A young man at Tesagan Gin Je in Phuket. All photos by Giselle Natassia

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

The Nine Emperor Gods is a nine-day Taoist event, celebrated every year across Southeast Asia during the ninth months of the lunar calendar. In Phuket, Thailand, it's honoured as Tesagan Gin Je or the Vegetarian Festival.

According to the festival's legend, a Chinese group occupying these parts once fell prey to a deadly epidemic. But upon adopting a vegetarian diet and praying to the nine gods, the group were cured. In commemoration, people today adopt a vegetarian diet and adhere to the festival's 10 principles. These include abstaining from sex, alcohol, and dressing only in white clothing.

And then there is the impaling. Photographer Giselle Nastassia traveled to Phuket last September to experience the festival. Her images capture these masong—those who pierce their cheeks, tongues, and bodies. By inviting the spirits of the nine gods to possess their bodies, it's believed the gruesome body modification rituals draw little blood and leave few scars.

The common belief is the impaling helps the individual obtain pure peace of mind and good health. Locals also told Giselle that inflicting pain on oneself takes away the sins of the community and transfers them to the individual. An altruistic act, if you will.

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Photo by Spencer Tunick

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out that VICE isn't the only magazine in the world. This series,Ink Spots, is a helpful guide to which zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not reading ours.

Self-love, vanity, lust; all topics to stop and consider for Lyra magazine, a new journal covering sex, culture and contemporary thought. It's a heady mix: Issue One's content page opens with an essay on lust from Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, features think-pieces on "Allah's Sex Slaves", "Spitting" and "The Big O", and discusses the work of artists from filmmaker Chantal Akerman to Paul Verhoeven (yes, the guy who directed Showgirls... using "artist" loosely here).

Throughout the magazine, there's a constant emphasis on cross-generational conversation; interviews with wise elders like octogenarian artist Molly Parkin and former Nova magazine agony aunt Irma Kurtz. There's also a mix of old talent and new among the artwork; the magazine features photography spreads from Spencer Tunick – the famous American photographer known for his group shots of nudes – and rising Ukrainian photographer Sasha Kurnaz.

Lyra's founder and editor, Georgina Gray, says she wanted to create something that feels both nostalgic and new. I spoke to her to find out more.

VICE: Hi Georgina. Can you start by telling me a bit about you? What made you want to start Lyra?
I'm a journalist, Polish by origin. I've always loved magazines – I spend a fortune on them – and I've always been a feminist as well. I started Lyra because I would sit at the dinner table with friends and we'd talk about things that bother us. We're young, ambitious and intelligent people – we have the power to try to change things. One day I decided that, if I want to actually have a voice, I should publish a magazine. I wanted to make it cross-generational in emphasis because I think we don't look to other generations for life lessons; we just look at older people like they don't exist.

Does the team reflect that ethos?
Yes. I'm 48 now – I'm of a much older generation than the people I work with. Our other editor, Jago, is 22. I saw him give a talk discussing a magazine he works on called Hysteria, and I liked the way he expressed himself. We went for coffee, I told him what I wanted to do and he said, "OK, let's make it happen." We were the most unlikely couple. Jago's mum is only two years older than me, so the cross-generational ideas thing was there from the beginning and is really ingrained in the way that we work.

Photo by Sasha Kurmaz

Lyra Issue One says it's "for women" on the front cover, but you're working with a guy on it, and a lot of your contributors are male. Isn't that statement limiting?
I think we've since realised that it's for everyone – that to say it's for women is a bit of a contradiction. It was almost a commercial decision, but hopefully when people read it, it will be passed on. That boyfriends and friends will read it and think, 'There's something for me here, too.'

Why did you decide to be a print magazine rather than digital?
The digital space is not tangible and we have a lower attention span when we read online, which means our mind sometimes jumps. Meditation and mindfulness are on the rise, which makes me ask, where are we going as a civilisation? I think it's more important than ever to pause and take time over things. A print magazine with long editorial can offer that escapism and the chance to engage with something on a deeper and more profound level.

What were your influences when you created Lyra? You feature two interviews with journalists from 70s magazine Nova... I'm guessing that had a bearing?
Definitely. I couldn't find the exact magazine I was looking for in life, until I came across Nova. I was surprised such a radical magazine could exist in the 60s and 70s. I started buying old issues of Nova online. It's such a treasure. I don't think there's been a magazine remotely like it, except maybe a slightly similar publication in the US called Viva – that was published by Penthouse and was a bit more more erotic.

What was very special about those magazines is they were brave and bold, but had strong critical stances and strong opinions. They didn't patronise or offer answers; they were just really intellectual and profound and demanded the reader to think for themselves.

Can you give me an example of what they covered?
Nova wrote a lot about the pill, racism, homosexuality, political corruption and different fashions. Molly Parkin, who we interview in Lyra, was the fashion editor, and she says they had advertisers, but everything they did was freethinking. The editor let them take up any topic. He didn't say, "No, we'll upset advertisers if we do this," or, "This isn't very politically correct." Plus, it wasn't just put together by graphic designers; it was done by artists.

It's good that you so obviously pay homage to Nova in Issue One of Lyra. I noticed you have a column dedicated to Spare Rib magazine, too?
The influence of the media, and the history of women's magazines, is incredible. I think it's important to look at how we're progressing in this sense. That's why we want to look back – to learn, rather than jump on topics that are relevant now, but ignoring how other generations looked at them. We need to look at issues like how we talk about the orgasm and ask: "Are we making progress? Or are we regressing?"

What are some of your personal highlights from the mag?
Spencer Tunick's work. We wanted to give a space to sexuality, because very often it's not being addressed at all, or addressed in a sensationalised manner. We included Spencer's work because he takes nudity and sexuality out of a lustful context and into the street. Also, the Showgirls essay – it's quite a demanding article from Philippa Snow, an incredible writer. You might ask: Why are they analysing an old film like Showgirls? But when you read it, you realise how the film influenced existing films today. It shows how much we're progressing.

Talking of progression, what's next for Lyra?
Issue Two is about vanity. We select carefully what goes in the magazine and the blog between issues. The blog has to reflect what's in print. Being quarterly, it's difficult to keep audiences interested in between issues, but we want to create a dialogue, a critical stance and a debate. We're currently looking at doing forums with speakers that are relevant to us and workshops where people can learn something new.

Thanks, Georgina.

Lyra is distributed across the UK and Europe, via Antenne books.

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Some guy using a couple of computers. Photo by Travis Rigel Lukas Hornung

Downloading films such as Bad Santa 2 and Roxette Diaries without removing the torrents from your computer, could turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes you'll ever make. Not because they're a waste of your time, but because, if uploaded, they could cost you 2,000 SEK/€210 each.

In countries such as Germany and Canada, national laws against piracy work on behalf of the state. In Sweden, peer-to-peer pirates are monitored by private companies. Swedish debt collector Gothia Law and PR agency Prime have created an initiative called Spridningskollen on behalf of copyright-holders Scanbox Entertainment, Noble Entertainment, Atlantic and Crystalis Entertainment. Spridningskollen refers to the IPRED law, which is based on an EU directive. The law allows copyright-holders to get access to your personal data via internet service providers (ISPs) without involving the police.

Since the IPRED law was enforced in 2009, the government expected it to bring about between 400 and 800 cases per year. But between April 2009 and August 2012, only 11 cases were reported. Here's where Spridningskollen – which monitors 150 films and TV-series – hopes to increase the number of piracy cases in Swedish courts. With the help of a "special software," Spridningskollen tracks IP-addresses with which they will identify people sharing files.

"One can compare it to a speed camera. In the same way that a speed camera only records those who drive too fast, only the internet users who share copyrighted material without permission will be logged," spokesman of Spridningskollen and Gothia Law CEO, Gordon Odenbark, told torrentfreak.com.

When enough information has been gathered, letters will be distributed in which Spridningskollen will demand that the user pays a fine of 2,000 SEK. It's estimated that between 500 and 1,000 individuals will receive a letter this year.

The current settlement fee will most likely increase in the future. "At this point we have said that we're only asking for 2,000 SEK per film, but that amount will increase. I can almost guarantee that we will raise the damages this autumn," Odenbark said.

If the alleged file-sharer refuses to pay the fine, the case is suppose to end up in court. "It feels very counterproductive and retrograde trying to scare people this way, where a private organisation works in a mafia-like manner, sending threats and blackmailing people," Jon Karlung, CEO of internet provider Bahnhof told me. "To threaten and intimidate one's client base has never been a good business model," he continued.

Jon Karlung. Photo by Emil Nordin

I called up one file-sharer who wants to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. "This is disappointing news. I think that are worried about how their own business model looks like and that there are people reluctant to follow them," he said.

One legal obstacle is getting proof that it's actually the internet subscriber who's been sharing certain files. Spridningskollen doesn't have the same jurisdiction as the police, who can seize and examine someone's computer to obtain evidence. Neither can they prove how many linked units are connected to an internet subscription.

"It's not reasonable for a parent to have an eye on everything that's going on in every computer and every installed program(s) on the computer(s) in their household. Perhaps the kids' friend or someone else has shared files during a visit. The internet subscriber can't be held accountable for that," IT legal counsel Daniel Westman told newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Spridningskollen will share the collected fees between copyright holders, administrative expenses, legal costs and ISPs that provide Spridningskollen with IP-addresses.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the now infamous Pirate Bay, is skeptical of the fact that ISPs are indirectly getting paid by Spridningskollen to hand out clients' information. "An ISP has the responsibility to build a fair access to the internet, they should not interfere with the content of the web – the courts are to decide what information the ISPs should share, not due to some deal they might have with copyright companies, whether it's money or other benefits," Sunde told me.

Peter Sunde. Photo via WikiCommons

However, Spridningskollen's model has been proven very successful in other European countries, Canada, and the US. In Germany, where file-sharers receive fines between €300 and €1,500, the distribution of copyrighted material decreased by 42 percent between January and April this year compared with the same period of 2015. In Sweden, the decrease was only three percent during the same period.

But Karlung sees Spridningskollen's methods as counter-productive and reactionary. "It's better for copyright holders to put their money into developing services that people want to pay for such as Netflix and Spotify, instead of becoming entrenched in the 1900s," Karlung told torrentfreak.com.

Karlung's own ISP company, Bahnhof, is behind the counter site Spridningskollen.org, and the first to claim the 'Spridningskollen' trademark at the Swedish Patent and Registration Office. They're currently accusing Spridningskollen of trademark infringement in an attempt to shut down the organisation's website.

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A version of this article originally appeared on VICE Germany

The drawer in your bedside table is basically your apartment's subconscious – filled with pills, condoms, religious texts, vibrators, earplugs and vials of ketamine. Compared to your living room's expensive coffee table books and carefully arranged record collection, your bedside drawer is like a post-coital, half-drunken pillow talk taking place at the break dawn, when you're saying way more than you should. That drawer is what's missing from all your online profiles put together.

VICE Germany asked our readers to be honest, anonymously, and send in photos of their beside drawers. Scroll down to see a selection of those.

More photos of people and things:

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Photos of the Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Kitchens of Stockholm's Young Ladies

Photo: Dimitris Kalogeropoylos, via

The Swedish government has launched an investigation on how to prevent drug-related deaths. Last month, Health Minister Gabriel Wikström announced that he wants needle exchange programmes to be managed by county councils instead of councils. County councils cover larger areas in the country. The report will be delivered in April next year.

"Needle exchange programmes are an important measure towards disease control, which we know from Swedish, as well as international, experiences. The aim of these propositions is to make needle exchange programmes available all over the country. This will give us new opportunities to meet groups that have previously been difficult to get hold of," Wikström said in a press release.

For decades, a majority of Swedish political parties have claimed that harm reduction programmes such as needle exchange programmes and drug consumption rooms "encourage" drug use rather than do good. But according to the 2016 annual report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Sweden has the second highest death rate from drug use in Europe. Only Estonia has higher drug-related deaths per capita. According to Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare, 48 percent of drug-related deaths in 2014 were caused by an overdose.

In November last year, UN's Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Flavia Pansieri, criticised Sweden's views on drugs. She told public broadcaster SVT that she was "surprised to see that lags behind a number of other countries in terms of its policies on drugs."

Stockholm's needle exchange programme has been available since 2012. The programmes have since become available at several places including Malmö, Jönköping, and Kalmar. And according to the Public Health Agency of Sweden, they're actually working. "For the individual, these efforts can improve the chances to a life without serious or deadly infectious disease. For society as a whole it all comes down to improving the possibilities of equal health," Johan Carlson, director general of the Public Health Agency said in a statement.

"Max" is a 24-year-old from Stockholm who recently got clean from a four-year-long drug addiction. He injected heroin during the last eight months of his drug abuse. "The argument that needle exchange programmes encourage people to use drugs is wrong. It's not encouraging because if you're injecting drugs, you're injecting drugs regardless of what programmes are available. If the people injecting aren't going to places where you can get needles for free, they'll order them online. They will use the same needles over a longer period of time. That would break their veins a lot quicker, and they would have to inject in other places on their bodies sooner. I've met plenty of people with broken veins in their arms who are injecting in their necks. It's insane," Max told me.

Photo: Psychonaught, via

However, despite the government's call on expanding needle exchange programmes, a majority of county councils are still in favour of Sweden's zero tolerance policy – ignoring scientific evidence that supports harm reduction instead of criminalising drug use.

I called up Mikael Andersson Elfgren, a Moderaterna politician who represents the opposition in Västmanland county council. He supports Sweden's zero tolerance policy. He thinks that there are other ways to get in touch with people abusing drugs than via needle exchange programmes. "Naturally, there are flaws within current policies. But I stand behind the main policy. I think it should be illegal to use drugs in Sweden," he told me.

This spring, Gothenburg council, who have been strong opponents of needle exchange programmes suddenly agreed with the government. Andersson Elfgren does not want his county council to follow Gothenburg's example. "I'm against needle exchange programmes because of two reasons. Firstly, I don't think politicians and politics in general should supply people with instruments that are used to break the law. Secondly, looking at Västmanland specifically, we have very few cases of disease associated with using needles," he said.

Fredrik von Kieseritzky is an experienced medicinal chemist who holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He has been appointed expert witness in several drug-related criminal and civil trials. His daily work includes collaborations with medical doctors involved with pain management and needle exchange programmes. He's also a scientific adviser to the Swedish Drug Users Union. "My main critique towards the Swedish model is that current policies are based on outdated beliefs and a zero tolerance policy that is not evidence-based. This becomes evident if we look at the international peer-reviewed science produced over the past ten years. For example, there is very little scientific support for the belief that repressive drug policies have had the desired effect on supply and demand. The current policies don't appear to achieve their intended goals. Do they cause more harm than good?"

Nils Bejerot. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Sweden's zero tolerance policy on drugs stretches back to the 1970s. According to Magnus Linton, author of Knark – En svensk historia , it all began when professor Nils Bejerot published a series of papers in which he claimed that unless drugs were eliminated, "a social process of decay will inevitably wear away welfare society."

Bejerot's views had a huge effect on decision-makers at the time. After more than a decade's work with authorities, schools, and police, Bejerot managed to unite Sweden on the path towards the dream of a drug free society. In 1988, the same year as Bejerot passed away, it became a criminal act not only to possess drugs, but to get high, too.

"As I support doctors and their patients, it's quite obvious that Sweden's narcophobia prohibits medical practitioners from giving patients the best medical care possible. I only wish that our drug policies were well-grounded in modern science. Unfortunately, that isn't the case," von Kieseritzky told me.

I called up "Anna" – a 22-year-old recovering addict from Stockholm who used to inject drugs over a three-year-period. She thinks the needle exchange programmes are great. "They're a good thing because they prevent blood pockets and disease. It's never a good thing to use drugs with dirty gear," she told me.

Photo: Biggishben~commonswiki, via

According to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, there are a number of other things Sweden can do to reduce and prevent drug-related deaths. One example is drug consumption rooms, which haven't been considered by any political party in the parliament. Youth organisation Grön Ungdom is the only political organisation in favour of drug rooms. "By establishing user rooms in all counties, life saving arrangements can reach more people," Carolina Bruseman, Mårten Roslund and Aida Badeli wrote in a debate article published in ETC this summer. "This means a safe and arranged environment where social workers and nurses can give information on how to inject safely, administering antidote during overdoses, and eventually recommend ways of quitting."

Although the rooms are yet to be considered in Sweden, this August, Scandinavia's largest ever drug room, H17, opened its doors in Copenhagen. According to an article published in newspaper Sydsvenskan, the room, spanning over 1,000 square metres, receive between 200 and 300 visitors per day.

Surprisingly, both Anna and Max think that drug rooms are a strange idea. "To me it sounds like a place to go to in case you want to get really fucking high. Or if you're like, 'I've never been injecting this much, but I want to try it and see if I survive,'" Max said. "If we're talking about encouraging people to use drugs, it sounds to me that setting up drug rooms is along that line if anything. I don't think that's good at all," Anna said.

Andersson Elfgren insists on other ways to prevent drug-related deaths. "I think the main issue with abusing drugs is the fact that people are abusing drugs. That's where the biggest risks are. It's obviously important to offer healthcare and treatment. Here's where contact centres should be available," he told me.

Max says he hasn't been in touch with charities to get access to healthcare. "Needle exchange programmes offer healthcare. I've been tested for HIV and hepatitis, and they've been really careful about giving me information. The people who work there are good people," he said. Von Kieseritzky agrees. "There exists extraordinarily solid scientific evidence in support of a national needle exchange programme and an extension to substitution medication programmes," he told me.

WATCH: Back from the Brink: Heroin's Antidote

Another way to prevent drug-related deaths is to make sure drug users get access to Naloxone, a nose spray that works as an antidote on heroin overdoses. But the political process of establishing a national Naloxone programme is slow. The Naloxone programme is on trial in Skåne county since last year. This summer, it was reported that the Naloxone programme in Stockholm will be delayed for at least a year due to legal and distribution matters. As a response, the Swedish Drug Users Union with support by billionaire George Soros handed out free Naloxone spray to users at Stockholm's central square Sergels torg. Chairman of the Swedish Drug Users Union, Berne Stålenkrantz, told newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that with the spray, "we have a chance to break drug-related deaths."

When I ask Max about what he thinks can minimise the amount of people dying from drugs, he thinks the zero tolerance policy is a bad idea. "I've only heard stories – because I didn't live at the time – when addicts came to schools and talked with kids and were like, 'if you smoke a joint, you'll end up like me.' Maybe something similar could be done, but kids should be told how things actually are. That people take drugs for various reasons. That it's stimulating, or because you're in pain, or because you're depressed – or any of those reasons – so that kids know what to avoid or what to be aware of. I think it all comes down to information that's correct. Not some fucking propaganda."

@caisasoze

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Getting people to have sex with you is like exercise: when you're doing it all the time it feels super easy and fills you with endorphins, but if you stop for a couple of months it's basically impossible to start again.

We've all had dry spells, but what does it feel like when you find yourself in a period of involuntary celibacy for months or even years? Does it help you achieve a monk-like state of zen, forcing you to focus your finite energies on more wholesome activities? Or does it just turn you into a serial cry-wanker spending consecutive days on your sofa swiping right on everything with a pulse?

I spoke to some people who experienced long-term dry spells about what it was like and how they eventually broke the seal.

PABLO, 28

VICE: Pablo, talk to me. How long did your dry spell last?
Pablo: About two-and-a-half years. I'd just come out of a serious long-term relationship and felt the need to be a hermit.

How did you deal with the sexual frustration?
It was pretty intense, but I had a few hobbies I could let my rage out on. Skating was my main channel, but I was also smoking a ton of weed, cycling and was re-united with my right hand, which I was pretty content with at that point, to be honest.

Were you trying to hit on girls or did you just not care?
After being in a long-term relationship I really did not give a shit about girls and was content just hanging with my boys.

Having sex after so long felt euphoric, like losing my virginity again.

How did you eventually break the spell?
At the time I was living somewhere that was really close to a skate spot by the river. I had noticed this girl – she'd been hanging out there for a few days – and when she approached me for a lighter I thought, 'Fuck it,' and just told her I lived 15 minutes up the road and had weed and asked if she wanted to come kick it and smoke. We went back to mine and it went down pretty much as soon as we got in.

What was it like having sex again after so long?
It all happened really fast, but it was pretty good. The next day I felt euphoric, like I'd lost my virginity all over again.

BETH, 25

VICE: Okay, how long are we talking?
Beth: Well, I'd just moved away from London and had slept with someone quite quickly in my new city, but had decided I was disinterested. When I realised that I actually really liked them – their nose, their music taste and teeth – they'd completely changed their mind and gone off me. What then followed was seven months of absolutely nothing.

Were you heartbroken and hiding, or just having no luck?
The city I moved to was populated by really contented couples in walking shoes who make tabbouleh together. I didn't know anyone single, and was finding that maybe because it's smaller there wasn't such a breezy culture of meeting someone while out and going home with them. Either that, or no one fancied me and I was just trying to make excuses. I fancied a few people but it was all unreciprocated. Also, Tinder in that city was just full of boys riding ostriches, which I don't find attractive.

How did you deal with the sexual frustration?
Not so well, because my best friend and flatmate really enjoyed mocking me about it. It also makes you such a melancholy drunk. I think one of the weirdest side effects of it was that you don't necessarily realise how much of female small talk is based around people asking about your love life, so when you have nothing to offer in a club toilet conversation it makes you feel super dull, like you're not any longer privy to that level of female bonding.

Did you not throw yourself into any exciting new hobbies or activities to take your mind off it?
Looking at boys on ostriches on Tinder.

After seven months you lose all your inner thigh sinew so being on top feels like acroyoga

Can it be a self-perpetuating cycle? Like the longer it went on the harder it got to break ?
I think I was having the problem that a lot of people our age have. In your twenties, the rate at which you meet people stagnates.

How did you eventually break the curse?
I came back to London and went to a house party where a really unattractive man who looked like a butterbean was flattering me with a lot of coke, and despite being really repulsed by him, I went back to his and ended up having sex with him, drunk as a lord. Incidentally, I ended up having sex with two different people the week after, and then someone else the week after that.

What was it like having sex again? Did you regain your confidence afterwards?
The first time with the butterbean was more for the sake of self-esteem, which obviously backfires when you are repulsed by the person. In a way, it felt like losing your virginity, in that you are just doing it for the sake of sakes. Also, in seven months you lose all inner thigh sinew, so being on top feels like acroyoga.

ROBBIE, 26

VICE: Tell me about your dry spell.
Robbie: I'd been sleeping with my friend's sister. I'm generally quite shy when it comes to girls and it had taken me months of encouragement to make a move, but I eventually did it and we started sleeping together every time we saw each other, but she lived down south and I was at university up north. She put a stop to it when we started acting like a couple and getting closer. It was the right thing to do, but I took it badly and my dry spell started soon after that. In the next two-and-a-half years I slept with one person, once.

Why was it so hard to break?
I spent most of university mainly sitting in my room getting stoned and listening to music. I didn't go out much, and if I did, I would go to a club and get fucked up, so I wasn't really looking to pull, or in a suitable state to be taken home by anybody. Also, I showered once a week. I was pretty gross, to be honest.

How did you deal with the sexual frustration?
A lot of wanking. I also started going to the gym, but I would go after getting high and would spend most of the time in the gym being prang as fuck and concentrating on what other people were doing instead of actually working out.

It sounds like the celibacy was related to other stuff going on in your life...
Yeah, in the long run it really fucked with my head and partially led to a mental breakdown in the summer after I graduated. One of the things that was on my mind a lot was my sexuality; I was starting to doubt it and think that maybe the reason I wasn't getting with any girls was because I wasn't attracted to them, and that they in turn weren't attracted to me because they somehow knew my real sexual preference which I had not realised yet. My head was fucked.

How did you finally break the dry spell?
I moved back home and hit up this girl who I'd dated before I left.

What did the sex feel like?
I was really unconfident and worried. I remember asking her if she wanted to and my voice cracking from the fear of rejection, but also the fear of actually going through with it. I was worried I wasn't going to enjoy it, which in turn would mean my sexuality had changed or something. Physically it felt OK, but it was pretty soulless. She came over, we watched a film, we had sex, then she left to go on a date.

How do you feel about your sexuality now?
The doubts over my sexuality came back even stronger after that. It took me a while to accept that I just don't know what my "true" sexuality is, and I don't need to be concerned about it.

KIERA, 27

VICE: What led to your dry spell?
Kiera: After being rejected by an older guy following a short fling, my confidence was crippled. The rejection put me in a really unhealthy headspace, and coupled with the pressures of my final year of university, it meant that I ended up not hooking up with anyone for well over a year.

Did you withdraw from wanting to have sex or did you try but get turned down?
Well, I moved back into my family home after university, which wasn't exactly the most conducive space for casual sex. I'm fine with one night stands, but I just never found myself in a situation where the opportunity presented itself, probably because of how closed off I was both consciously and subconsciously. I definitely craved intimacy, but the longer it went on, the tougher it was.

Did you feel sexually frustrated?
Obviously, who wouldn't be? But the worst part was feeling pissed off about the fact that I was young, free, hot and not getting laid. That just made me more closed off and bitter.

Is it harder to break a dry spell when you're a woman?
I went out a lot in the hope that I would meet new people, but in my experience, a lot of guys aren't used to a girl hitting on them and typically don't like it and have no idea how to deal with it when it happens. Rather than just taking it at face value I would come off as desperate or like I was super into them when really I just wanted to fuck someone.

How did you eventually break the cycle?
I was on holiday and being in a situation where I didn't have to be concerned with any "who knows who" stuff or the consequences of my actions, I had fewer inhibitions. I went to a bar on my own and ended up hooking up with the first cute French guy I saw. We started flirting, but neither of us spoke much of the other's language, which actually ended up being a plus – you don't end up learning anything about them which might be off-putting, and it meant there wasn't much else to do but have sex, which suited me fine.

How was it?
The sex was great – he was great and super into it, which made me feel amazing both during and after.

Did you feel like your confidence was restored after?
I felt so much better about myself – it was validation that it wasn't just me being totally inept and that people do actually want me. I was relieved that I wasn't going to be celibate for the rest of my life, which I genuinely thought might happen at one point.

WILLIAM, 29

VICE: What was the longest you ever went without having sex?
William: I'd been living in Leeds and had a thing with this girl I was living with who I was super into, but these were the mephedrone years and I was doing drugs basically every day. She was really special, but I had to get away, so I moved to Norwich to get clean. I don't know if you've ever been to Norwich, but it ain't saying shit. I also got super into boxing, to the point I was training twice a day five times a week, and before I knew it I just went 18 months without fucking anyone.

Did you care or were you just engrossed in boxing?
I was so focused on training that it just kind of passed me by. But on a deeper level I was a bit sad about life, which is why I think I decided to put it all into boxing. It was a good way of dealing with the sexual frustration as well.

Did you ever unsuccessfully try to hit on people?
All the time, but I guess I was just such a boring dude at that time – honestly, I just thought about boxing 24/7. I had a banging body from all the exercise, but my personality was so lacking that chicks just weren't on it. I think they could smell the desperation. I don't think I really cared, though; Norwich chicks are dead-out – they didn't have the magic.

How did you finally get lucky?
It was actually the best friend of the girl that I loved in Leeds. It was her birthday and I went into her room to see if she was cool, and she just jumped me. She was super hot and had a massive back-off, so I wasn't complaining. It was pretty quick, I think – we were both smashed.

Was it a boost in confidence?
Massively. It made me feel like I was attractive again, but also just normal. Boxing is pretty manly, but there is nothing more manly than fucking a really beautiful girl.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Some things are pretty much guaranteed to happen during the British summer: our national football teams will be wildly disappointing; it'll be the hottest July on record, again; and crowds of young people will flock to safe rural Tory seats up and down the country, to sleep on roll-mats and shit in holes for three or four days.

From police officers' kids to the politicians of tomorrow, millions of us go to festivals every year, and some 22 percent of us take drugs while we're there. Despite the dogs, the warnings and the security searching you on entry and sweeping the campsites, people manage to get their pills and powders in. From Glastonbury to Creamfields, Boardmasters to T in the Park, they're a fixture of essentially every British festival, bar maybe Camp Bestival and Jamie Oliver's Big Feastival.

So last year, when I went to Bestival to test the purity of the drugs that had been smuggled in, it wasn't a huge surprise that people had armed themselves with a large range of illicit substances. What did surprise me, however, just how dodgy a load of them were.

This year I headed back to the Isle of Wight, not to see how pure the drugs were, but to find out how people had managed to get them inside in the first place. A Bestival spokesperson told me they work closely with Hampshire Police to keep the festival safe, and they're not wrong: the evidence is there to show they confiscated a huge amount of narcotics over the course of this past weekend. €200,000 worth of drugs and psychoactive substances were seized by police officers and security staff, with €73,603 worth of that figure collected in amnesty bins before festival-goers entered the site – almost double the amount submitted to amnesty in 2015.

Still, as with literally every single other festival throughout Europe, people will find a way to get their stash in undetected – even if it's via the most rudimentary method going. "Normally I just shove the drugs in my balls, to be honest, and I won't shower for a few days to help cover up the smell," explained one guy I met on the ferry on the way over, who'd just done a big bump of K in the toilet.

By the time I arrived, I'd already clocked another way of sneaking contraband onto the site: nab yourself an artist wristband. "The thing is, we get driven straight to our stages, and we've got huge amounts of kit in the van," a band member from Saturday's line-up explains. "We get whizzed past security and nobody ever stops you – else half the bands or more at any festival probably wouldn't make it."

A security guard searching someone's wallet

Walking past the amnesty bins and sniffer dogs at Bestival's main entrance, beady-eyed cops and hired security were on the prowl for anything suspicious. I stopped for a while to watch. Occasionally, a look of panic would hit the face of a fresh-faced teenager, or a 20-something posh kid for whom the idea of a police caution was just too much to handle. Here, a beeline would be made to the nearest portaloo / amnesty bin / bush to dump whatever they'd been hoping to hide.

"I just couldn't risk it," said a teenager I spotted dropping a gram of coke into a bin. "It's my first festival, and I'm sure I'll be able to buy something inside."

Meanwhile, hardier looking arrivals – the ones who clearly had some experience of K-holing in 35-euro-tents – strolled straight on through. Plenty of people were searched, but the queue kept on moving.

Thursday might be the warm-up night at the last great festival of the summer, but the ground inside on Friday morning was already covered in empty baggies. It was time to get to work. Over a couple of hours I snaked through the various campsites, asking one simple question: how did you get your drugs on site?

The most common answer I was given was a simple: "I shoved them in my socks." It was hardly Ocean's Eleven, but I guess there's no need to fix what's not broken.

"I've got a special pair of knickers that I can slot a massive wrap into," a 19-year-old from Sussex proudly told me, grabbing the black lacy pants from her tent. "They always suspect boys might have something shoved up their pants, but girls? Less so."

Later, a guy who introduced himself as "party-boy Patrick" had a sneaky zipped up slot in his sweatband, which he assured me had, at one point earlier, been brimming with pills. A guy slouching opposite him just yelled: "Weed in a sleeping bag!" vaguely in my direction.

From shirt pockets to cigarette boxes, bra straps to snapbacks, everyone I asked seemed to have a failsafe drug smuggling routine. More inventive techniques included NOS canisters tied up into belt form with masking tape to keep the noise from giving the game away, and GHB poured into a hair lotion bottle and placed in a toiletry bag.

The most ingenious, however, came from a 21-year-old woman from Kent. "What I do is take a tampon in a plastic case, cut it in half and empty out the inside," she explained to me, exactly like a Blue Peter presenter. "Then all you need to do is fill in the bottom half with cotton wool and place your drugs in the middle, before topping it up with more cotton wool and resealing with an iron."

In a real "here's one I made earlier moment", she dived into a tent behind us to show us what she meant.

By the time I stopped marvelling at her creativity, the sun had started to set. No longer were drugs hidden or stashed in secret; darkness was cover enough. One guy decided he didn't even need to lock the portaloo he was in, leaning out to offer me a bump of MDMA off a debit card (which I declined, of course).

What seemed most concerning to me wasn't the fact that people were taking drugs at Bestival. Go to any European festival – or nightclub, or park, or house party, or suburban bus stop – during the long summer season, and you'll be confronted with an extremely similar sight. People will continue to take drugs at every festival going; it's a reality that's out of the hands of promoters and the police.

However, how safe we are when we take these substance is an issue that authorities can very much have an impact on. While experienced drug takers knew how to slip in their own supply, it was the most vulnerable – first-time users and younger people – who on the most part told me they were unwilling or unable to take the risk of bringing their own supplies in, and so were more likely to buy a mystery pill off some guy called Chaz stumbling through their campsite in flip-flops and shouting "pills pills pills". With the number of deaths at British festivals sitting at an alarmingly high rate, we've all got a responsibility to make sure there's a change of direction.

The Loop's drug testing tent at Secret Garden Party was a great start, but wholesale reforms – like those detailed by Max Daly on VICE – are needed across the board if we want to properly reduce harm. Because if we don't – well, people will keep on dying.

@MikeSegalov

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Viggo Mortensen in 'Captain Fantastic'

The real Viggo Mortensen is often confused with the characters he plays. And you can see why. Since Lord of the Rings, he's played on his image as the wild man of film, living in the hinterlands of art house and foreign language movies. Away from the camera, he paints abstract paintings and writes poetry. He releases music with Buckethead. He lends his name to custom-made knives.

All of these are hobbies that make you think there's a fair bit of crossover between the man himself and the man we see on our screens. So when I meet him to talk about his role in Matt Ross' new film Captain Fantastic, it doesn't surprise me to find him drinking what looks like tea from a strange-looking gourd – which a quick google reveals to be a traditional Argentinian drinking cup. He grew up in the South American country with his family for the first ten years of his life, and its crockery seems to have made a lasting impression.

With all of this in mind – the fact that the public perception of Mortensen is so clearly influenced by the characters he plays – the first thing I ask is how he sees himself. "When I am asked, if I'm at immigration or I have to do a landing card after a flight and they ask for your occupation," he says. "I just write 'artist'."

It's the sort of line that should make you laugh, but Mortensen delivers it without a hint of irony or pretence. And, in fairness, it's a pretty accurate summation: the man paints; he produces music; he owns The Percival Press, which publishes his own poetry and the work of others; and he's carved out a successful career as an actor.

It also helps that, for the most part, Mortensen lives outside of the media circus. He isn't likely to grace the pages of The Sun or the New York Post; you won't spot him picking up matcha lattes in Calabasas or being "surprised" by paparazzi as he strips off on the beach. But I still want to ask: does media attention piss him off? Is that why he seems to actively avoid being in the spotlight unless he absolutely has to be?

"Misquotes and misconceptions," he says, straight off the bat. "Where people make up a story about who they think you are. I think all people do that, not just with actors, but with people they know. Best friends – people who have been friends for decades – who, when asked to describe them as how they have encountered them, leave out that they might behave differently with others."

He drops the point, returning to discussing the media. "It isn't like I'm hounded," he says. "I guess I'm not that extroverted. Unless it's a movie premiere, or showing up with someone who is better known, I don't think people bother me that much. There are a lot of boring paparazzi pictures of me walking a dog, and I don't think they sell that much."

His role in Captain Fantastic seems like the perfect part for him to play, but it's not going to help audiences who continue to confuse the man and his onscreen personas. He plays hippie-survivalist Ben, a man raising his kids deep in the woods of the American Midwest. Ben teaches the kids survival skill lessons, from rock climbing to a healthy distrust of contemporary neoliberal American culture, encouraging them instead to read Noam Chomsky (they don't celebrate Christmas, they do celebrate Chomsky's birthday), as well as playing music around campfires.

One of the many charms of Fantastic is the family dynamic, which could be described as a sort of beatnik version of The Waltons, but with knives and jokes about Maoism. Mortensen's Ben is an unconventional father, happy to frankly discuss everything: from his wife's bipolar disorder to explaining what a penis is to his youngest on-screen daughter. " talking about sex and rape, or where she pees from – giving these really methodical explanations, which aren't playing for laughs," explains Mortensen. "The character of Ben is explaining these sincerely."

This extends to drug taking: "When she asks him about crack, he turns around and says, 'Well, it's...' and goes on to explain it. You take the time and interest in your child to explain and give them an answer with the respect you would give to anyone else – which may or may not be a good idea in some cases."

It's a role that you could imagine few others playing. For Mortensen, though, however many similarities we would like to see, he doesn't view it as different to any of the other characters he has played – and that includes the tattooed Russian hitman Nikolai Luzhin in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.

"I have never played a character, however different he was to me – be it worldview, ideology, inclination towards violence... I have never played a character that I couldn't identify with at some level," he says. "As an actor, my job is to take on the point of view of the character I am playing. And not only take it on, but to fall in love with that point of view or the way they are thinking. I have never played a character I didn't fall in love with."

@josephdawalsh

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All photos by Joachym Ettel unless otherwise stated

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Two naked men of about 30 are chasing each other around a bunch of tents, their long dark hair blowing behind them in the wind. A naked woman is lying on a naked man, who is lying on a mattress in the middle of a field. A couple in their early fifties are sitting on a garden swing. They're not looking at each other or touching, but they're speaking softly. In contrast to most of the other people here, they're completely dressed, even though it's warm outside – trousers, socks, shoes, T-shirts, cardigans, the whole shebang.

For the past nine days, 150 people have been occupying the grounds of a farm, in the south of Berlin, taking part in the Art of Love Festival. New arrivals are asked to keep their clothes on until they reach the barn in the middle of property, so they do not scandalise the neighbours. Behind the barn, most people are naked and having sex with each other out in the open.

The organisers of the festival have set up a clothing station to encourage gender play, but that mostly happens at night. In the daytime, guests seem to prefer nudity or body paint. For some reason, a lot of the men's bodies have been painted blue, with a red penis.

The 10-day schedule is rammed with workshops. For just 600 euros, participants can pepper their public sex sessions with classes in orgasmic breathing, prostate massages, the sense of smell, while there is also an orgy event called 'Le Partouze'.

Konstantin Stavridis came up with the idea to organise a sex festival, when him and his wife bought the farm three years ago. The pair, along with the other three organisers see their concept as an alternative to quick, anonymous sex in the big city, but also to monogamy. "The keyword here is freedom," says Konstantin who calls himself 'a community leader'. "Everything is permitted here, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else," he continues.

Everything might be permitted, but not everyone is invited. Part of the organisers' job is to go through applications and call each participant beforehand, to ask a series of questions that is meant to show whether someone is into the experience for the right reasons. Half of the people here are members of the "community" – meaning they're friends or acquaintances of the organisers. Many of them work in sexual wellness, they are tantric instructors, psychologists, performers, massage therapists. The rest are just people who stumbled across the website and signed up – whether because they wanted to raise a middle finger to societal norms or just to bone a lot, that remains to be seen.

Finn, 26, is the youngest person here; his brown hair is tied in a ponytail and his nails have been painted red. I notice him sitting in the field painting and approach to ask him what bring him to the festival. "My girlfriend and I were discussing polyamory and we landed on the website. We saw photos from last year's event and it looked fun. We came here looking for alternatives to monogamy that don't involve surreptitious cheating," he says.

I point out that everyone arounds us seems significantly older than him. "Do you have a problem with older people?" Finn asks me. "Yesterday I had a very sexy experience with a 57-year-old woman. We played around, it was beautiful. What's wrong with that?"

Finn. Photo by the author

At first, Finn thought all the talks and the classes were too "new age-y". Apparently every morning, more than 100 naked people would sit in a circle in a white tent, and discuss any issues that might have risen the day before: Jealousy in threesome situations; body image complexes; someone who might have gotten a little too space-y. But on day nine, Finn is feeling totally comfortable with everything that is going on at Art of Love.

Finn informs me that his time here has allowed him to explore his sexuality. "One night, I put on a black leather dress," he says. "Then, I found myself sat next to Seani Love – a hairy bear of a guy – and he asked whose ass he should flog. Without thinking, I bent over his lap and he flogged my ass. In the moment, there was I wanted more than that." Finn's girlfriend who is lying down during our conversation, says Finn's new developments are making her nervous.

"At the beginning all the moaning around here turned me on, but I'm so over it now," says Nina. That's not her real name, she is worried her employer could find out that she was at the Art of Love festival.On the first day, Nina got together with Daniel, a man whose body is painted green. They met while setting up their tents, and they have only been sleeping with each other since. Daniel has spent most of today running around the grounds with other painted people.

What Nina appreciates about the experience, she says, is that she now feels stronger as a a woman. In a vulva exhibition she attended, women lay with spread legs, hidden from the tummy up by a curtain, presenting their vulvas. The rest could walk by, sit down for five minutes and really look at the vulva in front of them. "I really feel more confident since coming here. But when it comes to Daniel, I'm going to tell my coworkers that we met at a music festival in Berlin," she says.

I move to the next tent, that is home to a Dirty Talk workshop. People are walking around, telling each other random words that are getting increasingly filthier and sexier. Outside the tent, two men and a woman are standing under a cold shower. The woman is spanking one of them.

Tonight is the final night of the festival and things are expected to go wild – apparently the plan involves a dildo performance and a porn party. "I don't really know what I am going to do when it's over," says one of the men, as they step out of the shower. "I might just stay here."

Konstantin seems up for that: "I dream that about 20 people will end up living here soon," he says. "But everyday life here would be much calmer. The festival is a way for many to let go – it's not necessarily a lifestyle. I see the festival as a research project on free love. Everyone comes here prepared to open up. But it's the ninth day, naturally I'm feeling a little tired."

David "Cuba Dave" Strecker posing with two sex workers. All photos courtesy of David Strecker

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When police handcuffed David Strecker on September 4 in a Costa Rican airport, the 66-year-old American remembers thinking he'd only have to answer a few questions before he could board his flight back home.

But Strecker never made it on the plane. He's been behind bars ever since after being accused of violating Costa Rican law by promoting prostitution. Now, Strecker—a Florida resident who ran a popular blog about his sexual exploits abroad, mainly in countries like the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Costa Rica, where prostitution is legal—will be the first person ever tried under the law in the country's history.

The statute Strecker is being charged under is part of a 2013 human trafficking law that, among other things, prohibits the use of any media to promote the country as a "tourist destination accessible for the exploitation of sexual commerce or for the prostitution of persons of any sex or age."

Fernando Ferraro, a former Costa Rican justice minister who sponsored the law, told VICE that it was designed to prevent illegal dealings, like sex slaves and child sex workers. A 2016 US State Department report found that child sex tourism was a "serious problem" in the country and that it remains a common destination for trafficking victims.

"Certainly the country has to protect its image as a tourist destination," Ferraro said. "But it's not just a matter of image. A lot of times criminal organizations, or human traffickers, are connected to the prostitution industry."

Strecker is an unabashed fan of the prostitution industry, but he claims that all he does is run a blog devoted to advising sex tourists like himself, not telling people to become sex tourists. Likely the most famous john on the internet, Strecker has whitening hair and tanned skin that has begun to sag from his once-defined arms. He's a former softball player and a diehard Yankees fan who freely quotes George Steinbrenner and has a tattoo of the Yankees logo on his right shoulder. In Costa Rica's La Reforma prison, where he's being detained, he's the lone American inmate and regularly wears muscle tees and sandals—about as gringo as gringo gets.

Strecker first made a name for himself on sex tourist forums and internet groups, where he detailed his experience touring the brothels and bars of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. He would later come to be known as "Cuba Dave" and would co-author a book called Cuba Dave's Guide to Sosua, Dominican Republic, which has since been banned from Amazon.

Once it became apparent that there was interest in the Cuba Dave brand, Strecker began documenting his sex-fueled travels through Costa Rica with suggestive blog posts, trip report videos, and photos with his girls. (He claims the women were always clothed and consenting when he photographed them.) He soon developed a following of horny male travelers by sharing his stories from the legal prostitution scene and imparted wisdom on "how not to fall in love" from his more than 40 trips to Costa Rica alone.

"Over the course of those years, I came to realize this is not real," he told VICE in a recent phone interview. "This is fantasy. This is entertainment. A 60-year-old man sleeping with 20-year-old women and believing that they really like them is crazy. So the majority of stories and videos were to explain that."

In Costa Rica, he focused his efforts mainly on an area of bars and hotels frequented by prostitutes in downtown San José known as "Gringo Gulch."

One 2010 post from his blog, which has been taken down since his arrest, read: "Miriam likes to have fun, and she is my girlfriend every day for an hour when I am in San Jose. She understands what I like, and I understand what she does. My advice is to remember what you are here for in Costa Rica, and don't question your (Costa Rican) girlfriends so much."

Strecker maintains his site was nothing more than a travel blog created to advise the single male tourist, but prosecutors say he was purposefully promoting the country to fellow gringos to come and take advantage of the legal pay-for-sex industry.

"The criminal case began after various publications were found on the internet made by the suspect in which he was apparently inviting other North Americans to visit Costa Rica, indicating that prostitution services in the country were easy to find," a spokesperson from the prosecutor's office told VICE via email.

Costa Rica—where prostitution is legal but pimping, or soliciting clients for a prostitute, is not—has long been considered one of Latin America's most popular destinations for sex tourists. Author and researcher Jacobo Schifter estimated in his book Love and Lust: American Men in Costa Rica that up to 10 percent of Costa Rica's tourists are there to have sex with prostitutes—which adds up to as many as 80,000 sex tourists per year.

Aware of that reputation, authorities are working to clean up that image and help the tourism-dependent economy come off more like Disneyland and less like Thailand.

In recent years, Costa Rican police have worked to break up organized trafficking groups and pimps who take advantage of sex migrants and child sex workers. An annual report from the US State Department said that over the previous year, officials here conducted 25 raids where sex trafficking was suspected. The State Department noted that Costa Rican government was making considerable efforts to turn around its historically poor track record when it came to fighting trafficking.

While it's not clear that Strecker was involved in any such activities, prosecutors have requested that Strecker serve 12 years of jail time for three counts of violating the statute against promoting prostitution—one count each for his CubaDave.com website, Facebook page, and a YouTube video.

The prosecution is reportedly honing in on specific photos published on the pages, as well as certain passages from the blog posts. One such entry, which Strecker said prosecutors had harped on zealously during preliminary hearings, includes the sentence, "Your pleasures are only dictated by the size of your wallet."

Strecker's lawyer, Luis Diego Chacón, said he's confident that the case will be dismissed in the trial set to begin November, since the sex tourism law was meant to combat organized human-trafficking groups, not bloggers.

"This law wasn't intended for people who have a travel site," he told VICE. "If you looked at his website, you wouldn't have seen any language deemed inappropriate in his home country in the United States."

If the trial drags on, Chacón may try to convince the judges (Costa Rican trials are decided by three judges rather than a jury) that because the domain's server was located in the US, then it should be US laws that apply.

Since the Costa Rican law hinges on promotion, Strecker's defense will also try to argue that he was merely informing readers about the country's prostitution scene, not advertising it to them. Strecker claims that before he started his blog, he received hundreds of emails from travelers asking for advice on the best prostitute-friendly hotels and the safest neighborhoods for gringos. So rather than answer each one, he doled out his advice from his web page.

"Every single thing I'm being charged with is legal," he said. "They should actually be patting me on the back for warning some of the guys about this stuff."

Now, though, he's on the verge of a trial that could end with him being sentenced to more than a decade in prison. It's been that kind of dramatic fall for the pseudo celebrity, who said his yearlong stay in preventive prison has forced him to think about why he was targeted in the first place.

All he can come up with, he said, is that he's the piece at the center of a government "ploy" to send a message against sex tourists like him.

"This is a country where if you happen to say the wrong thing, you're going to end up paying for it," he said. "I really believe I'm just being made an example of."

Follow Michael Krumholtz on Twitter.

In this photo taken on Saturday 10th September 2016, African refugees and migrants wait aboard a partially punctured rubber boat to be assisted, during a rescue operation on the Mediterranean Sea, about 13 miles North of Sabratha, Libya. (AP Photo/Santi Palacios)

The 20th century is littered with noble texts. The Conventional Relating To The Status of Refugees ; the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms ; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Convention Against Torture. As the crisis of borders and movement intensifies ­– as barbed wire fences and migrant detention camps becoming a regular feature of the landscape – the importance and uselessness of these texts has never been clearer. Professor William Maley's new book, What Is A Refugee?, looks between the lofty proclamations of international law and the world as it really is. He focuses on the people caught in this deadly space.

Like other authors writing on this topic – Reece Jones' Violent Borders: Refugees And The Right To Move comes to mind – Maley looks to the 17th century to find the source of today's disorder. (It's a sign of just how fucked up things are that you have to go back that far.) This was when the Peace of Westphalia was signed, which ended the Thirty Years' War. The Westphalian settlement marked the beginning of European sovereignty being conceived of in terms of physical territory. He follows the development of this ideology of space into the 20th century, when technologies of control – passports, visas, border monitoring systems – created the modern system of states we have today. In one of his most striking sentences, he writes that state violence towards those forced to move today, from the Mediterranean to the parapets of Donald Trump's imaginary wall with Mexico, "can almost seem like sovereignty's last gasp".

We spoke to Professor Maley – a professor of diplomacy at the Australian National University – about the way we talk about refugees.

VICE: Much of the book is concerned with the definition of refugees. What does the way we, in the so-called host countries, talk about refugees reveal?
Prof Maley: I think in a lot of host countries there's a disposition to see refugees as the Other; people who are intrinsically different from us and from whom we are, therefore, remote and distant in the responsibilities that we owe them.

One of the crucial distinctions is between how we define refugees, which is often a legal exercise, and how we characterise refugees. It's not as if there's just one pathway that leads people to be refugees: some people are outside their country when circumstances change for the worse and they can't return (refugees sur place); others have been forced to flee with nothing (acute refugees); others have seen what's coming and decided to get out before the sky falls in (anticipatory refugees). They may all be "refugees" in the legal sense but their experiences are very different.

Even the term "refugee crisis", which we use without thinking, suggests the problem belongs to the refugees rather than the states that refuse to accept them.
Yes that's right. There are two different dimensions to this issue. One is the disposition of people in wealthy countries to complain about the burden they're carrying, whereas if you look at the distribution of refugees worldwide only 6 percent are in Europe. The vast bulk is in Africa and different parts of Asia. So even a basic statistic raises questions about where the "crisis" is.

It's also the case, however, that refugees are very much a product of the system of states. If you don't have states and borders then people simply move from one part of the world to another. This is very much a phenomenon of the late 19th and early 20th century; until the First World War it was relatively simple to travel the world without a passport. Visas came in in the 1930s largely as a device for preventing the entry of Jews from Germany who already had German passports.

If we're talking about the way bureaucracies are weaponised by different politics and ideologies, one mobilising force that's relevant is racism.
There's no doubt historically there have been deeply ingrained prejudices, which have come into play in animating a disposition to reject refugees. At the Evian Conference in 1938, which President Roosevelt called to address the problem of refugees from Germany, the Australian delegate, T.W. White, stood up in front of all the other delegates and said, "Since does not have a race problem, delegates will understand that we are not anxious to acquire one." About a chilling a statement as you could imagine. And, yes, these days one doesn't have to dig far to find similar attitudes articulated by what in the past would have been fringe politicians but who now are making their way closer to mainstream politics.

Your area of expertise is Australia. Let's talk about the recent revelations of tortuous conditions in the Australia's offshore refugee detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Is there sufficient political will to get them abolished?
The Supreme Court of Justice in Papa New Guinea has ruled the centre established in Manus is in violation of the constitution of Papa New Guinea. So that's a hot potato that's bounced into the lap of the Australian government. The pressure is certainly building up within Australia to do something about these dreadful places. On the other hand, the Australian government may well be calculating that the continued existence of this is a way of attracting the votes of the far right. Given the government in the 2nd July election was returned with only a slender majority in the House of Representatives, it really can't afford in terms of its own interests to alienate politicians on the right, whether it's members of the ruling party – the Immigration Minister is a pretty far right figure – or the racist One Nation Party, which has returned with four senators in a finely balanced Upper House.

So while all the rational and decent arguments are in favour of shutting these places down as quickly as possible, there may be very neat calculations of domestic politics that slow down any movement in that direction. It would take a strong leader to move and people are really doubtful as to whether the current Australian Prime Minister is a strong leader.

You make it clear that "dehumanisation" isn't an exaggeration – it's explicit Australian policy.
In 2001 the office of the Defence Minister issued an instruction that "humanising" images of asylum seekers rescued from boats in the Indian Ocean were not to be distributed – really one of the most chilling directives I've ever heard surfacing from an Australian ministerial office. And I think that was because of a recognition from the government at the time that the moment ordinary people can put a human face on the victims of these policies it begins to change the dynamics of discussion. Politicians who do this kind of thing know what they're doing.

In the final chapter of your book, you sketch some potential solutions to the crisis, emphasising that "arguments based on economic costs... might carry more weight ". But if we start arguing that we should accept refugees because business will like that we can get them to work for low wages, aren't buying into a logic that sees them as quantities rather than humans?
I don't see the argument based on economic factors as the predominant principled argument for offering protection to refugees; the argument for offering protection flows from their humanity. It's simply a point which is often neglected by the people who want harsh refugee policies: the policies they're advocating are very costly, both in terms of the direct cost from running systems of detention and deterrents, but also in terms of the economic losses that flow from it. But, for me, the overwhelmingly important arguments are the ethical arguments.

Having said that, I don't think there are magical solutions to refugee problem. One of the ways in which one can seek to ameliorate their situation is having less intrusive and aggressive ways of preventing people moving from one part of the world to another.

People who come from refugee-producing countries like Somalia or Syria find it virtually impossible to get visa to travel to Western countries. In that sense, the Western policies of shutting down legal routes are driving people into the arms of people smugglers.

The UN estimated in 2015 there were over a million people in the world in need of immediate resettlement; and the number of resettlement places made available in 2014 was just over 73,000. So there's a gross discrepancy between the need and the supply of resettlement; and there's nothing more predictable under those circumstances that a black market will emerge.

'What Is a Refugee?' is published by Hurst on the 29th September

@yohannk

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All screengrabs from original GameCube television adverts, via YouTube

The GameCube is a console that was seemingly destined to fail. Suffering from extremely poor advertising, a divisive exterior design and a lack of third party support, it sold dreadfully in comparison with Nintendo's previous systems, and was even labeled an "unmitigated disaster" by TIME in its assessment of the system. In spite of all of this, though, it managed to gain some enthusiastic supporters both at launch and across the years since – myself included.

Fans of the GameCube will tell any non-believer who'll listen that the system, far from being the flop they read about but never played on, actually represented Nintendo's finest proverbial hour. While the odds were undeniably stacked against it, the console was ultimately home to consistently excellent first-party experiences, and outsold SEGA's Dreamcast – posthumously celebrated as an ahead-of-its-time system that deserved better.

The GameCube was my first console, so it already has a special place in my heart even before any considered reflection. Growing up in a house full of brothers, I had access to some older systems, but my time with them was always restricted. I had, however, been poring over every games magazine I could find that featured Nintendo's latest little box of tricks, and couldn't own my own quickly enough. The GameCube would finally allow me to play without constraints, devoting hours at a time to smashing swarms of bad guys and exploring brave new worlds.

I feel a great gratitude towards the GameCube, as it got me hooked on a medium that has given me so much in return in the years since. And no doubt this goes a long way to explaining why I feel so passionate about defending it from the negative opinions of some peers.

The GameCube's blocky design did have it looking as much like something you'd find in the toy aisles, alongside "baby's first laptop" or whatever, as it did a piece of technology you'd be able to experience Resident Evil on. That did nothing to put people, friends indeed, off from calling it a plaything for children. Was that ever a sore spot. Advertising around the system's launch was as fixated on its shape as it was successful in actually telling the public what was available on it – but while Nintendo's family friendly reputation was something the company was keen to maintain, the GameCube went well beyond mere teenage titillation, as a dig beneath its catalogue's surface reveals.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, the Resident Evil remake (and Resident Evil 4, of course, which was original produced exclusively for the console) and Metroid Prime were claustrophobic and often disturbing affairs, splattered with gore and horrific obstacles to overcome. They showed that the GameCube could reach away from the Mario crowd and towards the M-for-Mature market – but the console was also home to some excellent games that truly transcended demographics. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Luigi's Mansion and Super Smash Bros. Melee were exceptional, indispensable additions to any collection, whatever your age or prior gaming experience.

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I think it's time for a short story. Sitting my best friend down one day after school, I passed him the reins to Wind Waker, relinquishing command of the King of Red Lions. I was curious to hear his real thoughts on the GameCube, separated from our social group and the peer pressure that permeates throughout teenage conversation. Could he really hate it as much as he'd let on in class? As it turned out: no.

Only a few minutes into his turn, he began throwing out compliments about the controls, its visuals, and the fact that he could torture swine by throwing them off a cliff. Any pretense of hatred vanished, replaced by gleeful enthusiasm. It was at that moment that I knew I had succeeded. I had managed to recruit an ally to help me defend the "stupid, little purple box" from the classroom affronts. Overjoyed, I repeated this experiment with others, and again the results were positive. Clearly, the GameCube had something to offer that wasn't being supplied by its competitors.

Although the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox were the more popular contemporary systems – shifting 157.68 million and 24.65 million units respectively in contrast to the GameCube's 21.74 million – they were ultimately missing the first- and second-party support that Nintendo as a company was well known for. After all, Nintendo's sixth-generation system gave players a huge number of exclusives, including brand new entries in the Metroid, Zelda and Super Mario franchises. These presented players with the opportunity to experience Metroid in 3D for the first time, as well to play cooperatively in Mario Kart with Double Dash. Nintendo's experimenting with existing properties, altering perspectives and gameplay elements, was a masterstroke on the company's part, and also one that arguably couldn't be replicated by its younger competitors without such an illustrious history to draw from.

What lessons can be learned from the GameCube as it celebrates its 15th birthday in September 2016? Advertising matters, for one thing, and third-party support sure helps to sell consoles (not that Nintendo didn't again experience this with the Wii U). But then, unique experiences, whatever their background, will always tempt newcomers to check out a product, and perhaps even invest in it. The system that followed the GameCube, the Wii, was definitely, defiantly unique when assessed against its rivals. Nintendo learned. And they thrashed the competition in gaming's seventh console generation.

The Wii also launched with some spectacular television advertising that established its target market and key selling point: this was gaming for anyone and everyone. It received some solid third-party titles ranging from FIFA entries to Call of Duty, and the whole thing was "sold" with so much more confidence than the GameCube had ever benefited from. The motion controls might have seemed like a gimmick at launch, but weren't Sony and Microsoft quick to try their own takes on play without a traditional pad.

The GameCube was a significant turning point in Nintendo's history, then – not their biggest console, but one that both guaranteed itself a legacy through some excellent software and paved the way for its makers to go further into the (as it transpired, highly profitable) left field than ever before. It still holds pride of place in my home, a decade and a half later, sandwiched between today's consoles, machines that dwarf it in both power and size. I'll never be attached to a console as much as I am this one, and I'll never love another in quite the same way.

@JackGYarwood

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

One by one, the children walk down the stairs, wearing backpacks that seem bigger than them. They gather for breakfast in the main lounge of the City Plaza hotel, the walls of which have been decorated with hand-painted cardboard signs that read "Tomorrow, we are going to school".

City Plaza is a self-organised refugee housing project in Victoria Square, in Athens, Greece. The seven-storey building currently houses about 400 people – more than 180 of whom are children – but it used to be a hotel. It closed down seven years ago, at the beginning of the Greek economic crisis. On April 22, 2016, a local organisation called Solidarity Initiative for Economic and Political Refugees, together with tens of refugees, occupied the empty building to the chagrin of the owner. Their aim is to provide decent living conditions for refugees, who have been stuck in Greece since Europe's borders were closed.

The sign reads, "Tomorrow, we are going to school".

It's just after 7AM and the volunteers, who help out at the squat, are trying to get everyone ready for school. It's no simple task: They must divide about 50 children into age groups and safely guide them to the local public schools, for their first day of lessons.

Most of the volunteers are university students. They woke up really early to be here – at a time when a lot of them are sitting university exams – but they all seem so happy and proud; almost as if they're taking their own children to school.

For the people of City Plaza, today is pretty special. Thanks to their efforts and those of a few local teachers, children living in the old hotel are able to start school today, unlike the children living in refugee camps.

In a recent interview, the Deputy Minister of Education, Sia Anagnostopoulou, pledged that "children of preschool age will receive education in the camps. Primary and secondary school pupils will be transferred to nearby schools – at first, in reception classes." This has not happened yet.

Eleni has been volunteering at the squat since its first day. "For us, what's happening is also important in a political sense. We've fought for this, and we will continue to fight," she tells me. "Our experiment is part of a general effort to create a society that includes refugees. Refugee children going to school here is the first step towards integration. While the government has failed to do the same for the children living in the camps, the children of City Plaza and some other occupations are able to go to school today. That only goes to show that when you want something you have to try hard to get it. Nothing in life is for free."

"We have been working on this day since June. There is a group of teachers at City Plaza, who together with the Aristotle society (a local teachers' club), worked all summer to register and enrol the children. The books, the bags and other supplies were all donated," Eleni adds.

She goes on: "Most of the parents are excited. Some even went and registered their children at the schools without our help. The only thing that seems to worry them is the language barrier, and the possibility that Greece might not turn out to be their permanent home. Still, we all know how important school is to the socialisation and psychological growth of children, even if they end up leaving the country."

She also explains that they have tried to register as many of the children as possible. So far, the children of high school age are the only ones who have not been accepted to any school. "We've filed five children's applications but the principal of the local high school won't register them, because they don't have the documents that prove they finished primary school in their countries. There is a process to get a certificate, either through theUNHCRor the Greek Council for Refugees but we have not had the chance to do that because these children came to City Plaza very recently."

I speak to Dina Garane, who was one of the teachers who fought for the refugee children to be able to attend school. She says that "teachers are part of the great movement of solidarity towards refugees that unfolded in the last year. We fight for refugees and their children to be welcome, for the borders and towns to remain open, while opposing the austerity imposed by the government and the EU that is destroying the public education system."

But Garane says individual actions are not enough. "Mass education hires are what's needed to integrate all refugee children into public schools. Classes can't be held in the refugee camps or led by staff from NGOs. Kindergarten-aged children must be placed in formal education and reception classes must be created in secondary education," she says.

From all the children in the squat, my attention is drawn to a little one from Afghanistan. He must be younger than everyone else going to kindergarten today. His mother and two older sisters are also with him.

I decide to follow his group to school, which is made up of eight children, some mothers and three volunteers. We arrive at the school 10 minutes late. The children run into the yard, pointing excitedly to parts of their new environment, while the volunteers take instructions from teachers.

I ask the principal of the school, Dimitris Kritikos how he plans to integrate the children. "It is important to keep the numbers small. For the time being, they'll just be in the classes but we are also planning to give them separate Greek lessons. Additionally, one extra class will be created to support the teachers we already have at our school."

I ask him if the Ministry of Education has arranged for a reception class for refugee children. "For now they haven't sent us any staff, no. Our own staff will volunteer a few hours of teaching – as much time as each of us can donate. We would like to be able to hire at least one more teacher though," he replies.

Before leaving the kindergarten, I ask if there have been any bad reactions from local parents. "So far we have not had any negative feedback. And don't forget, this is a downtown school," he replies.

Marios Strofalis is the president of the parents' association of the 51st elementary school in Athens. He confirms that there have been no negative reactions in the area, unlike in some other parts of the country.

"This school is multicultural – a lot of the pupils already come from immigrant backgrounds. The one thing all parents worry about, whether they are Greek or not, is health. Many of them have asked me if the children have had a medical check up, and they have. In any case, we must endeavour to remain level-headed. When it comes to children, the only thing to do is open our arms and treat them with love and kindness."

Strofalis goes on to address the issue of the refugee children learning Greek in good time: "One problem that is generally observed in this school and other multicultural schools, is that some pupils struggle with the language. Naturally, when a child enters the classroom and does not know a single word, they become marginalised and that's a problem."

"What should a state do in this case? Create integration courses. Unfortunately, that does not happen in Greece. Children are not the problem. The problem is the state. If the government doesn't hire more teachers, all of our efforts will go to waste."

We leave the new kindergarteners at school and return to City Plaza, where the mood is festive. Anastasia, a third year student of Political Law tells me that "for the people of City Plaza this was the second battle we won. Our first aim was to occupy the building, and the second was to ensure that the children go to school. We are now able to offer those kids a routine and this is a massive feat. The next goal is to get the parents accustomed to that routine, as well as the local culture."

Of course the new routine will create new needs, which is why the squat is looking for more volunteers. "We need people to organise afternoon study sessions, to help the children after school," Eleni says. "And for the kindergarteners, we need water bottles and plastic microwavable lunch boxes."

If you'd like to help, contact the City Plaza occupation here.

Photo via Pixabay

Looks like our old friend levamisole is back in the news, but now he's got a friend. The livestock dewormer – which is also used as a cocaine cutting agent – has been periodically featured in the media over the past couple of years, semi-erroneously linked to the rotting of people's faces. I say "semi", because while levamisole technically can induce a skin disease, cases are incredibly rare, and you'd have to do a ludicrous amount of gak to ingest enough levamisole for it to have any real effect.

The new dodgy chemical on the block is phenacetin, which reportedly gives users an increased risk of bladder cancer. A study has revealed that the painkiller is the most common cutting agent found in "street cocaine" (is there another type of cocaine than street cocaine? answers in an email please), and another study found that people abusing phenacetin were four times more likely to develop bladder cancer than non-users.

The study, from DrugAbuse.com, said that 65 percent of cocaine is cut with phenacetin, but didn't specify what percentage of each gram was found to actually be the cancer-causing substance. The average concentration of levamisole in a wrap is between 1.5 to five percent, and the average purity of a gram of cocaine is reportedly around 52 percent – so make of that what you will.

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Donald Trump laughing on the campaign trail in April. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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This article originally appeared on VICE US

One of the prerequisites for running for president is having a lot of money. Even Barack Obama, one of the least wealthy presidents of the modern era, was a millionaire by the time he ran for the White House in 2008, and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both make him look like a pauper. Americans are fine with being ruled by the rich—not that we have a choice, lol—but there's understandably a lot of interest in how these rich people choose to spend their money.

Politicians generally being public-minded sorts, presidential candidates tend to give large chunks of their fortunes away. According to Hillary and Bill Clinton's tax returns, the power couple gave away $23.2 million from 2001 to 2015, or about 10 percent of their income. The 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his wife had them beat, giving away almost 30 percent ($4 million) of their income the year before his failed bid for the presidency. Proving charitable giving is normally just a box to check off for candidates, a way to signal that they're one of the good One Percenters.

In that context, Trump's history of charity is especially bizarre. As with so much else about the self-proclaimed billionaire, Trump talks big about his generosity but can't or won't go into specifics. Investigations by journalists into Trump's family charity, the Donald J Trump Foundation, have turned up little in the way of recent donations from the candidate's own pocket, and uncovered one case of an illegal gift to a politician who at the time was weighing whether or not to sue Trump University for fraud. Especially now that the foundation is itself being investigated for wrongdoing, it's worth taking a closer look at what the hell is happening with the Donald J Trump Foundation.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he's given more than $100 million to charity, and earlier this year, his campaign put out a list of nearly 5,000 donations he supposedly made. But the tireless work of Washington Post reporter David A Fahrenthold, who has called more than 300 charities individually to ask if Trump had ever given them money, shows that it's actually very hard to find incidences of the man himself giving away any cash, at least not in recent years. In an article published in June, the Post found that the supposed billionaire had given away less than $10,000 from 2008 to 2015.

How is that possible? It turns out that a lot of Trump's gifts to charity—including gifts he publicly promised to contestants on The Celebrity Apprentice—came from the Donald J Trump Foundation, to which he's donated nothing since 2008 and is instead stocked with other people's money. Other gifts his campaign referenced came in the form of rounds of golf on Trump's golf courses that were given to charities to be auctioned off; that list of donations, the Post reported, also included arrangements called "conservation easements" that involve a real estate developer agreeing not to use land for certain purposes while still owning it and making money off of it.

Trump has given millions to charities over his lifetime, though that amount isn't all that significant given how much money he says he's worth. Since the Post has started chasing this story, Trump has given $1 million to a veterans' charity (months after promising he would, and only after being questioned about it), and gave $100,000 to a Louisiana church last month following the floods that decimated the state.

But the Donald J Trump Foundation has its own problems separate from the lack of proof of Trump's personal giving. GuideStar, a nonpartisan group that evaluates nonprofits, published a blog post Monday comparing the Trump Foundation to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton's organization—which itself is controversial due to so far unproven allegations major donors essentially bought access to Clinton while she was secretary of state—is much bigger, much more transparent about what it does, and has more of its eponymous founders' money.

The Trump Foundation has also allegedly engaged in what's called "self-dealing," or using a charity's money for personal gain, which is usually against IRS rules. For instance, the foundation spent $20,000 on a giant portrait of Trump himself, and $12,000 on Tim Tebow memorabilia.

Oh, and then there's the alleged bribe the Trump Foundation paid to Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. This was a $25,000 donation that the foundation made in 2013 to a Bondi-aligned PAC, which was problematic for a couple reasons. First, charities can't give to PACs—Trump's campaign said that the charity had given the money to the PAC by mistake, then screwed up again by telling the IRS the money had gone to a different group (whoops!). When this came to light this year, Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty and reimbursed the foundation for the $25,000 gift. Second, just days after that gift, Bondi reportedly decided not to join a lawsuit against Trump University filed by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. (Bondi's spokespeople deny her office was ever considering the lawsuit, contradicting newspaper accounts from that time.)

Speaking of Schneiderman, in 2014, the Trump Foundation gave $100,000 (a sizable sum by its standards) to Citizens United, a conservative group that was then suing the New York AG over his efforts to get them to disclose their donor list. Citizens United said the gift wasn't related to the lawsuit, but a Schneiderman spokesperson didn't agree, telling Yahoo News, "Funding a meritless lawsuit against this office would be nothing new for someone like Donald Trump, who has filed baseless ethics complaints, planted bogus stories, and tweeted a steady stream of incoherent insults just to make himself feel better for being exposed as the fraud he clearly is."

Trump has called Schneiderman a "lightweight hack" and "a low-life, a sleazebag," and the evidently personal battle between the two men seems bound to continue—on Tuesday, it was reported by the New York Daily News that the AG's office had launched a probe "to make sure complying with the laws governing charities in New York." The Trump campaign responded by calling the AG a "partisan hack who has turned a blind eye to the Clinton Foundation for years."

It remains to be seen if Schneiderman's probe will result in any charges. But the legality of some of the Trump Foundation gifts aside, there are more basic questions about Trump's personal acts of charity that he refuses to answer, namely: What and when have you given to charity?

When BuzzFeed News looked into Trump's charitable giving in June, campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks told them, "He makes contributions personally, and there's no way for you to know or understand what those gifts are or when they are made." But no, there is a way to know what those gifts are—Trump could just release his tax returns, which he has refused to do. (Trump claims he can't release them because he's under audit, though Richard Nixon showed his returns to the public while being audited. This week, VICE News filed a lawsuit with the IRS seeking to gain access to the audits of Trump's returns.)

In the past week, even as the media has started to zero in on all this, Trump's campaign keeps sending out surrogates to proclaim his generosity in the broadest, least fact-checkable terms. Deflecting questions about their boss's activities is by now standard operating procedure for people on Trump's payroll, but the more important question has nothing to do with shady individual gifts. If Trump is willing to obfuscate and mislead about something as simple as which charities he gives money too, what else is he refusing to tell the truth about?

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

(Photo by Pixabay user aitoff via)

People cheat. You'd be lying if you said you haven't done it, or at least thought about it. Researchers in one strand of evolutionary biology recently theorised that women were naturally programmed to line up a replacement mate, and thus to ditch monogamy for more than one sexual partner. The study found that straight women are drawn to "cultivating 'back-up mates'", switching to a new guy if their man loses his usefulness. To translate: if a woman realises her partner's sperm isn't up to scratch, or he picks up an illness that makes him a less-than-ideal mate, she bails.

For a while, the gendered idea that men cheat to give their sperm the most chances to turn into fertilised eggs has proliferated in wider society. But do women stray for similarly rigid reasons? I did the very scientific thing and asked some ladies myself.

"I saw my virtually non-existent sex life stretching out ahead of me"

Imagine being in a sexless three-year relationship. Don't bother: that was me. I didn't mind too much at first when he said he didn't believe in sex before marriage. As I'm from a pretty traditional family as well, but I thought I could persuade him. I was wrong: nothing I seemed to do did the trick.

I'm embarrassed thinking of how many nights I wasted worrying about how he didn't fancy me and how low my self-esteem was throughout the entire relationship. To make matters worse, we were also planning to get married not long after graduating so I didn't feel like I could give him the chuck when I'd invested so much into our relationship (our parents had met and we'd organised some of it already).

I felt trapped and could see my virtually non-existent sex life stretching out in front of me. So when a guy gave me the eye over a few drinks with some mates, I took the opportunity and ended up sleeping with him. It wasn't great but it felt amazing to feel wanted. I didn't even care that he was a virgin – although I only found that out after. I didn't feel guilty for too long: turned out my boyfriend was cheating on me with a girl from his course (so much for saving yourself for marriage) and I rebounded with the not-so-virgin for a few months till I got over my ex.

— Surjit*, 23

"The more weight I lost, the more other men started to notice me"

I spent most of my earlier 20s as a bigger girl. If I ever went on a night out, guys would take the piss out of the way I looked so I ended up a bit of a recluse too. When the 'eat clean' trend was in full swing, I got massively inspired and ended up hitting the gym and cutting out Two for Tuesdays.

Within a year, I'd shed about three stone and looked like a completely different person – some people still don't really recognise me if I walk past them in the street. I'd initially wanted to shed the weight so I could be healthy, but I started to notice it had another effect: the more weight I lost, the more men started to pay me attention. At first, I didn't really care – I was already in a long-term, serious relationship. I'd met Rowan* at uni and we'd been together for around two years and were considering moving in together.

But the more compliments I got, the harder I worked out. And soon, I started flirting back. I thought it was harmless. After all, I wasn't going to end things with Rowan: He'd stayed with me the entire time I was fat and I was adamant I wouldn't be one of those girls that dumped their guy as soon as they "got hot".

Then I went to a private art showing in Chelsea and met an art director, who was quite persistent. He was really charming (and loaded too) so I ended up giving him my number. We exchanged flirty messages for about two weeks and pinned down a date for dinner. When Rowan found out we'd kissed, I didn't even have to grovel much – he took me back almost instantly so I lost a bit of respect for him. I know if I did it again, I'd probably be dumped, but have I learnt my lesson? Not really. I'm exchanging messages with the art dealer right now and we'll be meeting up again for our second date next week.

— Samia*, 24

"I'd spent most of the weekend silently resenting my boyfriend"

My boyfriend paid for my Boomtown festival ticket as I'm perennially skint, so I felt obliged to hang out with him. In the end I could barely catch up with some of my own mates – and he'd semi-threatened that I couldn't stay in his tent if I pulled one of my "vanishing acts". I was really starting to doubt whether I could see a future in the relationship when, just because he paid for me, he thought he could treat me however he wanted. But I also didn't want to completely get rid of him.

I spent most of the festival resenting him so the day I got back to London, I headed straight to my favourite gay bar and proceeded to get with Xavier, a hot Spanish guy. Admittedly, he was a bit younger than me, at 21, but he certainly made up for it. I proceeded to get down and dirty on the dancefloor much to the chagrin of everyone there, who wasted no time in telling me, "this isn't a straight club".

WATCH: Apps and the Mobile Love Industry

I could barely move my neck the next few days and it was completely covered in telltale marks. To make matters worse, there was a heatwave that next week so I couldn't even wear a rollneck. When I met my boyfriend, I ended up wearing said rollneck. It clearly didn't do its job as he saw the bites and was suspicious where I'd got it from. I lied and said it was my best friend who'd hit on me at the bar as she was 'confused' by her sexuality. Weirdly enough, he totally swallowed it and we're still together. I've got Xavier on Instagram and I'm not going to pretend that I don't slide into his DMs whenever I'm a bit horny...

— Charlie, 25

"Do I regret that I cheated? Sure – but positives came out of it"

I'd come from a pretty religious background. By the time I headed to uni, I was struggling with my sexuality and had internalised of lot of homophobia thanks to my overly Christian parents.

I lived with about 12 girls in first year and was terrified of being "caught". I got a boyfriend not long after, mostly to try and convince myself that I was straight. It didn't really help that he was homophobic either. I soon met a girl – ironically enough at church – who'd also been struggling with her sexuality. We kind of clicked and then ended up getting together.

Do I regret that I cheated? Sure, but there were loads of positives that came out of it too: for the first time in my life, I was comfortable with myself and came out to most of my friends and family not long after we got together. Although we're no longer seeing each other, I definitely owe her a lot.

— Maria, 26

*Some names have been changed to protect privacy/dignity.

@its_me_salma

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Illustrations by Julia Scheele

We have strange ideas about gender and sexuality. Most of us expend great energy wondering if we're normal, if we're too "masculine" or too "feminine", if we're slags or if we're weirdly frigid. How we got these ideas and the ways in which they can be dismantled is the subject of Meg-John Barker's new book, Queer: A Graphic History . The graphic non-fiction is a speedy aerial view of queer theory, from its founders to the current debates.

Barker, an author, psychotherapist and activist-academic, is a key figure in UK queer politics and has teamed up with artist Julia Scheele to create an utterly un-dusty tome that questions everything from the way we categorise our sexual desire to the foundations of happiness.

I caught up with them for a chat.

VICE: I loved being made to think about the idea that identities aren't fixed, that they're contextual and may change over time. It's hard not to see your sexuality as intrinsic to who you are, and not changeable. "I just fancy who I fancy." What do you think a world would look like where people were more open to flux and change?
Meg-John Barker: I so want to live in that world! 43 percent of young people see themselves as somewhere in between being attracted solely to men or to women. So it's nearly the majority. It baffles me that we still insist on this gay/straight binary when so many people don't experience themselves in that way and experience their gender identity and sense of who they're attracted to shifting over time.

It seems like such a journey doesn't it – when we're still battling for basic sex education in schools, to a place where we're talking about gender and sexuality like this?
That's what feels frustrating, especially when we look at the stats on mental health. Those who are outside the binary of gender or sexuality have a massive toll taken on their mental health. Forty percent of non-binary people have attempted suicide. Every time they do a study, bi people come out much worse in terms of mental health because they just don't see themselves represented anywhere, and when they do it's in terms of horrible stereotypes.

The argument made by TERFS (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – feminists who deny that trans people's self-affirmed genders are valid, i.e. Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel) here would be that there's nothing mutable about having a particular body; that biological sex is a solid thing with visible markers and that ignoring it is futile. Is there any way of reconciling the arguments?
I think so. It seems like the TERFs – for want of a better word – are mostly arguing for people to be whoever they are; that women and girls should have equal rights, but also that there should be diversity within that category. And in a way that's not far away from the queer argument that everyone should be able to be whoever they are in whatever gender they are. What's the sticking point?

I think a lot of TERFs have this sense that trans activists want to push everyone into surgeries and medical transitions, and that just isn't the case – not that there's anything wrong with those who need those things getting them. And also this idea that if somebody is a trans woman they'll have this basic maleness inside them that makes them violent. Those are the "bathroom bill" kind of concerns, but there's no evidence to support this. And again, it's a very essentialist understanding of gender, because there's a massive diversity in every gender around how violent people are.

I always feel like it boils down to vulnerability. We have our experiences in life that make us cling to certain ideas because we believe they'll make the world a better place. But it's very hard when one person's version of that excludes another's. Trans people are clearly some of the most vulnerable people in society – to suicide and homicide. They are really not the right people to pick on if you want to make the world a better place.

Would there be a more meaningful way of categorising the way we like to have sex than simply whether you fancy men, women or another gender? Your book made me want to read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who asks this question.
Looking at how sexual you are or how much you experience sexual attraction is a really useful one, because it makes it OK to not experience sexual attraction or to not want sex. Given that we're in a world of so much sexual compulsivity – and people do a lot of non-consensual things because they think they should be having sex – it would be really helpful to encourage people to realise it's fine to not have sex, or to be anywhere on that scale. For other people it's more about roles and power dynamics and sensations.

Thinking about your sexuality in this multifaceted way takes us into a much more interesting engagement with our own sexuality instead of being scared of it and just trying to be "normal".

You talk about the difference between assimilationist activism – that simply argues that, being gay, for instance, is perfectly "normal" and "respectable" – and the sort of activism that points out the underlying flaws in the way society sees sexuality and gender. Where do you think the best activism has been that manages to do this effectively?
Shiri Eisner's book Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution is really good on this stuff. The assimilationist way of doing bisexual activism would be saying "we're not greedy", "we're not just going through a phase", "we are sure of our identities". Kind of myth-busting.

And Eisner says that the problem with myth-busting is that it keeps those assumptions in place. To say "bi people aren't promiscuous" is to suggest there's something wrong with being promiscuous. So she takes it a step further and says, yeah there's no evidence that bi people are more promiscuous, but hang on, what's wrong with being promiscuous? While there's no evidence that bisexuality is just a phase, actually maybe everyone's sexuality is just a phase.

Sara Ahmed's work on happiness is incredible; the idea that we can and should challenge society's happiness tick-boxes. So I guess anybody whose life disrupts normative assumptions should get queer theory?
Yes, to some extent anybody who's questioning sex or gender, or even the escalator model of relationships – dating, getting married, having children – is, in a way, queer. My work as a therapist suggests that at some point in nearly everyone's life something makes them realise that there's a problem with that model.

And it goes way beyond gender and sexuality. The same challenges exist around class, race and disability. How can we make a world that's accessible to the full range of bodies? How can we make a world where the class that somebody's born in doesn't massively restrict their lives? How can we make a world in which all the cultural groups can co-exist? There are no easy answers, but it's the same set of questions. How can we include everybody?

Queer: A Graphic History, by Meg-John Barker, illustrated by Julia Scheele was released this month by Icon Books.

@frankiemullin

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

To someone living in the centre of the Greek crisis, experiencing the rapid social changes happening in the Balkans, America will always feel like a faraway, terrifying castle, guarded by the sea. America is demonised and dreamy, semantically charged, peppered with Hollywood glitter – a protest chant that has been sang so much, it's lost its meaning.

At the same time, to people living in the Balkan peninsula, the upcoming American elections and the fear of a President Trump are a painful reminder of how little say we have in the fate of our countries. In an attempt to turn that feeling into images, a few years ago I started to photograph the people I see on the street who randomly, and often unconsciously, wear or carry the American flag. Here are some of those photos I took travelling around the Balkans.

Boom Festival attendees wait for test results on their drugs near Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, last month. Photo by the author

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If you've been to a mainstream music festival in the United States, you've probably encountered your share of robust security measures. Long bag-check lines and uniformed police or private security guards are routine, and they're often tasked at least in part with weeding out illegal drugs.

But in Portugal, where the government's approach to drugs is almost completely outside the realm of law enforcement, the climate at music festivals is rather different. Onsite drug-checking services test purity, and virtually no one is hassled for their supplements of choice. That's because 15 years ago, a bold national policy was implemented where low-level possession of all drugs was decriminalized. Now the people doing the regulating are health officials, not cops.

As a frequent festival-goer in the past few years, I wanted to see for myself how one of the countries that's come the closest in the world to ending the drug war handles substances at these events. So I reached out to Dr. Maria Carmo Carvalho at the Catholic University of Portugal, head of Kosmicare, an organization that helps concert-goers dealing with a bad trip—or worse. At the Boom Festival, a biennial gathering held near the Spanish border around the full moon last month, about 100 Kosmicare volunteers committed to round-the-clock care for the more than 30,000 attendees throughout the weeklong event. I was one of them.

Kosmicare is in the thick of what's called the "harm-reduction" trend—which is to say it's all about minimizing risk and keeping people from going off the deep end. But unlike the harm-reduction efforts aimed at, say, providing clean syringes for heroin users or safe places for them to get high, Kosmicare is a pioneer in psychedelic harm reduction, specifically drug use at musical festivals. That means drugs like LSD, shrooms, ketamine, and various psycho-stimulants, often in combination with alcohol and weed. After all, when you combine a dry, hot environment with 18 hours a day of pounding psytrance, bad trips are bound to happen.

"We estimate that our service covers around 1 percent of the total festival population," Carvalho told VICE, adding that many people who come to the festival are from countries like France and the United Kingdom and are not used to the openness of such a service. While drug use itself is still not technically legal in Portugal, the decriminalization process has all but removed police involvement from casual use, instead keeping cops' focus on interdiction and high-level suppliers. Because of this, Carvalho explained, "People have nothing to fear from using our services, which includes our staff."

In order to be accepted on the Kosmicare team at Boom, this past February, I tried to gain some experience by volunteering for the US-based Zendo Project in Costa Rica. Helping people stuck in the throes of challenging psychological experiences, often stemming from drug use, is the more modest goal here. One man I encountered kept asking, over and over again, "Really, though, am I in trouble, did I do something wrong? This kind of work is confidential, so I can't reveal his name, but can say that for the previous few hours, I'd been chasing the 20-something from Canada around the grounds of Costa Rica's Envision Festival, trying to contain his fitful behavior.

"That's where services like Zendo come in," explained Sara Gael, the Colorado-based psychotherapist who heads up the organization. She said the group has served some 1,000 guests since 2012, both in the United States and abroad.

Not knowing for sure what, if anything, this particular man took, I could only try and make sure he was safe and didn't do anything he might later gravely regret, like giving away all of his money to strangers in the food court. (He tried repeatedly.) Once in my care, he eventually calmed down, presumably when he stopped peaking. When he came to shortly after sunrise the next day, he was confused and upset with himself. But he was also grateful that he wasn't in jail or a hospital—that a modern approach to recreational drug use had helped him out of a jam.

Once I made it to Portugal, I learned that unlike the legal atmosphere back home—where those who try to test drugs on site risk expulsion or arrest—a culture stressing safer use has been inculcated in plain sight and spanned the entire course of the festival.

Every night near Boom's main dance stage, a team of volunteers ran the check!n table, where people could drop off small samples of drugs and a few hours later learn the results of what was actually in their baggies. In addition to this service, funded by a Portuguese NGDO, Boomers could receive drug information pamphlets, ear plugs, and even tiny water bottles for nasal rinsing and paper cards meant to be used as snorting paraphernalia.

Facing my own culture shock with such progressive services, I was encouraged by the dozen guests I sat with throughout the week at Kosmicare, most coming by themselves after they realized their need for support. Instead of telling me they took "acid" or "molly," they referred more specifically to drugs they had tested at check!n, which informed them that they were actually consuming LSD or MDMA.

One of Dr. Carvalho's former classmates*—also a Kosmicare volunteer—is actually conducting a study on the impact this information from drug checking has on someone's decision-making over the course of a given music festival. For example, check!n received several samples of one gram baggies of coke going for €90 (about $100) that, when tested, revealed no cocaine. The former classmate, Helena Valente, wants to know whether people cut their losses and tossed the bag, or rolled the dice and gave it a sniff anyway.

All of this may sound like some kind of utopian vision for a drug-fueled future of partying, pushed by the clandestine agendas of private organizations taking advantage of international legal flexibility. But as festivals around the world attract more and more people, Gael hopes that calls for broader social cohesion—and harm reduction—will prevail in the United States, too.

"I believe that we are seeing increased public awareness of the importance and necessity of services which support the mental and emotional well-being of people who choose to use substances," she said.

Kevin Franciotti is an independent journalist in New York who work on psychedelic research has appeared in New Scientist magazine and Reason.com. Follow him on Twitter.

*Correction 9/15: An earlier version of this article said the study was being conducted by a student rather than a former classmate.