[body_image width='1023' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='when-multiple-personalities-are-not-a-disorder-400-body-image-1430411684.jpg' id='51697']

Photo by Flickr user Shardayyy

When Falah Liang was five, she began to sense the presence of a man named Lark in her mind. She could almost see him. His frame was birdlike, he had gray hair, and his company soothed her.

As Falah entered her teens, Lark's presence grew and solidified. He took on a name. He took on a voice. "I was well aware that it was unusual for those my age to continue having 'imaginary friends,'" she says, "so I kept him a secret, even as the two of us held thought-conversations throughout the day and explored elaborate mental worlds together. I knew he wasn't just an imaginary friend at that point, but I didn't know what exactly he was. Some words we tried and discarded: guardian angel, daemon, alter ego. Muse was the only one that felt right, and we still use it today. Only last year did we finally find the words for our experiences."

What she found were words like system and multiple and fronting—the vocabulary of the multiplicity community, a group that formed during the mailing lists of the 1980s. These multiples, as they call themselves, see themselves as healthy and empowered rather than disordered and "inherently pathological," as Falah says. And they desperately want the rest of the world to see them that way, too.

Their vocabulary is extensive, but the most basic concepts are these: A "multiplicity system" refers to the group within the body itself (i.e., "I'm part of a multiplicity system"). The system might consist of two people, or it might consist of 200. The "outer world" is this physical plane that we're all stumbling around in, while "inner worlds" are the subjective realms where their system members spend time when they're not "fronting," or running the body in the outer world. When I speak to Falah, she is fronting, not Lark.

The multiplicity community insists on being seen as healthy—even normal. This is our reality, they argue. Why are you imposing your reality onto us? Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—and its controversial precursor, Multiple Personality Disorder—are terms roundly rejected by the community, and most of them don't feel that they belong in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) at all. It's not that they don't believe people can suffer from DID (or, more broadly, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified [DDNOS]). They just don't accept that they suffer from it. To them, all those with DID/DDNOS are multiple, but not all multiples are DID/DDNOS. Contrary to what a DID/DDNOS diagnosis implies, multiples want everyone in their system to be seen as people. Not fragments, alters, or personalities, but distinct individuals who happen to be inhabiting the same physical body.

About a year ago, Falah and Lark were joined by Steven and Rain; a few months later, Marcus, Santria, and Alyenor came along. "We are not openly multiple," she says. "All of us disguise our behavior under one mask, one public persona, in essence appearing non-multiple to the outside eye and to most people we interact with. We're able to share memories and communicate among ourselves internally, so it's easy for us. We wear the mask well and look like your standard non-multiple STEM student, but it can be tiring to wear the mask."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/jIxEmd-CDNY' width='640' height='360']

The multiplicity community disagrees with the way the community is portrayed in the media, as in the TV show United States of Tara

Multiples who wear the mask, so to speak, may still notice others looking at them strangely, aware of shifts in speech patterns and personality traits but unable to put their finger on what's happening. Miakoda Combies, a computer technician and member of a nine-person multiplicity system called the JC Klatch, noticed that clients grew nervous when they didn't understand that she was a multiple. "They would sense a change in personality, but they didn't have an explanation [for it]," she says. "I guess they figured that if we didn't know what was going on, they should worry."

But certain clients knew that Miakoda was part of a multiplicity system, and remained unfazed. "We actually had customers that would prefer one of us over another," she says. "There were a few who could tell us apart the moment we walked through the door." Being multiple also provided subtle comic relief from an insufferable boss. "During meetings, as he repeated the same stuff for the umpteenth time, we'd poke fun inside where he couldn't hear us," she says. But when a disorder of the inner ear forced Miakoda and her system to leave that job, her employer denied them unemployment benefits. "After working there for five years, he insisted that a multiple couldn't possibly hold a job," she says.

Being denied benefits is just one example of the negative consequences of open multiplicity. Julie, another member of the JC Klatch multiplicity system, writes on her website that the Klatch's childhood signs of multiplicity were mistaken for ADHD, and that they were put on a cocktail of medication— Ritalin, Dexadrine, Welibutrin, Zoloft, and more—that led to extreme health problems and affects their body negatively to this day. "Social services might take your kids away," says Jazz Abbottlane, another multiple. "And you might know the laws to get your kids back, but the damage is done. Your kids are like, Oh my God, they can do that to us?"

Jazz fought for disability rights (unrelated to multiplicity) for years, so she's well aware of the law and has "taken a lot of precautions" to insure that her rights won't be encroached on. She's a member of Oure Gaiya, a system so big that she "hasn't a clue of the total." Both her mother and her grandmother were multiple, though she says they didn't pass down their wisdom to Jazz. "We had very messed-up childhood," she says, and declined to elaborate. Today, Jazz runs a group she founded called Plural Activism, which provides support for multiples and pushes for non-biased representation in the media. They're currently trying to soften the negative impact that Leonardo DiCaprio's latest movie, The Crowded Room, will have on the multiple community, as it portrays the violent side of Billy Milligan, famously diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.

For a long time, Jazz wasn't openly multiple, because the person fronting her system was a woman named Debbie. "Debbie was scared of the idea of multiplicity," says Jazz. "She didn't want to have anything to do with it. All she knew was what this society had been cramming down her throat for her entire life: That multiplicity is sick, horrible; that you can't be that way. And she just wasn't around long enough to learn differently." Eventually, Debbie died—one person inside a still-living body.

"There should not be one model of reality imposed upon everyone." –Anthony Temple

A multiplicity system named Astraea runs one of the oldest and most definitive guides to multiplicity on the internet: Astraea's Web, which started in 1995. As a group, Astraea is vocally political, and not just about multiplicity; they'll take up the flag for everything from free speech to LGBT rights to animal abuse. Despite being a figurehead of the movement, the system keeps their multiplicity a secret offline. "Only a handful of people know our actual identity and accept that we are a 'we,'" three of the members tell me.

"Any time that a multiple group lives in fear of the consequences of coming out of the closet, they are being denied their social rights," says Anthony Temple, a member of Astraea. "There should not be one model of reality imposed upon everyone. Society can and should change to accept those who are different, rather than enforcing a single standard of normality and punishing those who don't fit."

The idea of different modes of reality is fascinating, troubling, and incredibly slippery. It's not exactly a banner that the psych community at large is particularly interested in carrying. I asked a psychologist who specializes in dissociative identity disorder if she thought we should be accepting of different realities, and she immediately answered, "Of course there aren't multiple people in one body."

Still, she admitted that multiplicity "is how it's experienced and that is the reality of how it feels," which begs the question: Where is the line between experience and reality? If you experience life as part of a multiplicity system, that is, at the very least, your reality, whether or not anyone else agrees with you. So it's not about whether multiplicity is real, because that's not necessarily the point here. Instead, we should be asking ourselves whether or not we should try to change someone if we disagree with their mode of reality. Is it our duty to make all realities conform to our own?

"The multiplicity community's history with the MPD/DID/DDNOS labels is complicated, and full of contention," says Falah Liang. "There's a lot of resentment towards psychiatry for pathologizing what is seen as simply a neurological difference like being left-handed, for painting multiplicity as freaks and invalids, and for pushing integration as a necessary 'cure' that all multiplicity must undergo." On the flip side, the anonymous psychologist I spoke to expressed mild resentment at the idea of healthy/empowered multiplicity distracting from people who actually need a DID diagnosis. "People with DID need to be recognized, as it's a genuine disorder," she said.

[body_image width='1400' height='969' path='images/content-images/2015/05/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/06/' filename='when-multiple-personalities-are-not-a-disorder-400-body-image-1430873156.jpg' id='53050']

Photo by Flickr user Holly Lay

To be diagnosed with DID, you must fit several criteria under the DSM-5. Here's one: "The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." This is the criterion that really annoys multiples. They'll readily admit that they have problems, whether they're anxious or depressed or just bad at responding to text messages, but they don't chalk those problems up to multiplicity. They chalk them up to being human.

They also dislike the diagnostic language of "identity" and "personality," which implies that their system members—who they consider full-fledged people—are just fragments of some truer, more real Self that will one day, ideally, be unified again. This is the thinking behind integration, a controversial and somewhat dated process wherein all the people in a multiple system fuse into one. Most multiples are understandably skeptical, especially since famous integrations, like the ones undergone by Billy Milligan, Chris Costner Sizemore (who was written about in The Three Faces of Eve), and Shirley Ardell Mason (whose experiences were documented in the bookSybil), were never actually permanent. In these integrations, the many fused into one, but eventually, the one splintered back into many.

Dr. Max Krucoff, a neurological surgeon at Duke University Medical Center, would be the first to acknowledge the potential slipperiness of DSM diagnoses. "Most medical diagnoses are defined by a pathophysiology—something identifiable, anatomic," he says. "Psychiatric diagnoses have no known underlying cause. I can't take a biopsy of somebody's brain and look at it under a microscope and say, 'You have Multiple Personality Disorder.'"

Still, the controversial term "disorder," he says, is a means to an end: effective treatment for those who want and/or need it. "If people aren't hurting anybody or dangerous to anybody or asking for help, there's no reason to go looking for them and treating them," he says. "Everybody's on a spectrum, and what's considered a psychiatric illness is often evolving. If you feel like you're sick, if you feel like you need help, then doctors may be able to label you with a disorder only so they can figure out a good way to treat and help you."

Other cultures, religions, and historical periods have been open to the idea of—well, maybe not multiplicity exactly, but similar phenomena, like muses, phantoms, and fluid "selves." In ancient Greece, Sophocles had his daimon, a mysterious sort of influencer whose presence he chalked up to the gods' generosity. We see the idea of autonomous-but-bodiless consciousness in Tibetan Buddhists, who allegedly invented tulpamancy, where one meditates and conjures up imaginary beings that eventually become sentient. Spirit possession is ritualized in religions from Pentecostal Christianity to Haitian Vodou. Even Descartes's famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am" can be read in a multiplicity-hued light—if multiple beings inside one body are all thinking, don't they all "exist"?

Point is, multiplicity wasn't born on 1990s internet forums, or dreamed up by lonely gamers longing for imaginary friends. Aspects of it, at least, have been around for centuries.

"We're not made-up, we're not characters, we're not role-playing, we're not identity disordered. We're people." – Samari of the Monokrom System

Studies about dissociative identity disorder have shown the following: First, a body diagnosed with DID can react differently to medicine depending on which person is fronting. Second, one body examined by doctors could see when certain people were fronting, but was blind when others fronted. And third, there are distinct differences between the brain patterns of those with DID and the brain patterns of actors who are simply taking on different personas.

This is all to say that though the shift in behavior that happens when multiples "switch," or change who's up front, may seem implausible or even fake to a layperson, the multiples aren't acting.

I watched a video made by six members of a system known as the Monokrom System, each answering questions like "What is your hair color?" and "What is your favorite quote?" If you had showed me the video without context, I would have assumed it was an acting reel, or maybe just the result of a bored day at home, because the female body onscreen never changed. She dressed differently, she spoke differently, she wore her hair up or down or braided, but she was always the same brown-haired girl with bangs. One body. And, by extension, I would have assumed, one mind.

The Monokrom System is so large that they think of themselves as a city, with both locals and visitors—tourists of the mind, you might say. I Skyped with Samari, one member of the system, whose voice and personality were consistent throughout our interview and consistent with what I'd seen of her in the previous video. I asked her about the hardest part of being multiple. "Making people understand that we're people, we're not made up, we're not characters, we're not role-playing, we're not identity disordered," she says.

In the video, Samari says that her hair is "strawberry pink," though she speaks from a brown-haired girl's body. That's because while multiples exist within a body, but they don't always identify closely with it. A person within a multiplicity system might be a different age than the body's age. They might be a different gender. They could be covered in tattoos but living in a body untouched by needles.

"Like any nine people forced to live together, we have spats," says Miakoda from the JC Klatch system. These spats often center around the body, whether physically or spatially. "One of us wants a tattoo, the others disagree. Two want to dye the hair, but they disagree on color, and the rest disagree on dying it at all." At one point, she laughingly refers to the body as the "meat car." The nine members of her system simply take turns driving it around.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/IA5ewFS4ga8' width='640' height='360']

If you take this sense of disconnect too far, the ethics get a little murky. You run into cases like Billy Milligan's: He raped three women but used a successful insanity defense, saying that others in his system had committed the crimes without Billy being aware of them. In other words, the body committed the crimes, but Billy's detachment from the body made him innocent.

Interestingly enough, many multiples disagree with Milligan's insanity defense. They take full responsibility for the body, no matter how disconnected to it they otherwise feel. According to Astraea's Web, "The multiple personality defense should be abolished; if one person in a system commits a crime... the body goes to jail. Period."

"I see that people are abused by the medical and psychiatric profession simply because they are not like me." –Jim Bunkelman

A person with one mind inside one body is a "singlet," according to multiple's terminology, and Jim Bunkelman is what they call a "singlet ally." His story is typical, at first: Jim met Rhonda at a production company, where she was the office manager and he was a freelancer. Then one day, when the two of them were hanging out with Rhonda's sister, the sister alluded to Rhonda's multiplicity.

"Rhonda didn't seem nervous about it, but she was," says Jim. "She didn't know if it would scare me off or not." It didn't faze him at all, a fact he chalks up to a curious personality, an open-minded upbringing, and a degree in physics, which taught him that you can never be sure you're totally right. "I've always felt that the universe and the human mind are amazing and the possibilities within each are endless," he says. Plus, Rhonda was a total catch. "She was such a lovable and good being that everyone loved her and accepted her and her system," he says. "If you knew Rhonda and spent time with her and the people in her system, you could not be skeptical."

Jim and Rhonda married, and eventually, Jim met 70 other members of Rhonda's system. He even fell in love with another one of them, Gloria, and the two of them had a wedding in his and Rhonda's backyard. "The others were my friends, my companions, and my kids," he says. "I had an entire family of Rhonda. It was the most wonderful experience of my life."

[body_image width='640' height='438' path='images/content-images/2015/04/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/30/' filename='when-multiple-personalities-are-not-a-disorder-400-body-image-1430412142.png' id='51702']

Jim and Rhonda Bunkelman

After 15 happy years of marriage, Rhonda Bunkelman passed away. A grieving Jim went online, searching for some way to perpetuate her memory. He stumbled across Plural Activism, the group run by Jazz Abbottlane, and has been an active member ever since. "I have no investment in this group other than the fact that I have lived with a multiple and I see that people are abused by the medical and psychiatric profession simply because they are not like me," he says.

"There's this whole evolving understanding of how the actual physical brain interfaces with the mind, and how we identify the self and consciousness—when you say 'I am this,' what that actually means as far as the physical substrate of the brain," says Dr. Krucoff. "It's hard for anybody to say what's really a disorder versus a variant of normal."

Jim created a memorial for Rhonda in Los Angeles with three columns that listed the names of everyone in her system. He says over 5,000 people attended the event. "There are so many things we do not know," he says. "To declare them not possible solely because we have not experienced them is incredibly foolish to me."

"Where does consciousness reside? Where does the brain end and the mind begin?" –Dr. Max Krucoff

I sat outside at a coffee shop the other day and tried to retreat within my own mind. I identify with my physical self so closely: my eyes, my fingers, my annoying hair. I wanted to see if I could imagine others milling around inside my body, but instead, I was overwhelmed by a sense of single occupancy. It felt like my mind, my selfhood, was occupying every square inch of my frame, pressing against the inside of my skull and furling out to the tips of my fingers. I waited for a voice to step out from the shadows and say hello, but there was no room for anyone else.

The self is an infinitely complicated topic. Personal reality? So subjective. The brain? A mysterious organ, its surface barely scratched by neuroscience. Consciousness? A living phantom, still impossible to pin down. "When you start digging deep into neuroscience," says Dr. Krucoff, "you start digging into the question: Where does consciousness reside? Where does the brain end and the mind begin? What's the chicken and what's the egg? When you have a spontaneous thought, is it because neurons fired and you had the thought or because you had the thought and neurons fired?" And later: "We're not even close [to understanding the brain] in some regard."

It can be beautiful to dwell a little in mystery, to inhabit our own unknowing. Maybe admitting that we don't understand everything is a vital stance for all of us: for those asking to help and medicate and "fix," for those who say they don't need help or medication or fixing, and for those of us on the sidelines, unsure of our role in the complicated realm of the mind.

Follow Tori Telfer on Twitter.

From Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Walter Scott in South Carolina to the more than 100 people tortured and framed over two decades in Chicago, the issue of police abuse has finally started to permeate the national discourse. But even as regular headlines reveal fresh abuses, many officers continue to take shelter behind the use-of-force framework for police interactions, suffering few or no negative consequences for excessive use of force.

There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. Most of them operate relatively autonomously, yet officers are shielded in the same way in most states and jurisdictions. Spurred by the growing national movement against police brutality, lawmakers and activists have started looking for solutions that would hold police officers more accountable for the use of force. On Friday, President Obama's new Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department would investigate the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether there had been systemic civil rights violations by officers.

But given the sheer number of law enforcement agencies in the country, the DOJ doesn't have nearly enough resources to investigate all of them. Between close relationships with prosecutors, secretive police culture, and laws that protect officers from taking personal responsibility for their actions, the obstacles to police reform are stifling.

Prosecutors and the Police
Trusting police officers is effectively a professional requirement for most prosecutors, and that trust doesn't evaporate when an officer the prosecutor works with shoots a suspect. So it's not surprising that indictments for on-duty incidents are exceedingly rare without incontrovertible evidence that contradicts an officer's version of events.

In Los Angeles County, no officer has been prosecuted for an on-duty shooting since 2001. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, "In each of the 409 shootings since January 2010, prosecutors determined on-duty officers were justified in using deadly force." Taken together, that seems like a lot of shootings without a single unjustified incident. But prosecutors look at each case individually on its own merits, and, more often than not, they believe the police officer.

Generally speaking, prosecutors are not incentivized to doubt every story of the cops they work with daily. In addition to working together on criminal cases, many state and local prosecutors are elected officials who rely on political support from police. And prosecutors often run on their conviction stats, further disincentivizing them from questioning the people who supply the cases that keep them in office.

As for the use of force, over the years the Supreme Court has essentially created a checklist of requirements for police violence to be justified. Unsurprisingly, police explanations in use-of-force incidents often sound remarkably similar to those requirements: the most common explanations will include "the officer feared for his life," and "the suspect reached for his waistband," as if for a weapon.

This doesn't mean all officers who say something like this are lying. Rather, officers know exactly how to frame their account of an incident in a way that will satisfy a prosecutor. And the current state of the law gives a large benefit of the doubt to police officers, giving prosecutors all the more reason to accept their version of events.

The Problem with Police Culture
In 2010, the Village Voice published an exposé of New York City police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant's 81st Precinct. The report was based on many hours of secret tape recordings that revealed police practices that had been denied publicly, including manipulation of criminal charges to satisfy departmental statistical goals. Put simply, the precinct ran a coordinated effort to lie about crime stats.

The whistleblower, Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, was dragged from his apartment by police supervisors, and involuntarily committed to a mental health facility for six days—on those supervisors' claims of his mental instability. For his public service, Schoolcraft was harassed by fellow officers, run out of the department, and still awaits action on his lawsuit against the city and NYPD. The deputy chief who ran Schoolcraft's precinct and helped drag him from his home retired in 2014 with a $135,000 pension.

The retaliation is evidence of what is commonly known "Thin Blue Line" or "Blue Wall of Silence"— an internal cultural code that trumps constitutional policing with "how things are really done" in many police departments, enforcing trust and loyalty among officers over the individual rights of citizens. The penalty for breaching can be ostracism, harassment, or worse.

Sometimes, it's as simple as officers covering for one another. In the shooting death of Walter Scott in South Carolina, the initial police reports were missing critical information about what happened, suggesting that other officers may have been complicit in crafting a narrative that looked good for the officer now facing a murder charge. Same goes for the Tamir Rice shooting, in which initial reports don't match what the surveillance video showed. In other cases, the wall has been used to obscure a long-running pattern of torture more commonly seen under brutal dictatorships, or the sadistic retaliation for a punch that never happened.

Related: Radley Balko on the Militarization of America's Police Force

Laws That Protect Cops
Last year, a months-long investigation by the Baltimore Sun exposed how much money the city was paying in police brutality settlements. The reporters had to dig through court records because police disciplinary records for Maryland law enforcement are kept secret by statute. Records secrecy is common among many states, but Maryland and a few other states go much further, giving police a full swath of procedural protections known as the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights (LEOBR).

As attorney Ken White explained at the Popehat blog, these codified protections give police more rights than citizens during criminal investigations. In Maryland, the LEOBR shrinks the statute of limitations to 90 days for a citizen to file an actionable complaint against a police officer on duty, grants the officer full access to the investigation against him, and strictly limits the time, place, and manner of interrogations of the officer. White also notes the notorious "cooling off" periods that an officer enjoys after a potentially criminal incident before investigators may question him. Depending on the state, those periods last anywhere from 48 hours to ten days.

Some states provide labor arbitrators to reinstate fired officers and award them back pay, even when they were dismissed for violent conduct. Such protections make it exceedingly expensive and difficult for cities and departments to purge violent officers from their ranks.

Is It Fixable?
The federal government exercises a limited role in overseeing police departments. In the wake of a scandal involving police corruption or violence in a major city, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division may launch investigations for "patterns and practices" that violate the civil rights of residents, as it has in Baltimore. But the decentralized nature of law enforcement in the US means that in most cases police reform will have to be implemented at the state and local level.

As Maryland lawmakers can attest, reform will not be easy. Nearly 20 law enforcement reform bills died in the legislature this year, though a dedicated working group promises to reintroduce many reforms—including repeal of Maryland LEOBR—in the next session.

On the plus side, the city of Baltimore established a searchable database of brutality lawsuits in response to the Sun investigation. In Missouri, the state legislature is considering modest reforms of the state's use-of-force law in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting.

In New York State, the Legal Aid Society has created a database of lawsuits and allegations against police officers that defense attorneys and litigators can use in future actions against officers who re-offend. And a sustained campaign by activists and protestors induced the City of Chicago to set up a $5.5 million reparations fund to over 100 victims of torture by the police department over a 20-year period.

Exposing the human toll of systemic abuse to the public puts pressure on politicians to act to curb it in the future. This pressure is driven home to those politicians by the steep financial liability to which abusive officers expose their governments. The challenge lies in getting access to such information, publishing it, and shaping the reform when it comes.

Jonathan Blanks is a writer and researcher in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-the-election-was-bullshit-157-body-image-1431344308.jpg' id='54597']

Voters vote in Hackney. Photo via Wikicommons user Alex Lee

This article first appeared on VICE UK.

Imagine being John Curtice. He was one of the five experts responsible for Thursday night's exit poll, which predicted a Tory win but totally disagreed with 140 other polls by half a dozen other pollsters this year. To be exact, he was the one who had to go on the BBC just after ten 'o' clock and defend it to incredulous pundits. He looked about as happy as a servant having to tell Kim Jong-un why his Pop-Tarts got burnt.

"Bollocks to it," was my reaction on Twitter, "I've never believed an individual poll before and I'm not going to start now." Dozens of opinion polls in recent years had shown a hung parliament with a Labour-SNP advantage, so for that to suddenly disappear on the night seemed pretty unlikely.

I was hilariously wrong. The Tories won a clear majority, in the biggest election night upset for at least a generation. Waking up in the morning I had that disconnected feeling when you load a game and you realize you're playing the wrong save file. I couldn't work out how we'd got to this parallel universe.

It's hard to grasp the scale of the failure here. Half a dozen independent companies carried out almost 2,000 polls since the last election, 140 since Christmas, and in one stroke they meant jack shit. Another half-dozen election forecasters, wannabe Nate Silvers trying to make a name for themselves, used those polls to forecast who would win what seats. Their predictions were complete nonsense, as were the bookies'.

Hundreds of pundits and journalists took those figures and spun a "too-close-to-call" narrative out of them that literally shaped our understanding of reality for the last six months. Every news report, every editorial and opinion column, every tweet and Facebook post lined up behind the same prediction. Entire election campaigns were redirected. Journalists openly ridiculed David Cameron—now the smuggest man in the country—over his claims he could win a majority. After all of that, the exit poll was like physicists finding out that gravity goes upwards.

Where did it all go wrong?

I can't tell you. The truth is, nobody knows. Finding out could take months or years of research, and a major inquiry has already been announced. What we can do though is start narrowing it down, ruling some things out. And while I can't say exactly what went wrong, there is one theory that sticks out of all this like a sore thumb.

First, let's start with what it wasn't. The actual result of the election was 37 percent of the vote to the Tories and 30.5 percent to Labour. The polls were steady around 33/34 for both of them for months, even on election day, so it wasn't a last-minute swing. It wasn't a random error, either, because hundreds of polls went the same way. It also wasn't about online polling vs. phone polling—the results of both types of survey were pretty much the same, and completely wrong.

The exit poll gives us one clue, as Anthony Wells of UKPollingReport put it: "Given that the pre-election polls were wrong but the exit polls were right, how pollsters measure likelihood is definitely worth looking at. Exit polls obviously don't have to worry about likelihood to vote; they only interview people physically leaving a polling station." Maybe Labour supporters were far less likely to vote than the pollsters assumed, and more Tories turned out on the day?

Polling companies know about these kinds of problems, though—raw numbers from polls are usually pretty wrong, so they "correct" them. For example, they know that fewer people say they'll vote Conservative than actually do, something called the "Shy Tory" effect. To get rid of that bias they tweak the number a bit, based on results from previous elections. They also have a rough idea of which way swing-voters tend to break, so a percentage of people who say "don't know" are reallocated to the different parties. Usually these tricks work pretty well, but at this election they failed miserably. The Number Cruncher Politics blog actually raised this possibility before the election, and they look pretty smug now.

Why? Some of it could just be that this election was just so different from any other in recent history, with the rise of two new major parties—the SNP and UKIP—and a surge in votes for the Greens. The thing is, the results predicted for those parties (and the Lib Dems) were actually pretty accurate—it was the figures for Labour and Conservative vote shares that were completely wrong.

There's one last clue, though, which I think might turn out to be at the heart of all this, and it was revealed in a cowardly blog post published by Survation the day after the election. They revealed that in fact they'd carried out a poll a couple of days before that showed almost exactly the right result—37 percent for the Tories, 31 percent for Labour. It was so different from other polls, though, including their own, that they were too scared to publish it.

My gut feeling—and this is really just a guess on my part—is this: Sometimes a story gets so stuck in people's minds that it kind of warps reality around it. Everyone assumed that the next election would close and we'd be in a new era of coalition governments. I have a hunch that polling companies probably had the data they needed to contradict this, but they were stuck in a feedback loop with each other and the media, everyone persuading each other that the accepted wisdom had to be right. Everyone fell neatly into line, and anything contradicting the story was either explained away or, like Survation's "rogue" poll, just thrown in the bin.

There's a big irony in all this. In the wake of Nate Silver's success predicting the 2012 US election results, a crop of new sites like New Statesman's May2015.com appeared, where ambitious data journalists produced ever more convoluted essays about who was or wasn't winning the election. They were supposed to represent a new wave of more intelligent political analysis, but in reality all they did was recycle the exact same poll-driven bullshit we'd seen in the past.

May2015's final prediction showed the Tories with five more seats than Labour. In reality, they finished 99 seats ahead. the Guardian were even worse, predicting a dead heat. Even the best forecaster came almost 50 seats short of where the Tories would end up. That's just embarrassingly wrong, and some serious groveling needs to happen if people are going to take these sites seriously in the future.

Then again, why do we give such a shit in the first place? This was the most unreal campaign I can remember in my lifetime. Two focus-group-obsessed candidates with the character of assembly line robots toured the country in hermetically sealed buses repeating meaningless phrases that nobody gave a shit about. They approached the public the way a germaphobe enters a pub toilet. Each question was evaded, every meaningful issue avoided like a plague pit.

Journalists could have tried to tackle that, to pierce the bubble and find some kind of meaning in all of it, but instead they spent six months obsessing over numbers that turned out to be bullshit. When you think about it, it explains quite a lot.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

[body_image width='827' height='551' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='charlie-leslie-worlds-biggest-penis-collection-body-image-1431342999.jpg' id='54593']
Photos courtesy of Rick Day and Steve Benisty

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Now well into his 80s, Charlie Leslie has spent a good part of his life to building what must be the world's largest collection of homoerotic art. Together with his late partner, Fritz Lohman, they founded the Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art back in 1987, as a reaction to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the time.

Housed inside a Manhattan loft, the collection boasts hundreds of depictions of naked male bodies including their, well, "pieces." Whether in the form of straws, bookends, wall mounts, or table pieces, penises are everywhere. Some of them even carry famous signatures like Mapplethorpe, Warhol, or Cocteau. The pièce de résistance, however, is the massive nude portrait of Charlie and Fritz hanging above their sofa.

The story behind the collection is as fascinating as it is depressing. A good chunk of the museum consists of work retrieved from the families of artists who died from AIDS. What they threw out as shameful trash, Leslie saw as pieces of history worth rescuing.

The man's life story is so interesting that author Kevin Clarke decided it deserved to be made into a book. In The Art of Looking, Clarke recalls anecdotes from Charles Leslie's life, including the story of how he started the modern SoHo scene and became a collector.

The Art of Looking will be published by Bruno Gmünder this month.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='heres-what-the-next-five-years-of-protest-could-look-like-933-body-image-1431345146.jpg' id='54600']

Photo by Oscar Webb.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The defining feature of the first 18 months of the last coalition government was protest. It began almost immediately after the results of that election became clear, with the efforts of Take Back Parliament, who wanted voting reform. Then there was UKUncut, the 2010 student movement, the massive "March for the Alternative" on the March 26 and, later, the August riots. Either side of those riots were two large days of national industrial action on June 30 and November 30, the latter of which saw as many as two million workers on strike and demonstrations across the country, including one of more than 50,000 in London.

All of that unfolded in a climate where the Liberal Democrats, as is now painfully clear, restrained the Tories from further destroying what the protesters were trying to save. What's more, the swelling energy of dissent was constantly told that its only real outlet for change was through the Labour Party which had, at least in some aspects, shifted to the left.

Both factors have now gone, as the Tories prepare to govern alone and Labour shift back to the right. If you thought Ed Miliband was useless in backing strike action or joining protests—with his "these strikes are wrong" video one of the most bizarre political interviews ever—wait for Chukka Umanna or Yvette Cooper, two of his most likely successors, to take the reins. Just as contentious politics on the streets, in workplaces, and neighborhoods is set to increase, the context has shifted.

But what would such protests be about? Many will be triggered by an often incoherent, underlying discontent with austerity and would encompass numerous grievances. As the name suggests, that was the case with Saturday's "Fuck the Tories" protest—a middle finger to the braying Etonians of the government, a howl against cuts to various services, a moan about the voting system... whatever people felt like being angry about.

This has been a hallmark of anti-austerity protests since 2010 like the Million Mask March, which now takes place every November 5. The most outstanding example of that kind of general response on the immediate horizon is a demonstration called by the People's Assembly for June 20, which has as many as 45,000 "attending" on Facebook at the time of writing.

Alongside these broader protests—increasingly liable to be organized through digital media and difficult to foresee—there will also be specific moments and policies which are likely to bring people out onto the streets. What's the "Tuition fees broken promise" of 2015-2020 going to be? Where's the next Millbank going to happen?

Well, it might be tuition fees again. With it being rumored that the Tories want to increase the annual fee cap to at least £11,500 [$18,000], expect to see angry students out in force again. Unlike in 2010, the NUS and student activists seem politically prepared. Shelly Asquith, President of the student union for UAL, sounded confident when she told me that student activists were "expecting the unexpected."

"I was in my first year of uni in 2010 and even then the 'student movement' nationally was being led by people who didn't even believe in free education," she said. "What we have now is an NUS with a largely unquestioned free education stance, we have anti-cuts groups on campuses more active than ever, and a movement that is unafraid of taking direct action like occupations and demos. If there is anything that gives me hope going into five more years of Tories, it is the strength and potential of the student movement in leading the fightback."

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='heres-what-the-next-five-years-of-protest-could-look-like-933-body-image-1431345208.jpg' id='54601']

Photo by Chris Bethell

If recent history is anything to go by, higher education will be the biggest battle in the next five years. If the Conservatives have any sense, they will try and see it off sooner rather than later. Expect something that is bigger than 2010. The student movement could win and more importantly, win through direct action rather than through a parliamentary vote. That would be a testament to how radical students have set the agenda for free education like nowhere else in the anti-austerity debate. Here, it seems, is an alternative which has consensus among those facing down the Tories. The same cannot be said in housing, healthcare, or the general running of the economy.

Another point of contention—and something that shows how Britain's culture wars will hot up before 2020—is the Tories promising a free vote on repealing the ban on fox hunting. With a majority in the Commons, it is quite possible that such legislation could succeed and that Britain will see a return of legal fox hunts before the end of the decade.

Related: Watch our film about people who love hunting foxes:

That would almost certainly lead to protest far beyond anything seen in relation to the badger cull of the last several years. Demonstrations in central London would be very large, but more importantly hunt sabotage—already a common phenomenon and something dating back to 1963—would dramatically increase, becoming increasingly violent as passions boiled on both sides. Expect to see animal lovers dressed as ninjas and red coated hunters running around the countryside beating the shit out of each other.

As well as hunting and tuition fees, there is a myriad of other reforms, from legal aid to repealing the Human Rights Act, which will meet with substantial protests, but perhaps the most important moment in the next five years will be the referendum on membership of the European Union in 2017. It was the referendum on Scottish independence last September, and paradoxically its defeat, which laid the groundwork for the breathtaking scale of the SNP's victory north of the border on Thursday. It is possible that a referendum vote to stay in the EU could in fact be the best outcome for UKIP. They could gain members, mobilize supporters and thicken local networks. What's more, if they lose, Farage and his "People's Army" could point to the sheer power of the forces which oppose them in the form of the major parties, big business, and the BBC. Could we be about to see UKIP members take to the streets and orchestrating a march on London against the EU? It's kind of unlikely, but not impossible.

Perhaps the key difference between the next five years and the last five is that the historic organizations of the left—such as the TUC which coordinated the half-a-million strong March for the Alternative in March 2011—can no longer simply say that protest is powerless without ultimately voting Labour. After last week's results, such a position seems absurd, with the big take-away of this election being that without Scotland, Labour will likely never get a majority in the House of Commons again. That means that the line of "vote Labour to keep the Tories out" no longer washes—if it ever did. Given all that, you might think more intelligent Labour politicians and activists will be participating in the coming years of protest, although the prospect remains unlikely.

The next five years will see much more protest than the last five and it will be interesting to see how party politics interacts with the politics of the street. A febrile atmosphere of protest offers potentially rich pickings for Labour, the Greens, and UKIP. That said, the former seems to have nothing but revulsion for street protests, and that could contribute to their ongoing demise. The most important resistance to the Tories for the rest of this parliament will likely be on the streets, and parties on the opposition benches that fail to keep up will become increasingly irrelevant.

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

[body_image width='1500' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='welcome-to-jumbo-a-bc-municipality-with-no-residents-295-body-image-1431356960.jpg' id='54739']

Photo by Howard Smith, courtesy Wildsight

You might call Jumbo the sleepiest town in British Columbia. Perched between four glaciers in East Kootenay's Purcell Mountains, it's a municipality with no streets, no houses, and no people.

Jumbo Mayor Greg Deck was appointed to serve this grizzly bear-populated wilderness in 2012. He and his two-person council meet once a month in the nearby village of Radium to pass bylaws, draft annual reports, and wait around for a ski resort that may never exist. As court challenges, expired permits, and now avalanche hazards throw the billion-dollar Jumbo Glacier Resort project into peril, it's unlikely this vacant town will be welcoming human residents anytime soon.

Italian-born architect Oberto Oberti first proposed a 6,250-bed resort and real estate development for the valley in 1991. Oberti's "master plan" includes 23 all-season ski lifts, a 3,000-metre high gondola, hotels, condos, shops, and chalets.

Since its inception, the project has faced opposition from environmentalists, local governments, First Nations, competing ski businesses, and hockey hall-of-famer Scott Niedermayer. The Ktunaxa Nation says the area is sacred; activists stress the project's impacts on grizzly migration; and neighbours argue BC's tourism market can't sustain the massive development. Nevertheless the project stumbled through 24 years of public consultation, lobbying, legal suits, funding troubles, and permit extensions, until the province passed new legislation allowing Jumbo to incorporate as a resident-free "mountain resort municipality" in 2012. (This move resolved a zoning dilemma without a drawn-out public hearing.)

[body_image width='750' height='387' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='welcome-to-jumbo-a-bc-municipality-with-no-residents-295-body-image-1431357041.jpg' id='54741']

Rendering of a possible Jumbo resort from government documents

Deck was a good sport when I called to ask what a mayor with no constituents does with his time. Most days he tends a campground on the outskirts of Radium, where he previously served as mayor for 18 years.

With no tax base, Jumbo Glacier Mountain Resort Municipality relies on provincial government funds to cover its modest day-to-day costs. "We run a really efficient operation," he assures me. "We contract with the Village of Radium to get part-time help from their admin [staff], their treasurer and their planner."

By the end of 2015, BC will have transferred $650,000 to the empty town. By 2019, Jumbo is expected to soak up an additional $1 million taxpayer dollars, according to its latest financial plan.

Deck tells me legal fees are a recurring line item. "It would be nice if people quit suing us," he says. "It's one of the bigger costs that we have."

Jumbo's financial statements show most government transfers remain unspent in a "capital reserve" account. Deck says the ski town will draw on this money to pay for public projects and infrastructure once all the buildings and people finally arrive. So far, the only existing public asset is a small bridge.

Meanwhile, the resort company's construction plans have suffered some awkward setbacks. So far Jumbo Glacier Resort has managed to pour not one but two concrete building foundations in avalanche hazard zones.

According to a government-ordered risk report the majority of Jumbo's partially-built "service building" is in a high-risk avalanche zone, and most of a "daylodge" foundation is in a moderate-risk zone. The province issued a stop-work order on April 24, stating the resort structures do not meet the safety commitments of Jumbo's environmental assessment.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='welcome-to-jumbo-a-bc-municipality-with-no-residents-295-body-image-1431357082.jpg' id='54742']

Photo of the foundation of Jumbo's upcoming day lodge. From government documents

"The location of the daylodge and of the service building had to be changed at the last minute from the location in the master plan," explains a company statement authorized by Jumbo's vice president Tommaso Oberti. "[Aerial] photography and surveys had failed to identify a small creek that crossed the intended dayldoge [sic] site." The company claims previous avalanche studies cleared these areas for building, and that modern avalanche mitigation techniques will prevent threats to public safety.

Jumbo's competitors disagree, citing Canadian Avalanche Association guidelines. "In North America, we don't build temporary or permanent structures in an avalanche path," says Graham Holt, general manager of RK Heliski, a company that first warned the province of the avalanche threat in October last year.

Mayor Deck says the avalanche debate strains an already tight construction window. With such high elevation, Jumbo Valley snow prevents construction from happening for a large chunk of the year. Which means Deck could spend an extra year or more waiting for his town to start attracting human residents.

The avalanche risk drama comes after the company's environmental certificates expired in October 2014. To renew the certificates, Jumbo had to prove to the government "substantial" development was already underway. The company began rushed construction just a few days before the October deadline. Seven months later, the government has yet to rule whether or not the two building foundations represent a "substantial start."

In urgent correspondence with the government, the company makes clear big money is riding on two slabs of concrete. "Given the 24 years of delays incurred by the project, and the millions of dollars spent in the approval process, the project's investors are anxious to generate revenue and begin operations as soon as possible," reads a November submission. "With 325 tonnes of concrete and 125 tonnes of steel in the ground we believe that physically the project has been 'substantially started.'"

Environment Minister Mary Polak is expected to release a decision by early to mid-June. "Now that the [avalanche] compliance determination has been made, the environmental assessment office will be proceeding with the substantial start determination for the project," an environment ministry spokesperson confirmed in an emailed statement. "We will incorporate the avalanche report findings into the substantial start determination report to the minister."

As a municipal budget hangs in the balance, the project's founder isn't taking no for an answer. In a letter to the Columbia Valley Pioneer, president Oberto Oberti declared: "the project will not be stopped by games of words; we trust that the Canadian justice system would not permit it and we expect that the legal route will not be necessary."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

[body_image width='1274' height='704' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='elizabeth-may-gave-the-worlds-most-awkward-speech-talking-anal-trudeaus-hair-and-omar-khadr-290-body-image-1431363244.jpg' id='54830']

Elizabeth May at the Press Gallery Dinner. Screenshot via CBC

Much like your tipsy uncle who decides to use the dinner table at Thanksgiving Dinner as his bully pulpit to make a series of off-colour remarks about who he thinks is ruining the country this year, Green Party leader Elizabeth May used the hobnob-y Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner on Saturday to deliver a meandering rant about her hips, penis envy, and Omar Khadr.

The nine-minute speech, delivered to the annual black-tie piss-up for Canadian political journalists, began with a shout-out to Canada's First Nations, swerved into a strange attempted takedown of Stephen Harper, then an unnecessarily long bit about her artificial hip, morphed into uncomfortable meandering about Justin Trudeau's hair, followed by an off-putting tribute to Freud, and capped off with—in her own words—a "deranged" coup de grâce Omar Khadr tribute.

The CBC has May's whole speech online.

The Press Gallery Dinner used to be an off-the-record trainwreck where party leaders, including the prime minister, would show up to get loaded drunk and take potshots at their media tormentors without fear of their intoxicated rants ending up in a newspaper.

In recent years, however, since the dinner has gone back on the record—thanks, Twitter—leaders have largely just been reading relatively tame speeches written by a committee of their press flacks.

So about three minutes into May's speech, everybody was caught between nervous excitement for something unscripted and disastrous, and outright awkwardness and empathy for watching someone bomb so terribly.

By minute seven, where May brought out a long-winded, confusing, and jaw-dropping Freud joke—which was sort-of a set up for her to get to a "debate envy" joke—the crowd was fidgeting in their chairs.

"That whole sexual maturation thing on the Freudian scale, that we go from the oral—I'm not going to eat the mic," May improvised, looking down at the two microphones that I-guess-sort-of look like penises. "To the anal—I don't even want to think of it—to the genital."

It was pretty much at that point that Transport Minister Lisa Raitt, heels off, decided that she would do the humane thing and try to take this speech out behind the woodshed.

"Do you guys ever wake up with old theme songs from former black and white TV shows that you never thought your kids would never see, and they're running through your head? Like every now and then, I wake up thinking—" At this point, May spotted Raitt. "Lisa, you've got to wait."

May then pulled out her Blackberry, and the theme song from Welcome Back, Kotter came on. And, considering that Omar Khadr had been released earlier that day, everyone knew where this bit was going. Like watching a clown car catch fire with its passengers still inside, you either had to bury your face in your hands, or you couldn't look away.

Raitt made a few "help me" faces to the crowd as May refused to be swept offstage.

"Do you wonder why I'm thinking about this?" May asked, obviously rhetorically.

"We do wonder why you're thinking that, Liz, but—" Raitt tried, to no avail.

"Welcome back Omar Khadr! You're home!"

At this point, Raitt actually tried to physically drag May off the stage, as she grabbed the podium like a child throwing a temper tantrum.

Then May dropped the big one:

"Omar Khadr, you have more class than this whole fucking cabinet."

At that point, giving up, May went arm-in-arm offstage with Raitt—a member of the cabinet that she just said had less class than a former child soldier—leaving everyone in the room to collect their jaws from the floor.

In the interim, certain rebellious commentators have been convinced of a broad media conspiracy to hide May's comments. Of course, the story has been reported in dozens of outlets, was discussed endlessly on Sunday's political talk shows, and graced the front page of Monday's Metro Ottawa.

May has since apologized for the whole thing, blaming jet lag and a botched attempt at humour.

Raitt, meanwhile, should expect flowers.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='1439' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357573.jpg' id='54753'][body_image width='1000' height='1438' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357584.jpg' id='54754'][body_image width='1000' height='1434' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357595.jpg' id='54755'][body_image width='1000' height='1441' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357554.jpg' id='54752'][body_image width='1000' height='1441' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357609.jpg' id='54756'][body_image width='1000' height='1432' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357664.jpg' id='54758'][body_image width='1000' height='1439' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='megg-mogg-owl-altered-beasts-237-body-image-1431357631.jpg' id='54757']

Follow Simon Hanselmann on Twitter and look at his blog. Also buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face.

[body_image width='1024' height='681' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='atheism-terrifies-people-because-it-makes-us-think-about-death-511-body-image-1431364699.jpg' id='54837']

Photo by Flickr user Hans Van Den Berg

When my friend and fellow nonbeliever Greta Christina wrote her recent book Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, she noticed a common theme among the over 400 stories she collected: The subject of death came up a lot.

"When atheists come out (to Christians, anyway), the first reaction is often about Hell," Christina told me. "Sometimes it's manipulative or hostile, an attempt to scare atheists back into belief. More often, though, it's genuine concern or fear—they sincerely believe atheists will burn in Hell, and they don't want that to happen to the people they love."

A new study by Corey Cook, entitled "What if They're Right About the Afterlife? Evidence of the Role of Existential Threat on Anti-Atheist Prejudice" sheds some light on the phenomenon Christina noticed. Cook, a social psychologist at the University of Washington, told me that while the well-documented mistrust of atheists shows up in the polls over the years, there's not much literature on why atheists are perceived the way they are by religious believers in America.

When participants thought about atheism, it actually activated concern about death to the same extent as actually thinking about death.

Cook's study's lays out a hypothesis, which he calls "terror management theory." The idea is that the awareness of death can make people terrified, but those fears are assuaged by the cultural sense that we are each a meaningful part of the universe. Anti-atheism, then, comes "in part from the existential threat posed by conflicting worldview beliefs."

"What we found is that when participants thought about atheism, it actually activated concern about death to the same extent as actually thinking about death," Cook told me.

As an atheist myself, I put it to Cook that maybe getting people to ponder their mortality in a non-threatening way wasn't as dire as terror management theory made it sound. Cook agreed with me in part, and responded that thinking about death in a conscious way "can increase your appreciation for things" and "can be a great thing," adding that there are 30 years of research to back this up. However, "There are different responses when we think about death consciously and unconsciously."

Cook's study looked more at the unconscious side of things. He did this by using two different experiments conducted with students at the College of Staten Island, which he told me was chosen in part due to the diverse makeup of its student population.

In the first experiment, comprised of 236 students (172 female, 64 male, most of them Christian), participants were asked to write down "what you think will happen physically when you die," and then "describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you." Then they were asked their feelings about either atheists or Quakers, including rating their trustworthiness.

The second experiment asked 174 students to either describe the emotions they felt toward their own death, or "write down, as specifically as you can, what atheism means to you." Then, students completed a set of word fragments, which could be either read as neutral words ("skill") or death-related words ("skull").

Related: VICE meets euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke, the world's first physician to administer a legal, lethal injection in Northern Australia.

Cook's experiments were more specific than just talking about death. They made it more salient. And according to terror management theory, when that happens, "people start to care about people who buffer or support their worldview and you actually start to see increased derogation against people who believe differently about the world. When suddenly your values matter more to you, that's an unconscious thing, you're not realizing that they matter more than they did a couple minutes ago."

Interestingly, the atheists in his study weren't immune to this. "We found the effect even if we included atheists in our study. Because as an atheist, you have to confront that, 'Wait a minute, what is going to happen?' Atheism increases thoughts of death even for atheists."

[body_image width='1280' height='853' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='atheism-terrifies-people-because-it-makes-us-think-about-death-511-body-image-1431365835.jpg' id='54842']

Photo by Flickr user Ben Francis

Clearly, this struck a nerve. I asked Gary Laderman, professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University and the author on two books on death in America, what he made of the study. He wasn't surprised by this finding, although he seemed to place it within a broader context of people questioning closely-held religious beliefs about death. "The power of [religious] institutions and those traditional cultural authorities is really eroding in a lot of ways," he told me. "People are more willing to accept a variety of different possibilities about death. But one thing that most people don't want to confront is what we associate with atheism. The idea that there is nothing post-mortem. There is no transition to some other kind of life. So that's what it's interesting about the study: It's digging beyond the kind of theological obvious kinds of debates to these more existential, basic ideas about human life."

Ideas about how and when we die are also being challenged. When I spoke with Michelle Boorstein, the religion reporter for the Washington Post, she brought up the example of euthanasia. "I think as we have more conversation in our society about assisted suicide and the idea of people having some say over their own death, I think it just puts more public discussion about it out there. I mean, we don't talk about [death] much anyway."

Even though death is generally taboo, Americans are making efforts to reclaim it—largely based on secular ideals.

Boorstein believes it's possible that maybe all of those things will work in favor of a growing acceptance of atheism. "As you look at the percentages of people who are more in favor of assisted suicide and that sort of thing, that would sort of challenge this idea that 'Only God can decide when I go.' I think as you see people thinking more about what they want around end of life and ask why, that will [positively] affect people's attitudes towards atheists to the degree that they start to agree with them on these issues."

People of no religion (the Nones, as they're called) are the fastest growing segment of the American population—second only to Catholics and comprising a third of of adults under 30. To be clear, most of the Nones don't identify as atheists and many maintain supernatural beliefs, but what they don't have is a religious affiliation that rigidly informs how they practice burial rituals. Add to this the two-thirds of the American who support physician assisted suicide, and several states now enacting legislation to legalize the practice. Even though death is generally taboo, Americans are making efforts to reclaim it—largely based on secular ideals.

However, as Cook's study highlights, there is still a lot of defensiveness around the secular notion that death is the end, since most Americans still desire an afterlife. So how should atheists navigate the anxiety that the lack of an afterlife provokes in many people? One way is certainly the path chosen by Christopher Hitchens, who in his books and talks argued that the very notion of heaven was highly overrated. In 2010 and 2011, he wrote very honestly about his "year of living dyingly" in a series of articles for Vanity Fair after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Influenced by his old friend Jessica Mitford's critique of the American funeral industry, Hitchens also donated his body to science and opted to not have a funeral—a principled stance that, in my view, deserved a bit more attention than it received. Borrowing the term from terror management theory, the idea is make mortality not only salient, but also compelling.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='portraits-without-people-in-coober-pedy-body-image-1431305137.jpg' id='54433']

Images by Abigail Varney

Coober Pedy, 500 miles north of Adelaide, Australia is the opal capital of the world. It's known for its minerals, underground homes, and as a place to stop on the way to Uluru. The name comes from the local Aboriginal term kupa-piti, meaning "white man's hole." You can interpret that however you like.

But Melbourne photographer Abigail Varney wasn't interested in opals or rest-stops. She decided to create a series around the town and use the shots to explore a sense of space and desolation. The resulting works form Rough and Cut, her attempt to look past the gems and locals to the strange town that frames their lives.

VICE: What was your initial impression of Coober Pedy when you arrived?
Abigail Varney: It felt like a set. There was no one around. There were all these opal stores that were closed. We walked along the street and this one guy came up to us with opals stuck in the lining of his jacket to sell. It was bizarre.

[body_image width='1366' height='911' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='portraits-without-people-in-coober-pedy-body-image-1431305201.jpg' id='54435']

Did you get to know the locals?
There were so many different characters, we had so many different interactions. The guy who managed our accommodation was really sweet and told us who was who around town. There was a guy called Crocodile Harry, one called Swampy, another named Crazy Joe. We ended up meeting Crazy Joe after driving past his house. He has a mini museum with all this weird stuff in it.

Crocodile Harry's place is another we visited—he used to wrestle crocs and is apparently a womanizer. In his house there is all this underwear left for him with notes like, "Love you, Harry."

Everyone was really nice. They were a bit taken aback when they found out it wasn't just a stop off. A lot of people go through Coober Pedy to get to Uluru so the locals kind of said, "Oh, you just want to be here?"

[body_image width='1500' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='portraits-without-people-in-coober-pedy-body-image-1431305279.jpg' id='54436']

Were there any issues with taking photos?
They're used to cameras being around, people have filmed there before. if you walk down the main strip and you'll see this massive spaceship—something must have been shot there and they'd just left it.

Was it a choice to leave these characters out of Rough and Cut?
Yeah, I wanted there to be a sense of people but also show how desolate it was. It wasn't hard, a lot of the time there really was no-one around.

[body_image width='1500' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='portraits-without-people-in-coober-pedy-body-image-1431305341.jpg' id='54437']

Can a landscape say as much about people as a portrait?
Definitely, using a different set of skills. I felt like I had a job to go to Coober Pedy and take portraits. But it became more about the place and taking shots that had a sense of people. It was nice to tap into a different way of taking a portrait.

Words by Hannah Scholte. Follow her on Twitter.

As soon as I saw the white wisps of smoke pluming from the dormant volcanic fields outside the tour bus window, I started sweating. From my seat by the window, the vapor signaled that our destination was close, our 45-minute ride from Reykjavik, Iceland's capital, nearly over. My breath quickened, my thoughts raced. As everyone else shuffled with their luggage in anticipation of the arrival, I sat trapped in my seat, overcome with worry that I was suffering from an undiagnosed case of hyperhidrosis.

Disembarking a few minutes later, the driver practically peeled me off the bus. As I stood on an asphalt oasis in the middle of the Icelandic wilderness, I realized with a shudder that it was too late to reverse course. I stared at the path ahead of me, surrounded on all sides by black volcanic rock. In the distance, the glass walls of the compound loomed. A fellow traveler shouldered me out of the way as what looked like his entire extended family—dead relatives included—charged forward. I plopped down on my travel pack, took a deep breath, and tried to delay the inevitable.

You might assume from my bizarre behavior that I was approaching some sort of Hunger Games (Arctic Circle Edition) scenario. I had just arrived at the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa carved into petrified black lava, a tourist haven invariably adored by the estimated 400,000 visitors who pass through its gates each year. It is Iceland's most popular tourist destination and, in a country chock full of Kodak moments, its most photographed. National Geographic named it one of the 25 Modern Wonders of the World.

The Blue Lagoon is essentially the ur-spa experience. The water, pumped from 2,000 feet below the surface, holds a temperature of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit year-round and is packed with regenerative minerals. The Lagoon boasts incredible vistas, floating masseuses and more sweat lodges than you can shake a stick at. And thanks to Iceland's lunar landscape, it can feel like a parallel world, an ultra-pampered moonscape of wonder.

For most people. For me, the prospect of all that relaxation made my skin crawl.

The thing is, relaxing situations stress me out, and pretty much always have. I don't know when it started, but I do remember being seven years old and unable to lie still in bed as my brain cycled through various apocalyptic scenarios. I missed months of second grade with an awful case of separation anxiety from my mother, and it was always the worst when I was with her, knowing that soon we would be separated again. A few years after that, she bought me a book called The Worrywart's Companion, a humorous attempt to attack my stress by identifying it head-on. It didn't work. In my teens, I found workarounds, and for a time a combination of promiscuity, substance abuse, sarcasm, and self-deprecation made me enjoyable at parties and on vacations while I corroded from within. Now I'm in my 20s, and I've gotten better at relaxing. I can get a massage without emerging tighter than when I started. I can sit on a beach chair for more than an hour without worrying about contracting terminal skin cancer or drowning in a freak tidal wave. Meditation is still out of the question, but at least I can now cuddle without discomfort.

But I needed a test to gauge how far I had come. I figured a solo vacation to Iceland—and the Blue Lagoon, in particular—would serve as a barometer for my newfound powers of relaxation.

Having made it up the path and through the Blue Lagoon doors, I approached one of the steely Icelandic women manning the Blue Lagoon check-in portal. I felt all the progress I thought I had made evaporate like so much Icelandic volcanic water. The woman scanned my reservation slip, equipped me with a smart bracelet and pointed me, like an executioner identifying the guillotine's blade, to the locker rooms. I was swept up the stairs and into a small room packed with British teens—an Icelandic spa experience is apparently part of the English public school curriculum —and paunchy old men hunched, distressingly exposed, in front of their lockers.

At all Icelandic public pools, patrons are required to shower naked before putting their swimsuits on and entering the pool. Officially, this is done for sanitation purposes, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's all just a big Nordic conspiracy to make Americans as uncomfortable as possible.

After navigating the labyrinthine locker rooms, I emerged at the Lagoon itself. It's more like one massive pool carved into the petrified lava. I scurried from the building through the freezing air and hopped in the water, as Nordic men in Speedos strolled casually by. I attempted a casual laugh, but it came out creaky. Looking around, I realized I had no safety valve for the stress. No significant other, good friend, travel buddy, hip flask, nothing. Not even an acquaintance I had met during my stay. There was no externalizing this time, no projecting, no sarcasm. It was just me. And 1,500 to 2,000 other tourists. I sank down to my neck, tried to take a deep breath and accidentally drank some of the lagoon water on the inhale.

There are myriad anxiety disorders out there, on top of the typical anxiety to which any biped drawing breath is prone. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is the run-of-the-mill over-thinking and constant worry, while Social Anxiety Disorder describes a heightened fear of social interaction, which "automatically brings on feelings of self-consciousness, judgment, evaluation, and scrutiny." Social phobias, panic disorder, OCD, and PTSD all fall somewhere on the anxiety spectrum, and about 40 million Americans are afflicted in a given year.

Relaxation-Induced Anxiety (RIA) is a different beast entirely. For those experiencing RIA, the physiological signs of relaxation—the slowing of the heart rate, deep breathing, shoulder loosening—triggers a wave of anxiety and insecurity. While RIA is still waiting for official inclusion into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), recent research indicates that it affects as many as 15 percent of people. One of the leaders of that research is Christina Luberto, a clinical psychology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. Luberto told me that the tentative treatment for RIA would be a combination of exposure therapy and mindfulness, a common practice that's been effective in treating anxiety and depression.

"You have people expose themselves to things that are frightening for them, and you kind of sit with it and nurse it and watch what happens in order to develop more of an openness to it," Luberto told me. "You learn that, yeah, the anxiety is uncomfortable, but you're capable of tolerating it."

Or, to paraphrase the immortal Joe Rogan, determine if fear is a factor for you.

When I booked my Blue Lagoon excursion, I sprang for the "Comfort" plan that included a beverage of your choice. With nothing better to do, I floated chest-deep through the opaque geothermal body fluids into the long line for the swim-up bar. and after a protracted, non-relaxing period of wait time, I scored an ice-warm Viking beer. I thought this would be some salve for my anxiety, but now I found myself wading with one arm shot straight up in the air, aimless in my pursuit of ultimate relaxation. I was treating the place like a waterpark's lazy river, scraping along the craggy floor on my knees, bumping into fellow revelers in hopes of creating some human contact. I remembered the horror stories I heard about dehydration, so I slowly sipped my beer and checked my vitals every four seconds for signs of dizziness or nausea. The mineral-heavy water can be toxic on people's hair, so I kept my head cocked skyward and my neck stiff throughout my swim.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/05/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/09/' filename='blue-lagoon-gave-me-anxiety-422-body-image-1431131719.jpg' id='54343']

Finally, in order to keep from completely melting down, I followed the hordes to one of the boxes situated around the Lagoon. I dug some silica mud out of a box and, like a robot who mimics the actions of humans around him, slathered it all over my face and shoulders. I heard myself say "Ahh." I laid back against the lip of the lagoon, settled my body in the water, sipped my beer, and let the mask do its thing.

For just a moment, I closed my eyes and allowed my thoughts to go quiet. I let the mash of tourist dialects fly past me without trying to interpret every inflection and surrendered to the judgment of myself and every other flabby soul floating past me in the pool. This, I would discover later, is what Luberto meant by mindfulness.

"The really interesting piece is that present-moment awareness without the intention to relax has actually been shown to increase relaxation," Luberto told me. "It's this paradoxical thing where when you try to not relax, you might find yourself more relaxed than when you're intentionally trying to relax."

I documented the way my skin sealed and tightened under the mask without worrying whether my expression would be frozen forever in a puzzled grimace. I focused on my breathing, and noticed how a deep breath made my legs and torso prickle against the mineralized water. It felt almost meditative, or at least a brief buzz of whatever full relaxation might actually be.

As soon as it began, it was over. I squinted, downed the rest of my pint and hopped out of the pool. I toweled off and made my way to the overlook to take my obligatory Instagram photo ( Caption: The Blue Lagoon #iceland #tbt #takemeback; Likes: 38) and headed back to the locker room.

There, I waited patiently as a Scandinavian teen did some VERY thorough toweling off in front of my locker. As I tried to avoid watching Sven locate his boxers, I had to chuckle at the absurdity of it all. My 3,000-mile-long, five-day pursuit of relaxation had ultimately resulted in about two minutes of something resembling meditation. Still, it was a start, and I felt buoyed by the thought of what other challenges were out there. As Luberto and any other clinical psychologist will tell you, it is not the anxiety that cripples, but "the restrictions you place on your life in order to avoid that anxiety." I had quite literally jumped off the deep end and, after a few desperate splashes, started to acquire a set of sea legs.

Or, you know, lagoon legs.

Davis Harper is on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='nigel-farage-is-leader-of-ukip-nigel-farage-is-unkillable-body-image-1431361802.jpg' id='54799']

Photo by Michael Segalov.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Good news for people who say "samosas are just pasties with dots on their head" and lock their front doors whenever they hear a car outside playing hip-hop: Nigel Farage has returned from beyond the grave to reclaim his rightful place as the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), for whom he will continue his work of being the acceptable, if newt-like, face of British racism.

Farage—who, you will remember, tendered his resignation as leader of UKIP on Friday, after failing to win the not-even-that-hotly-contested South Thanet constituency—was reinstated as leader of the party today after UKIP rejected his resignation. You know when vampires don't die at the end of vampire movies, but instead the camera zooms in on their one bloodied eye, and it just suddenly blinks? It's like that, but imagine the vampire hated its own traditional Romanian roots, and campaigned to have itself deported away from the country where it had made its blood-thirsty home, because they come over here, these vampires, in their gangs, and they drain our children of their sweet and tender blood, don't they? They come over here and they kill our children with their teeth and they have the temerity to ask the NHS for more plasma.

In a statement today, the party said: "As promised, Nigel Farage tendered his official resignation as leader of UKIP to the NEC. This offer was unanimously rejected by the NEC members who produced overwhelmingly evidence that the UKIP membership did not want Nigel to go."

It went on: "The referendum campaign has already begun this week and we need our best team to fight that campaign led by Nigel. He has therefore been persuaded by the NEC to withdraw his resignation and remains leader of UKIP."

Because who else are they going to have lead the party? Mark Reckless? Mark Reckless is an egg that somehow ended up with a Bond villain's name. Suzanne Evans? Suzanne Evans is a woman, and UKIP distrust women. Douglas Carswell? Who would vote for a man who looks like he is hired to scare children away from farms? No, it has to be Nigel Farage, a bottle of Matey floating in a bath of real ale. Because, despite their trouncing at the hands of the first-past-the-post voting system, that's what so many people in Britain want: none of this benefits system or social fairness or strong economy or anything like that. We want a man who almost certainly has a story about someone being banned from a members-only club for doing something vulgar with a lit cigar.

Watch: We Filmed at UKIP's Insane Party Conference:

On one hand, it feels like UKIP have, to an extent, run their course: they exerted everything in the election, their biggest shot at relevance for the next five years barring the (admittedly nailed-on) European referendum. On the other hand: the party got a 13 percent vote share in Thursday's General Election. And that makes Farage's job ever easier, now: he can drop his act of being a human meme, instead targeting the people he's already won onside, turning to a crowd of already half-racist Middle Englanders and whipping them up into a frenzy, telling them the health service is just some AIDS-specializing foreigns-only situation, reminding them of the Good Old Days where you could still walk down the street saying "wop," shake hands, drink pints, smoke tabs.

This is the danger, really, a danger that swings both ways. Farage is the fist around the beating heart of UKIP: he is like a screaming, possessed vessel of a racist god, but he's the only hope they have, and they know that. With Farage reinstated, they are strong again, revitalized. While Labour pisses about finding the next person to inoffensively lose to the Tories and the Lib Dems melt like a sad snowman, Farage glows in his dark plotting cave, every fibre growing stronger. UKIP are nothing without Farage. Farage is nothing without UKIP.

Because whether you're pro-UKIP or not, it is totally alarming that Nigel Farage seemingly will not die. And that's not being figurative: the man has countered cancer, a plane crash, and now his own resignation. He is the dictionary definition of "unkillable." And that now places us all in a bizarre alt-horror film, of creaking doors and moving shadows. You go to bed, and the wind whispers: "Aren't them lot bad at driving?" You close the curtains but you feel a chill: lizard-like tongues hiss the words, "Why do their weddings have to go on for three days?" And there is a distant howling, and dark clouds envelope the moon, and you turn around and he is behind you—proud, gray, and naked, his penis slimily uncoiling like a chameleon's tongue—and he leans close, Nigel, he leans close to you, and flutters his eyelids and says: "Europe is bad."

Farage is back, everybody. Rejoice about it as you will.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

[body_image width='800' height='531' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='medical-marijuana-worked-for-morgan-freeman-so-he-wants-legalization-across-the-board-vgtrn-body-image-1431364672.jpg' id='54836']

Photo via Flickr user Trisha Fawver

Almost a decade ago, universally loved actor Morgan Freeman decimated his arm, shoulder, and elbow in a car accident. He still has problems with his left hand and has to wear a compression glove to stop blood from pooling, according to the Daily Beast. The accident left him with chronic pain, from which the only relief, he says, is that sticky icky.

"How do I take it?" Freeman told the Beast, "However it comes! I'll eat it, drink it, smoke it, snort it!" He supports medical marijuana legalization "aross the board" and dismisses the claims about weed's negative effects.

"Look at Woodstock 1969," he continued. "They said, 'We're not going to bother them or say anything about smoking marijuana,' and not one problem or fight. Then look at what happened in [Woodstock] '99."

To be fair, you could probably pin the blame of Woodstock 1999's riots on Creed and Limp Bizkit, not the prevalence of alcohol over marijuana. You can only hear "With Arms Wide Open" so many times before being overcome with blind rage.

Here Are Five In-Depth Stories About Weed:

1. Watch Our Documentary About the Real Nancy Botwin
2. Watch Our Documentary About Stoned Moms
3. Smoking Weed Can Be a Lot of Fun, but Let's Not Pretend It Doesn't Fuck You Up
4. Thanks to Congress, DC's Weed Legalization Is Going to Be a Nightmare

[body_image width='1200' height='1100' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='things-i-learned-while-not-wanking-336-body-image-1431356949.jpg' id='54738']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Chastity is not a foreign concept to me. More than once I've been in a relationship where, because I and the other person were heavily into starving ourselves of sex for sexual reasons, abstinence was enforced.

The longest I went was about three weeks, meaning no sex and no masturbation—and therefore no orgasms—for 21 days. It turned my life around; I got work done, I kept my house clean, I finished off personal projects that procrastination had always forbid me from finishing. I realized that a self-enforced period of blue balls can actually be a lot better for the mind, body, and soul that I'd first assumed.

However, it does need to be mentioned that having a DMC with your own junk every once in a while is a very healthy thing to do, encouraged by actual professors. For instance, Jim Pfaus—professor of neuroscience at Montreal's Concordia University—told me this:

"[Masturbation] is a great stress reducer—there's evidence that having sex or masturbating can reduce our resting heart rate for up to 12 hours. Plus, it does our sex lives the world of good to learn our sexual rhythms. We connect [through masturbation] to the types of action that we see in erotic or pornographic visual stimuli. This feeds our sexual fantasies, which is an enrichment of our creative process."

So it's clearly important to keep bashing away—but abstaining for a few weeks at a time certainly has its benefits. Benefits I thought I'd share with you here, backed up with scientific facts provided by Professor Pfaus.

[body_image width='1200' height='1100' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='things-i-learned-while-not-wanking-336-body-image-1431357097.jpg' id='54743']

YOU TURN INTO A WAY MORE PRODUCTIVE VERSION OF YOURSELF

In the three weeks that I abstained, I wrote 20 articles, built a bed, started work on a book, and began eating salad, like any proper, functioning adult with a fear of imminent heart disease should. As soon as I started going at myself again, all that productivity disappeared, shot up the wall in a long, thick arc of lost potential.

I have little to absolutely no knowledge in the field, but I figured there must be some kind of scientific link here; since semen contains testosterone, it follows that if you keep that testosterone off tissues and all to yourself, like some sort of spermy Scrooge, you'll end up with more "drive." Right? Kind of.

"Holding semen in does not increase the likelihood that any of the constituents will 'leak' back into the blood," explains Professor Pfaus. "However, if you are holding it in, that means you are not having sex or masturbating, which could increase your arousal in anticipation of actually having sex. I think this is the 'energy' that the purveyors of tantric sex talk about. Learning how to maintain erection and hold off ejaculation makes the orgasm experience more intensely pleasurable. This is true for us and rats. So the increase in 'energy' is more psychological and belief-driven than anything else."

This is the increase in energy I experienced. After setting "no masturbation" as a kind of personal challenge, I quickly discovered that I needed other things to occupy my mind. And what's a better distraction from your thoughts than trying to assemble a flat-pack bed invented purely to destroy long-term relationships?

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR ADULT LIFE YOU'LL WAKE UP AND NOT WANT TO CRY

There was a time, roughly a millennium ago, when I'd wake up in the morning and the whole world would seem bright and exciting and full of opportunity. Now I'm a grown man, each morning instead seems to bring back pain, 20 unread emails before I've even managed to brush my teeth, and some guy who takes an inexplicable amount of time to withdraw cash from the ATM.

However, during my three weeks of abstinence there was a silver lining to all that horror. For some reason, each new day felt immeasurably less shitty. There was a sort of levity to not masturbating—a cleanliness. "Some men experience extreme guilt over masturbation," says Professor Pfaus. "Others attempt to achieve orgasm several times a day in an obsessive manner. Some men are afflicted by both. The obsessive and compulsive nature of this makes them masturbate frequently—perhaps too frequently, because they end up in a chronic state of refractoriness over their penis and ejaculatory mechanisms."

Essentially, not being able to control your dick—or feeling as if you cannot control your dick—is a pretty miserable experience. You're being emasculated by the very part of you that makes you masculine. Wrestling control back from your penis catapults you out of a grubby little world where you're always looking to steal a few moments to rub one out. And that, objectively, is just a nicer place to be.

WATCH: The South Korean Love Industry

YOU HAVE AN ERECTION BASICALLY ALL THE TIME

This one speaks for itself, and is less of a positive and more just a physical fact that you'll need to endure. Not masturbating can be a good thing to do—you might feel awake, cleansed, and ready to turn your life around. But you'll also constantly be walking around with half a Snickers Duo in your jeans, even if you're on the phone to your dad. As Professor Pfaus explains:

"Erection in both men and women requires the orchestrated activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system. First, the heart has to pump more blood to the tissue. Then, once the blood engorges the spongiosa—the sponge-like tissue that holds it in the cavernosa of the penis and clitoris, along with the labia and other erectile tissue—the parasympathetic nervous system takes over, crimping the blood vessels so that blood will stay in the genitals (and nipples and other erectile tissues). There is a spinal mechanism in the lower lumbar region that acts to shift the parasympathetic to sympathetic, which in turn activates orgasm (along with ejaculation in men). While you have an erection, this flip-switch mechanism is inhibited by (among other things) descending serotonin.

"So, if you masturbate frequently, you are in a state of refractoriness, which also activates that descending serotonin system, but which now diminishes or inhibits blood from flowing into the genitals because it maintains parasympathetic tone (which causes a contraction of blood vessels). So if you lay off for a while—say, 24 to 48 hours—you may notice your erections come back harder and stronger. However, everyone is different, so one person's optimality may well be another's dysfunction. Optimality has to be determined by each individual in different circumstances."

So if you're going to try to abstain, find the right amount of time for you. And if you're committed to going the distance, but don't want people staring at you on the tube, you can always strap yourself to yourself using Sellotape, because this is the 21st century and adhesives exist that allow you to fasten your dick to your leg, so why not make the most of them.

[body_image width='1200' height='1100' path='images/content-images/2015/05/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/11/' filename='things-i-learned-while-not-wanking-336-body-image-1431357673.jpg' id='54759']

YOU MIGHT GET A BIT SEXUALLY FRUSTRATED

This is the hideous, grotesque, embarrassing part of not masturbating. And definitely not a benefit. Deprived of sexual conduct for anything over 48 hours, most men I know will devolve into stupid, leering, chimp-type things. This is a disaster, because there's pretty much nothing worse than being a stupid, leering, chimp-type thing.

The litany of distractions provided by work and hobbies are helpful, and if you can keep them coming then you might be OK. However, it makes sense that not masturbating will up your sex drive. Therefore, in my experience, chastity is something best enjoyed—somewhat paradoxically—with a partner. If you're doing it solo, either as a sadistic personal challenge thing or for the perceived benefits, and you notice yourself staring at people, just stop immediately. After all, masturbation is nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary: it's a natural part of sexual expression.

"Abstaining from masturbation will not kill us," concludes Professor Pfaus, "but it will deprive us of important self-discovery. And we know that abstinence of masturbation—and sex and pleasure in general—is often dictated by people obsessed with 'purity' and 'morally correct behavior.' People like that cannot stand the pleasure of others."

Follow Alex on Instagram.

Watch 'Life After Food'

I've never gotten pleasure from food. Eating has always felt like a supreme waste of time and money with no lasting benefit. Forced to shove shit down my gullet routinely for the rest of time, I find it a bleak and vicious circle. I eat, get full, then have to eat again.

Thank God for a few brave food scientists out there fighting the good fight, trying to come up with tasteless, nutritional pastes and powders that I can swallow down a few times every day and liberate myself from the prison of food. Soylent made a splash a few years ago, but it wasn't a big success and quickly faded from public view (watch intrepid VICE host Brian Merchant choke Soylent down in our documentary, Life After Food, above). Now, there's a new food replacement on the market—MealSquares.

MealSquares are made from eggs, oats, orange juice, sunflower seeds, and all sorts of other healthy shit that people used to eat before the invention of burritos. The company compresses all these vital nutrients down into a bread-like square, ready for human consumption. It sounds wonderful.

You can pre-order a month's worth of MealSquares for under $100 on their website, and the company swears they taste fine, not that I care much about that. Cars don't bitch and moan about the taste of their gasoline. Humans should follow suit.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About the Perils of Eating?

1. I Toured NYC's Least Hygienic Restaurants and They Were Delicious
2. Should Your Dog Be Vegan?
3. I Worked at Golden Corral, and It Was Disgusting
4. Expats Really Like to Drink in Front of Korean Convenience Stores

Follow River on Twitter.