Pictures via original WikiHow article 

A couple days ago, a WikiHow article called "How to Stop a Wedding" went viral.

What drew everyone's attention was the sheer insanity of the headline, but what made everyone share it on Facebook was the seemingly methodical and sober step-by-step approach it recommended, and the surprisingly competent artwork. On the surface, it seems like a sane, rational way to go about doing something totally insane and irrational.

Elysia Skye, owner of LA Wedding Woman, was the most experienced and trusted minister I could find on short notice, and she was surprisingly game to go through the manual step-by-step and provide an unsentimental critique. 

VICE: How many times have you had someone bust in and break up a wedding?
Elysia Skye: None. My grandfather, my father, my sister, and myself are all officiants. In 40 years, and thousands and thousands of weddings, we've never seen an objection on the wedding day.

Can you criticize the procedure for me anyway, as an expert? You consider yourself an expert, right?
Yes.

How about step 1?
I do like that the article reminds people that it’s not about you. It’s not your movie. It’s their movie. 

What about the rest of the planning steps? Are they practical?
Even if phase one is discouraging them, the bride will probably say, “We’ve invested $100,000, and we’re not getting it back.” So go, “OK. Have the party. Just don’t sign the license. You’re not ready yet. Have the ceremony. Enjoy your day. Just don't get legally married." I've seen things like that.

What about this?
At that point you’re kinda going into crazy town. 

What about the part about sneaking in?
They don't seem to realize that other people might be aware of you. Which means when you pull up there’s gonna be someone outside. I've experienced versions of this, where there was a crazy person who might show up. Everyone who was there knew, “If you see this person, escort them out immediately.” Sometimes what's going on is not a private matter. People know. People know you’re the crazy ex-girlfriend and you’re not allowed on the property.

OK. So it might be tough to get through security. What about the part where you build your case? 
Unless you know something, and you have proof, you can’t do it. What I’m alluding to is “someone is cheating.”

So you should come in with surveillance footage on your phone?
You can walk in and say, “I’ve been sleeping with him for six years,” and nobody might believe you. If the groom is walking down the aisle that day, he’s gonna say, “Who is this person? I’ve never seen her before in my life,” or “She’s crazy. It’s not true. She’s an internet stalker.” They’re going to continue to lie. So don’t come in unarmed.

Then it says to pipe up and object. Could this happen, even though you've never seen it?
The article is correct that most people don’t put that “speak now or forever hold your peace” part in the ceremony. That’s not in any of my ceremonies.

Oh, really? None of them?
Never. In fact, in our ceremonies, we say, “Does everyone here support Tony and Jim and their marriage?” We ask for support, not objections. If you don’t support, you don’t answer.

Oh, but there's still that pause. They could go "not me!"
Well, at that point everyone yells and cheers and claps. Sometimes people ring bells. It’s a loud, fun, energetic, awesome moment, and everyone’s feeling great. If someone was like, “Well not me!” you probably wouldn’t hear that.

But anyway, it's true that most people don’t include that at all now. It’s just tacky. Maybe your brother-in-law’s a douchebag. That doesn't mean you'll object at the wedding.

Let's say it all worked. What then?
This is all fine and dandy, and someone can run into a wedding and stop a wedding, but that doesn’t mean the couple isn’t already married.

It would be too late? Why?
Oftentimes the marriage license is signed with the couple ahead of time. The minister will sit in a room with the couple before the ceremony and say, “OK, do you wanna marry this person? Do you wanna marry this person? Yes? Let’s sign." Then when the ceremony is over, they don’t have to take time to go and do paperwork. They go right into cocktail hour or couple's photos. 

What percentage of the time?
Let’s say 50 percent. 

Wow. 
Yeah.

That should really be in the guide. 
I know. Someone can be all high and mighty and run in and stop a wedding, but that doesn’t mean shit if the couple’s already married. Or they’re getting married at a destination wedding, like in Hawaii or India, and they don’t want to deal with paperwork out of the state. That’s another large percentage on top of the other 50 percent that’s already finished getting their paperwork done the day of.

But what if they say, "I do" but don't sign the license? Can someone stop them from signing?
Maybe, but even that might not work. Even if they tell the minister, "Hey, don’t mail that marriage license in. We’ve changed our minds," that’s impossible. They’re already legally married. They’ve said their oath in front of the minister. Even though there’s a separation of church and state, the state says that if a minister pronounces you married, you are legally married, even if you don’t want to sign your own license, and it’s the minister’s responsibility to sign that license and send it in. The court will do their best to track you down and get your signature.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo by Allen Ying

After a broken pelvis left him unable to skate when he was 18 years old, Colin Read began filming on a friend’s handi-cam and editing footage on whatever programs he could download from Limewire. Ten years later, Colin has emerged as a voice that feels both nostalgic and new in underground skate videos. Shot from the rooftops of New York City to the streets of Tokyo through a distorted fisheye lens with mesmerizing editing, Colin's films make you ask yourself, Why haven't I skated today?

I first became aware of Colin’s work through the “New York Clip” video series he created for SLAP magazine. Watching the clips made the art of skate videos exciting for me again—especially the rooftop section, which revealed a slew of untapped skating spots in New York City. I was hooked.

To find out more about his technique, I met Colin in his Brooklyn apartment a few weeks ago. Like a shrine to Colin’s passions, the apartment’s walls were filled with decks and the floor was covered with video gear straight from the shelves of a Best Buy circa 1999. I talked to Colin about his brand of lo-fi filmmaking, his cult favorite skate film Tengu: God of Mischief, and what it means to be "greedy about life."

VICE: Why’d you choose to shoot on the Sony VX1000, the classic skate video camera from the late 90s and the early 2000s?
At the time it came out, it was exactly what people were looking for. The balance is right. The colors are great and crisp. It has the classic golden look. The sound is amazing—the pops are loud and the power slides sound great. You can get so close to people. It also creates a rush of speed. People blaze past, but you can still see. It came at a time when people were perfecting the art of skate videos. Because of that, it just has a history in skateboarding for people of my generation. 

Why shoot in a 4:3 aspect ratio?
That is an important question that people forget to ask themselves when they’re thinking about switching formats. Skateboarding is vertical. Human beings, we stand vertical. The thing about 16:9 is that the frame is so wide, there is too much dead space. You need a separate camera. Also, it so wide, the fisheye can’t be distorted. You can’t get as close. And since you’re not as close, the skateboarder is filling even less of the screen, so there’s even more dead space. With the VX, the skater can fit as much of the screen as you want. With 4:3, there’s also a sense of speed. It doesn’t go on for so long. The background zooms past and you feel the speed. With 16:9, the background just slopes away and it robs the footage of a sense of speed and the improvisational feel of skateboarding.

Why not shoot in HD?               
HD is so clear and you can see everything. It forces you to be farther away from the skater. You can see so much, you can predict what the skater is going to do. But, with the VX, you can choose how you want to show the reveal. You can put a lot more thought into when you want objects to appear, when you want people to realize what’s happening. It stays surprising, and I think that’s the most important thing. If its not surprising, why even watch it?

That’s one thing that I love about your movie: You see every obstacle in a new way. How did you get the films opening shot of the front side flip onto the roof bank from a subway train? Did you have a friend on the train calling and saying, "Go!"
No, I was calling him. [Laughs] We’re pretty low budget. I was filming with one hand and my other hand was on my phone. I would count down over the phone to a friend who was with Conner and that friend would count down with me.The first time we did it, Conner did a front 180 into the bank off the roof. The 180 took like four tries. And that meant I had to ride the train all the way into the city, transfer all the way back and then do it over and over again. It took like a long time, but it was worth it. That night when we got home, Conner calls me, he’s like “Hey, I want to try and front side flip it.” So we were back to square one. The second time Conner just put on headphones, which were connected to his phone. So I said, “Alright, ready man?” And then he went and did it on his first try, which was a big relief.

I hear that you can only skate on the roofs in the winter because of the tar.
The roofs get so mushy in the summer. They get so soft and your wheels just sink. Even if you walk around in the summer, you leave footprints in the tar up there. It has to be winter or close to winter to be able to roll fast and do tricks. That’s the reason this film took so long. We could only film it in a few months every year. It was three winters before we could finish. The first time we got a roof clip, it was by accident. We didn’t realize that was such a sick spot. And there are these spots everywhere that have just never been seen. Its like a whole new world of spots that is untouched.

How did you find those spots?
We’d walk around Brooklyn and try and see if the doors unlocked. We’d try to buzz and get in or climb up the fire escape. We had no criminal intent. We were technically breaking the law, but we weren’t hurting anything. I’m sure that we annoyed some people for a short amount of time, but I think that’s the price you have to pay for art.

Let’s talk about the subway track gap—it blew up. The photo was everywhere.
Allen Ying’s an incredible photographer. He really captured how insane Koki is. We took the artistic approach. Media today has become diluted by the ever-present camera. Every person in America has a camera and a microphone on him or her at all times. That means everything’s on film. That takes away a lot of the magic. You’ll see something as soon as it happens, but you wont see the amazing photograph that was taken of it and comes out in a book months later.

Do you think the proliferation of recording devices creates a wall of white noise?
Good work speaks for itself. Even if you don’t have a big outlet, you’ll get noticed. And if you keep making solid work, it’ll grow to be something that will be seen in a larger venue. But there is a lot of “white noise.” That term is pretty apt.

Do you see that in skateboarding, too?
Skateboarding is at a point where there’s so many people doing it. It’s one of the biggest sports in the world, which I think is pretty sad, because I don’t see it as a sport at all. I think it’s more of an artistic expression. But today, huge corporations are invested in it and big skate companies put ads in the big magazines and pay writers to take trips to China to film clips for their video. And then there’s the street league, which is featured on ESPN and has hosts wearing Nascar-type outfits covered in logos. It’s completely foreign to me.

Let’s talk about the editing of Tengu.
There’s two to 300 sequences in the project. For me, a video isn’t anything without the music and the flow between sections. It’s a pet peeve of mine when a video just has a hard cut and starts another section. It’s interesting to watch how editors deal with the problem of moving from one part to the next in a logical way. With Tengu, I tried to go further than I’ve gone before and perfect the flow. It’s all about finding a way to move seamlessly from one part to the next. As I went along through the trends of footage, I figured out the parts and how I wanted to tie them together. Some of them just came together after the fact.

Which ones?
The roof section to Conner’s part. Conner didn’t mean to fall off the roof like that. That was scary—but nobody died. Anyway, we knew we wanted to get from the roof to the street. Originally, he was going to do an actual trick where he rolled off a roof onto the ground. But in the end, we decided against that. We ended up watching that clip and thinking about how cool it’d be to do an animation of him falling, catching the board, and then dropping. We went to the museum and he did the drop-in and I filmed it from underneath. Then I gave those clips to Evan Borja, who is an incredible animator and skater. He did the hand drawn animation.

In Tengu, you lift a quote from Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru about what it means to live. The film is about a bureaucrat finally deciding to live once he finds out his life is over. Are you running from becoming that bureaucrat?
No, I’m the dude at the swing silently freezing to death and dying of cancer. [Laughs] I used that quote from Ikiru because it talks about how you never know the true value of life until you’re face to face with death. My friend Justin Clady almost died during the filming of this video. He was bombing a hill and a guy was jamming in reverse up a one-way street and hit him and dragged him 50 feet. The guy tried to do a hit and run but they got him. Claydy was in a coma for a while. He was messed up and we were scared for a long time. It was Clady’s accident that was an eye-opener and made me not want to waste any time ever. His whole part was filmed before he was hurt. Except for the last trick—the skitch on the taxi—that was filmed after he was better. Where it says, “You have to be greedy about living."

Tengu: God of Mischief is available to purchase at Mandible Claw.

Follow Andrew on Twitter.

Late last year, South Sudan's president, Salva Kiir, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup d'état amid accusations of rampant corruption within the government. Infighting immediately broke out within the presidential guard, sparking what has now become a brutal tribal and civil war that has pitted Machar’s ethnic Nuer loyalists against the majority Dinka, who have sided with Kiir. Machar narrowly escaped assassination, fleeing to the deep bush as Kiir’s troops razed his home and killed his bodyguards. And now the world’s newest sovereign nation is in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.

In February, journalists and filmmakers Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia set out on a grueling mission to locate Machar in his secret hideout in Akobo and get his side of the story. Accompanying was Machot Lat Thiep, a former child soldier and Lost Boy who had advised on South Sudan’s constitution and now works as a manager of a Cosco in Seattle. Machot acted as a guide of sorts, arranging Pelton and Freccia’s rendezvous with Machar through a series of endless satellite-phone calls to old contacts and rebel platoons, who would eventually guide the group to the deposed vice president.

After spending a couple days with Machar, he granted Pelton and Freccia unprecedented access to the front lines of a battle in Malakal, where for the first time in history the pair documented the heretofore mythical White Army as they looted, murdered, and pillaged their way to some twisted interpretation of “victory.”

As Kiir and Machar plan to meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we will release Saving South Sudan, a multi-platform exploration of the horrors of the country’s newest civil war.

Saving South Sudan premieres Monday, May 12.

Barrel bombing drove this elderly couple from their village in the Golan to a field near Tal Shihab, where they wait for the border to open. Photos by Abo Bakr al Haj Ali

Syria’s southernmost province of Daraa is often referred to as the birthplace of the revolution, but for a growing number of displaced people, it’s also literally the end of the road.

Even though the stretch of border between Daraa and Jordan has been closed since the summer of 2013, families from Homs, Hama, Damascus, and beyond are still turning up there, trying to get away from the chaos of the Syrian civil war. In many cases, they only reach Daraa after exhausting their resources in a failed bid to enter Jordan through the last open crossing, much further east, at Ruwaished.

This continuous flow of new arrivals has led to a buildup of people in the towns and villages near the border. Omar al Hariri, a Daraa journalist with the activist-based Sham News Network, estimated there are more than 5,000 people crowded into the stretch of land that includes the border villages of Tal Shihab and Naseeb. Lama Fakih, a Syria and Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch agreed that there could easily be between 4,000 and 5,000 refugees in the area, but can’t say for sure because his organizatoin hasn’t had access to the area.

Human Rights Watch isn’t the only aid group to be effectively shut out from Daraa. “Due to security constraints our access to Daraa has been restricted,” said Ahmed Mohsen, an external relations officer with UNHCR’s Damascus operation. “We rely on our partners on ground to deliver the respective services and assistance.” Those partners, noted al Hariri, are mostly informal local organizations and individuals giving what they can, when they can. But it is not enough, he said.

The lack of aid organizations has led to a situation verging on the catastrophic—and according to Baroness Valerie Amos, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, it is only getting worse.

Around 200 displaced people, mostly women and children, are crammed into this school in Tal Shihab.

While factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) currently run the camps, there is none of the infrastructure that well-funded humanitarian organizations can provide. People are crowded into abandoned schools, other disused buildings, and orchards filled with makeshift tents. More arrive by the day, straining already stretched resources.

“We’ve got clear and consistent messages that in some parts of Daraa people are struggling to feed themselves,” said Robert Beer, the Jordan country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, an NGO that receives new arrivals and distributes relief items at Za’atari and Azraq refugee camps—both across the border in Jordan.

“They say it’s getting more and more difficult, that there are lots of checkpoints," Beer continued. "There are pockets of safety, but other places will have been heavily affected and houses destroyed.”

Um Firas, a young mother from Homs who was wearing a black niqab when I spoke to her, has been in Daraa since the beginning of February. In January her family paid to be smuggled to the crossing at Ruwaished, making the long journey through regime-held land in the back of a truck “like sheep,” she said. But there were questions about her family booklet—an identity document—and she said she, her husband, and their young child were ultimately denied passage to the Za’atari camp.

Abu Khaled, a 34-year-old father of two, had a similar disappointment. “We came from Reef al Sham through al Ruwaished road," he told me, his face wrapped in a red and white keffiyeh. "They let us enter Al Sarhan square, and then they took us out because of IDs and I don't know what.” He and his family had no choice but to come to Daraa, where they have been stuck ever since. “The borders are closed and now there is nothing.”

One of the many factors compounding the desperation in Daraa is poverty. Any bid to enter Jordan costs money, and the price is going up. “We’ve recently heard that people are paying $140 per person for transport to the border, up from $10 to $15 not that long ago,” said Beer.

In Tal Shihab, a local entrepreneur opened up shop selling cookies, chips, and juice outside a school filled with displaced people.

Um Mohammed, a 45-year-old from Al Ghouta, near Damascus, said she sold her last item of value—an automatic washing machine—to pay smugglers to transport her and her five children to Ruwaished. “They kept on moving us from one place to another, not to mention the hunger, the cold, and if a child got ill. Then we reached Al Sarhan square. I had my family booklet and a receipt for my ID, but my ID got lost in the town.” Without her ID, she was unable to convince authorities that she was Syrian. “I was put in the station and I was unable to go past this point.” Like Um Firas, Abu Khaled, and so many others before her, Um Mohammed and her children had nowhere left to go and precious little money to get there. After ten days in Daraa, she was truly desperate: “I can’t go back to Damascus and I can’t live here. How can I reach Jordan just to sort my children?”

All along the border, displaced families spoke of feeling trapped and having nothing to do but wait until the border re-opens—if indeed it ever does. After failing to reach Jordan at Ruwaished, they have run out of options.

But for an unlucky few, there is one last way out: by ambulance. Jordan quietly provides emergency medical care to those with the most grievous injuries. Typically a local ambulance takes victims to a Daraa field hospital, then transports them to the border, where they are transferred to a Jordanian ambulance and rushed to hospital for specialized care.

As I filed this article, I got a message from Daraa: Helicopters were hovering and barrel bombs were falling. A long pause. Then another message: A 12-year-old boy had been hit. He’d lost a leg. It had been severed, then and there. The boy was in an ambulance within minutes, bound for the nearest field hospital and then on to the border and a Jordanian ambulance. It’s not policy to take family along—this is emergency medical care, not a pathway for refugees.

The boy crossed the border alone.

Additional reporting by Abo Bakr al Haj Ali

Follow Sara Elizabeth Williams on Twitter.

Photos by Kristina Podobed

Kiev is not a city you'd immediately associate with fashion—especially in these days of passive-aggressive war with Russia. Yet, the Ukrainian capital loves fashion enough to have two fashion weeks: Ukrainian Fashion Week (UFW) is one and Kiev Fashion Days (KFD) is the other.

The main difference between UFW and KFD is their age. Last March, UFW held its 34th season while at the same time KFD celebrated three and a half years of existence. At its conception, KFD was created in reaction to UFW. Back then, UFW was a rather kitschy event—full of glitter, pretentious luxury, and glamorous politicians’ wives in the frows.

Forever looking to the West, the organizers of KFD tried to set up an event of a more European level that would feature younger talent (in the end, that largely meant designers who were into minimalism). Their target audience was the fashion forward crowd, the hipsters and the so-called "creatives," while UFW was more for pop stars and rich men's wives.

Today, UFW is not as kitschy as it used to be and KFD is not as hipster. Both fashion weeks take place in decent venues, hold no less than 20 scheduled shows and presentations, attend to hundreds of guests, and include educational programming and design competitions. Hiccups usually have to do with planning, a lack of funds and the quality of certain designs—which is normal for a country so young, with no long-standing fashion industry.

Basically it's a little hard to tell if either event is better than the other, but the rivalry between organizers is still alive and well.

Not that it should make much difference, but these photos were taken during Mercedes-Benz Kiev Fashion Days this year. For a deeper look into the scary and exciting world of Ukrainian Fashion Week, watch Charlet Duboc in Fashion Week International: Ukraine here.

See more of Kristina's work here

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s some very good news: After two decades of steady decline, teen pregnancy rates have hit a record low in the US, plummeting in every state and across ethnic groups, according to new research from the Guttmacher Insitute. The study, released this week, found that just six percent of women between the ages of 15 and 19 got pregnant in 2010, which means that there were 57 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage girls. That’s a stunning 51 percent drop from the peak rate in 1990, and a 15 percent decrease from 2008 alone.

Teen abortion and birth rates have similarly declined from their respective peaks, although the drop off has been less dramatic.

Image courtesy of the Guttmacher Institute 

“We’ve known that birth rates were falling, but this is something different—now we know that it’s because fewer teens are actually becoming pregnant in the first place,” said lead author Kathryn Kost, a Guttmacher researcher. “The takeaway is that it appears teens are taking control of their sexual and reproductive lives.”

“I think we’re probably seeing the wider impact of efforts to ensure teens can access the information and contraceptive services they need to prevent pregnancies,” Kost added. But she conceded that the report doesn’t offer much to explain the trend. “This is basically a statistical report to put on the table, and look at what we have,” she said. “Really the next step is asking why? What can we do to figure out what is causing these declines?”

It’s easy to see the numbers as proof that progressive sexual health policies, like expanding health care coverage for birth control and cutting off funding for abstinence-only education, are working—and that conservative opposition to said policies is just backwards paternalism and vagina fear-mongering. But while birth control and comprehensive sex ed obviously play a role in lowering the teen pregnancy rate, that’s not the whole story. A deeper look at the data on teen sexuality reveals a much more nuanced picture, raising big questions about what is actually behind the dramatic drop in teen pregnancies, births, and abortions. Clearly some teenage girls have figured out a way to avoid getting pregnant. But what exactly it is that they are doing—and why—remains a mystery.

Of course, it’s not all good news. Despite the downward trends, the US still has more teen births than any other industrialized nation. According to the report, there were still some 614,000 teen pregnancies in 2010—a huge number that doesn’t include 11,000 pregnancies among girls aged 14 and below. The study also found that while teen pregnancy declined nationally, progress from state to state has been uneven, and pregnancy rates among black and Hispanic teens remain twice as high as rates for white teens.

“One of the nation's great national success stories over the past two decades has been the truly stunning declines in teen pregnancy and childbearing,” said Bill Albert, the chief program officer for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies. “But when we talk about all of this good news, we do have to temper it a bit with a glass half-empty interpretation.”

The most obvious, albeit slightly surprising, explanation for the decline in pregnancy rates is that teens are actually having less sex than they used to. According to federal data, 57 percent of teen girls reported that they were virgins in 2010, up from 49 percent in 1995. That timeline closely corresponds to the heyday of abstinence-only sex ed, which started getting federal funding as part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and turned into a billion industry under the George W. Bush administration before the Obama administration slashed abstinence spending in 2009. Interestingly, CDC studies have found that since 2002, the number one reason most teens, male or female, give for not having had sex is that it is “against their religion or morals.” All of which suggests that telling kids they should wait to have sex—or alternatively, warning them that premarital sex will turn you into a prostitute and/or junkie, as the Las Vegas Police Department did at a “Choose Purity” event last weekend—might actually be working, at least for some teens.

“The Guttmacher report doesn’t really address the fact that there is an increase in the number of high-school students who are waiting to have sex,” said Valerie Huber, president of the National Abstinence Education Association. “Anyone who wants to have an honest dialogue about this has to acknowledge the fact that in the midst of a highly sexualized cultures, teens are holding off on having sex.”

Abstinence-only or otherwise, sex ed is horrifying, so it’s not totally surprising that it has scared kids out of having sex. Add to that the Teen Mom tabloid horror show and crying-toddler PSAs, and it’s safe to say teen girls are getting the message that having a baby is really fucking terrible.

But while the overall teen pregnancy rate includes a substantial number of young women who have never had intercourse, the Guttmacher report also found that pregnancy has also declined among teens who are having sex, dropping 43 percent from its 1990 peak to a rate of about 127 pregnancies per 1,000 women. It’s worth noting, too, that most girls haven’t had any sex education by the time they lose their virginity, according to a recent CDC report, which calls the mistiming a “missed opportunity to introduce medically accurate information on abstinence and effective contraceptive use.”

It is true that kids are using contraception way more than they did back in the days before AIDS and the Moral Majority, when bras were optional and everyone was having cowboy sex. But just because teen pregnancy rates are falling doesn’t mean that teens are practicing safe sex. About half of new STD infections in the US are contracted by people under age 25, and girls ages 15-19 have the largest number of reported cases of gonorrhea and chlamydia, according to the most recent CDC statistics. Moreover, data shows that rates of contraception use among teens didn’t change much between 2002 and 2010, although teen pregnancy rates fell by about 18 percent during that period.

“There seems to be an unsolvable mystery here,” said Bill Albert. “Teen sex has gone down, but it has leveled off, contraceptive use continues to creep up a little bit. But pregnancy rates have fallen off the charts. And yet the STD rates remain quite high.”

So what exactly is it that teen girls are doing to avoid getting knocked up? Maybe it’s as simple as taking Plan B, which wasn’t available at pharmacies until 2006 (and even then, only with a prescription for women under age 17.) Or maybe teen girls are just telling their boyfriends to pull the fuck out. Maybe it’s some combination of factors, and teen girl magic. Whatever it is, finding the answer could unlock the secret to helping the too-high number of teen girls that are still getting pregnant.

“As with all things, the more targeted you can get, the narrower you can refine the message, the more successful you can be,” said Albert. “The wrong message to take from the new data is that we can pack up our tents and go home. It's not like we found a vaccination.” 

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–NBA legend Michael Jordan makes a shocking admission in an upcoming book about this life. The New York Post reported that in Michael Jordan: The Life by Ronald Lazenby, the Hall of Famer admits that as a teenager, he had contempt for all white people. Jordan grew up in North Carolina during the 1970s, in a hotbed of KKK activity. In the book, Jordan recounts a story where he threw a soda at a girl who called him a "nigger." 

“I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people," Jordan is quoted as saying. Of course, saying you used to be a racist isn't a crime. There are a lot of awesome ex-racists out there. The guy from American History X, Paula Deen, the late Strom Thurmond, Michael Richards, and Mel Gibson all used to be racist. They saw the error of their ways and evolved. Same with Air Jordan. Eventually, Michael Jordan saw the many, many great things about white people. Golf, cigars, polo shirts, and money are all awesome. I bet some of Michael Jordan's best friends are white. I bet the guys who fly Michael Jordan's private plane and details his fleet of luxury automobiles are white. 

It's easy to hate when you are given ample reasons to do so. Having racial slurs (and actual physical objects) thrown at you is a pretty difficult rationale to quibble with, and I'm sure there are white people, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans who have similar reasons for being prejudiced. It's even harder to avoid feelings of ill will when you're trapped in a small town where races don't easily mix. Once Michael Jordan's talent developed and he was clearly destined to be special, it was no longer practical to hate.

As the world around you grows, so does your perspective. Maybe that doesn't always happen, but it does more often than not. Unfortunately, not everyone can be as wealthy and gifted as Michael Jordan. "Be Like Mike" is less a slogan than a thinly veiled taunt. People of all races benefit from more opportunity, even if they can't dunk. The more comfortable society becomes with ignoring economic and social disparities, the more racial tension will develop. If only people like Michael Jordan would speak up more. 5

Photo via Flickr User Mullan Alzheimer

–Former Florida Governor, Florida State Senator, Florida Education Commissioner, and Florida Attorney General (shit, this guy's had more jobs than Chris Hardwick, Ryan Seacrest, Carson Daly, and Charlie Rose combined)  Charlie Crist claimed in a recent TV appearance that he left the Republican Party mainly due to perceived racist attitudes in the GOP toward President Obama. The conventional wisdom is that Crist's willingness to give Obama a bro-hug during an event promoting the President's economic plan sealed his 2010 defeat to US Senate opponent Marco Rubio. In that race, Crist had already left the GOP to become an independent, but two years later, Crist went full donkey and re-registered as a Democrat.

His comments come at a pretty odd time, as he's engaged in a tight race with incumbent Republican Governor Rick Scott. Maybe it's Crist doubling down on his base, or just the act of a man who's had too much over-the-counter cough syrup, but this could seriously alienate him from the moderate voters that tend to swing an election in a purple state one way or another. Just to throw some salt in the wound, Crist's nemesis Senator Rubio called Crist's comments "absurd" and "ridiculous and silly" in an interview with Fox News. If a guy begging for support from within his own party is putting you on blast, you should probably take a second to reconsider your strategy. Also, Crist is one to talk about racism, since he's so orange that he's practically created his own brand new ethnicity. 5

Photo via Flickr User accidentalpaparazzi

–Kim Kardashian is speaking out about racism, which is sure to turn the tide of intolerance any day now. Kardashian posted a blog entry which details her newfound understanding of racial politics. She attributes this awareness to the birth of her first child, North West. Let this be a lesson to all of you out there: having a baby solves all of your problems. Not the world's problems, just yours. 1

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

u a nigger @michaeljordan

— YungSoySauce (@_iansewell) May 6, 2014

I refuse to go to indulge for happy hour I really hate you colored folks despite being a Coon

— Coonie J (@_JMoye) May 9, 2014

Steven is a dirty wetback who lives in bum fuck Texas cause he works for the drug cartel and smuggles cocaine into the US

— MissterJameson (@Spac3ghost) May 9, 2014

I look like a fuckin sand nigger right now.. Holy shit

— Shane (@Shane8oh1) May 8, 2014

Dice K you fuckin dune coon sand Muslim prick I hate your guts! Get your bags packed nd go back to your country where they might welcome you

— Broseph A. Spivey (@Spivey_Kid) May 6, 2014

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GOP Rep. John Mica assuring himself a place in the history books. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Debates about drug legalization tend to take place in exotic places like Uruguay and the state of Colorado that US political elites in Washington, DC, can dismiss as far away dens of nefarious hedonism. So it hit a bit closer to home a few weeks ago when the local city council voted overwhelmingly to decriminalize pot in the streets of DC, raising the specter (in the most paranoid minds, at least) of choom gangs harassing lawmakers as they make their way between Capitol Hill and swanky parties with corporate lobbyists.

Mayor Vincent Gray quickly signed the bill, which would render most possession offenses civil violations with fines rather than jailtime, as is already the case in 17 states ranging from Alaska to New York. And normally, that would be that. But because this is our nation's capital, one where the mostly black population has lacked legitimate representation since America's founding, federal lawmakers on Friday morning held a goofy hearing about what the crazy natives have been up to. In fact, if both houses of Congress were to pass a bill blocking the DC law before it goes into effect this summer, all it would take is a signature from Mr. Choom Gang himself to negate it entirely.

Given the way the hearing started, that outcome did not seem completely beyond the realm of possibility.

"Marijuana is an addicting substance. There’s a myth out there that it’s not," said Republican Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana, who annnounced plans to introduce a bill blocking the decriminalization law during a break from the proceedings. The GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee that conducted the hearing, Rep. John Mica, went so far as to brandish a fake joint apparently assembled by his staff—"They have more experience," he said—and warn that pot is a gateway to more serious drugs, a refrain most of us have been hearing from cranky old people our entire lives. (Mica complained there was no way to submit the doobie to the congressional record: “I can’t submit this … as I said, it’s a faux joint.")

But legalization advocates I canvassed immediately after the hearing are confident the law will survive, in part because the national trendlines are clear at this point—even many Republicans don't want to look like old school drug warriors anymore, as it just kills them with young libertarians. And advocacy for the DC bill centered on the fact that weed arrests disproportionately affect black youth even though they use the drug no more often than whites, not the idea that we should be free to get high.

"The DC decriminalization bill is fundamentally about racial justice," said Seema Sadanandan, program director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital and one of the experts who testified at the hearing. "We don't want this to become a flashpoint for some partisan battle." (To his credit, Rep. Mica acknowledged the racial bias in drug arrests to be a problem, even if he was skeptical decriminalization would fix it.) The strategy is poised to bear fruit.

"DC decriminalization will take effect in mid-July," Bill Piper, director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, e-mailed me confidently. "There's no way Congress can stop it before then. Fleming's resolution will never pass, and even an appropriations rider would come long after decriminalization takes effect."

The rider he's talking about is a more surreptitious way lawmakers might block DC's decriminalization plans. Indeed, it's how they gutted a medical marijuana ballot initiative city voters passed in 1998. Each year, the House of Representatives passes a financial services funding bill that includes money for the District of Columbia, and theoretically lawmakers could include language prohibiting any of that cash from being spent on enforcing the new law. But because the spending bill isn't likely to pass until late this year—if it passes at all, no slam dunk given how dysfunctional Congress has been lately—DC's new law will have already become reality. Turning back the clock on drug policy would be a stretch given the way the national winds are blowing, especially when combined with the crystal clear implications for the city's youth.

"It seems increasingly unlikely that congressional leadership will see interfering with DC's decriminalization law as a smart political move," said Tom Angell, founder of Marijuana Majority, a national legalization advocacy group. Of course, that doesn't mean the old dudes who run this country can't keep acting like reactionary buffoons to remind us how out of touch they are.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week Syrian rebels blow up an Aleppo hotel used by government soldiers, Venezuelan security forces arrest more than 200 students in the latest crackdown on protests, American fast food workers plan to strike across 150 cities, and Pakistani families resort to risky measures to vaccinate their children against polio.

Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria

On the night of April 15, police in Peoria, Illinois, raided the house of my friend Jon Daniel in response to his operating a parody Twitter account mocking Peoria mayor Jim Ardis. The incident sparked a media firestorm, with Peoria all of a sudden being covered by national outlets like Al Jazeera and the Washington Post, and Ardis was condemned for what looked like a clear violation of the First Amendment. (Daniel is not being charged with any crime in connection with the Twitter account because, obviously, it’s not illegal to mock a public official.)

What wasn’t clear at the time was how intimately involved Ardis and Chief of Police Steve Settingsgaard were in ordering the raid, but according to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, city officials were so eager to nail the author of the parody Twitter account that they had a detective comb through Illinois statutes to find something to charge him with, in the process bungling the legal aspects of the case and drawing the ire of local citizens.

Ardis and others learned of the account on March 11 and sent dozens of emails over the next few days, apparently panicked by the idea that someone with a few dozen Twitter followers was making fun of the mayor. On March 12, Ardis himself asked City Manager Patrick Urich, “Any chance we can put a sense of urgency on this?” Urich passed that request on to Settingsgaard, saying, “Quickly please.”

On March 13, Ardis emailed Settingsgaard and told him he wanted to pursue criminal charges against whoever was running the account, @peoriamayor, apparently unaware that no crime had been committed. “I will absolutely prosecute,” the mayor wrote to the chief. “Bring it on.”

A day later, the first of three search warrants relating to the case was filed. At that time, the account had already been marked a parody, according to documents gleaned from one of three FOIA requests filed by Muckrock.

A screenshot of some of the parody account's Tweets.

Parody accounts are allowed by Twitter as long as they are clearly marked as satire, and the social network informed city officials of this after they requested to have the account shut down. Despite this, and despite the fact that Twitter ended up suspending the account on March 20, Ardis and Settingsgaard continued to press the matter for weeks afterward.

“It's not a joke & it's not funny,” Ardis wrote to Settingsgaard on April 16, the day after the raid. “I want this Prosecuted because what they did was WRONG.”

The next day Ardis and Settingsgaard exchanged several emails after an Associated Press reporter contacted the pair seeking comment on the raid—by then, the story was becoming a national punchline. Settingsgaard sought the mayor’s permission to talk with the journalist.

“Jim, do you have a problem with me speaking (to the reporter) and telling them that this account violated Illinois law, with no indication that it was meant to be a parody until well into the investigation, and that you filed a criminal complaint?” Settingsgaard wrote to Ardis. “I can also ignore it and let them spin it the way they want to spin it.”

“Go ahead,” Ardis responded. “And tell them you couldn’t print what (Daniel) wrote in the paper or say it on TV because it was so crude.”

“I like that,” Settingsgaard replied. “For anyone in the media who would like to say that we should not prosecute this, I challenge them to print or cite what was written there word for word. It was patently offensive.”

The tweets Daniel posted portrayed Ardis as partying and hanging out with strippers, a la Toronto’s Rob Ford. For instance, on March 12 @peoriamayor tweeted, “2 fucking things to get off my chest. 1. If you don’t like Peoria and u wanna sit here and bitch about den leave. 2. Who stole my crackpipe?” The day before, Daniel had the fake mayor say, “Im up all night and woke up with pussy on my breath and blood shot eyes and we got people talking about live tweeting. Let me do my job u do urs.”

Though Settingsgaard presumably agreed with the mayor that the tweets were a nasty piece of work, he didn’t think they constituted a crime, and neither did James Feehan, a detective the chief consulted with. In a March 11 email sent to Ardis, Settingsgaard expressed this belief (emphasis mine):

“Mayor/Manager, I reviewed this matter with Detective Feehan. He is in the process of shutting down the account as you saw from my last email. This phony Twitter account does not constitute a criminal violation in that no threats are made. I'm not sure if it would support a civil suit for defamation of character. I'm not an expert in the civil arena but my recollection is that public officials have very limited protection from defamation. I asked (Ardis) about identity theft and he advised it did not qualify because the statute requires the use of personal identifying information such as a social security number, DOB, etc., and a financial gain form (sic) the use of that information. Twitter does not require identifying information other than an email address and name, and there appears to be no financial gain.”

The email was backed up by one Feehan sent that same morning (again, emphasis mine):

“I looked at the comments and photographs posted by the suspect. Nothing contained within amounts to criminal violations. However, there are tweets posted by the individual which amount to defamation. Without a subpoena issued to Twitter to obtain the IP address of the account creator, there is not much else we can do. I did send Twitter the report of the impersonating account and requested it be removed asap.”

That reading of the law—that Daniel hadn't committed a crime when he posed as a grotesque version of Ardis—shifted over the next two days. The change in opinion came when Feehan discovered Illinois statute 720 ILCS 5/17-2, which dealt with “false personification.” Settingsgaard reported to Ardis:

“Feehan is preparing a notice to advise Twitter that the account violates Illinois law and an order that would cause Twitter to preserve the record for evidentiary purposes. Is it correct to assume that you wish to prosecute the offender criminally? It is a misdemeanor but it is still a crime. If so we can proceed on it. Feehan will need to meet with you to take a formal complaint from you.

We will also check with the (State’s Attorney’s Office) to make sure we are interpreting and applying this new statute correctly. I believe we are.”

Peoria County Judge Kirk Schoenbein agreed, and on March 14 authorized the warrant that allowed police to obtain the IP address linked to the parody account. Judge Lisa Wilson signed off on another warrant on March 29 that gave police the right to obtain a massive store of data from Comcast, the internet service provider at the home of Daniel’s roommate Jake Elliott (who, thanks to the raid, is now dealing with an unrelated drug charge for possession of marijuana). In his search warrant affidavit, detective Stevie Hughes wrote that there was “probable cause to believe” that the seized data would contain “evidence, fruits, contraband, and instrumentalities of the dissemination and possession of child pornography.”

Far left, the author, middle, Jake Elliott, far right, Jon Daniel

But that wasn’t enough.

Police had a name and an address. And they thought they had the person behind the account in Elliott. So Hughes filed for a third warrant, this one allowing police to seize electronics from the home. The warrant was approved by Peoria County Judge Kim Kelley, and called for the seizure of numerous electronic devices as well as “heroin, cocaine, and drug paraphernalia.”

None of that stuff was found in the home, and in fact the premise of the raid—that someone was violating 720 ILCS 5/17-2—was legally shaky. While the subsection of the statute that deals specifically with public officials makes it a crime to impersonate one in person, it does not specifically state that doing so online is a criminal act. This caveat was addressed in an email sent from Settingsgaard to Urich on April 18—three days after the raid—that had “Twitter problem” as the subject line.

“Det. Feehan is going to review with [Peoria County State’s Attorney Jerry] Brady on Monday but there may be an internet exception to the impersonating statute. If it is exempt, everyone missed it from the investigators to the (State’s Attorney’s Office) and the judges.”

Following the raid, police interrogated Elliott and his girlfriend, Michelle Pratt, about the parody account and took Daniel and another roommate in for questioning. At that time Daniel refused to talk, but told me police confiscated his phone without his consent as part of their investigation. Late on April 17, city staff began talking about the swelling media attention. In one email thread between city employee Rachel Cook and Chief Information Officer Sam Rivera, they discussed the backlash to the police raid that was being directed at the city’s official Facebook and Twitter pages. Rivera linked to a CNET.com story about the raid and said, “It’s only going to get worse.” By the next day, Rivera saw fit to forward his email exchanges with Cook to Ardis, Settingsgaard, City Manager Patrick Urich.

Just a few moments before sharing the thread, Cook asked Rivera: “Does mayor (sic), (City Attorney Sonni Williams), or Settingsgaard know how widespread this is yet?”

If they didn’t by then, they soon would.

Peoria County State's Attorney Jerry Brady at a press conference April 25. Brady announced that day that no charges would be filed in relation to the Twitter account.

Four days later, on April 22, Ardis, Urich, and Williams were grilled by members of the Peoria City Council over what had become known as the “Twitter raid.” Additionally, several citizens spoke in damning terms about the actions of police, the mayor, and whoever else had been involved in the investigation. None were as scolding as Elliott’s grandmother Caroline, though, who spoke in soft but admonishing tones to Ardis and told him that while the account was certainly not in the best taste, it didn’t amount to a crime.

“It was my grandson in that house. And the stories he’s telling, and the other kids who are in that house are telling, are absolutely ridiculous,” she said. “I just wonder, what happened with you sending the squad to my grandson’s residence?

“I don’t think you need to use your employees as weapons to get even with the citizens of this city," she went on. "We have the right to stand up for what we believe in. We have the right to have freedom of speech in this country.”

Caroline Elliott’s sentiment was echoed in dozens of emails sent from around the country and the world. The communications are part of nearly 200 emails released through the FOIA request, which in addition to showing a massive amount of messages sent between police and city staff also show the full scope of vitriol from the Twittersphere.

“Keeping the world safe from Twitter. I guess there is no Constitutional Oath sworn by your officers,” a man named Dave wrote to the police department. “My sincere hope is your department feels the wrath of the web for your corrupt actions.”

Somewhat ironically, the tweets Ardis had called “filth” and “sexual doggeral” were G-rated compared to the threats of murder, maiming, and rape coming from across the country. As the level of hatred in the complaint emails rose and climaxed, Ardis and the city government clammed up, in full-on damage control.

When I emailed Settingsgaard for comment, he defended the handling of the case, saying the number of emails between the cops and city employees over the Twitter raid was “not typical but not unheard of either.” When I said that many saw the whole case as an egregious waste of taxpayer resources, he replied, “I don't believe there were as many man hours spent on the case as some would believe. Oftentimes people equate the amount of media coverage with the amount of time spent by the police on the case when the two have little to no relationship.” (You can read his full responses to my questions here.)

For his part, Brady said his office’s involvement in what has turned into a national debacle that has caused many to question whether a lawsuit could punish Ardis and the city for possible First and Fourth Amendment violations, was done by the book.

“From our standpoint this is how investigations normally proceed,” Brady said. “Communication may have been more broad just due to the nature of this alleged offense—that it did involve a public official.”

Ardis did not return an email seeking comment. 

Justin Glawe is a freelance journalist who lives in Peoria. He chronicles crime and violence there.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user waltarrrrr

It may be unjust, but nobody will ever consider you classy after Bill Clinton penetrates you with a cigar and has “oral-anal contact” with you. Don’t tell that to Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s least favorite “narcissistic loony tune” who is talking about the sex scandal that defined her life in a personal essay in Vanity Fair, the magazine for respectable wealthy people who like their celebrity sleaze swaddled in $8,000 dresses. (It’s not online, but you can read bits of it here.)

Lewinsky writes she decided to share her story with the world after she talked to her mom about Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge because his roommate secretly filmed his gay hook-up. During their conversation, Lewinsky’s mother burst into tears because Clementi’s suicide reminded her of the times her daughter considered suicide after Matt Drudge broke the news of Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton. “Perhaps by sharing my story, I reasoned,” Lewinsky writes, “I might be able to help others in their darkest moments of humiliation.”

Clementi committed suicide in 2010 and the trial of his roommate Dharun Ravi ended in 2012, so the timing of the essay is a little weird, but otherwise Lewinsky has a point: She was the first person to be at the center of a public scandal that unfolded in the age of the internet, the spiritual ancestor of women like Sydney Leathers, the sexter who brought down Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign.

One lesson to draw from Lewinsky’s life since she became the woman with whom the president did not have sexual intercourse is that it’s almost impossibly difficult to return to normal life after you get famous for something like that. After attending grad school in London, she writes, she struggled to make ends meet and had to occasionally take loans from family and friends. Respectable employers rejected her because of her history and the publicity that would presumably follow her, while others just want to profit from her image and story—she claims she’s been offered deals that would have made her upwards of $10 million.

If Lewinsky had embraced her identity as the world’s most famous other woman, she no doubt could have made a comfortable living, say, appearing in ads for cigars, breath mints, and phallic foods she could insert into her mouth on camera. She could have been Paris Hilton four years before The Simple Life aired. Instead of everyone talking about her reentry into public discourse with the Vanity Fair essay, we’d be wishing she’d shut up.

Instead Lewinsky tried to straddle exploiting her scandal-driven fame and respectability. She hosted a (short-lived) dating show, started a (failed) handbag line, and accepted a $500,000 deal to tell her story to a journalist instead of a rumored $5 million deal from Judith Regan, the controversial publishing mastermind behind OJ Simpson’s If I Did It and other insanely profitable celebrity books.

Lewinsky could afford to turn down offers like Regan’s because she had a well-off family she could rely on in times of financial crisis. Other stigmatized mistresses have had to take any deal they can get. In a personal Facebook status this week, Sydney Leathers, who made a porno and tried to auction off bits of her labia after her 15 minutes of fame as Weiner’s sexting partner, asked her followers to imagine if Lewinsky had come from her working-class background. Depending on your point of view, Leathers told me in a text, Lewinsky would have made smarter or lousier business decisions—but she definitely would have tried to cash in a lot more, rather than trying to simultaneously profit off her infamy and separate herself from her scandal and get back the trajectory her life was on pre-Clinton.

As the Vanity Fair essay shows, Lewinsky is still clinging to decorum. While discussing how Hillary Clinton called her a “narcissistic loony tune,” Lewinsky refers to Clinton as “Mrs. Clinton,” a move that virtually screams HIGH ROAD, as do lines like, “In 2008, when Hillary was running for president, I remained virtually reclusive, despite being inundated with press requests,” and, “recently I’ve found myself gun-shy yet again, fearful of ‘becoming an issue’ should she decide to ramp up her campaign.”

I was a bullied gay teen four years ago, and I can tell you that the vast majority of the young homos and other ostracized outsiders—the people Lewinsky is ostensibly writing to help—don’t empathize much with this longread-for-Vanity-Fair stuff. Thanks to the internet, there are dozens of places to find personal narratives where the stigmatized and abused share their stories. Tumblr has helped proliferate a culture of outrage, but it's also changed the national conversation about women by allowing anyone to publish a personal essay. These blog posts, along with reality TV, are slowly making Americans less prude. When Lewinsky’s sex acts were in the news thanks to the Starr Report, the details seemed salacious, but now all of that stuff will be on a single episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It’s so-called “low culture” like reality TV, internet confessionals, and cheesy pop music that speaks the language of the bullied.  

If Lewinsky truly wants to help outsiders, she shouldn’t remain silent or write high-minded essays—she should team up with Leathers, V Stiviano, and other alleged mistresses for a reality show, or a public outing coincidentally filmed by TMZ, that would celebrate their notoriety and actually help American outcasts. 

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter. 

Painting by Kunisada Surimono. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

If you aren’t masturbating right now, you should be. May is International Masturbation Month, which means if you have been celebrating properly, you should have carpal tunnel and a very sticky laptop. If you haven’t, you should clear your weekend plans for some five-knuckle shuffle.

Good Vibrations, a sex toy shop in San Francisco, declared May 7, 1995 to be the first National Masturbation Day, after President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders because she suggested that masturbation be included in sex education as a way to combat the spread of AIDS. Obviously, one day was not enough to dedicate to the practice of self-love, so the entire month was soon devoted to rubbing one out.

Since I think everyone should take advantage of their right to masturbate all month long, I have rounded up the best masturbatory tools for your pleasure. It’s time for you to spend some quality time with you.

Fresh Brew Love Skin® Masturbator Vagina

Want to masturbate discreetly on your morning commute or during a boring meeting? You can do it with this masturbator that is disguised as a coffee cup. No one will even notice you're dunking your dick in the java like a jelly doughnut. Buy it here for $11.

XM Midi Ring Vibrator

This is the only ring that matters during Masturbation Month. It will give you more pleasure than a bulky carbon stone any day. All your friends will be jealous. Buy it here for $74.95.

Keith Haring Tenga

Tenga makes your dick feel like it’s been sucked up by a vacuum cleaner—in a good way. This one is extra special because it was designed by Keith Haring, so you can keep it around for decoration or regift when you’re finished. Buy it here for $9.99.

Lovelife Smile Discreet Vibrator

All women need this Smile vibrator in their life. It knows you better than you know yourself. It has adjustable speeds and fits in your pocket. I think God created it. Buy it here for $59.

Bordello Saskia

Who doesn’t want to fuck a lady piledriver-style? Plus the description says she is an educated conversationalist who loves to laugh. Clearly this fine little lady will keep you entertained for hours and won’t complain about cramping up. Buy it here for $118.

Cheeky Pets Three Speed Vibe

This is for all the animal lovers out there. This three-speed vibrator comes in various shapes such as bear, alligator, and walrus. If you ever had the urge to shove a cute creature into your vagina, here is your chance. You can even cuddle it when you’re done. Buy it here for $28.82.

"Getting Off: A Woman's Guide to Masturbation"

A little reading material between petting the pussy will help you have an even better orgasm the next go-round. Buy it here for $15.95.

Realistic Tongue Vibrator

I was drawn to this product because it’s shaped like a tongue, but after further observation, the color makes it look like it belongs to Gollum. I think some chicks dig that, so I am keeping it on the list. Buy it here for $14.39.

Lonely and Lusty Inflatable Love Doll

Masturbation Month is a time to embrace being lonely and lusty. This love doll has a ribbed love tunnel and a deep throat. Just look at that face. You might have to call off of work for this one. Buy it here for $86.01.

Penthouse® Secrets Bath Bliss

This kit is all about relaxing and romancing. Light a candle, blow up the bath pillow, and give yourself the best orgasm of your life with the multi-speed massager. Buy it here for $29.99.

Misty Stone Butt Fleshlight

This is an exact replica of Misty’s gorgeous booty hole. If you are looking to get some backdoor action, this is the obvious way to go. Just close your eyes and you'll really feel like you're inside of her large intestine. Buy it here for $59.96.

Animal Delight Dual Rotating Vibe

This new product also incorporates animal buddies into your orgasms. This time they just vibe on your girly parts as a cute little reminder they’re there. Buy it here for $69.99.

I hope you have a great time playing with yourself. Happy Masturbation Month!

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.

Yo yo yee-yah! It's Saturday and 82 degrees in New York City, which means it's time for the Week In GIFs. Catch up on what you didn't hear about this week because you were out getting drunk and being a degenerate!
 

GIFs by Daniel Stuckey

Some woman filmed her abortion, and YouTube was nonplussed. Expected and arguably hypocritical considering how popular scat videos are on there. Either way, all-around dumb and in my opinion a bigger challenge to the concept of privacy (my privacy, to be clear) than even the NSA leaks.

“Cannibal Cop” (awesome title for a movie, btw) Gilberto Valle is responsible for cooking breakfast and lunch for his fellow inmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. At least that's what the New York Daily News was told by his mommy dearest, who still thinks he's a “good kid” despite making intricate plans about how he was going to kidnap, kill, cook, and eat his then-wife and 100 other women on a fetish website. Valle and his mom say it was all fantasy. His current inmates say, “Why does this chili taste so weird!?!?” Just kidding, but they should.

In other food-related news, despite what you may have heard, a high school student in Bakersfield, California, DID NOT bake splooge into cupcakes and then feed it to bully classmates who had picked on her. But she did serve them up, smiled widely while they chowed down, and then after they were finished tell them that stuff like pubes, jizz, expired food, and pills had been on the ingredients list. Sites like Gawker hedged against the story with a “grain of salt” but haven't bothered to correct it. And that's because... sites like Gawker have no souls? Or maybe they're just lazy. 

In other fake news that Gawker and other lame-brained sites purported to be real, we have the case of the girl who was hit in the head with a shovel and hours later dropped dead from head injuries while watching Mean Girls. It doesn't take a punch-up guy working out of a West Hollywood CBTL to figure out that this was a load of shit. Again, Gawker offered no correction because, hey, traffic... but to be fair, I'm not sure if the post was written by a staffer or a glorified commenter considering that there is barely any distinction between the two these days. Cuz, hey, who needs editors! Fuck 'em! 

There was bad news in São Paulo earlier in the week, when yet another worker died while rushing to finish a stadium ahead of the World Cup. This guy was electrocuted and later died of cardiorespiratory arrest, making it the eighth fatality attributed to World Cup preparations. Sadly, something tells us that's going to only be a drop in the bucket once the favelas start heating up. Or that “something” is us, because we reported on it for our HBO show.

Something I wish was headline news every day: A few lion cubs at the Smithsonian passed their mandatory swim test. Hooray! 

Runner-up for most awesome news of the week goes to this ATM that spits acid at would-be robbers when someone tries to bust it open. In your face, literally, dickheads! 

Monica Lewinsky made headlines earlier this week by writing a piece for Vanity Fair's latest issue, in which she expresses regret for getting caught giving Bill Clinton a blowjob while he was president. She also talks a bit of smack on Hillary, who (very) arguably is the only one who will gain long-term benefits from rehashing a scandal that was utterly boring in the first place. Monica, if you really want to make some headlines sell that dress at Christie's. Presidential semen increases the value of everything. Our weekend editor makes the best point of anyone by comparing Monica to Paris Hilton. 

Continuing the frenzy over killing supposedly killer sharks that's been going on for a bit now in Australia, the formal penal colony just murdered 50 of the largest sharks it could manage to catch because, one can only reason, they think Jaws is a documentary. At least they still have Outback Steakhouse!

This week’s Weediquette is a special treat from one of my favorite Philadelphians, a talented artist and musician named Steve Teare. I first met Steve at the M-Room (which is short for the Manhattan Room though the neighborhood looks like Camden, New Jersey), where he played guitar for MC Poop Dog, a foul-mouthed rapper who later changed his name to El Oso and wrote equally foul folk songs. At the time I had no idea that Steve could draw the shit out of comics. We reconnected a couple of months back, and he agreed to turn one of my Weediquette stories into a comic. I am delighted with the result, and I hope you like it too.

Here’s Steve’s rendition of “Blazing in the Woods.” Enjoy!

Steve Teare is an artist, musician, and teacher based in Philadelphia. Read Back and Forth, his ongoing web comic.

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Photos by Justin Morrison and Kelly O

I've watched a lot of weird porn, because stereotypical porn about fake blondes with fake boobs bouncing on a greasy dude’s dick is meh to me. I have no desire to watch a cartoon pound E.T. in the ass while yelling, “Shut up and take it, space whore!” (E.T. 2: Dark Territory) or watch porn in a public theater—what sex columnist and It Gets Better Project founder Dan Savage described as “seeing porn the old-fashioned way,” when he spoke to me over the phone a few weeks ago.

Since 2005 Savage has organized the HUMP! Film Festival. Every year regular people become porn stars for a weekend, filming their own five-minute sex tapes that they show at the festival, where they compete for cash prizes. This year Savage has taken 20 of the short films on tour across America. A few weeks ago, I attended the New York stop of the HUMP! Tour to pop my porn-theatre cherry. 

Before the event I wondered if the theater's ushers would pass through the aisles to check if anyone was masturbating. As Chie, a young Canadian woman in attendance, put it, “This is definitely my first time doing anything like this. I've watched lesbian porn at home, sure, but nothing this wild and not with this many people around.” Chances are some of the amateur porn stars had never watched porn in a theater either. “We got submissions from teachers, doctors, lawyers, bus drivers, and baristas who want to show off, have fun, and get their freak on,” Savage told me. 

Some of their movies were more silly than sexy. The mocumentary Mythical Proportions explored the taboo of centaur sex, while other films were straight up sexy. Magic Love showed a straight, good-looking couple fucking in various places, including a bubble bath filled with packing peanuts—at one point he flung a peanut off his penis, and she caught it in her mouth.

The crowd favorites were tapes that were both hardcore and humorous. In The Beat a hot, young guy masturbated intensely with various anal toys. He delivered the perfect pop shot, and then the music changed, and we saw him picking up a bible and dressing in a sweater vest adorned with a nametag that revealed he’s a Mormon.

Tim, another audience member, told me his favorite aspect of the festival was that “the films were both sexy and funny, which is hard to achieve—it's usually one or the other.” This is what Savage was going for. “The films were meant to be both sexy and funny, which is how sex really is,” he explained. I told Dan I thought the film that won Best in Show last year, Ouroboros, was both explicit and romantic. The gay sex scene was so hot Rick Santorum would get hard watching it, yet for every explicit moment or funny joke, there was an intimate moment that balanced the scale, allowing hearts to warm as well as genitals.

Best of all, the festival taught straight dudes to get down with realistic gay and lesbian porn. One guy, Ben, saw gay porn for the first time at the festival. Krutch taught the audience about realistic lesbian sex and to remember that disabled people have fully functioning private parts. Described as proof “that people with disabilities have [genitals] that work just fine,” the movie cut back and forth between the disabled protagonist walking through New York City, dealing with public transportation, and masturbating at home in her leopard-print sheets. At the end of the film, her girlfriend walked in to join her, finding her face flushed with post-orgasm sweat. (Porn can be romantic!)

Other movies introduced the audience to new sex techniques. Edged taught the audience about edging (bringing someone to the brink of an orgasm then not allowing them to come), when the sub character unsuccessfully prevented her orgasm by thinking about tampon commercials and Sarah Palin.

One of my favorite shorts was Lauren Likes Candy, an S&M piece set against a chain-link fence. The film featured a Janet Jackson-style nipple clamp removal that made the audience gasp. The film balanced the extreme content with the ending, when the characters lay on the floor laughing—of course, there weren’t many lesbian-oriented movies. My one problem with the festival was the lack of trans, queer, and lesbian porn. 

“That was a hurdle in putting the fest together,” Savage said, defending the event. “We don't keep any copies of the films or paperwork after the fest is over, so when we decided to take it back on the road, we had to from memory reach out to filmmakers. Not everyone we contacted wanted their film on tour. They felt comfortable with it in Seattle and Portland, but not in their home city.” He said the movies’ gender variance depended on what films people submitted.

“Three or four years ago, we had absolutely no lesbian films at all, which was a bummer for us, but then the next year, we were overwhelmed with lesbian submissions!” Savage said. “HUMP! is generated by its audiences. If there is something you want to see, make it!”

Savage had a point: HUMP! only reflects the turn-ons and politics of the participants. This structure has its flaws because it leaves certain groups out some years, but it also allows attendees to feel (some what) comfortable while learning they're turned on by porn they would never watch at home. How else would straight dudes know that realistic lesbian sex is hot?

For upcoming dates of the HUMP! Tour click here.

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