjectives that float above our heads like avatars from the SIMS. 'Lad Culture' thrives upon this pack identity paradigm – reducing the human condition to a real-world BuzzFeed quiz. Sure you can be a Ladbrokes Lad, but which variety do you choose? The Smooth Talker? The Wildcard? The Joker of The Pack? The Sensible One? Our culture serves to funnel men into an increasingly limited set of default expectations, which in turn creates a pressure valve of unvented emotions, these then spill over into shitty and inexcusable behaviours, then the admonishment winds men up even more and the grim cycle repeats itself. The sad result is exemplified by the roll-necked Dapper Laughs, sat like a naughty schoolchild under the reproachful glare of Emily Maitlis. This can't happen again.

With events like Being a Man, Jude Kelly hopes that the discourse surrounding masculinity can become broader and more inclusive. "The reason why gender equality is a great thing for men and women," she says, "is that it means that you don't have to assume that you have the upper status, you haven't got to worry about your power, you haven't got to prove that you deserve to be a man." Ultimately, this feels like an attainable goal. As long as the dialogue keeps pushing forward, away from the toxicity of pre-Industrial masculinity and towards a landscape that's more in-keeping with the progressive, tolerant and inclusive society that most of us would want to inhabit. Dapper Laughs didn't die for nothing. Society is ready for masculinity to be revamped and remoulded, and if it takes an event like Being a Man to kick-start the conversation, then that can only be a good thing.

Southbank Centre's BAM – Being a Man Festival takes place Friday 27 November – Sunday 29 November 2015. It features three days of talks & debates, performances and workshops with contributions from over 150 speakers and performers. See www.southbankcentre.co.uk/bam for further information.

@millsandboom / @Dan_Draws

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"Honey". All images by Jamie Hewlett courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery

This article was originally published on VICE UK

Having created both Gorillaz and Tank Girl during almost 30 years as a graphic artist, Jamie Hewlett has finally been tempted into a gallery for his debut art show. He was inspired, like so many before him, by Googling "tramp sex".

"I was talking to someone in my studio about online pornography," explains Hewlett. "I said to him, jokingly, "Whatever you tap in, it will be there". He didn't believe me. I said, "Ok, let's think of something... tramp sex". Sure enough, he tapped it in and there was a website about that. I didn't really want to see that, and I'm not sure many people do, but my point was that it's all there. Nothing is left to the imagination at all. I don't like that. I prefer the power of suggestion."

So "The Suggestionists" – his first gallery exhibition – was born. The show brings together three different styles of Hewlett's work. Fans of his cartoons will immediately recognise the "Tarot" pictures, inspired by magical-realist Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky's reconstruction of the original Tarot de Marseille. Hewlett's wife Emma de Caunes stars as "Honey" in his tribute to 70s sexploitation movie posters and "Pines", a series of drawings he did in the south of France, provides a bucolic counterpoint.

"They're very different in style and medium, yet they're connected by the idea of the power of suggestion," says Hewlett. "Having taken so long to do an exhibition, I wanted to show three different sides of what I do." Here, he talks us through some of the images from the collection...

"Double Honey".

"These posters are my tribute to people like Saul Bass, Russ Meyer and Oz magazine. I'd had the idea for a long time but I was apprehensive about hiring a model and asking her to pose for me, so my wife agreed to do it. It meant there was an instant connection that we could play around with. It also meant I had to be respectful towards her. These are the new works that have thrown people the most, especially my friends. I guess that's the English thing of being uncomfortable about nudity."

"Honey La Douce"

"The titles had to be a little cheesy, because a lot of them were back in the day. My wife is an actress, so she said she'd only pose if she could be a character. That's why we created Honey, a forgotten erotic star from the 70s who did a bunch of films that all had these stupid titles, like "Double Honey", "Honey La Douce" and "A Taste Of Honey". That was my wife's way of stepping into character, instead of just taking her clothes off and being naked in front of me. We had fun with the credits too, which are all based on sex toys and positions from the Karma Sutra: Ben Wa Balls and Ananga Ranga."

"A Taste Of Honey"

"The posters are my homage to erotica, which is kinda kitsch and cheesy, but I remember it quite fondly. Posters like these were outrageous at the time. Today, whatever you want is online. I prefer that period where things were left up to your imagination. I think that's far sexier and more arousing. Online pornography worried me when my kids were young. They stumbled across all kinds of unpleasant shit just by tapping in "puppies" or whatever and then having a giant cock appear on the screen. That sort of thing gives people the wrong idea about sex and love."

Le Mat

"Le Mat – The Fool – is supposed to have a dog pulling on his shirttails, but in Jodorowsky's interpretation he talks about the fact that sometimes there's a monkey there. I drew the monkey, because I like monkeys. The Fool is related to Card Number 13, which everyone calls the "death card" but is actually nothing to do with death – it's supposed to be the skeleton of The Fool so they're connected. There are so many hidden meanings within those cards, you can find yourself in all of them. I wanted people to have a favourite character, like having a favourite Pokémon."

"L'Amoureaux"

"L'Amoureaux – The Lovers – is complicated because it has so many meanings. There's a hand in there that could be coming from the man in the middle or from the woman to his left. The scene can be interpreted in many different ways. It could be a madam offering a prostitute to a man. It could be a young man introducing his bride to his mother. It could be a three-way relationship involving an older and younger woman and a man. It's ambiguous. It's like a Rorschach test. You take from it what you will."

"Pine 1"

"The pines tell stories. When I was drawing them I was pointing out to people the little characters that I could see in them and the stories they were playing out. The people I was showing them to were in turn pointing out things I hadn't seen in them that they could see. I started to realise that everybody could see something different in them, and that excited me. It fits into the idea of suggestion, just as tarot and the movie posters are about suggestion. I like the idea of people using their imagination and trying to figure out what they can see in them."

Pine 7

"There's a lot of sex in the trees. I did an interview with a German programme that syndicates in Arabic countries, and there were certain tree pictures they wouldn't shoot in front of. I asked why and they said: "Look, that's obviously a penis" and, "There's a large breast in the side of that tree". I said, "I didn't see that, but you've seen it. That's your dirty mind." There's a lot in there that I didn't notice at first."

"Pine 9"

"I drew the pines in Cap Ferret, a peninsula in the south-west of France. They were all drawn at eight o'clock in the evening when the sun was very low and they were covering themselves in shadows. It was an obsession I had for about three months. I just couldn't stop drawing fucking pine trees. It got to the point where I was dreaming about the texture of the bark, so then I stopped. I'm not going to start drawing oak trees or anything now. I think I'm done with trees now."

The Suggestionists is at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until December 2

@KevinEGPerry


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All photos courtesy of the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's almost time to say farewell to 2015. You'll have regrets, of course you will. But you'll also have parties, parties offering the opportunity to crush those regrets into dust with the brute force of no lunch followed by several shots of tequila and six "share-size" bottles of import-strength lager.

Sometimes parties happen at home – not your home, you understand, because forget dealing with that carnage the next day. No, no. Someone else's place – and if that someone else's place also has a games console handy, all the better, because while you might think video games require perfect hand-eye coordination to really get the most out of, frankly, that's baloney. Video games are super fun when player one is half-cut and desperately trying to get the better of player two, who's just poured their fourth "large" glass of something that used to taste a bit like wine, but this far into proceedings doesn't even register on the tongue.

Which is how we come to video game drinking games, because you'd best believe that they're a thing you can do, in the relative comfort of an acquaintance's archaically decorated rented apartment, spilling colourful booze onto carpets that even the 1970s would have rejected for being too swirly, but bloody hell do they ever do a good job of hiding the stains. Drinking games have forever been a part of drinking culture, the entrée to the main course of a night spent in a hospital corridor shaking with the effects of alcohol poisoning. And since video games are a dominant force in the modern mainstream media, well, it only makes sense to combine these pillars of bollocks-to-tomorrow entertainment.

Which is what we've done, right here: tried and tested ideas for mixing drinking with video games. There are rules to follow, naturally, and not just any game suits simultaneous, short-session binge drinking. For a game to work, it needs natural pauses in its play, or else how do you ever take a shot? It can't be too fast, either – nobody wants to ruin themselves within three minutes of turning on an old Genesis. Thirdly, a good drinking game video game should be one that makes sense to anyone after the very merest explanation – complicated controls and hard liquor should never be mixed.

Five video game drinking games, then, guaranteed to get you messy. Assuming that's what you want. And of course you do. Other people are hell, but they're slightly tolerable when their faces go all skewwhiffy.

Obviously, VICE doesn't encourage excessive drinking. That's irresponsible. But if you're planning a bender anyway, who are we to stop you? It's your liver.

New, on Noisey: Listen to Lil Wayne Cover a Bunch of Drake Songs

THE DEATH ADDER

You'll be playing: SEGA's old-school arcade brawler Golden Axe, although similar games, like Streets of Rage, will also work. It's best played on the original hardware, as emulated versions run faster, making the game that bit harder to get into.

Booze requirements: A bottle of whiskey or rum or vodka, whatever you like, for shots; a couple of beers or ciders on the side.

Rules: Two players can get involved simultaneously here, in co-op. They must down a shot of their spirit of choice every time their character dies (which will happen a lot), or when they have to use a "continue". Every time a level is completed, both players take two fingers from their weaker drink. If anyone uses magic, like the dirty cheats they are, everyone has to take another shot.

Ease of play: 8/10 – this is a game that anyone can pick up within 30 seconds.

Likelihood of being wasted inside 30 minutes: 9/10 – you might remember being good at Golden Axe way back when, but you're older now, slower, and the game gets pretty merciless.

SKINS-FUL

You'll be playing: Wii Sports Golf, or any Tiger Woods game that has a skins game mode.

Booze requirements: Flexible. Drink what you've got, so long as it's relatively even of strength across all players.

Rules: Skins mode means competing on a single hole at a time, basically. You win the hole, you don't need to drink. But everyone else does – which on Wii Sports Golf means up to four pissheads at once. There's a twist, though – win five holes and you down your drink, and if anyone hits a shot out of bounds, everyone takes a hit (you can decide to what degree).

Ease of play: 10/10 – because, seriously, who doesn't know how to play golf on a Wii?

Likelihood of being wasted inside 30 minutes: 7/10 – the problem here is that you'll drink while waiting to drink, but that's entirely your own fault, because you're weak.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film, Life Inside Japan's Aging Biker Gangs

GRAND THEFT SURVIVAL

You'll be playing: Any 3D Grand Theft Auto game, which gives you plenty of platform options. Everyone owns a GTA game, don't they?

Booze requirements: Something from the spirits shelf, and plenty of pre-loaded shot glasses.

Rules: We've all done it – sacked off the mission at hand and just gone for chaos, messing up the beautiful world Rockstar spent so much time and money on creating, murdering innocents, exploding vehicles, generally being a massive dick to Liberty City (or wherever) until NOOSE (or whoever) is shooting out your tyres before filling your face full of protect-and-serve lead. Honestly, this is even better with a cheat code, to get all the guns you need right away for maximum results. And as this only works as a one player at a time game, it's best to hurry the fuck up with the mayhem. Every wanted star means a shot. When you're finally taken out, another shot. However, accidentally kill yourself, and it's two shots for everyone.

Ease of play: 6/10 – you need to know your way around the GTA controls.

Likelihood of being wasted inside 30 minutes: 7/10 – if you're doing everything you can to get SWAT teams on your tail, you won't last long, meaning that player turnaround time can be around the five minute mark, max.

SUPER SMASHED BROS.

You'll be playing: Come on, really? In fairness, though, this drink-along works with any fighting game, but Super Smash Bros. on the Wii U lets up to eight players go at each other, around the same console. The more, the merrier, quite literally.

Booze requirements: Player's choice, determined prior to play – a shot, three fingers, half a pint of Baileys, whatever does it for you. We're not your parents.

Rules: With Super Smash Bros., you drink every time you get knocked out of the arena. But if someone uses a Final Smash move, then everyone takes a drink. Everyone drinks at the end of each round. You can also impose handicaps. For example, if someone chooses a character they're especially proficient with, even when shitfaced, they have to down double the booze that the others do on victory.

Ease of play: 8/10 – you can mostly button mash your way to an unlikely victory, as Super Smash Bros. is far away from the complicated controls of any Mortal Kombat.

Likelihood of being wasted inside 30 minutes: 8/10 – though results depend on what drinking rules you decide on, and whether or not a healthy crowd is egging you on.

Related, on Munchies: A Rogue Gene Could Be Making You Act Like a Drunken Idiot

QUIPLASHED

You'll be playing: The Jackbox game, Quiplash. It's a party game, available on pretty much everything, where up to eight simultaneous players use their phones to input answers to questions like, "What is a better name for France?" You can write anything you like, and players vote on "the right" answer. There are loads of in-jokes and, if you're brave, you can stream the game to have a live audience voting, too.

Booze requirements: Line up the shots.

Rules: Very simple. If your answer is the lowest voted, you drink. If you voted for the lowest answer, you drink. If everyone votes for the same answer and you get a "Quiplash", you all drink.

Ease of play: 9/10 – once you get past the initial phone setup, it's a breeze.

Likelihood of being wasted inside 30 minutes: 10/10 – each round is over quickly, so make sure you've got enough glasses to go around.

Please drink responsibly. Know your limits. And so forth. If you do play any of these video game drinking games, or even come up with your own, share the results with us – VICE Gaming is on Twitter, here.

Games conceived and tested by @cleaverslips / Additional words by @mikediver

Screencaps via Brigitte Noël

The increased popularity of HIV prevention system PrEP on hookup apps seems like good news for gay men and for Canada's healthcare system. But the trend is highlighting a bit of a hitch: the potentially life-saving drug program is still not approved by Health Canada.

Truvada, the revolutionary drug used in the PrEP system, is sanctioned as an effective way to treat people who are already HIV-positive. Yet the drug has also proven itself as a hugely successful way to prevent transmission, prompting doctors to prescribe it as "pre-exposure prophylaxis", aka PrEP, to people who are at risk of getting HIV. Canada's federal government, however, has yet to officially recognize this very important other purpose.

But gay men have taken note and are passing the message along. On hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff, users are mentioning PrEP under their sexual preferences or even directly within their profile names. Erstwhile Grindr user Dan Snow says it's sparking a conversation, albeit one that leads to a disappointing realization for Canadians.

"It's definitely planted the seed for me to ask my doctor," says Snow, a Toronto-based digital strategist. "But my understanding is that it's hella expensive."

That's because without Health Canada's stamp of approval, PrEP can be prohibitively pricey.

Sean Hosein, editor at HIV resource website CATIE.ca, says that in most of the country, a month's supply of the daily-dose drug can cost more than $1,000. "Every province and territory has a list of drugs they subsidize," he explains. "The Quebec government does subsidize the use of Truvada, but not the rest of Canada." La belle province's universal drug insurance plan means that insurers cannot refuse coverage of the PrEP system and so the drug is much more affordable, sometimes even free.

Since preventing HIV is not the drug's approved mandate, prescribing Truvada within the PrEP system counts as off-label use. "Because it's approved for treatment, many insurance companies can reimburse patients," Hosein says. "But some HIV negative people are saying their insurance companies stop paying once they find out the drug is being used for prevention." Snow's doctor also warned him that insurers who find out about off-label use can request a reimbursement for any amount they've covered.

"Unless you have private insurance that's willing to pay for this, or you're someone who is wealthy, most people who want or need Truvada are not getting it," Hosein says. "Point is, access to Truvada is limited."

Yet making the PrEP system available to all is more important than ever.

Snow says that for young people, HIV awareness seems to be lacking. "We're the generation that's just far enough removed from the AIDS epidemic that we've forgotten that it's still a thing." he says. And while HIV rates have remained relatively stable since 2008, "they are increasing at larger rates among men who have sex with men and yes, younger people are getting infected more," says Hosein.

According to 2011 data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, men who have sex with men are 71 times more likely than straight men to get HIV.

Hookup apps are often criticized for encouraging promiscuity, and some reports claim they're actually contributing to the hike in STI and HIV rates. Conscious of the applications' outreach powers, the companies have responded by giving PrEP more visibility within their platforms.

Last year, Grindr administrators joined forces with PrEP makers to raise awareness through in-app messaging. And last month, Scruff added PrEP to its Safety Practices drop-down menu to encourage disclosure.

Snow says subscribers have also taken it upon themselves to spread the word, and even noted one user—a healthcare worker—offering to educate men on the topic: "Using to get sex and as an educational tool? That's two birds!"

Hosein says this type of information-sharing is a positive step. "As news about Truvada's power in protecting people gets out, more and more people will ask about it," Hosein says. "It shows that gay men, when tools are available, are willing to use them to prevent from getting HIV, and that's a good thing."

Until PrEP is greenlit by the federal government, however, the awareness campaign can lead to frustration. Health Canada spokesperson Sean Upton says it's up to the drug company to make the first step. "The decision to seek market authorization for an expanded indication rests with the manufacturer and requires the manufacturer to submit an application to Health Canada," he told VICE. A representative from Truvada manufacturer Gilead confirmed the company had filed the necessary submission in August. Considering the standard Health Canada review period is about 300 days, this means PrEP won't be fully sanctioned until late 2016.

In the meantime, Snow says he'd like to see Gilead make their product more affordable. "The conversation will be the catalyst for change," he says. "It makes sense for the drug company to lower their price and increase their share of market, if the demand is there."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the price of PrEP in Quebec was $25. The drug's price's can actually vary from person to person.

Related: Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Memes Flooding the Internet

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations is a racist propaganda film that has gone viral. The video, which is designed to scare people about the supposed menace of refugees, has notched up approaching four million views in just a few weeks on YouTube – a figure that has raised significantly following the Paris attacks. As you can see at the top of the video above, the uploader, 'Death of Nations', has been using the Paris terrorists attacks as a way of promoting it.

Back in September, as the refugee crisis in Europe got dramatically worse, I wrote about the bullshit anti-refugee viral memes that were being spread across Facebook and Twitter to vilify people fleeing violence in Syria. I wanted to show that forming an opinion on one the most important issues of our time using something a fascist drew up on a meme generator is stupid. Unfortunately, With Open Gates has made things more stupid. At first, debunking it seemed about as good a use of time as talking politics with a toddler. But while the film has lowered the bar for racism and fidelity to the truth, it has raised the bar for the influence and virulence of online refugee-bashing. After seeing the number of views keep rising, I decided it was time to call bullshit.

The 20-minute video is a mishmash of comically fake and out-of-context footage, bad subtitling and Islamophobic propaganda. Let's take these elements in turn:

FOOTAGE TAKEN COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT

The video begins with the narrator claiming the other side of the refugee crisis is "how it will change Europe". What follows is a montage of selectively chosen footage designed to present refugees and migrants as violent and dangerous. Some of it is genuine footage from the past 12 months, but a lot of it has absolutely nothing to do with the current crisis. It's just a collection of random footage of people that aren't white in circumstances that aren't stated.

Take the above clip at around the 2.40 mark. I managed to trace it to a protest that happened in August 2011 in the Spanish resort of Salou, which had been called after the death of a 50-year-old Senegalese street vendor following a police raid. Here's the proof:

Take this one at 2.55:

I traced it to another video from Caserta in southern Italy. It shows an uprising that took place after the murder of six African men in a gangland shooting back back in 2011.

So, nothing to do with the current wave of immigration, and everything to do with tempers fraying thanks to some pretty legitimate grievances.

Here's another clip of angry men looking like some sort of "foreign menace".

As you can see above, these guys are in fact a bunch of German IS supporters attacking a Kurdish rally back in 2014. Bad but again, nothing to do with refugees.

Here's another, implying that refugees beat people up:

It shows pro-Kurdish demonstrators clashing with Turkish nationalists in Frankfurt who were holding a demonstration against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), a group currently embroiled in a conflict with the Turkish state. Not a bunch of refugees gone an a rampage.

And here's a final one at 7:43, shown during a segment criticising Sweden's "failing" immigration model:

What it actually shows is a Slovakian migrant worker being beaten up by an antifascist who apparently mistook him for a Nazi:

FOOTAGE PRESENTED WITHOUT CONTEXT

The bits in the montage that really are to do with the current wave of refugees are presented without any context whatsoever. At the beginning, for example, you can see shots of refugees rioting in Lesvos as a white Greek woman says "You have to do something. Somebody has to protect us".

It's sad that she feels threatened, but what happened in this case was that unregistered refugees were prevented by the Greek authorities from boarding a ferry bound for Athens and got stuck on the island for days. After the trauma they had likely already faced on boats across the Aegean, it's hard to imagine how stressful this must have been.

It's a similar story for the other chaotic clips that show refugees breaking through the fence Hungary shamefully put up on the Serbian border or trying to board the ferry in Calais. When European countries and institutions offer no safe passage to people fleeing violence and no real humanitarian response when they arrive, emotions can run high and things can go wrong.

OBVIOUSLY INCORRECT SUBTITLES

Another section of the video tries to smear refugees by showing clips of them "bored" at supposedly luxurious asylum centres, throwing food away and Donald Trump repeating the myth that they are all "strong, fit men". The point here is to make refugees seem selfish, ungrateful and on the take. The problem is they aren't, which is why the video has to resort to putting words in people's mouths.

Take this clip at 12.35. It claims to show a refugee saying, "I want money because I want to smoke and give it to my mother in Syria."

What he actually says – and it's quite obvious because he's speaking English – is, "I want money for smoking and telling my mother in Syria." Presumably he wants to do what anybody else that had just completed a life threatening journey across several continents would want to do: call his family.

Or take this clip shortly after, at 12.41. The video quotes him saying. "People in Croatia told me here is good, good, good asylum. We go to Germany because their money very good."

What he actually says – again, very clearly in English – is "me go to Germany because Germany is very good."

OBSCURE AND IRRELEVANT FOOTAGE OF ISLAMISTS

Not satisfied with presenting refugees as thankless, greedy troublemakers, at various points the film turns to the issue of radical Islam in a desperate attempt to smear people fleeing war as dangerous Islamists. Never mind that in many cases these people are actually fleeing the real dangerous Islamists of IS. Unable to establish any actual link between the two, the video turns to using a bunch of fake, obscure and hyperbolic footage.

For example it shows a video of Islamists on a "refugee train to Germany"...

...that has nothing to do with refugees and was actually filmed in Paris back in 2010.

It shows other random, unrelated clips of extremists like this one from a Stacey Dooley documentary I remember watching in 2012 on BBC3 about the EDL and Islamists in Luton.

There's also a super-random moment at 4.52 where the narrator says, "the high Muslim birth-rate is changing the political landscape. Imran is looking forward to replacing Belgian law with Sharia law, including amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and death to homosexuals." Who the hell is "Imran"? What's his story and what does he have to do with the refugee crisis? The film doesn't say. Perhaps because the answer is absolutely nothing. This bit is lifted from an article written in 2012 on the Christian Broadcasting Network that admits most people don't take Imran's group – Sharia4Belgium – seriously.

OTHER RANDOM RACIST BULLSHIT

The video also broadens out into a more general discussion about immigration which is replete with Islamophobic propaganda. The most ludicrous example it comes up with is the story of a rape epidemic in the capital of Oslo which it claims is entirely down to "immigrant non-western males".

The story actually dates back to 2011, when it was widely reported on far-right websites, and has of course been wildly distorted. The journalist Ali Abunimah found the police report on which the story was based and had the most pertinent sections professionally translated. It actually shows that the vast majority of rapists in Oslo for that specific dataset were Norwegian citizens. And though assault rates were all committed by "foreigners", this comprises a specific category of which there were just six cases. In fact the report specifically cautions against drawing any link between ethnicity and sexual assault: "Crude generalisations that have given the impression that rapists are only foreigners – and primarily Muslims – are shown to be inadequate and erroneous".

AN ANTI-SEMITIC MESSAGE

The message of the video ratchets up the anti-refugee rhetoric to a whole new ideological level, making Britain First look comparatively PC. About nine minutes in, it quotes former BNP leader Nick Griffin saying that an "unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation".

It ends with a quote from Barbara Lerner Spectre, the founding director of the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, who says, "Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the centre of that." She's talking about Jews playing a role in making Europe a more tolerant and diverse place. But taken out of its original context and spliced into an anti-refugee film, it implies that Jews are at the heart of a project to destroy Europe as we know it. This is an anti-Semitic trope claiming that immigration is part of a Zionist/Jewish plot to destroy the white race – something the far-right likes to call "white genocide".

These Nazi overtones are swimming among enough run-of-the-mill bigotry and dramatic footage that millions are happily sharing it. Many are probably unaware that they're sharing something Leni Reifenstahl would have been proud of, but I'm not sure that makes it any less sinister.

@PKleinfeld

Today is Black Friday, our national holiday built solely to motivate shopping. One hundred thirty-five million Americans are expected to hit brick-and-mortar and online stores this weekend, spending on more stuff at a time when the average citizen already has 300,000 possessions. In 2014, we spent more than $51 billion during the long Black Friday weekend. This holiday season, according to a recent Gallup Poll, Americans are budgeting to spend 15 percent more.

Our spendthrift ways are a bit problematic considering the average household already owes $7,500 in credit card debt. Last year, thirty-nine percent of Americans went over their Christmas budget. And it takes about two or three months for American families pulling in less than $100,000 just to pay off their holiday splurges.

Reflecting on all of this, the big question becomes: What is all of this holiday spending for? Is all of this conspicuous consumption putting us on the path to a Merry Christmas? According to smart people who study this sort of thing, the answer is no. "The path to a Merry Christmas comes not from purchasing many expensive gifts at the mall, wrapping them, and placing them under the tree," writes professors Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon in their study "What Makes for a Merry Christmas."

If our consumerism actually made us happy, America would be by far the world's happiest nation. But according to the most recent survey by the World Happiness Report, the happiest people live in Switzerland, followed closely by Iceland, Denmark, and Norway. In 15th place, behind Mexico, is the USA. "In the United States, we have more money than any country in the history of the world," said Andrew Morgan. "We're richer than anyone's ever been and yet we fail on indexes that measure things like happiness."

In fact, despite our increased spending around the holidays, a poll by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America found that nearly three-fourths of people feel more "anxious or depressed" during the jolly season than the rest of the year.

Instead of spending, Kasser and Sheldon say the way to happiness is "satisfying deeper needs to be close to one's family and find meaning in life." Stuff you can't buy.

And yet, the prosperity of the nation requires that we be good cogs in the economic machine. To keep us spending, the system bombards us with messages to buy, buy, buy. One of the first things President Bush said after 9/11 was, "I encourage you all to go shopping more." The government wants this system to work so badly that they don't even tax advertising dollars, they consider that a business expense.

And in many ways, it's the advertising that convinces us that the things we buy can bring us happiness. We're promised that this is shampoo will give us glistening hair that'll make everyone find us attractive or that a pair of new sneakers will make us effortlessly cool or a drop-top convertible will makes us feel young again.

Just take a look at the awesome new holiday ad from Coach where a stylish woman kicks Christmas's ass when she strolls into Santa's workshop, knocks him out, and takes the Coach bag she covets. She's cool, she's stylish, she's tougher and smarter than Santa, and she knows how to get exactly what she wants. If we want to be her, we must value a Coach bag and do whatever we have to in order to get it.

Bob Dorfman, a veteran marketing executive, said people repeatedly fall for advertisements like this for the same reason we fall for romantic comedies. "We always like hearing stories about somebody who is not in a good place and something happens to them and in the end they end up happy," Dorfman said. "Advertisers want to create some magic around a product or service. Make it something that you feel is unique or special and the fact that you would buy this product rubs off on you and it makes you a little more special, it makes you a little bit better, and a little happier."

But will we ever reach the sense of happiness and contentment that the ads promise? Purchasing things that fulfill our most basic human needs—food, shelter, basic clothing—do indeed satisfy us, but after we rise above the level of subsistence and enter into the marketplace of sexy goods, the promises of happiness climb dizzyingly high and the returns droop depressingly low. But the system has a message for you: If the last purchase didn't make you happy, the solution is to buy more. So we buy more, hoping that the next thing will be the one that finally does it. But it doesn't and on we go chasing happiness from store to store, never catching it.

We are all on a gigantic hamster wheel, running towards something that will always be out of our grasp.

"The desire to be materialistic is basic to being human," said Tim Kasser, a professor of psychology at Knox College and the author of a book called The High Price of Materialism. "From what I understand, evolutionarily there is something very basic about people that leads them to want to have stuff and the status that stuff conveys. We're primates and most primates are pretty status-oriented. One of the reasons why we as a species were able to survive is we are excellent collectors of stuff. Spears and hoes and seeds and stuff like that. That's part of who we are. What Madison Avenue and consumer capitalism have done is to find excellent ways to encourage and entice people to pursue that particular desire."

Over the centuries our approach to acquiring stuff has changed. "Philosophers always said don't let materialism get out of hand," Kasser said. "If you look back at the medieval ages a lot of the basic sins are oriented around materialism. But once we as a world transferred over to the consumer capitalist society, that particular set of desires becomes encouraged and held up as one of the highest goods and something that is a way to build a meaningful happy life."

However, psychologists say the basis of true happiness is meaningful relationships, not materialism. "From what we know from dozens of studies," said Professor Kasser, "the more people have the materialistic values, the less happy they are. The consumption mindset can distract us from the more direct and satisfying ways to live our lives. And that's why a consumption-oriented lifestyle leads to not being a very happy one."

However, none of the people I spoke to suggested we should all just stop buying stuff. We live in a world where just questioning consumerism seems bizarre, but we can reject its commands and reclaim some of our power from it. "We have to begin to look at the things we're bringing into our life," Morgan said. "We have to evaluate them on the basis of is this something that I'm going to use up or something that I'm going to invest in? Buy things that are made with quality and care, things you're going to hold onto."

Or maybe we can find ways to send the message of love this holiday season without buying things at all. "If you ask my wife," Professor Kasser said, "the best present I ever gave her happened a couple of years ago. There was one particular chore that she just hated. She had to wash the plastic bags and hang them up so we could reuse them. So I said, 'I will do this chore from now on.' You should've seen the look on her face. I think that was meaningful because it really showed that I knew her and that I loved her."

Kasser said for Christmas he gives his kids coupons entitling them to get a parent to play a game with them or clean up a mess they've made. I told my kids I was going to try that this year and they were so excited they started jumping around like they'd won the lottery. Looks like we might finally win Christmas.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Yesterday I wandered around London's Oxford Street shopping district speaking to the men and woman on the front line of Black Friday. Heightened security and extra staff are deemed a necessity at stores today – last year we witnessed a maelstrom of enthusiastic shoppers trying to grab, snatch and fight their way through to any deal they could get their hands on, all of it gleefully documented by the press.

Thanks to nervous corporate PR strategies, only a few would speak to me and nobody gave me their name. But those who were happy to chat talked about their individual preparations, past experiences and what they expected to see pouring throu gh the doors today.

RIVER ISLAND

VICE: Is this your first Black Friday here, or generally?
Security guard: Yeah first Black Friday, yeah.

So how have you prepared for tomorrow?
We'll come early. See if there is no rush going on on the streets. Obviously we 'll check out John Lewis. If there's madness going on over the road they'll come to our shop after they've finished and basically just hope for the best!

So what are you expecting it to be like?
Well to be honest with you I've spoken to a few of my colleagues about what to expect and they said its gonna be really busy. So the main thing is safety of the customers and the staff and obviously the building. And apart from the theft that does go on – hopefully we limit that . And the rest is up to God.

How have you been briefed on how to deal with tomorrow?
Well there's two issues that we've been briefed on – first is obviously the safety and security of the building obviously when the sales happen make sure all the tags are correct, the shop floor is immaculate and give good customer service. And the second thing is obviously with the terrorism thing going on in Paris we 've been given a few leaflets on how and what to do if an incident happens. What to do with ourselves – hide, lock ourselves in thinks like that.

Who gave you those leaflets?
The company gave it but we've been talking to the police on the street as well and we have Oxford Street security on our tannoys here [points to walkie-talkie] to keep in touch with all the other stores.

So the stores, the police ...
Everything is linked with this radio – police, other stores and internally as well.

And how are you feeling about it?
Excited. Obviously I cant go to the sales but my wife will!

A security worker at another shop

ALL SAINTS

VICE: How are you preparing for tomorrow?
All Saints shop floor worker: Ummm, I actually don't know, we're not actually preparing at all I think its just like – 30 percent off and make good footfall. We're expecting it to be really hectic. I think our goal is to make 70 grand.

How much do you make on a typical day?
30-40 . On a Friday about 50 grand so yeah hopefully 70.

What are you going to do to accommodate for the wave of customers? More staff?
Yeah I think actually everyone is working – yeah we have about 150 in general I mean maybe not everyone – I think we have like 90 people working tomorrow...all our Christmas temps are in early. Usually we get temps in a lot closer to Christmas.

What do you think it'll be like?
Shop floor worker 2: It should be a busy day, y'know – everyone knows Black Friday but usually it starts today so we're expecting double amount of the customers we get today. Around more than 1,000, 2,000 customers. It's gonna be a mental day. We get free meals tomorrow. Black Friday for people and Black Friday for the staff!

You think it'll be any different tomorrow because the terror attacks in Paris recently?
You know after the 7/7 bombings and stuff everyone still got the bus and everything, y'know what I mean?

NEW LOOK

How long have you been on security here for?
Security guard: Six months, not too long

And what are you expecting on Black Friday?
I'm expecting a busy day. Busy day. For buyers coming in, for noise – for people wanting to buy the products. Yes, a busy day.

Have you been on briefed on what to do if thinks get out of control?
Yeah I've been briefed. Um... just for the safety of the customers, to protect the products from getting stolen because yes we know, it is going to be very busy. And also we are inviting more security. We 're expecting another security but he's going to be undercover. He'll be wearing plain clothes going around the shop making sure there is no fighting and stuff.

Will you have meeting with the managers to advise you on what to do?
Yes. they have confidence in us but they have briefed us about Black Friday. We started the sale today. So normally we start at 9 o'clock but today we started at 8 o 'clock. We're also expecting crazy days, crazy things from tomorrow.

Were you a security guard somewhere before here?
Yes, I was a security guard at Marks and Spencer – I worked with the security detail.

You were there for Black Friday last year?
Yes I was there for Black Friday last year. That was in Lewisham. But we didn't have a Black Friday sale or anything in Lewisham.

Watch: Searching for Spitman

ALDO

Where you hear last year for Black Friday?
Aldo shop manager: I wasn't in this store I was in the Covent Garden one.

What was it like?
Yeah good, it was good. Nice and friendly. Good atmosphere, nothing too aggressive but that 's what you get in Convent Garden, its a bit more tranquil over there I'm sure here is gonna be very different a bit more ... rumbustious shall we say.

And how are you preparing for it?
We're obviously over staffed, making sure we have plenty of staff here for it – designating people to certain areas. We're here to pacify people if they do tend to get aggressive. And if they do get aggressive then we 're quite happy to ask them to come back another time when they're not so aggressive.

What are you expecting tomorrow then?
Saturday times three!

Do you think anything will change due to the terrorist events that have recently occurred in Europe?
I don't think so, no. There will be people still coming out in force because they want to shop for Christmas and they want to get a bargain now. I think overall they will just forget about that for the day.

HOUSE OF FRASER

Have you worked as security on Black Friday before?
Security guard: Yeah this is my second Black Friday.

Were you here?
No, I was at another retail store.

What was it like?
Manic. Absolutely manic. The store specialised in electrical goods and obviously stores that specialise in electrical goods there seems to be a lot more customers, people going absolutely bonkers for a TVs videos and VCRs – or DVD players, I should be saying.

So how are you guys preparing for tomorrow?
We've got extra security in store and a different operation plan than usual because obviously there is a higher demand and a lot more customers and obviously with the current situation we have to be on alert. They've drafted a lot more staff to help out with key management and operation control but... yeah – it's all planned, it's all planned.

I was speaking to another security guard who had been briefed about the threat of terrorism. Do you think that might make things less manic?
I think obviously the current situation we're in there is a bit of ambiguity in regards to the public coming out and shopping in the city. However, those who wanna shop will shop and I don't think that'll stop them.

MONSOON AND UNIQLO

Will you be here at Monsoon tomorrow?
Security guard at Monsoon: No I'll be at Uniqlo, I work there too, on Oxford Street.

How are you preparing for it?
Well, we have two doors on Oxford Street. So we have to kind of be vigilant when the alarms go of, we have to ask customers – make sure there are no tags left on the items — and uh, watch out for the bad guys .

Do you think it 'll be very different tomorrow because of the terrorist ... Absolutely crazy.

But do you think Black Friday will be affected by what happened in Paris?
Oh... no, I don't think so – I remember the day when this happened in Paris. Next day, the Uniqlo shop on Oxford Street was busy as usual – nothing changed.

What about yourself? How are you feeling about it?
I'm expecting it any second to go off . I don't think its gonna happen in my shop, but we are ready. We are prepared.

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Mouataz Arian busks with his lute on the famous Istiklal Street in Istanbul's trendy tourist district. Photos by Cody Punter

It's a bustling Friday night on Istiklal Street in Istanbul's trendy tourist district. With his hair parted to one and side and sporting a freshly pressed blue dress shirt Mouataz Arian slings an oddly shaped bag over his shoulder as he pushes through the crowds looking for somewhere where he can set up shop. After scouting several locations the 32-year-old refugee from Syria stoops down in front of a metal shutter with a small ledge and unsheathes his instrument from its case—a lute, which he bought a year ago to replace one that was smashed during his escape from his hometown of Qamishli. After playing a few traditional Arabic songs, Arian decides to play a rendition of Beethoven's magnum opus, Ode To Joy.

"I love classical music," he told VICE in a McDonald's on the main drag later on that evening. "It takes me a to a beautiful world."

Three years ago, Arian was in Syria, heading into his fifth year of studying music at the University of Damascus. But after being threatened with conscription into Assad's army, he decided to flee the country.

"It is a very hard life there," he said. "The regime wants everyone in the army."

Ever since then he has been surviving by working occasional odd jobs and busking on the streets of Istanbul where he makes $20 to $25 a day. While it has been hard for him to make ends meet he says he prefers the financial uncertainty to fighting a war he doesn't believe in.

Arian, who fled his home three years ago, recently recorded a composition entitled Migrants, that evokes the suffering of the refugees who have been displaced by the war.

Arian is a Syrian Kurd, an ethnic minority that has traditionally been discriminated against by the Shiite majority in the country. Growing up, he said he wasn't allowed to speak his own language or learn about his own culture due to the fact that the publication of books or other materials in Kurdish is illegal. He is also an atheist, who believes that religion is the root of many of the problems in Syria and throughout the world. One of the reasons why Arian loves to compose music is because it allows him to express himself in a way that transcends the barriers created by language and religion.

"Music is the message—an expression of what is happening in our world and a way deliver the message to humanity to love each other," he told VICE. "This is a language that does not need a translation."

Arian may not have had access to a live symphony since he left Syria but he has kept writing compositions while in exile. Thanks to computer software called Finale, he has been able to transcribe and record them. In the last few years he has written several pieces with names such as "Syrian Revolution" and "Freedom." As the refugee crisis began to spiral out of control he felt inspired to write a composition dedicated to those who have been affected by it. The final piece, which took him six months to complete, is a five-minute melancholy dirge entitled Migrants. Led by a solemn clarinet, which plods along amidst a steady drum beat and the soaring horn and string sections of the orchestra, Arian explained the song is supposed to be an expression of the physical and intellectual suffering experienced by refugees uprooted by war.

"It's about the pain an immigrant perceives because he left his home," he said.

Mouataz Arian looks for somewhere to busk on Istiklal Street in Istanbul.

Over the past few years Arian has been looking for a way to leave Turkey so that he can get back to working with an orchestra. He said he attempted to apply for a visa to Germany a year ago but was denied. After hearing an announcement that Canada was accepting 25,000 refugees he decided wanted to apply but has so far had no luck figuring out how. He said he won't consider taking the boat to Greece but in the end decided it would be too dangerous.

Wherever he ends up, Arian says he hopes to be able continuing studying music so he can one day conduct an orchestra in front of an international audience in a concert hall.

"I want to make music not just for Kurds or Arabs, but for the whole world."

Photos via BKK

When I was asked if I wanted to review the BKK Cybersex Cup, I was excited and honoured. I'm a horny son of a bitch and I've fucked some weird shit in my time, so it was kind of thrilling to, a whole three years after I lost my virginity, come full circle and revisit the world of putting my penis into an inanimate object.

But then I was a bit overcome with skepticism. The sex machine in question is called the BKK Cybersex Cup which, beyond sounding like the prize at some shady Japanese porn marathon, is a fancy matte black fleshlight-type device that not only has the ability to detect your motions but also translate your thrusts and jerks into the virtual world, which you view through a bundled VR headset. Wearing the thing makes you look like a horny Voltron. The company that created it just launched an Indiegogo page, racking up almost $21,000 of the $50,000 it hopes to raise over the next month, despite a promotional video that opens with a budget James Bond sequence that ends with a secret agent type character jerk-miming alone in a dramatically lit warehouse.

Did I even want to fuck this thing? The answer was: no, not really. In fact, the only thing on my mind was what someone would see if they happened to walk into my room during the act. I mean, I don't consider myself easily embarrassed, but the sight of some pale-ass dude with his boxers down to his ankles, wanking off furiously with a plastic tube while wearing something that looks like a prop for TRON didn't sit right with me. There's also just the fact that banging a machine seemed somewhat soulless and made me feel like I belonged in a Philip K. Dick novel. At least with my own hand, there was a human element involved.

I was going into this with an open mind (although with a slightly less open dick). With the rise in popularity of devices like the Oculus Rift and Microsoft's Hololens, I imagined a virtual sex machine was going to create some full-on immersive experiences into the world of 3D porn. This is the future, right?

After taking the bus home with the box tightly wrapped in my arms in hopes that no one would recognize what I was carrying, I brought the thing into my room, plopped it down on my bed, removed the lid, and stared at it. Beneath the bubble wrap and plastic were three items: a bulky VR headset, a plastic bag with a cleaning cloth and other doodads, and a black tube that looked like the IRA and Calvin Klein collaborated on a pipe bomb.

One thing was missing: instructions. In fact, aside from a quick diagram on how to insert the phone into the headset so it doesn't pop out during a violent wank sesh, there were no directions for how to turn the device on, charge it, or install the app, which I didn't even know existed until I googled the company's website.

When I finally downloaded and installed the Android app—which (surprise) doesn't exist on the app store, I found out that this wasn't the immersive porn experience I was hoping for. Instead of jerking my gherkin to in-the-flesh porn stars, the 3D subjects of this fuck machine were Japanese hentai characters. Okay, yes, I once beat off to a sex scene in Mass Effect when I was 14—but at this point in my life, I feel like I've graduated beyond rubbing one out to huge breasted cartoons, especially considering that in this case it just screams "THIS IS NOT REAL AND YOU ARE FUCKING A MACHINE."

Add to this the fact that the headset itself is nowhere near advanced as I thought it'd be, and it's an instant bonerkill. Rather than a built-in hi-res screen like more sophisticated pieces of VR tech, the headset bundled with the Cybersex Cup has a mount for your smartphone to slide into, much like Samsung's Gear VR. My phone, an LG Stylo, kept crashing, so I had to borrow my roommate's iPhone 4. I'm unsure if the lower resolution from the smaller screen had an effect on the overall visual experience, but it ended up looking like total shit.

The app itself is a pain to use. Nothing says "countdown to orgasm" more than spending 30 minutes setting up the specifications for a sex scene. And while the game doesn't allow you to customize much, the options it does allow you to modify are pretty offensive. For example, you can change the skin colour of the girl, but you can't make her black. In fact, the closest thing you could get to black skin is a very light brown, even when choosing the skin colour of the male character. Sorry dark-skinned humans, you'll have to wait for Cybersex Cup 2.0 to get off on ridiculous cartoon scenarios.

Also the fact that the female character can only be made to wear skimpy, humiliating outfits, or stereotypical stuff associated with Japanese animes, such as school girls and lifeguards (not unsurprising, considering the variety of hentai games that focus on rape and subordination of women) was also problematic.

I chose a classroom for the backdrop (the girl was already dressed like a schoolgirl so I figured this would be appropriate), and set up the sex scene by arranging the positions in the order that made the most sense to me. I wanted to both test the capabilities of the device but not stay up all night fapping, so out of the dozens of positions available, I chose: regular blowjob, deep-throat blowjob, missionary, reverse cowgirl, and then doggy style (I know, how basic am I?).

Lying comfortably in my bed with the rig strapped firmly around my noggin, I watched as the scene loaded and the virtual girl I had created appeared with her mouth around my poorly animated penis. It's at this point I realized I hadn't actually lubed the silicone vagina lips of the sex toy, so I yanked off the headset, ran to my cupboard and grabbed a bottle of Lubriderm (it's the best thing I had on hand, OK?). I greased the machine but when I slipped the headset back on, the regular viewing angle I had before had changed to some weird shot of the ceiling. I guess the machine took my throwing off of the headset as movement from my head and re-calibrated.

It took me a minute of awkward positioning and dancing around my room with my cock hanging out before the angle reset. The only problem was that I was now in the middle of my room instead of lying down on a comfy bed. At this point, I was pretty fed up and just wanted to get this over with, so I slipped my dick inside and began the process of getting it on with my robot companion.

Despite how weird and unfamiliar this seemed, similar applications in technology are already being tested. Last year, Motherboard tried out an early prototype for sex-toy company Tenga's VR sex robot. Of course, no one actually put their penis in anything—unlike the wand that I now had around my dick, Tenga's robot merely simulated one-to-one resistance with a virtual companion, fully-clothed. The final plan is to have a robot you can actually have sex with, but that's a long way off.

Here's the thing: I have to admit that the initial plunge was amazing. If it weren't for the fact that I was gripping a sophisticated technological tube of love, I could probably mistake this for a real vagina (albeit somewhat cold and lacking muscular contractions). With that said, the tube required a lot of creativity for me to feel actually stimulated. Each jerk had to be quick, aggressive and deep to get a real feeling of satisfaction, and the actual video wasn't doing much to help. Poorly-programmed animations and loud, obviously-recorded yelps and moans made for not only an awkward experience, but also made it difficult to suspend my disbelief.

After a few minutes of this position, I thoroughly had enough. The now ridiculous speed at which the 3D girl was bobbing up and down on the virtual penis that was supposed to represent my 1-to-1 thrusts was beginning to turn me off and I felt like staying in this perpetual state of jerking any longer would leave me with carpal tunnel or cause me to go limp.

With some fumbling on my part, I was able to press one of the four buttons on the tube that allowed me to change positions to one where she was mounting the virtual me. Considering I was standing in the middle of the room beating off, however, this just seemed weird and uncomfortable. I really wanted this thing to feel good, but it just wasn't working for me. I ended up pulling the headset off and finishing with just the tube. "I'll try again tomorrow," I thought, as I capped the tube and put it away. It was midnight. I was tired and ready to sleep.

I also forgot about cleaning the fucking thing.

When I came back to it next day, the weight of my choices the night before hit me. I was incredibly afraid to see what lurked beneath the lid of this fuck tube now that I had let my jizz cultivate in it for nearly a day, and when I eventually removed the cap, the smell was truly atrocious. Apparently, fermented semen and body lotion inside a hot canister is not a good mix. The stench was so powerful I almost wanted to toss the thing in the trash and tell my editor I got robbed on the way home. But I need that Pulitzer, so I pushed through.

With one hand pinching my nose and the other holding the now-dripping plastic vagina an arm's length away, I ran to the bathroom, grabbed my favourite toothbrush (RIP), squirted some dish detergent on the bristles and began to clean away. After about 10 minutes of scrubbing and careful rinsing the inside of the vaginal canal (making sure not to flood the machine and fuck up its components), I dried it off and gave it a whiff. All clear.

Like James Bond, this thing too would have to die another day.

This time, I knew what I was doing. I set up the sequence, plugged the phone into the headset, lubed up the machine, and went to town. While slightly more comfortable, I still felt like I wasn't getting much out of it. The tube lacks any actual vibration or stimulating functions, so the most I had to play with was alternating between various angles and changing the camera position from overhead to a first-person point of view. At one point, I began dreaming about a porn video which I really liked a few years back. The thought kept me going through most of the 20 minute session, and it when it came time to bust, I made sure to actually use the big button labelled "G" to indicate to the machine that I was cumming in real life.

With speed and precision, right as I began to feel myself swell, I spam tapped the G button. In unison, both me and the computer girl came at once. Load moans echoed out from my headset and through from my apartment (my roommate, obviously not yet comfortable talking to me in person, later told me through Facebook chat that he could hear the entire thing). With the animation still going and the headset still attached to my head, I fell back onto my pillow and let out a gigantic sigh. Although there was a futuristic fuck machine on my penis and the fleeting feeling of a decent orgasm in my heart, overall I just felt lame and disgusting.

After that session, I never ended up cleaning the thing again. In fact, it's sat there capped in the corner of my room, neatly tucked away beside the headset which I sometimes take out to startle house guests with. Although the idea of fucking virtual women sounds like a concept created in heaven, I can honestly say from experience that sex technology has not come far enough along to warrant spending your money or time on. At best, you'll leave with a decent orgasm, but mostly, you'll probably just feel exhausted, frustrated, and somewhat depressed with yourself for being this desperate.

Also, you're going to probably have to sacrifice a toothbrush or two.