Pop Star Emily Vaughn is Our Crush

Pop star Emily Vaughn has a love/hate relationship with social media.

The 24-year-old Florida native was recently in Hawaii trying to unplug from a busy life in Los Angeles when she looked at her phone and instantly regretted it.

Checking social media, she came across a post that brought all her anxieties to the surface. Another up-and-coming pop star had released a single with the same title as one of Vaughn’s songs. Its cachet was lost.

“I do struggle with depression and anxiety, and being on social media can make it even more difficult,” the singer admits. “There’s always something to compare yourself to. My generation are the guinea pigs of how this tool will affect our mental health.”

Like most in Gen Z would, Vaughn took to Instagram to write about her feelings. She tapped out a long message about anxiety, depression, and mental health. She posted it, closed her phone, and felt relief.

“It’s ironic I’m bitching about social media,” Vaughn says, “because I owe my whole career to the internet.”

She grew up on Merritt Island, near Cape Canaveral, with a musical mother who also taught visual art. Vaughn and her sister played piano and guitar, and sang, often performing in school musicals and choir.

“Coming from a town of 30,000 people, I never imagined I could actually be a pop singer,” Vaughn says. “No one in my town was doing things like that.”

She was writing songs, though, sitting on her bedroom floor with her guitar or perched at the piano, her voice memo app on. Soon, she started putting the music online, hoping to catch the attention of some industry insider. Eventually, she was discovered by a music manager who flew her out to L.A. for a meet and greet. It went well (obviously), and Vaughn moved west in 2017.

Her singles have popped online, gathering a whopping three million-plus listens on Spotify. She’s been praised by Nylon, Interview, and V magazine for her infectious, daring hooks and lyrics that mix emotion with tongue-in-cheek humor that come off sweet as honey.

Her debut EP, Bitch Bops, dropped in April, and soon she’ll be hitting the road for her first American tour. For now, though, she’s thriving off the loving fans who slide into her DMs and let her know that her music has brightened what had been a shitty day.

“I have a spin to my music that is vulnerable yet cocky,” she says. “I want people to listen to my music and feel as confident and excited as I did while writing it. When fans reach out to me and say that my music makes them feel like that, I’m so happy.”

Emily Vaughn Promotional Photograph

Emily Vaughn

Photography by Justin Gilbert

Actress Jamie Lee Refused

2019 is shaping up to be an exciting year for actress/writer/comedian Jamie Lee. Season three of the Pete Holmes/Judd Apatow HBO series Crashing premiered in January, starring Lee as Ali Reissen, a sassy New York City stand-up. She’s also appearing in another HBO comedy hit, 2 Dope Queens. We caught up with the 35-year-old comedian by phone to discuss her evolving role on Crashing, her hometown of Dallas, and why she refused to be a goat on her wedding day.

Your 2017 debut comedy album, I Mean…, features hilarious riffs on hookups, tying the knot, and rough sex. Does stand-up still give you a safe space to navigate the dark corners of your brain? 

Without comedy I might not have an outlet for exploring my dark side, and I feel very grateful to be able to do it. I mean, other types of writing and performing are really satisfying, but stand-up is kind of a catchall that lets you write and perform and sort of say whatever you want. And connect with people over ideas that maybe they’ve thought, but didn’t have the confidence to articulate.

The flaws that I see within myself, when I put them through the filter of comedy, I only appreciate more. I start to view them not as flaws, but as things that define me. What’s important about stand-up is that it takes the things you might deem bad or complicated and makes them kind of hilarious and beautiful.

In season three, episode four, of Crashing, you take on the obnoxious and overrated comedian/club owner Jason (Dov Davidoff). Was there catharsis in that?

My character, Ali, is dealing with this headliner who says whatever he wants, and thinks that makes him edgy and important. Ali proceeds to stand it up as a lot of totally off fluff. It was really thrilling to be able to portray a comedian who was taking a stand, and standing up to him.

One of the things I like about Ali is that she’s subverting people’s stale notions of female comics.

It’s really important to have this depiction of a girl stand-up on TV right now. We’re obviously living in a pretty complicated climate where a lot of people are putting close eyes on these issues of sexism and sexual harassment and being “woke.” Episode four does a really good job of tackling all of those things, and in a pretty realistic way.

I think my favorite moment would be the parking-lot scene at the end. Jason was provoked to come at me. Ali probably wouldn’t give him the time of day otherwise, but because he was attacking her directly, she really let him have it.

You’ve said that episode six, which you wrote yourself, is your favorite.

Yes. The episode is very relatable to me in my own life because when you do a stand-up set on a late-night TV show for the first time, you have a lot of friends who want to make a party out of it.

As a comedian, there’s part of you that’s really proud of yourself. But there’s also a part of you that has a lot of shame and you have a kind of fraud syndrome, and you feel a little embarrassed because there’s so much attention on you.

What’s your advice to emerging female comedians?

The advice I wish I could have given myself is to try and tune out the noise as much as possible. Try to focus on yourself and remind yourself that you are just as worthy of this pursuit as anyone else. All of that sort of positive self-talk is really helpful, because it’s a really formative time in your life, and in your comedy life. Be a kind voice in your head because, at the end of the day, only you can motivate yourself to keep going.

What do you do for balance?

I recently got into working out pretty intensely. I was not an athletic kid at all. I did not play sports. I could barely run without getting winded. And then, within the last two years, I got a personal trainer and she really kicked my ass. I leave there being like, Oh, I guess I am capable of moving my body.

You live in L.A. now. Do you miss your home state of Texas?

I do. When I was a teenager in Dallas, I thought it was a little boring, but there’s this area of Dallas called Deep Ellum, which has a lot of really cool music venues. Now every time I go back, there’s a new cool neighborhood to discover. In parts of Dallas where there was no population, [there are all these] really cool bars and restaurants. So yeah, it’s really changed a lot since I’ve lived there. Now when I go back I’m like, Ooh, it could be fun to live here. I wish that L.A. would up and move to Dallas.

Any imminent projects you can tell us about?

I just closed a development deal with [the channel] Freeform for a show called The Girlfriend. I wrote the show on my own and it would be for me to star in. It’s about a girl who finds out she might be dating a murderer. It’s sort of a female Breaking Bad. I also wrote a book about planning a wedding and modern-day wedding culture [called Weddiculous], and we’re working on turning it into a TV series.

It’s cool that marriage is increasingly egalitarian and inclusive. Your zinger “[My father] is not giving me away, because I’m not a fucking goat” makes me laugh. 

For my wedding, there were definitely some traditions we adhered to and then others that we were like, “That’s just not for us,” which I think is what everybody should do. We didn’t do the father-daughter giveaway. I think that we’re in a space right now where everyone wants to be talking about it more openly and honestly, and challenging some of these things that we were force-fed to be true. And they’re just not.

As this is Penthouse, what does being sex-positive mean to you?

Sex-positive means to each his own, not judgmental of one person’s sexuality or sexual dispositions. I feel like I fall into that category. I think the more open we are about sex and sexuality, the less alone we all feel.

Image courtesy of Sechel PR.

Peter Lloyd

Stand By Your Manhood was dubbed “The Bro Bible” by the press, and men everywhere were pumped on Lloyd’s dry wit. But unlike Jordan Peterson’s best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, Lloyd poses funny hypotheticals, like the politics of penis size or if watching pornography makes you a misogynist. He also addresses more serious topics like rising suicide rates and how the school system is failing young men. Lloyd was ridiculed by female talk-show hosts while on his press tour, but he laughed along with the jokes and reminded them that almost all the professional references in his book were from women, and that his editor was also female. We asked Lloyd for his two cents on all the so-called man-bashing that’s taking place today.

Why write Stand By Your Manhood?

I wanted something that countered that toxic narrative and gave men the affirmations they deserved, while also being funny. Bizarrely, these feminists often hate women, too–especially the sort who appear in Penthouse. So while the book gives blokes their balls back, it also serves women, too.

Is there a feminism you could get behind and, if so, what does it look like?

Oh yeah, but it would be a feminism that didn’t require reference or a name. It would just be women living fully-realized, self-determined lives alongside men, and thinking nothing of it. I don’t want women to be indebted or answerable to the sisterhood in any way, shape, or form. I don’t want them to be bogged-down or distracted by the politics of the past. They’re better than that. Personally, I love women like Camille Paglia, Ronda Rousey, Christina Hoff Sommers, Pamela Anderson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali–they’re all very different women, but they all embody these qualities. They’re free-thinking, free-living people who are also fucking fabulous. They just happen to be women.

So many books have been written for women on this subject. Why has your version for men caused so much controversy?

Publishing is a very political, female-dominated industry and its output is tightly controlled, so I guess they think my manuscript slipped through the net, and it drives them nuts! To me, that’s deliciously funny. Not least because, years ago, women with a voice were seen as dangerous. Now it’s men like me–but I love that. It means the book is countercultural. It’s a little bit punk rock, which is way more fun than being the status quo.

Image courtesy of Peter Lloyd.

The Foggy History of Hangovers

That’s why writing a column like this one is a pretty plum gig. No matter how innocuous the topic might sound, you’ll inevitably come across a story that seems totally bizarre to our modern sensibility if you’re willing to dig deep enough. So with this month’s theme of hangovers, I was sure I was once again in the clear — after all, what could be an easier target than the disastrous aftereffects of too much booze?

Reader, I appear before you today humbled. After spending hours poking around online, and stomping around multiple university libraries, I am here to report that hangovers are…kind of boring, historically speaking.

At first glance, this makes no sense. Getting drunk is an act that’s nearly as old as humanity itself; some researchers believe people were making alcohol even before we figured out how to grow our own crops. And as long as we’ve been drinking, we’ve been drinking too much, and then rolling around on the floor as our heads and stomachs team up to punish us for our liquid gluttony. In all that time, the course of history hasn’t been altered by a particularly nasty hangover or two?

Well, it has. We just don’t know about it. In truth, the reason the history of hangovers isn’t all that weird is because, unlike a lot of things, they aren’t some mysterious experience that science can only explain retroactively. The cause and effect are fairly obvious, and has been understood as such at least as far back as ancient Greece: Drink too much, and you’ll pay for it later. So stop talking about it so loudly, and pass me the Advil already.

Not that that dissuaded anyone from partaking in the first place, of course. The Greeks loved their wine so much that they created a party god, Dionysus, who was responsible for the all-important grape crop. They also believed that people who preferred water to alcohol weren’t just boring, but actually smelled bad. The Greeks didn’t believe in a hangover god, though (an unusual omission that would later inspire author Terry Pratchett to invent one). Instead, they knew to seek out better-quality alcohols, and, when all else failed, to sleep the rest of the day away.

No matter the part of the world, wherever alcohol appeared, hangovers weren’t far behind. And each culture grappled with them in its own way. The oldest-known Arabic cookbook, from the tenth century, suggested adding an early kind of lemonade to your alcohol to stop a hangover before it started, and if that didn’t work, downing a bowl of yogurt-y stew called kishkiyya.

In the exceedingly formal society of sixteenth-century Japan, meanwhile, it was considered polite after an alcohol-heavy event to demonstrate the extent of one’s hangover — even if you didn’t actually have one. To fake it, people would send late thank-you notes to the host, written with intentionally sloppy handwriting.

But if humans have long understood the what of hangovers, sometimes a little too well — I’m partial to Kingsley Amis’s description, from Lucky Jim, of feeling like you’ve “somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beat up by secret police” — they continued to struggle to understand the how. However, hangovers are starting to get their due from scientists. Recent studies have tried to break hangovers down into their constituent parts, from dehydration to nausea to a catch-all category of leftover fermentation chemicals in your stomach called “congeners.”

Still, the search for a cure remains as elusive as ever. In fact, by far the weirdest part of hangovers isn’t their past, but their future. As we speak, plenty of private companies are hard at work on developing a workaround — all that remains to be seen is which version gets to market first, and which one takes off with the public. Will it be RU-21, a Russian-made pill originally developed by the KGB? Or the tea company Tetley, which plans to roll out a special hangover tea by 2026? Or how about one of the many groups working on so-called “synthetic alcohol,” which is supposed to manipulate and massage the neurotransmitters that give us the feeling of being drunk?

Personally, I’ve learned to avoid the problem by drinking two beers and then quitting. But the estimated $148 billion that hangovers cost the U.S. economy in lost productivity each year suggests that a more pressing solution might be useful.

Sticky Situation

This past December, a town in Germany made international headlines when a local chocolate factory’s storage tank ruptured, literally repaving the streets with a layer of chocolatey goo so thick it took 25 firefighters armed with shovels, blowtorches, and hot water to chip it all away.

The story was a funny little curio, to be sure. But for fans of weird history, it also couldn’t help but bring to mind one of the oddest and most infamous events of food-related disaster on record: the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. And since I haven’t covered it in these pages yet—and also because it just celebrated (if that’s the right word, which it isn’t) its centenary in January—now feels like as good a time as any to dive back in and get reacquainted.

The date is January 15, 1919. The scene: the North End neighborhood in Boston. There, by the harbor, sits a massive, 90-foot-wide tank capable of holding more than two million gallons of molasses, which at the time was being imported from the Caribbean to be distilled into rum and ethanol. But this was no ordinary molasses tank. No, this tank was an incredibly shoddy molasses tank. It was built a few years earlier for the nearby Purity Distilling Company, but for some reason was never properly tested, and problems were evident early on. For one, the tank had a leak so bad that local kids figured out they could bring over empty cans and scoop up the dregs for free. When notified of this issue, the project manager responded by having the tank painted a molasses-y shade of brown, so that the leaks would be harder to see.

On that fateful January afternoon, the gigantic tank, full nearly to the brim after a recent deposit, split open for good. 

“A dull, muffled roar gave but an instant’s warning before the top of the tank was blown in the air,” wrote the New York Times the following day. And the ensuing wave of molasses that flooded the streets of Boston was nothing short of surreal. Eyewitnesses estimated the wave was between 8 and 15 feet high, and it moved at 35 miles per hour—in every direction. In a matter of seconds, two full city blocks were submerged.

The explosion devastated the surrounding area. The gooey wave moved so quickly it caught bystanders before they were able to get to higher ground. Even when the molasses leveled off at about knee height, cooling in the winter temperatures, it was still so sticky that people couldn’t escape easily. 

“Here and there struggled a form,” wrote the Boston Globe, “whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell.” Meanwhile, the force of the explosion itself toppled several buildings and destroyed a chunk of an elevated rail line shortly after the train had passed over it. In all, 21 people were killed, and another 150 were seriously injured. The last victim wasn’t found for more than 10 days.

After an inquiry that lasted three years, an auditor found that the tank wasn’t built to construction standards, and for a long time, it was assumed that the rivets were to blame, in conjunction with a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide inside the tank. More recently, however, a local engineer, who studies the flood as a hobby, found the type of steel used in the tank was, in fact, the main culprit.

While not considered a risk at the time, engineers now know that this kind of steel is too brittle, and therefore more likely to crack under duress. In this case, the steel was also only half as thick as it should have been, given how much liquid the tank was meant to hold. This same steel was also used in the construction of the Titanic, which is not generally a comparison anyone wants to be part of.

Following the inquiry, the company that owned the tank, U.S. Industrial Alcohol, was forced to pay $600,000 (roughly $6.5 million by today’s standards) in settlements. Cleanup in the surrounding blocks took weeks, and far longer in all of the outlying areas and corners to which the molasses ultimately spread. And once the streets were officially scrubbed clean of the deadly, sticky mess, reports persisted of the smell of molasses in central Boston for decades afterwards.

Please Stop Being Outraged: The Culture War Isn’t New

Pity the rookie combatants in today’s culture wars. It can’t be easy to join a battle that’s been waged since before they were born and to think it’s new. I’m talking about free-speech warriors in neatly pressed Fred Perrys and un-scuffed boots, collecting their “blocked by” Twitter designations like medals, and howling their God-given right to make rape “jokes.”

All the young dudes hoping history will judge the video games they play to be as cool as rock ’n’ roll—a cohort of guys who, when they’re no longer young, seconds from sliding toward the great apolitical beyond, will—like dying Confederate soldiers picturing their mothers’ faces — envision Eminem himself laying a cooling hand upon their wrinkled foreheads.

As a veteran of the music-culture wars, I remember Tipper Gore’s denunciation of both the Dead Kennedys and Prince back in the eighties. It was alarming. Moreover, I’ve been engaging in lengthy arguments in defense of some sketchy black metal since the 1990s. I like to think, then, that my take on these rookies—the boys who are proud—has more behind it than the jerk of a knee.

If you’ve never heard of Hollywood’s Hays Code (puritanical censorship of movie sexuality), or Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent (comic books create juvenile delinquents, it argued), or the hysteria about jazz (“It’s the music of drug-using Negroes!”), followed by hysteria about rock ’n’ roll, disco, porn, punk, Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, hip-hop, and more, then yes, it must seem like we’re living in very combative times indeed. And we are! But not more so than any other. It only feels that way if you’re a person who really, really wants to wear that Burzum shirt onstage, or thinks that any episode past the second one of the new Roseanne was funny.

Maybe we’re at war, maybe we’re not. Far be it from me to diminish anyone’s heroic narrative. But this idea that cultural clashing has our country doomed? C’mon, it took almost 200 years for Rome to fall. Unless America peaked in 1812 (and unless you think Tchaikovsky’s famous overture was about the British burning the White House, when it was about Napoleon in Russia), we should be okay at least until the end of Radiohead’s album cycle.

I have perspective—and not because I’m a nerd. While I wear glasses and have weird breath, I’m not really smart enough to be a proper nerd. I’m using the broader, original definition of the word, the one that means being good at science and math, as opposed to being a guy who worships mass-media franchises like Star Wars so much he’ll send death threats about casting. But I’m nerdy enough to have a passing interest in the last hundred years of popular culture and, baby, let me tell you, it was turbulent.

Comedian Lenny Bruce and crooner Frank Sinatra (pre-Republican version) both got fucked with. There were laws against dancing that are still on the books. Weird as it may seem in a world where all moms have terrible tattoos, I remember a time when a mohawk and ripped shirt could get you beaten to within an inch of your life. What made it especially wild was that, for the most part, the culture wars were fought by artists, African-Americans, and gays on one side, and organized religion and the truncheon-wielding state on the other.

It wasn’t until the disco backlash—where rockers and long-hairs across the country, forgetting that Little Richard himself once sang about anal sex, waged a record-burning war on the infernal blackness and gayness of this glittery dance music—that sectors of the general population took the initiative. But by 1985, Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center had restored the gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair about bumping-uglies content in art to its rightful, bureaucratic place: Washington, D.C.

In the 1990s, with the advent of the term “political correctness,” we witnessed harbingers of today’s culture wars. Fugazi and their ilk bummed out thousands of punks by demanding they do less shoving of strangers at their shows. That the prerogative to take a running jump from a stage prior to crashing on someone’s head would be seen as a cultural imperative might arguably be considered fucking insane, but then again, “go my own way” non-neighborliness, “don’t tread on me” politics, and, for that matter, states’ rights, are as much a part of the American identity as the Freedom March.

That strain of solipsistic individualism won the frontier West, and pointing out the human cost to this expansion is pure sissydom, they argue, so you can understand why so many young men hated Bikini Kill. It’s like those bitches hated fun.

Somehow, despite the reign of PC terror, Nu Metal and VICE still happened, so maybe, just maybe, the dour cultural killjoys weren’t as powerful as some put-upon dudes thought. Or maybe the “culture wars” are not, in fact, wars; they’re just culture. Nobody wins or loses and the sides overlap. It’s just the push and pull and cyclical noise we all make together.

In fairness, I should acknowledge that friends and peers of a more—cough—libertarian bent make an (occasionally) potent argument that, in the year of our Lord 2018, leftists have taken over the government’s role as art- and freedom-haters. They argue that not everything has to be political, and that uptight, indoctrinated squares are constantly rallying their online mobs to crush any art or opinions that stray from (cultural Marxist) orthodoxy.

I don’t disagree that perpetual outrage can be a hell of a drug, and of course some people really are just puritans—in the thirties, they’d have been Stalinists—but I just can’t muster the rhetorical reach to equate hard-rock band Black Pussy losing shows in Portland because of their name with, say, President George W. Bush denouncing Ice-T’s band Body Count for “Cop Killer.” The difference in power dynamics is just too vast.

It maybe doesn’t help that some of the most strident voices railing against social-justice warriors are people like Brett Kavanaugh’s conservative crony Mark Judge, a sometime music writer, who, while denouncing a fellow music writer’s argument against cultural appropriation, bizarrely referenced Sonic Youth’s novelty side-project, Ciccone Youth.

As with most situations in our time of degraded discourse, it’s the dummies and dullards who get the most clicks, so it’s easy enough to find examples of pure insanity on both sides (yes, I can think of examples of said dummies on my side of the fracas, but I’m not going to name them because they’re hella embarrassing).

But idiots on both sides is not the same as “very fine people on both sides.” While I like a bit of nuance now and again, if your beef is in exact accordance with that of the state—in other words, you view your opponents as mouthy, marginalized miscreants shitting in capitalism’s punchbowl—you’re perhaps not the free-speech underdog you imagine yourself to be.

It’s been a rough few months for those staring back at me from across the field of cultural combat. Two bands not exactly noted for their liberal uptightness, Texas thrashers Power Trip and New York hatecore pioneers Sheer Terror, have both publicly stated that Proud Boys are not welcome at their shows. I don’t imagine it’s fun when musicians you’ve delusionally decided share your worldview want nothing to do with your eternal crybabyness. Culture war is hell when metalheads and skinheads both agree that you’re too evil to live and too corny to kill.

At least the alt-right can take some comfort in the fact that the army, police, and every branch of government is in their corner. It must be nice to know that, in this grand clash of civilizations, this Custer’s Last Stand against dark-skinned Star Wars cast additions—not to mention rappers who decry your use of the N-word even though they use it, and comic book-ruining feminazi hordes—your President Dad has a shit-ton of guns and will wait outside the show in case you get picked on in the mosh pit.

A comfort, for sure, but one that hardly makes for a sexy T-shirt.

We tried to point out the irony in being outraged about people being outraged, but editors as a rule do not readily appreciate nuance. … Apparently readers find it boring. Who knew? … Gosh, without editors we’d apparently all be really stupid. Thank goodness for them, then.]

UnYourself: Why Won’t My Wife Fuck Me?

Here’s the main lesson I learned from writing my memoir Unwifeable: If I had not done all that painful work to ultimately “own” everything I feared made me unwifeable, I never would have been able to —i n the end —find the partner of my dreams.

This archetypal go-to-battle-with-your-demons lesson is called by many names. There’s “lean in” and “the hero’s journey” and “phoenixes rising from the ashes.” In the book The Gnostic Gospels one particularly illu minating passage reads: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

It’s one of those universal truths that intersects with all the great stories. The darkness you fear most will often present you with the Battle Of Your Life. Confront it valiantly, and only then, can you achieve far greater freedom than you ever imagined.

Consider the very first episode of Game of Thrones, for example. A series-defining moment occurs when the “imp” Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) tells Jon Snow (Kit Harington) to stop protesting when people call him a “bastard.”

“Let me give you some advice, bastard,” Tyrion says. “Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.”

Truly, there is so much vulnerability and power in confronting ourselves. Scared you are unworthy? Nervous you are unsuccessful? Afraid you will be forever unlovable? Well, that’s why I’m calling this advice column “Un Yourself.” Let’s turn the paradigms upside down, inside out and confront it all.

But now, let’s go forth and tackle the first question to UnYourself. And boy is it ever a doozy.

Sexless In Not Really Seattle writes: “I haven’t had sex with my wife for ten years. I’ve given up that it will ever happen again, and I do admit that my resentment seeps into our relationship. What can I do?”

Dear SINRS (amazing acronym there, by the way):

Most people will not admit it, because this is one of those insidious plagues that is simply not discussed in polite society, but your challenge is more common than you may think.

Marriage is one of the hardest—and some evolutionary biologists would argue “most unnatural”—institutions in the world. There are so many damn advice books out there (Men Are From Dickbags, Women Are From Cuntfucks, etc.), but not to worry because—guess what—I have read them all! “Why?” you may ask. Well, two reasons, really.

1) As a “sex and love” reporter, I have been forced to read more of them than the average person just on account of it being my dumb job.

2) Honestly, I just really love self-help.

First things first, when it comes to marriage, the gold standard here is Dr. John Gottman—and, by extension, the scientific research conducted at the Gottman Institute.

For a taste of exactly how science comes into play in the studies he’s done, I recommend this extraordinary segment on This American Life.

In the episode, the researchers at the Gottman Institute are able to predict, with almost total accuracy, which marriages will stay together and which will not. How do they do it? Easy. The study participants are asked to discuss a sensitive topic of disagreement. As they either bicker and escalate or quibble and calm one another down, the researchers take to coding all of their interactions (an eyeball or a sarcastic sigh, for instance, might be marked as “contempt”).

What they find is that you don’t actually need to agree with your person about everything. Because everyone disagrees. Some marital researchers even posit that the No. 1 predictor of divorce is conflict avoidance. Until that wondrous day when we are able to clone a version of ourselves just to fuck over and over again as our AI-Me sycophantically agrees with every word we say, cheering us on and on as we bad-decision-it-up into personal apocalypse, we will always be forced to deal with—contemptuous sarcastic sigh here—other people.

For the longest time, do you know what grudge I nursed above practically all others?

I was so pissed at men who did not follow to a T the imagined script I had set out for them.

Men were terrible.

More often than not, this irrational resentment decreased my sex drive.

Like your wife, I did not start out this way.

To get my sex drive back, I needed to confront severe, deeply buried issues of incredible contempt and resentment simmering beneath the surface.

Similar to my eventual realization that other people are not actually disappointing or offending me by failing to follow some imagined script I wrote for them in my head, sometimes your wife’s issues of contempt and resentment might be illogical.

But oh my God how deeply it is in play.

And if you love her: It needs to be honored, respected, and validated. Because, like you, she really is doing her best with what she has. She’s not trying to be unreasonable. She’s just trying to protect herself.

You can only understand, to use a Jaws metaphor, what size boat you’ll need (therapy, a divorce, or a sort of modern understanding wherein your wife agrees you can meet sexual needs and desires outside of the marriage) when you accurately understand just how big the damn shark is in the first place.

This means ignoring Mayor Larry Vaughn, dude.

Or in this case, all the terrible advice pushing you to either cheat or take the seething martyr route and suck it up as a consequence of A) you cheating years ago, B) you traveling too much for your job, C) forgetting her birthday this year, or D) whatever ingrained self-loathing from your childhood you’ve projected onto your wife and circumstances.

The reality is that the only way you can figure out the root of the problem and develop an informed plan for what to do is to uncover the true nature of what caused your marriage to break in the first place.

Because a sexless marriage is a broken one.

Now I have several friends who are the smartest individuals I know who are just dead-set against therapy, so I know exactly how difficult it is to convince someone to see a shrink. In fact, for many years it was impossible to convince me to see one. But then I discovered something that shifted my whole perspective: Seeing a shrink is no different than going on a first date.

As in, check this out, you can just make up an excuse to leave. So many people feel like because they’ve had one or two or 29 bad experiences that all psychiatrists are worthless. Interesting fact: Not true.

The secret is to develop a litmus test and do research as if your mental health life depends on it. Because it does. My favorite strategy: Ask for recommendations from smart folks who you know do not tolerate fools.

But first let’s validate your concern: Yes, many shrinks are drawn to the field because they are indeed bat-shit crazy themselves. However, there are just as many who have done the difficult psychotherapeutic work to slay their pesky, meddling egos in order to best help you learn how to slay your own.

The speech I was given that finally got me to go see a psychiatrist came from a doctor friend of mine.

As I told him about all of my bad experiences with shoddy therapists who had given me awful advice or whom I simply did not think were smart, he listened patiently. “I don’t need to see a shrink,” I protested. “I write morning pages every day, and I have some great friends who I can talk to about my problems.”

“Mandy,” he said, “your writing can’t talk back. And your friends don’t have the training.”

What do you know: The doc was right.

Eventually, when you really do the work to find the right marriage counselor and/or personal therapist to unravel what shit is going on in your sexless marriage, you’ll be able to develop a tactical plan to what you can do in the future.

When you have that, then you can start communicating in terms that will not be alienating, resentment-filled, and cruel, as so many (and definitely me) often resort to because abuse and trauma and resentment shaped our internal roadmap.

Here’s the carrot I can promise you, too.

Life — and sex — gets ah-fucking-mazing when you start the journey. Trust me on this one.

To even bring up some of these incredibly sensitive topics with your wife, I recommend a book that was a game-changer for me.

It has a weird name, but the principles are revolutionary. It’s called: Nonviolent Communication.

If you want another reason to read it, consider this: The very sexy Manhattan Madam first recommended it to me when I was in the initial stages of courtship with my now-husband and she was in prison, and we emailed every week about what the hell was going on in our vastly different life situations.

“Read that book,” she said, and holy fuck, the Manhattan Madam was right.

It teaches you how to communicate in a way that strips most of our natural instincts to condemn, brutalize, blame, and be wantonly cruel by bringing up are always at the ready Wrongs That Have Been Committed Against Us That We Can Use Against Another Person So As to Justify Whatever Shitty Thing We Have Just Done or Said.

Because once you start to chip away at all of the bullshit that has created a sexual ice block in your relationship, you can actually figure out how to start fucking again.

The principles of nonviolent communication break down to a four-step process which is: observing what is going on without judgment, clarifying the feeling this situation creates, identifying what need this triggers for you, and then, in a kind and positive way, formulating your request.

If you want some sample scripts (and good advice), read this

Kiwi husband’s tale about how contempt eroded his wife’s ability to feel like she could enjoy sex, and he was trying desperately to use the principles of NVC to save their relationship. The Reddit community chimes in with an array of helpful sample scripts he might be able to use, including this one:

It sounds like you are really scared to just talk about your needs such that it is easier for you to say ‘sex just isn’t who I am.’ If that’s the case, I feel sad because I want to meet my needs and your needs as well.”

To even broach the topic initially, certified sex coach Hillary Berry gives this terrific template example:

Honey, when I noticed that you froze and withdrew from me last night when I tried to initiate sexual touch, I felt discouraged because I enjoy sharing touch and I want to connect with you intimately. Can you let me know what was going on with you in that moment?

Of course, if you haven’t had sex in a decade the script would likely read more along the lines of:

I love you so much, and I feel so discouraged by what’s happened between us over the years. Being physically close to my partner is an important need for me, and I’d love to start the process of talking so that I can be meeting your needs as well.”

Now, let’s just say that you’ve done all of this already and the issue that is at play is an age-old predicament when two people who have been fucking each other forever simply get sick of each other and fall into a routine. The wife is upstairs with her vibrator, you’re on PornHub, and the emotional disconnect is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Well, I have good news for you.

All hope is not lost!

A whole new world of discovery exists out there for you if you can keep an open mind and be kind to your wife as you bring her into the process as something that can benefit you both.

If you don’t write about sex regularly, it’s easy to not be aware of how much progress has been made in the field of re-invigorating sex lives that used to be considered DOA.

Sexual doulas and sexual medicine and sexologists and sex coaches and female-vetted tantric practitioners. Orgy domes and sex clubs and kinky play parties. Chakrubs and secret favorites and utterly innovative new robotic devices like the Osé that mimic the sensation of a blended orgasm.

Say your wife has trouble orgasm-ing. Consider finding a specialist who can assist in ways that will likely turn both of you on. The practice of “orgasmic meditation” is trendy AF (and totally cult-ish), but like most organizations that advertise “you too can attain a level of higher consciousness if you spend enough money,” there are some great core lessons about how to stroke the clit that are gangbusters effective.

Visit women-friendly sex shops like Babeland and make your wife a co-conspirator on a journey of re-igniting your love life together. Talk to people who make you feel safe and get their tips for how they get turned on and how they come.

Here’s a for-instance. Several years ago, I mistakenly believed butt plugs were only meant for gay dudes until some sweet bisexual girl told me that nothing increased her orgasm like a butt plug—and boom, pop, she was right!

Really talk to your wife, make her feel safe (using those sample scripts or some authentic variant thereof), and no matter what, try to be aware of all those little things that men do that make women feel like shit—and don’t fucking do them.

I’m talking about the little emotional affairs with hot chicks. Nothing turns off a woman like making her feel like shit. You may not even realize you are doing it. Find out. Ask her. Actively try to make her feel special and safe.

Because I promise you: Make your wife feel like it’s the two of you against the world, and pretty soon, the world of sexual miracles will come to you.

Intellectual Dark Web Sex Expert Dr. Debra Soh

Debra Soh, a 28-year old Canadian neuroscientist and sex researcher, saw her public profile climb last May when she was included in a New York Times article highlighting a group of bold, dogma-challenging intellectuals, academics, scientists, and cultural commentators. Titled “Meet the Renegades of the Dark Web,” the piece, by Bari Weiss, became a culture-wars lightning rod, bashed and saluted on social media.

Along with Soh, the rebels included Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Christina Hoff Sommers. Joe Rogan, on the strength of his interview podcast, and comedian Dave Rubin, thanks to his free-thinking YouTube channel, also made the roster.

“If you produce findings that the public doesn’t like, you can lose your job,” Soh told Weiss, referring to today’s walking-on-eggshells environment for researchers, not least in her charged field, sexology.

And with the politics of gender and sexuality even more fraught in academia, Soh decided to leave life as a university researcher to write and speak freely, using her expertise to counter perspectives that might fit some ideological agenda but are not supported by science.

Today Soh writes about sexuality, biological differences between men and women, free speech, political correctness, and more, contributing to an impressive range of publications, from North American newspapers to Harper’s, Scientific American, and Playboy.

“I’ve stopped censoring myself,” she tells Penthouse. “I used to worry that things I say might alienate some people, but I’ve realized I can’t live like that. We should be able to speak about facts and the truth without fear of being punished for it.”

Recently, Soh has criticized the way coverage of topics such as gender differences and transgenderism has been politicized, leading to non-scientific viewpoints. In her columns, in conversations with Rogan and Rubin on their hugely popular shows, and elsewhere, Soh has also exposed weaknesses in the assumptions and operations of corporate and academic diversity policies, such as those in place at Google and Harvard University.

Addressing the politics surrounding transgenderism, Soh says, “There is a long history of transgender activists going after sex researchers if a scientist produces findings that activists don’t like. I left academia [so] I could defend what the science says, particularly about children who are gender-dysphoric [who feel they were born in the wrong body]. The majority of these kids will outgrow their feelings by puberty, which is considered a controversial subject in today’s climate.”

“I take a lot of pride in having been a sex researcher,” Soh adds. “My colleagues should be able to do their work without having to deal with activists’ bullying and intimidation.”

Besides hosting her own popular podcast, Wrongspeak, alongside Toronto author, editor, lawyer and ex-engineer Jonathan Kay, Soh is developing new projects for 2019, but her lips are sealed. Meanwhile, she’ll continue to expose the way political correctness and academic leftism is interfering with scientific progress and cogent debate.

Despite being regularly attacked by activists on Twitter, Soh feels optimistic.

“I see a backlash to political correctness coming,” she says. “We saw it with the 2016 election, and I see more on the way because people are understandably fed up.”

A Nun Is Raped In Harlem

THE CRIME

Bo Dietl and Tommy Colleran were hard, cynical New York police officers. But they had never heard of anything like this.

There were still other cops on the scene, moving about quietly, softly. The nun — a white, 30-year-old, sparrowlike woman — had been taken away hours earlier. Peter Christianson, from the sex crimes unit, came up to Bo and Tommy.

“Petey, what happened?”

“Bo, it’s fucking crazy. Two guys took a nun in there, punched the shit out of her, raped and sodomized her, stuck a broom up her and some candles, carved crosses all over her butt and breasts—27 crosses, Bo, with a goddamned sharpened nail file! They pissed on her, threw her downstairs, and left her for dead. And they may have used a crucifix, we don’t know. We’re checking all the crosses inside.”

Tommy suddenly hit himself hard in the chest. The thud made everyone jump.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding. In a convent?” His eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Mother of God, they didn’t do that.”

“Oh shit,” exhaled Bo. “How is she?”

“We don’t know. She’s in shock at the hospital.”

“Have you got anything?”

“Well, we’ve got a couple of junkies who were in the building across the street that said they saw two black guys on the corner, one tall, one short with like a limp. They never actually saw them coming out of the place though, so maybe that wasn’t them.”

Bo and Tommy crossed the street and studied the convent from there. Behind it loomed a dark, four-story brownstone with a ladder leading down from its roof.

“That’s how they got in,” said Bo flatly, pointing.

“Since when have you heard of a sex crime with two guys doing it, Tommy?”

The other said nothing. He lit a cigarette and threw the match into the gutter.

“And if they were just sex guys, they would have gone straight through the front door, not entered through the friggin’ roof! These were burglars. The sex offense was an afterthought; these bastards came here to burglarize the place.”

For a moment the two cops stood still, breathing hard and steady, not speaking.

Like a wide asphalt canal, 116th Street bisects Harlem, running from the Hudson to the East rivers. Our Lady of Mount Carmel convent sits on the southwest corner of 116th and, ironically, Pleasant Avenue. This is the heart of the tiny Italian section: a poor, detached, defiantly white, and surprisingly safe enclave tucked in the corner of the city’s huge black and Hispanic community.

The convent is a plain three-story building, light-colored and clean except for a little pale-blue and red graffiti that ribbons its front wall. Inside, it is Spartan. The small group of nuns live in tiny rooms meagerly furnished, each with a cot bed, plain wooden chair, simple night table, and small cheap chest of drawers. The walls are bare, except where the sisters have hung holy pictures and crucifixes. Unshaded bulbs light the landings with their dead glow. The chapel is small and plain.

Facing the convent, a line of buildings and a vacant lot stretch out like a row of bad teeth with one missing. The buildings in East Harlem are either tenements or shells. They stand side by side regardless—uniformly soot-darkened and braided with rusty and uncertain fire escapes, poor men’s terraces. Some of the empty apartment houses are incongruously ornate under the dilapidation, like the dirt-stained and moss-covered, but probably once fine, marble headstones of a run-down graveyard. These buildings are boarded or bricked over at street level. But they are not entirely deserted. Creeping into them, with what is left of human instinct after even the need to eat has been forgotten, are the junkies, New York’s undead.

Tom Colleran turned to Pete Christianson. “How long did these animals…violate her?” he asked.

“Apparently about an hour 45 minutes, we don’t really know. She figures she was unconscious about 45 minutes. She came to at the sound of the noon church bells and called the precinct.”

“Jee-sus,” whispered Bo. “Who’s got it?” he asked.

“Sex crimes.”

“It ain’t a sex crime.”

They got back into their car and swung west along 116th, looking for the people who usually knew everything that went on locally. They stopped at Andy’s Colonial Tavern and talked to some of the people Bo euphemistically calls “Italian businessmen”; they had not heard about the nun being attacked. The officers continued down 116th, stopping in each of the narrowly fronted, brightly glowing cigar and grocery stores still open. It was the same everywhere. No one had heard about the atrocity or could imagine who would do such a thing.

As the terrible news spread across the neighborhood, the two cops discussed the possibility that the rapists were junkies on angel dust, a drug that can inflame its users with a mindless viciousness. So they decided to hit a junkie joint on 115th Street—an abandoned apartment in a tenement that drug dealers had taken over, reinforcing the door from inside and cutting a hole in it through which to sell their wares.

The two cops drove up and parked diagonally across on the pavement. Tommy went into the building. Bo got on the hood and silently pulled himself up to the fire escape. He waited outside the blackened second-floor window. From inside, he could hear voices and people moving around, then the rapid bang of Tommy’s gun butt at the door and his muffled voice demanding: “Police! Open this fucking door!” At the furious sound of the toilet flushing as the panicked junkies tried to get rid of their drugs, Bo crashed through the window, gun drawn, bellowing: “Freeze!” He rose quickly from the floor, one hand holding his gun, the other instinctively sweeping fragments of glass off his clothes. He ordered the door opened. Seething, Tommy entered clutching his 9-millimeter automatic with both hands and yelled: “Get up against the fucking wall!”

For an hour they questioned the junkies, who were scared and suggested anyone or anything that they could think of—all obviously worthless. By the end of their tour that night, Bo and Tommy had to concede defeat. The streets were dry.

For four days the story was kept out of the press. When it broke, what ensued was the thunder of a public’s grief and outrage and behind it the reverberation of their disbelief: New York has come to live with violence, even murder, and almost no longer notices it. But this was too horrific. It cast a gray pall, an odor of bereavement, over this normally dispassionate city and, while the nun’s desecraters remained free, suspended it there.

They probably would never have been caught but for these two anticrime plainclothes cops, both Catholics. The official police task force had 100 of the city’s top detectives, with nearly another hundred backing them up part-time. But after a week and a half had passed with no results, Bo Dietl and Tommy Colleran asked to have three days to work the case on their own: Bo had received a piece of information that was so weak he was embarrassed to report it, but he inexplicably believed it would lead to cracking the case.

Later, these two men would talk about their investigation as a mission from God, a miracle. At any rate, in three days they caught both rapists.

THE COPS

At the time Bo and Tommy had worked together for four years. All over Harlem they were known and, they will tell you, respected—others will say, feared. The truth is that in areas like Harlem there is no difference; the polite semantic distinction between respect and fear has long since been worn away and the two separate concepts have merged into an instinct, a reflex. “You can’t talk to these people,” says Bo. “You’ve got to whack them a few times before you can talk to them. You’ve got to get down on their level. If you try to treat them like gentlemen, they tell you to go fuck yourself.”

In his eyes you can see the hardness the street has engendered, and the instinct it has honed. But you can also see the sensitivity that drives him: Reflected in those bright, clear brown orbs are particles of all the tragedy he has witnessed in his 14 years as a cop. He retains it not morbidly or proudly but unavoidably. All good cops do. It collects on their souls like coal dust on a miner’s lungs.

Although only five-eight, Bo is phenomenally powerful, with the chest and shoulders of a bull and the arms and fists of a heavyweight. Instead of having the usual sepulchral features of a veteran cop, he is boyishly handsome. He smiles warmly and laughs easily, with the strange sound of his laughter seeming to end before it starts. He speaks rapidly, almost percussively, in a husky, cheery voice. Sometimes in his enthusiasm to say something he explodes it, an arm flailing up and backward in a reverse karate chop that is dismissal and acceptance at the same time.

But Bo’s extraordinary career has made him a legend among his peers; they can’t talk about him without smiling and gently shaking their heads. He has over 1,300 felony arrests to his credit—the average for a police officer is 12 a year. He seems to fear nothing and on the street the “skells”—felons, whom Bo describes as “low-grade scumbags,” as if to imply there are better grades of scumbag—fear him because they suspect he is crazier than they are. Bo encourages this fear. ”I’ll fight a guy,” he understates. ”I’ll get involved. I won’t shoot a guy, but I’ll immobilize his nose, mess up his day.”

But he has never fired at a suspect, preferring to rely on his strength and speed. He confesses, however, that his reluctance to shoot is an Achilles’ heel that may someday cost him his life. Once it nearly did: With gun drawn, he was backed all the way down an alley by a suspect with a knife, and was actually stabbed before overpowering the man.

Bo came to the “Two-Five” (the Twenty­Fifth Precinct, which covers East Harlem) in 1975. By then he already had a reputation for spectacular collars and intermittent brushes with authority. His partners had aptly nicknamed him “pit bull,” and Patrolman’s Benevolent Association official Paddy Burns had defended him so many times that he later joked that when Dietl became a detective, the promotion left Burns with 50 percent more time on his hands.

In Harlem, Dietl’s new lieutenant asked him if he would work decoy. They hadn’t done it before because it was considered too dangerous, but now the Two­Five had an assault and robbery epidemic on its hands. Bo readily agreed, as long as he could train his own backup team. Tommy Colleran was one of the men assigned to work with him.

Because Colleran resembles a latter-day frontier sheriff, and because he hero-worships John Wayne, the Two-Five christened him “Cowboy.” He stands a little over six feet and is erect, square, strong, and solid-looking, though he’s neither broad-shouldered nor particularly muscular. In fact, he looks older than his 42 years. He smiles appealingly, but his eyes are hard and penetrating—not unattractive or unkind, just unafraid.

He speaks in a voice absurdly low and deep, which actually becomes harder to follow the more he drinks—and it continues to get quieter, so that you move closer and closer to hear him at all, trying desperately to disregard all other sounds and concentrate on the low hum the way you would on a faint radio signal.

His fellow cops love to tell the story of the time he was shot and lying in a hospital with five bullets just removed from him. He wouldn’t let anyone tell his wife how bad he had been hit, so when she entered the room, she found him with his usual stoical face, trying to smile. She went to him and touched his shoulder, and he winced, saying painfully: “Careful, honey, I stopped a little lead there.” Shaking, she took his hand and he, again wincing, said (the Cowboy voice getting understandably weak): “Don’t touch me there either; I caught some lead there, too.” Astonished and frightened, she sat down and put her hand on his thigh. Once more, his face registered tremendous pain, and he forced: “Not there either, honey; I got a little lead there, too.” Whereupon, almost exasperated, she asked, “Where can I touch you?”

He had been off duty when he was shot. He and a partner were drinking uptown when the partner got into an argument with a black man. Finally, Tommy said he’d fight the man, who replied, “Sure, man, you’ve got a gun!” Tommy took it out of his holster, slammed it on the bar, and hissed, “C’mon motherfucker, let’s go, you and me.” When they got out to the street, the black man pulled a gun from his trouser belt and unloaded it at Colleran. Inside, the bartender screamed: “They’re shooting your partner!” but the other cop stayed frozen on his bar stool and said he didn’t hear any shots. After Tommy got out of the hospital, he went up to his partner at the station house and said: “There’s a lot of talk, Jimmy—listen, it was your argument, I got involved, that’s okay, I went outside—but there’s a lot of talk going around that you’re one big faggot.”

Colleran lives for being a cop. His father, whom he calls “the toughest man I ever knew,” was a policeman and a rebel in the IRA in 1916 “when it really was an army, really fighting for something, and when it never would’ve killed children.” Tommy also tells you, in an almost reverent tone, that he was shot in exactly the same places as his father had been a half-century earlier.

Tommy sees himself as a pro’s pro and appears only to be really comfortable in the company of other cops. Until recently he spent his entire career, starting in 1970, at the Two-Five. He has been shot at 22 times, if you count the bullets, which he does, on seven separate occasions. He once killed a man in a fierce shoot-out on 118th Street under the rusted girders of the Park Avenue el. For four years afterward he had nightmares, although his action had been entirely justified—the man having fired at him from point-blank range. When he went to see the mother, to offer his condolences and explain what happened, she thanked him for shooting her boy. All these years later he is still affected by that: “Slap my face, get mad, scream at me, do something, but don’t thank me for killing your son!”

From the beginning, Bo liked working with Tommy. They matched as perfectly as they contrasted. When they worked decoy together Bo asked Tommy to make him a promise. “One guy got his throat slashed from ear to ear, and I was always afraid of getting stabbed in the back. So I said to Tommy, ‘You want to back me up, there’s only one thing I ask you. If I get it, if I buy it, I only want you to do me one favor: I want you to get him, and I want him to die, too. That’s my biggest thing—if he kills me, please, you kill him.’ And I used to go out with that; if somebody got me, at least Tommy would get him. Once I had that in my head, that made me feel so comfortable out there.”

Bo was the motivator of the partnership, the leader. But it was the chemistry between the two that made it work so well: the balance of indomitable scrapper and thoughtful, quietly dependable backup; affable extrovert and stoical introvert.

Bo recalls, “The great thing was, Tommy believed in me. When he believed in me, he made me believe in myself. If I quit, Tommy would quit, and I didn’t want to quit, because I always wanted to show Tommy: Lookit, we can do it.”

In the months preceding the nun’s rape, Bo and Tommy were on a roll—every case they “pulled down” was a success.

THE CASE

Although Bo and Tommy were not assigned to the rape investigation and had their hands full with other cases, everyone they knew, especially the Italians in Harlem, kept pressuring them to “go after the nun-rapers.” The Italians regarded Bo and Tommy as different from other cops and trusted them in a particular way: They liked and respected Dietl and Colleran precisely because the two were not pure. Honest, yes, and dedicated lawmen certainly, but men who, like themselves, understood and still retained the raw vulgar texture of the streets. So the community residents expected more, too; they expected, without consciously thinking about it, the two cops not merely to understand, but to share their outrage.

On the second Monday after the rape, Bo was drinking alone at the bar in Rao’s, one of his favorite neighborhood hangouts. Once again, the regulars asked Bo what he was doing about the nun’s rapists and expressed their clear opinion of the rest of the police force. At the end of the night, Vinnie Rao motioned Bo into the kitchen, where he imparted to the lawman a single strand of information that he hoped could become a rope. “Bo, I don’t know if this is anything, but I was sweeping outside the other day, and some guy came up to me and said: ‘If you want the guys who raped the nun, they come from 125th Street.’ Then he kept walking through the park.”

It did not matter to Bo that even a child would have seen that this was no real information. Even a child would have screamed back at the old man standing in the glare of his scrubbed and ancient kitchen: “This doesn’t help us, don’t you see? It wouldn’t do much for us even if this guy told you he did it himself!” It didn’t matter what a child might have said—because this time the child would have been wrong.

From Rao’s, Bo went to the Adam’s Apple. About 2:30 in the morning, the place virtually empty, Bo’s friend Felix slid into the seat next to him and asked the usual question. Bo just looked at Felix, and he felt as if a sledgehammer had suddenly come down on his head. He spurted, “Felix, we’re going to break that nun case!” Everything inside him had suddenly exploded in a brilliant flash. It seemed to him that he and Tommy had been singled out by God to rectify a terrible wrong, and for that inspired moment everything came together in his vision of certainty—their recent successes, their measure of Harlem, the faith everyone placed in them, and Rao’s morsel of vague hearsay, which Bo suddenly and inexplicably knew was the absolute truth.

The following day, Bo said nothing to Tommy. He called Pete Christianson and repeated what Rao had told him. Christianson confirmed that the old man had given other detectives the same information when they questioned everyone in the neighborhood. And Pete told Bo what he already knew—that it didn’t mean much. They had received hundreds of similar tips.

“Pete, have you got anything?” Bo asked before he hung up.

“To be honest, we don’t have a damn thing. Nothing. You might as well work on this as anybody.”

The next day, when they were finished working, Bo told Tommy he’d meet him later at the corner bar; he had to go see someone first. He went to the precinct captain, Louis Fortunato, who congratulated him for recently solved cases.

“Okay, I’ve got one for you now,” declared the stocky cop leaning over his superior’s cluttered desk. ”I’d like three days to work on this nun case with Tommy ”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’ve got a little information.” He didn’t want to go into it, but the look on Fortunato’s face insisted, so he continued, “Cap, we got some information from our people. It ain’t much, but we might have something. You might think I’m fucking crazy or something, but all Tuesday I was shaking. It was like I was hearing voices or something.”

Fortunato gave Bo three days.

He hurried to the bar and told Tommy.

When he finished, Tommy studied his partner and said, “We’ve got just about shit here. There’s no evidence, nothing.”

“No, Tommy, listen, I feel it in my bones! I don’t know what it is, something spiritual maybe; I can’t explain, but I got the strongest fucking feeling I ever got.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

Bo persisted and the more they drank, the more Tommy began to believe they had a chance. “All we can do is sonofabitch try, right Bo?” They drank until 2:00 A.M. before finally deciding to get some sleep. Outside they hugged and kissed like brothers—as they always did when they separated—and Bo shouted after the retreating form of his friend, “Tommy, you better be there, Tommy. Eight o’clock, we’re starting this thing off.”

They met at the precinct, hung over awfully, and the first thing they did was get a can of beer to take the edge off the way they felt. Then they started at the East River and worked west along 125th Street. Sticking to their original hunch that the rapists were burglars, and remembering the junkies’ description of the tall and short blacks they had seen by the convent, Bo and Tommy went from building to building, questioning everyone about a “Mutt and Jeff” burglar team. They had a composite drawing of what one of the men might have looked like. Showing it to each potential witness, Bo flatly inquired, “You know anyone who looks like this Mutt?”

They continued this type of elementary, painstaking questioning until midnight. Then, exhausted and wanting a drink, they decided to call it a night and go to the corner bar.

As they walked from their car to the bar, Tommy said, “This is getting futile, Bo.” And Bo himself was thinking, I’m playing with myself. We ain’t gonna catch anybody like this. But he didn’t let on to Colleran. Inside they found their sergeant, Bob Stephens, and a couple of others from the squad.

“What the hell are you guys working on?” asked Stephens.

“The captain gave us special permission on the nun case.” Bo told them what he and Tommy were doing. The others, except Stephens, laughed. Bo burned inside. “We’re going to break this case,” he said, more hurt than angry.

They played poker in the back of the bar and continued drinking. At about 4:00 A.M., Bo announced, “C’mon Tommy, let’s go, it’s time to work again.”

They drove slowly up Park Avenue and witnessed what they had seen a hundred times before: the savage landscape of Harlem mysteriously softened by the kindness of night. The burnt-out buildings that in daylight soundlessly glared with their charred, sardonic grimaces, now dissolved into the dreamlike darkness—the darkness itself stained by the gentle frozen light of street lamps, by the burning white eyes of the few cars gliding and bumping over the roads like giant rats hurrying along a corridor, by the now limp, then furious light of the all-night grocery stores and fast-food places, and by, where it is seen between the impervious and sleeping buildings, the city’s reflected iron glow in the sky.

The only people on the streets were prostitutes, pimps, and nickel- and dime­bag pushers. Bo and Tommy got heavy with all of them, threatening to lock them up every night from now on if they didn’t come back with information.

They worked through the not-morning, while the pimps and prostitutes disappeared, withdrawing like shadows banished by the fuller light, and were replaced by the thick flow of humanity that surges through Harlem by day. Around noon, a Hispanic informant directed them to a nearby tenement. Inside, said the man, lived a burglar named Harold Wells. Wells had a friend, a short guy, who had helped him rip off a discotheque owned by a Harlem mobster, Nicky Barnes.

The building, at 62 East 125th Street, was five stories high, dirty brown, and partially abandoned. Inside, garbage was strewn on the floor and stairs, and its smell permeated the narrow hallway. Bo knocked at the first apartment. Through the door, he and Tommy heard a girl calling, “Cops are here, cops are here!” The door opened, and a crowd of youngsters, giggling and slapping each other quiet, faced them. In the background, Bo thought he heard the sounds of a couple in bed.

“Where’s Harold?” he asked.

“He lives upstairs, second floor.”

“Does he have a friend he hangs out with?”

“Yeah, a short guy.”

“What’s he look like? Does he limp?” All the kids were talking at once. Someone said, “No, he walks with a bop.”

“He walks with a bop?” In the hallway, Bo imitated an exaggerated ghetto bounce.

“Yeah, he walks like that!” shrieked one of the little girls.

Bo looked at Tommy. “Which apartment does Harold live in?”

Someone told them and they went to it. An old man with a glass eye opened the door. He was Wells’s stepfather and the building superintendent. He invited them into an untidy but clean single room with the kitchen in the center. The pale, colorless light of indirect sunshine washed the room. A pretty, wide-eyed three-year-old girl sat on the couch.

The two cops explained about the nun and showed their drawing. The old man shrugged; it didn’t look like Harold, he said. He was cordial but evasive, saying that he hadn’t seen his stepson for a week. Finally, Bo handed him a card. “Lookit, please call if you hear anything.”

They crossed the hall to an abandoned apartment into which a cable ran under a slightly ajar door. They pushed it open and entered. The apartment was dark except for a candle flickering on the floor. Suddenly a huge, seven-foot-three black man tried to slam the door shut. Bo and Tommy pulled their guns and shouted, “Police!” The giraffelike black man stared murderously at them.

“We’re not looking for you. Chill out, chill out!” screamed Bo. “I don’t give a fuck what you’re into! I want info on your friend Harold.”

“He hangs out with Max. I haven’t seen him since Monday. He lives with the old man.” His voice was tremendously deep, and his eyes were wild. When he was sure the cops weren’t interested in him, he became extremely cooperative, telling them that Harold’s nickname was “Chicago” and that Nicky Barnes’s men were looking for them. No, he didn’t know anything about the nun.

They went back to the old man: “Look, don’t fuck us around! Where’s Harold?”

“I haven’t seen him since Monday,” he replied sheepishly.

“All we’re concerned about is the nun case. We don’t give a fuck about any of these other burglaries.”

They left the building and continued along 125th. By late afternoon, they were deep in the heart of Harlem and going through the projects. The evening turned nasty as a tremendous rainstorm crashed over the city.

They drove to the Colonial, parking right outside and dashing through the torrent into the restaurant. Inside, they slapped the rain off themselves, and Bo kissed the Italians at the bar and told them he was working on “the nun caper.” He lamented, “I think I fucking missed the guys that did it. I think we missed them. I feel these are the freakin’ guys. I don’t know what Tommy feels.” He looked at his partner, then turned back and blurted: “Tommy feels like another scotch and soda!”

Their seafood salad arrived and Tommy, still just drinking, didn’t eat. He stared at his gleaming plate of octopus, calamari, and shellfish. “C’mon Tommy, eat,” implored Bo, his mouth full.

“How can you eat that fucking stuff?” returned the other. “I never eat anything that has one eye and looks back at me.”

The phone rang at the bar. It was for Bo. When he returned to the table, his face was deadly serious. “The old man just called. The precinct is looking for us. He’s got info, let’s go.”

They raced back to the precinct, picked up Bob Stephens, and then tore up Park Avenue to 62 East 125th Street. The old man opened the door to their knock and looked cautiously along the corridor, then invited the rain-soaked cops in.

Two black women in their fifties sat on the couch, silent and apprehensive. The little girl was still there, awake, now lying on the bed propped on her elbows. Bo and Tommy went with the old man to the kitchen table.

“What’s up?” Bo asked.

“I don’t know if my stepson did anything, but…he was here earlier.”

“Listen,” interjected Tommy softly, “wouldn’t you rather him be vindicated in your own mind? Cooperate with us and we’ll talk to him.”

The old man nodded. “Let me tell you something: If my stepson had anything to do with this nun rape, I want to know,” and he jabbed himself in the chest, his glass eye peering in one direction, his good eye looking straight at Bo.

“I should have called you earlier,” he went on. “After you guys were here this afternoon, Harold came here. He had a girl with him. When he heard you were looking for him, he asked me for money. I gave him money, and he left for Chicago with his girl. They went from Port Authority. He was very nervous. If he had anything to do with raping the nun, I want him to be caught.”

Stephens’s and Tommy’s eyes widened; Bo was shaking in the chair. “What time did he leave?”

“About five o’clock, for the Port Authority.”

It was 11:00 P.M. now—Wells would have been on the road six hours. Even though Bo was cautioning himself, This is still nothing, we haven’t talked to the guy yet, he was so excited that he bounced up and kissed the old man, telling him, “There’s a $10,000 reward. You’re going to get it if this is the man who did it.”

“I don’t want any reward. If my stepson had anything to do with this, I want you to arrest him.”

Emotionally, Bo hugged him. “l love you. You don’t know what you’re doing for us! If ever I can help you with anything in your life, you call me and tell me.”

Back at the precinct, Bo phoned Captain Creane, who was with the task force, and told him about the old man. Creane told Bo to contact the sex crimes unit. But it was midnight and no one answered. When Creane called back, he told Bo that he had just spoken with Inspector Sibone, then chief of detectives for Manhattan North, who remembered them from a previous case. Sibone said that if Dietl and Colleran thought they were onto something, then he would be willing to take it seriously. Moments later, Sibone himself called.

“What have you really got?”

“Inspector, I don’t know what we fucking got, but I’ve got the strongest feeling I ever had in my life. We got a guy on the run to Chicago because he heard we were looking for him. He’s definitely a burglar, and he’s tall and works with a short guy that bops, and those might be the guys those skells saw at the convent. We haven’t spoken to the fucking guy, but I think he’s one of them.”

“Okay, I’m authorizing you to fly out there. See what flight you can get.”

They phoned the airports, but there were no more flights leaving that night for anywhere. It wasn’t even possible to charter a plane.

Bo got a brainstorm. He called the Chicago police violent crimes section. A Sergeant Kelly answered.

“Lookit,” explained Bo, after telling him the background, “we’ve got a guy coming out on a bus, a possible suspect. We haven’t talked to him, but you’ve been a cop a lot of years, and my partner and I have got a feeling that’s unbelievable. We want you to follow him when he gets off the bus.” Kelly willingly agreed—the Chicago papers had been full of the case, too. Bo described Wells from a photo the stepfather had given him. “Just follow him, now, till we get there. Don’t pick him up,” stressed Bo.

When Sibone called back, Bo told him what he’d done, and the inspector said he’d see them both in the morning. The two cops could not go to sleep. Instead, they spent the night trying to piece together an ID on Wells. They couldn’t. He had no previous record.

Sibone arrived a little before 7:00 A.M. Tommy was out getting breakfast. Suddenly the phone rang. It was Sergeant Kelly. “We’ve got your boy!”

Bo went cold all over. “What do you mean, you’ve got our boy? You’re supposed to follow the guy, not grab him!”

“No, no, no,” protested Kelly, “he ‘fessed up to everything.”

“Why’d you pick him up?” stammered Dietl.

“He got off the bus with his girlfriend and he told us everything. All the details. He was afraid the mob was going to get him.”

Tommy had returned and was standing over his partner, their breakfast on a tray in his hands. Bo abruptly leapt up and threw the tray into the air. “Tommy, we got him!”

For the next few minutes, mayhem erupted in the precinct. Like an inflated but untied balloon released, Bo tore through the station house. He came back into the squad room and he and Tommy bear-hugged.

Wells had named Max Lindeman as the man with him at the convent. Tommy recognized the name—he had locked him up during the 1977 blackout for looting. Now Tommy called home and woke up his son to locate Lindeman’s record in his dad’s arrest files.

Meanwhile, Bo ran outside, took one of the blue-and-white radio cars, and, with lights flashing and siren wailing, rushed over to 116th Street to yell the news at the waking neighborhood—screaming out the window in a voice soon hoarse from the effort and brittle from accumulated exhaustion and exhilaration. Some old Italian widows on their way to early morning mass, dressed all in black and looking like ageless and enduring crows, came up to the car that he had stopped in order to speak to them. As he told them the news, he could see the emotion on their faces—faces that looked as if they had long since exceeded the time when it was necessary to express emotion—and he heard their ancient, weak, but indomitable voices blessing him.

He went to the convent and told the nun who answered the door that he and his partner caught the rapists. They hugged each other, silently, for a moment. From there, he went to Rao’s, pounding on the restaurant door till Vinnie, still half asleep, irritably opened it. Bo planted a big kiss on his cheek and spurted, “We got ’em, the guys that raped the nun!” Rao’s face lit up and then they, too, embraced.

When Bo returned to the precinct, he found it full of police brass, case investigators, and press. The squad room was as crowded as a platform waiting room after a train has been canceled, and just as impatiently tense. But Bo discovered that he and Tommy were being pushed out. All over the station house, meetings were being conducted without them. He couldn’t even get to speak to Sergeant Kelly again; the sex crimes detectives had him exclusively. To add to the insult, some task force detectives were wandering around dousing enthusiasm by saying they didn’t think Wells was guilty—they suspected the Chicago police had beaten a confession out of him.

Bo and Tommy became as depressed as they had been elated. And then Bob Stephens walked quietly over and said, “Let’s go get Max.” In the confusion, everyone had forgotten about Lindeman.

First the trio went to his mother’s address, but found only her and her boyfriend there. Like three crazed men, they hit the most likely junkie joints, broke down doors and grabbed junkies, slapping them around and putting their heads down toilets—”Where’s Max? Where’s Max, you fucking junkie!” they shouted each time.

Eventually they returned to the precinct where there was a message waiting. Max’s mother had called: He was with her now and wanted to surrender to Tommy, who, he remembered, had bought him a packet of cigarettes when he was in jail in 1977.

So Tommy went to collect the fugitive. Lindeman walked into the squad room between Stephens and Colleran, almost hidden by the two much larger men. Lindeman was very short, just over five feet, and wimpy looking, though with an attempt at arrogance.

“Your partner gave you up in Chicago,” growled Bo.

“Fuck you, I didn’t do nothing,” spat back Lindeman.

Bo’s mind went black and the anger burst inside him. He threw a punch into Lindeman’s face, sending the man sprawling across the wall of the interrogation room. Tommy jumped on Bo and held him down while his partner seethed at Lindeman through gritted teeth: “You fucking scumbag! After what you did—what did you do in there? How did you rape that nun?”

Lindeman was against the far wall holding his face and pleading, “Keep that little guy off me!”

“What happened out there? WHAT DID YOU DO TO THIS NUN? Let me go, Tommy, I want to shoot this motherfucker now!”

Tommy held on and dragged him out of the room. “Bo, just take it easy, take it easy.”

Bo calmed down and went into the viewing room where he could watch and listen to the interrogation. For four hours, Pete Christianson and Danny Ruffle, from sex crimes, and Tommy questioned him, never losing their patience, although not getting anywhere with the frightened, 22-year-old suspect who kept repeating, “I don’t know what I should do….” To which Tommy would reply, leaning forward with a soothing voice that sounded like a priest’s, “You’re going to have to answer to that man upstairs. Cleanse your soul.” When he could see that they were getting absolutely nothing out of Lindeman, Bo would burst into the room and pretend to go for him, screaming that he was going to let him go so the Mafia could get him, while the others “restrained ” him. After each explosion, Lindeman would be nervous for a while and talk, but still deny being in the convent.

Once more, the people in the squad room were saying they didn’t think this was the rapist. Detectives stood with Bo in the cramped dark viewing room, leaning against the filing cabinets or sitting on the spare desk and watching the proceedings going on in the brightly lit room next door. Repeatedly they shook their heads, “Dietl, this ain’t the guy.”

Now it was late afternoon. Bo was watching alone—leaning forward against the lighted glass like a child pressing his face against the window of a closed toy store on a dark Christmas Eve, any sense of how long he had been there, or in how much discomfort, washed away by his obsession with what lies on the other side of the glass—when Lindeman, alone with Danny, suddenly but slowly dropped his head into his hands and mumbled: “We were smoking dust that day and all I remember is grabbing the nun…”

A sensation more intense than any Bo had ever known overwhelmed him. He described it later as “20,000 of your best orgasms rolled into one.” For a second he didn’t move. Then he flung open the door and burst into the squad room. It was mostly empty now. Tommy was smoking and talking with two cops from the DA’s office.

“Tommy, he ‘fessed up,” Bo shouted. “We’ve got two guys, now, in two places, that said they did it! Tommy, it’s over! It’s over!”

TWO YEARS LATER

It was a summer evening. Bo and Tommy had been reassigned to different precincts in Brooklyn soon after they broke the case. But they had returned to the Two-Five for a retirement party.

They came off the East River Drive at 116th and stopped the car opposite the convent. A few lights shone in windows on the corner of the dark street. In the car, there was only the glow of the dashboard as Bo spoke quietly to a friend in the back seat.

The rapists had been able to cop pleas, Bo explained. Because the nun didn’t want to testify, Lindeman got 20 years and Wells 15 years. In fact, Bo said, the nun even forgave her assailants and prayed for their souls.

The friend asked if they ever met her.

“No. The only contact we ever had with her was after we cracked the case; she sent Tommy and me a dozen red roses, and said she would say a prayer for us every morning for the rest of her life.”

For a moment, no one said anything. Then Bo broke the silence. “We don’t go to church every Sunday, but believe it or not, after we broke the case we started to go.

“Everybody said it was great police work, but I go beyond that. Did you ever believe in miracles? We had nothing, but we were steered to take on the case, we were steered to go to the building where the old man lived: It was a miracle.

”And after that,” he continued shortly, “nightly we would be drinking up at the corner bar, me and Tommy would start hugging. This was months after. We would get a feeling sitting there talking where our whole bodies would go into a thing and the chills would come back. And I’d say to Tommy, or he’d say to me, ‘We did something, Tommy, something no one else could have done. And they can never take it away from us!’”

The car was purring, the engine still on. Bo turned to face his friend behind him and, his eyes alive with the recollection, told how his young daughter had brought some of his clippings to school and declared: “My daddy is a famous detective. He raped and killed a nun!” Then he roared the laugh that exploded over everyone else’s—”Aaahahaa!”—threw the car into drive, and lurched it away from the curb toward the party.

Generation Xanax

Fifty million prescriptions for alprazolam — Xanax’s generic name — were filled in the U.S. in 2013, making it the most prescribed psychiatric medication in the country. Prescriptions were rising by nearly 10 percent a year back then, with no indication of slowing down, so 2018 numbers are presumably much higher. And judging by how quickly a casual complaint about an upcoming transatlantic flight is met these days by an offer of a couple of “Xans” to smooth out the trip, there are untold legions of additional Americans taking it off-prescription for at least semi-legitimate reasons. Xanax belongs to America’s most popular family of mood-altering drugs, called benzodiazepines. Even if you only count users with prescriptions, benzos are more popular than MDMA, LSD, heroin, and meth.

It’s impossible for a drug to permeate a society that thoroughly without leaving a mark on its culture, and the popularity of benzodiazepines — Klonopin, Valium, and Ativan are the other top antianxiety meds in this drug family — among America’s creative class has only amplified its impact. Four decades after Xanax first hit the market, this particular benzo surrounds us completely, a primary element in our cultural atmosphere.

The drugs we take have been defining the aesthetics of our times since the dawn of pop culture. Back during the Jazz Age, when radio and records came within reach of the working-class, weed-smoking big band leaders became our first rock stars. Psychedelics gave the sixties their Day-Glo vividness. The hard-edged gloss that got wrapped around nearly every cultural product created during the eighties was so clearly derived from massive piles of cocaine it’s become a cliché. The style of the nineties was shaped by “heroin chic” and Ecstasy-fueled rave visuals.

The past decade was all about weed, as marijuana began to get legalized and Adult Swim-style stoner humor took over the mainstream. But this decade’s been about benzos. Deeper into our century, when people look back at the media we’re making and consuming today, they’ll see the influence of benzodiazepines as clearly as we see coke residue on Reagan-era cultural artifacts. As more of us get on benzos, the dominant cultural aesthetic is getting softer, gentler, and more compatible with the cozy benzo high. Opiates get more press, but in truth, we’re living in the Age of Xanax, this drug being the most popular antianxiety med in a world where anxiety has become the dominant mental state.

How we got here is clear enough. Our brains’ insatiable hunger for information drove us to connect them to fat data-pipelines and we gorged on the ceaseless flow. Then we required increasingly more extreme stuff — from esoteric porn genres to hyperpolarized culture war propaganda — in order to get a response from our fried-out dopamine receptors. Like any addict who’s drifted into the ugly side of a bender, we’re reaching for tranquilizers to take the edge off, only we’re doing it collectively, as an entire nation.

Everyone on this planet right now is fucking crazy. Life under Trump is a nightmare state of doom just over the horizon for anyone on any part of the political spectrum, whether it’s liberals freaking out over the executive branch’s relentless attacks on civil rights or conservative MAGA types constantly on frantic guard against the deep-state coup attempt or an invasion by MS-13 that they’ve been told are inevitable.

War, the economy, the environment, hackers, and the general sense that we’ve already crossed some invisible line on a path toward destruction have us all perpetually on edge, and since we can’t seem to turn off the endless news-feed of everything bad happening in the world, we feel anxiety all the time. The human mind can only handle so much negative stimulation without medication, or else it falls apart entirely.

Opiates are brutally effective at reducing that agitation, but they cloud the mind. And in a hyper-stratified society like ours, creative elites want a better class of drugs than the working-class. According to the prejudices of the day, opioids are for Appalachian Trump voters — expendable, blue-collar hillbillies fueling small-town drug economies with workers’ comp checks.

Benzos, on the other hand, are a more refined downer, designed to cure a more cerebral affliction — a brain that can’t stop working. There’s a not-so-subtle hint of a brag in the way a lot of people in the creative class discuss their anxiety and the way they medicate it, implying that their real problem is that they’re literally just too smart for their own good.

And since benzodiazepines give the illusion of acting on the mind and not the body, with its icky, working-class associations, it’s easy to ignore the fact that they’re highly addictive and extremely dangerous when mixed with the most common intoxicants, such as alcohol.

But the main thing is that they work. They really, really work.

Inside our brains we have millions of receptors for a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, which, among other roles, regulates the neurons in our brains and central nervous system, reducing their activity when we get too stressed. If something lights up our primitive fight-or-flight response — a loud noise, a traumatic memory, an article about climate change — GABA can apply the brakes and slow things down so we don’t cross over into full-blown panic. Benzodiazepines work by flooding our GABA receptors and binding them all together, telling sweet lies to our nervous system that everything’s fine, that there’s nothing to worry about after all.

Benzos feel like the blissful first fraction of a second after an orgasm, stretched out into hours.

That state of anxiety-free grace — a feeling of complete all-rightness — is what we spend our whole lives chasing. Reducing the amount of stress the world inflicts on us, whether it’s financial or emotional or societal, dictates so much of our behavior, from recreational pursuits, self-improvement regimens, and self-medicating, to career choices, relationship choices, and devotion to domestic sheltering. Popping a Xanax gets you there without the work, and not only much quicker than through non-chemical means, but deeper into the state of chill. I can say from personal experience that a month’s worth of daily meditation can’t hold a candle to the worry-negating effects of .5 milligrams of alprazolam.

Benzos make you feel like you’re floating in a warm bubble bath the size of an ocean. They feel like the blissful first fraction of a second after an orgasm, stretched out into hours. They feel like an off-switch for the part of your brain that gives a shit, allowing you to float above the world as aloof and unbothered as a cloud.

When I’m anxious, the inside of my head feels like a crowded rush-hour subway platform, with different worries elbowing their way to the front of the pack and yelling for my attention. On Xanax, it feels like I’m the only person in a Greek and Roman museum wing, walking in pristine silence, surrounded by nothing but air and light and marble, smooth and serene. After feeling crushed by anxiety, it’s like being weightless. That sensation alone would be enough to get hooked on, even if it wasn’t one of the most dangerously addictive chemical compounds we’ve ever invented.

The Xanax aesthetic is a way of externalizing that sensation of absolute detached mental tranquility. It’s an utterly unbothered style, without the haziness that comes with more stoner-y perspectives. Benzos clear the mind rather than cloud it (at least when you take them on their own), so their vibe is soft but crystalline, uncluttered and unchaotic. It is, above all other things, intensely comfy.

The current popularity of muted pastel colors — from album covers to hair dye — is part of the benzo look, whether they’re used as fields of flat tones to create a perfectly placid mood, or combined in soft ombré gradients to add the suggestion of languorous movement and the floaty, bubble bath sensation of a brain awash in friendly neurotransmitters.

Pastels fit nicely with the trend of dressing softly. The rise of benzo use in the U.S. has corresponded with a steep decline in anything approaching formal attire. T-shirts and sneakers are now acceptable in settings that only recently demanded suits and ties, including weddings and funerals. By calling sweats and sneakers “athleisure” wear, and making them more expensive, we’ve been able to justify bringing the fleecy comfort of homebound self-care days into our everyday public lives. The more tranquilizers we consume as a nation, the more we’re starting to dress like the zonked-out, sweat-suited residents of a psych ward.

Orderly minimalism is another major visual component of the style. Things in tidy rows and columns can soothe the parts of our brains that flare up in people with anxiety, particularly those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. For people with OCD, the feeling of a benzo flooding your GABA receptors gives the same sensation of just-rightness that you get from indulging whatever organizational kink you feel compelled by.

So it’s no surprise that advertising has become increasingly tidy, as well as flat, minimalist, and pastel in recent years, particularly in advertising aimed at urban creative professionals and those who aspire to an urban creative lifestyle. In the past, ads fought loudly for our attention, but in a world where overstimulation has become the norm, serenity has become a valuable product. If people are willing to shell out good money for inner peace — the meditation app Headspace is currently worth about a quarter of a billion dollars — giving consumers even a small taste of calm during their commute or while they’re overstimulating themselves on the internet is like giving them an expensive gift.

And if that sensation maybe reminds them of the tranquil feeling they get from having a benzo in their system — or even happens to vibe with the wave they’re on from the Klonopin that they popped first thing that morning — that wouldn’t be bad either.

Which is why New York City subways and Instagram are so plastered with ads showing reasonably hip, youngish city dwellers resting peacefully on their backs in tidy arrangements against tonal color-on-color backgrounds. Whether the product is retro-inspired eyeglasses or memory foam mattresses or pills for erectile dysfunction doesn’t matter at this point. This kind of starkly serene late-capitalist still life has taken on a life of its own as a visual genre. There isn’t a contemporary artist working who’s doing a better job of capturing our current moment’s distinctive blend of hyper-consumerism and tranquilized shellshock.

For people with OCD, the feeling of a benzo flooding your GABA receptors gives the same sensation of just-rightness that you get from indulging whatever organizational kink you feel compelled by.

Musicians have responded to benzos with a push into sonic softness. Despite the tumultuous state of the world, angry music is out of style. Today’s most relevant pop artists aren’t raging against the machine, but creating cozy sonic nooks where listeners can hide out and forget about the machine altogether. Drums have become muted, singing has become more whispery, and loud electric guitars have almost entirely disappeared from the Top 40.

But unlike the warm soft rock of the Quaalude-heavy seventies, the artists whose work has spread the most easily and organically into the zeitgeist today are cool and more than a little aloof.

Kanye West’s album 808s & Heartbreak — whose sense of detached loss should be familiar to anyone who’s dealt with the death of a family member through a veil of pills — gave pop and hip-hop its first taste of benzo cool. Frank Ocean has become one of the most important performers of his generation singing about intense emotions held at arm’s length, in the way that benzos allow you to observe your own feelings as if they were happening to someone else. Lana Del Rey’s cult icon status comes from her ability to channel a cryptic, otherworldly glamor inspired by the sensation of being “Xanned” halfway into another plane of existence.

But no one has made art more openly indebted to benzodiazepines than today’s young rappers. And what their art says about them says a lot about the dark turn that the Xanax boom has taken.

Rappers have been at the leading edge of Xanax’s cultural takeover from the beginning. Back when the rest of the pop world was still high on Molly and Obama-era optimism, Southern mixtape rappers like Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, and Future promoted Xanax as part of a world-obliterating pharmaceutical cocktail, mixed in with Vicodin, Percocet, and prescription cough syrup containing codeine and promethazine.

Sometime just after the beginning of the decade, a pack of young, independent hip-hop artists emerged through free platforms like SoundCloud and YouTube with a sound that opened up the ratcheting rhythms and dialed-back tempos of Southern hip-hop to a breezier atmosphere. Rappers like A$AP Rocky, Lil B, Main Attrakionz, and Yung Lean shook off the suffocating darkness of hip-hop’s lean-sipping years with dreamy flows over weightless beats that were more New Age than boom-bap. Fittingly, the style earned itself the name “cloud rap.”

This new breed of hip-hop phenoms made music that had the same spacey, lighter-than-air feel of a benzo high, and it didn’t take much critical guesswork to make the connection. Yung Lean rapped about his Xanax habit before it landed him in the hospital. The scene’s spiritual leader, A$AP Yams, who, among other things, helped curate its aesthetic on his cult-popular Tumblr account, had Xanax bars tattooed on his arms next to the words “Black Out,” and eventually died from mixing it with the codeine-based lean (aka sizzurp or purple drank). Cloud-rap-adjacent artists like Travis Scott, Earl Sweatshirt, and Danny Brown talked openly about popping benzos for both business and pleasure.

Cloud rap was a relatively niche phenomenon that happened mostly underground and online, but a wave of musicians that it inspired have spent the past few years upending the rap game and making inroads deep into the mainstream.

So-called “SoundCloud rappers” like Lil Uzi Vert, 6ix9ine, Smokepurpp, Kodak Black, and XXXTentacion have scandalized the hip-hop world by embracing unorthodox influences like emo, and scandalized the pop world by attracting massive teen fan bases to their Instagrammed rock star lifestyles, which frequently feature reckless levels of benzo intoxication (not to mention face tattoos and sexual abuse allegations).

This strain of hip-hop occupies a remarkably similar place on the pop landscape as alternative rock did back in the nineties — a semi-official sound of alienated youth that’s managed to sneak past pop’s old guard and get its hand on the wheel of the zeitgeist. It’s dominating the pop charts, setting the stylistic agenda that even superstars are following, and giving the media a field day with outrageous, headline-making behavior. It’s like Nirvana multiplied by the dozens, which makes it fitting that so many of them have adopted Kurt Cobain’s uniform of ripped jeans, chin-length dyed hair, and cat-eye sunglasses.

The major sonic difference between this new soundtrack for dissatisfied teens and nineties alternative rock is mostly a matter of volume. Where Cobain and his peers got their angst out through loud, distorted guitars and guttural screams, Xanax rap is spacey, quieter, and cool to the touch. The beats shuffle more than they bang, laced with twinkling synthesizers and softly susurrating white noise, and the vocals tend to be delivered in a dissociated melodic mumble.

When this almost abstractly chill sound is paired with the genre’s lyrical fixation on despair and death, the results can be profoundly unsettling. It would be one thing to hear a kid in his early twenties scream, “Push me to the edge/ all my friends are dead” — we have a template for that kind of thing, and rage feels like a natural reaction to desperation. Hearing Lil Uzi Vert slurring it with an aura of absolute benzo-inspired detachment — sounding like he’s tranquilized beyond the point of being physically able to give a fuck about whether he lives or dies — leaves you shaken.

Xanax rap invokes a feeling of genuine nihilism that makes Gen X’s rebellious phase look like a tantrum. And Xanax rappers’ behavior backs it up. To anyone who knows how benzos work — how easy it is to take too many, how wrong things can go when you mix them with other substances, how effortlessly you can end up hooked on them — the level of benzo abuse that these kids engage in is jaw-dropping.

So is their age. When Lil Pump hit a million followers on Instagram, he celebrated with a cake shaped like a giant Xanax bar and did the same two months later when he turned 17. Lil Xan was still below the legal drinking age when he began his come-up with an image centered around continuous pill popping. (He’s since publicly sworn off alprazolam, and has repeatedly talked about changing his stage name, although he hasn’t followed through yet.) Lil Peep, who’d collected the most “voice of a generation” accolades of anyone in the cadre, died from overdosing on fentanyl and alprazolam when he was only 21.

Today’s most relevant pop artists aren’t raging against the machine but creating cozy sonic nooks where listeners can forget about the machine altogether.

Music has always been the art form with the closest relationship to drug culture, uniquely able to both reflect trends in getting high and to influence them. It’s impossible to imagine Sgt. Pepper’s being made without LSD; it’s just as impossible to imagine LSD becoming as mainstream as it did without Sgt. Pepper’s. (TV and movies are occasionally able to capture an era’s druggy identity — you can feel benzos in Atlanta’s bemused detachment, Big Little Lies’ dissociated trauma, and the all-too-relatable robots in Westworld, Blade Runner 2049, and Ex Machina — but their size and budget constraints make it difficult.) But social media, blindingly fast-moving, infinitely mutable, and by now as much a conduit for aesthetics as information, could be taking over.

Most of the look and feel of this era of anxiety and panic barely held in check by massive amounts of tranquilizers first originated on Tumblr, the social media platform that only minimally blipped on the mainstream’s radar but which reshaped youth culture in ways that are only just now making themselves apparent. Tumblr is where much of the Xanax rap trend got started. It’s where the cult of Lana Del Rey grew its deepest roots. And it’s the birthplace of vaporwave, an obscure internet trend that’s had a disproportionately large influence on pop culture.

Joan Didion

We wanted to find out, so we hired reality television legend Farrah Abraham as our book critic. After enduring a working-class childhood and life as a single teen mom, Farrah’s blossomed into an entrepreneur. She’s bringing her unique perspective to reviews of new and classic literature, starting with Joan Didion’s seminal tome Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New Yorker and New York Review of Books, it’s time to get real. A new critic is in town!

As a devout reader, I believe women should write their life stories because most journeys teach valuable lessons. But if you want consumers to trust you, you probably should avoid starting a book with your gin issues. Journalist and screenwriter Joan Didion apparently never received this message.

In 1968 she published Slouching Towards Bethlehem. If you’re looking to find out what not to do as a writer, this is a great book for you. Over the course of twenty essays, Didion describes her life in Los Angeles during the sixties. She jumps from year to year, often for no rhyme or reason. The non-linear structure confuses me. I had to wonder, “Was Didion even trying when she wrote this junk?”

According to her Wikipedia page, Didion is some sort of queen of nonfiction, but I doubt Slouching Towards Bethlehem’s credibility. How would she remember all these quotes? Did she walk around with a recorder in her purse? I suspect Didion wrote many half-truths because she prides herself on her diva behavior. At one point, Didion brags about her missed deadlines. Who does that? If Didion behaved this way on a reality tv set, she would be fired for unprofessionalism.

Overall, I did not connect with this book. I don’t think the writer herself was even connected to the material. In a dull boring style, Didion goes on and on about John Wayne and Charles Manson and all her alcohol-fueled parties. Although some people online called Didion snobby, I wouldn’t consider her writing snobby. I don’t care what Didion thought about some old Western movie. There are more important issues taking place in America, like the rising cost of child care and sexism in the workplace.

Maybe lost souls in my generation connect to Didion? I think this book is best suited for readers in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Personally, I find the behavior of Didion and her friends obnoxious. Without ever feeling the need to grow up, these baby boomers drink their way through life, developing all sorts of problems with drug use and addiction. They never consider the future. They only think about drinking and drugs.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a great book for people who abuse substances every day. When you need a book to read and ponder your drug problems, pick up a Didion essay collection. If you’re looking for a book that discusses real issues, you are better off picking up my memoir, My Teenage Dream Ended. My life story is closer to the truth of life.

Art by Official Sean Penn

Farrah Abraham

Farrah Abraham

Feminist Terrorist

“What can we do now,” asked Emmeline Pankhurst, “but carry on this fight ourselves?” She was speaking to a crowded meeting of the WSPU in Hampstead Town Hall, a leader reaffirming her soldiers’ commitment to war. “I want you not to see these as isolated acts of hysterical women, but to see that it is being carried out with a definite intention and purpose. It can only be stopped in one way: that is by giving us the vote!” Powerful words, at a time when the glorious cause had become a “guerrilla war,” fought in the dark with weapons women were not supposed to have. In the years since Kitty had suffered attacks at the hands of the police, endured abuse selling suffrage propaganda, disrupted political meetings, hounded the prime minister, and suffered through horrendous force-feedings while on hunger strike, the WSPU had moved from being a war of words to a war of weapons.

We think of this as a period of window-smashing, women chaining themselves to railings and the rushes on Parliament, but the reality was far more extreme. Guns, bombs, and arson attacks became second nature to the women involved, radicalized by a combination of the revolutionary leadership of the WSPU and the physical violence they experienced at the hands of anti-suffragists, the police, and the prison system. As the government repeatedly betrayed and discounted the suffragettes, the rage felt by the women who only wanted to be seen as equal, and have ownership over their own destinies rather than leave them to the decisions of men, drove the organization to commit highly aggressive acts that have since been erased from our history. The violence of the suffragettes has been sanitized, downplayed, and, in some cases, simply denied — a final injustice to those brave women who made impossible choices in the hope that the ends could somehow justify the means.

From 1912 to 1914, Christabel Pankhurst orchestrated a nationwide bombing and arson campaign the likes of which Britain had never seen before and hasn’t experienced since. Hundreds of attacks by either bombs or fire, carried out by women using codenames and aliases, destroyed timber yards, cotton mills, railway stations, MPs’ homes, mansions, racecourses, sporting pavilions, churches, glasshouses, even Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory. Chemical attacks on postmen, postboxes, golfing greens, and even the prime minister — whenever a suffragette could get close enough — left victims with terrible burns and sorely irritated eyes and throats, and destroyed precious correspondence.

Imagine the internet suddenly becoming inaccessible all the way from London to Glasgow, and all phone communication suddenly ceasing. That was the impact of the suffragettes cutting the huge trunk telegram and telephone posts across the country, on numerous occasions taking out communications for the government, police, and ordinary people. Bombs were left outside banks and newspaper offices and could also be sent in the post — one discovered at the South Eastern London District Post Office, made of nitroglycerin and gunpowder, was so large that if it had gone off it would have destroyed the entire building, killing all 200 people inside.

At the site of one of the most daring attacks, on the St Leonards home of the MP Arthur Du Cros in April 1913, the immediate aftermath of the destruction was caught on film. The newsreels were a growing business, and Pathé’s camera arrived while the ruins were still smoldering. As it pans along the shell of the house, figures fill the frame; men trying to salvage roof tiles, women observing the wreckage and a young schoolgirl, standing on the lawn, staring directly into the camera. She turns, looking up at the remnants behind her, while all the other figures hurry across the frame. What did she think of the arson executed in her name, to secure her a future in a utopia of political equality? The dull thud as the workmen’s hammers hit the charred wood was not recorded, but even without sound, the power of the arson attack is clear, a century later. Kitty was the author of this destruction. Did she watch Pathé’s newsreel of the attack’s aftermath, wearing her suffragette colors as the images flickered across the screen?

Du Cros had consistently voted against the enfranchisement of women, which was why he had been chosen as a target, and the razing of his house to the ground was part of the growing “Reign of Terror” that Christabel Pankhurst organized from her Parisian hideaway. She had fled the country after the grand window-smashing campaign and taken up residence in France. Her commitment, and her commitment of the WSPU, to this radical aggressive action, caused a deep schism within the leadership. The Pethick-Lawrences, who had for so long stood beside the Pankhursts and whose newspaper Votes For Women Kitty sold on the streets, were ousted by Christabel and her mother for their opposition to the growing violence at the end of 1912. Determined to exercise full and total control over every aspect of the WSPU, Christabel created a new weekly newspaper for the Union, The Suffragette, priced at a single penny, to carry forward both her edicts and the reports of the actions of other members. Kitty was devoted to the new paper: “The Suffragette became more and more daring and defiant and was continually being raided, everybody, including the printers, being arrested, but never missing an issue since secret reserves were always ready to “carry on.” Many of her fellow suffragettes had now been tasked to carry out destructive and dangerous attacks. As words had not worked, the WSPU issued a new manifesto warning of a “fiercer spirit of revolt” that was now awakened and was “impossible to control.” Emmeline Pankhurst made her directives clear in a now legendary speech:

“Be militant each in your own way… Those of you who can break windows — break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realize that property is as greatly endangered by women’s suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old — do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion.”

Arrested in 1914 Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested while trying to present a petition to the King at Buckingham Palace, 21 May 1914

On the platform, Kitty rose to cheer wildly. She was committed to the new violence with a radical and burning passion. The women involved were given many different names in the press, from “wreckers” to “wild women” or the individual “professional petroleuse,” language that conjures up images of these women as the daughters of the French Revolution — a rejected social group bent on political representation, brandishing the colors of the WSPU and shouting out an anglicized war cry reminiscent of “Liberté, Unité, Égalité.” Christabel lost no time in linking the cause to a Francophile revolutionary spirit; she appropriated the image of Joan of Arc, a female martyr who gave her life for what she believed in and was the equal of any man and, under the headings of “Reign of Terror,” “Guerilla Warfare,” and “Fire and Bombs!,” devoted double-page spreads in the Suffragette to reporting the bomb and arson attacks that were now occurring around the country. Following on from photographs and articles of suffragettes still suffering after force-feeding would come the photographs of burned-out buildings and railway stations and parks wrecked by bombs or chemical attacks.

On 29 January 1913, letters addressed to “Mr. George” and “Mr. Asquith” exploded into flames as they were lifted out of postboxes. The envelopes contained fragile glass tubes full of a chemical liquid that, when broken and exposed to the air, immediately caught fire. In the following weeks, further attacks on letters and postboxes came in Coventry, London, Edinburgh, Northampton, and York.

The first bomb attack, and one of the most spectacular in its daring, came on 19 February, when Emily Wilding Davison and her companions succeeded in blowing up David Lloyd George’s new holiday cottage at Walton-on-the-Hill, near Epsom. The Pall Mall Gazette reported the attack under the headline “SUFFRAGETTE TERRORISM,” and that “the perpetrators of the outrage appear to have used a motor-car, and they got away, leaving only two broken hatpins as clues.”

In July 1912, an abortive arson attack on the Nuneham home of Lewis Harcourt, by Helen Craggs and Ethel Smyth, had demonstrated the lengths the suffragettes were now willing to go to. After they had refined their methods, the arson campaign kicked off in earnest on 20 February 1913, when Lilian Lenton and Joyce Locke successfully burned down Kew Gardens’ tea pavilion.

In March, fires raged at railway stations and private homes across Surrey, and railway signal wires, telegram, and telephone trunk masts were cut in Glasgow, Kilmarnock, and Llantarnam. Watching the escalating violence, Sylvia Pankhurst recalled, “Telegraph and telephone wires were severed with long handed clippers; fuse boxes were blown up, communication between London and Glasgow being cut off for some hours.”

April brought with it a full-scale war on the railways: carriages at Davenport Junction, Stockport, exploded after devices were placed underneath the seats. Oxted railway station was decimated by a bomb left in the lavatory. A traveling basket was found, containing a clock timed to go off at 3 A.M., while the fuse had been laid with gunpowder. On 9 April, two bombs were left on the Waterloo to Kingston line, placed on trains going in opposite directions. One bomb was found at Battersea on the train coming from Kingston. In a previously crowded third-class carriage, the railway porter had seen smoke slowly creeping from under a seat. He discovered a white wooden box containing a tin canister, measuring about eight inches by four, in which sixteen live gun cartridges, wired together and joined up with a small double battery, had been attached to a tube of explosive. Packed in among the cartridges were lumps of jagged metal, bullets, and scraps of lead. Four hours later, as a train from Waterloo pulled into Kingston, the third-class carriage exploded and was quickly consumed by fire. Although it was empty, the rest of the carriages were full of passengers, and the risk to their lives was considerable.

Throughout the month, bomb and arson attacks occurred in Abercorn, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Bath, Aberdeen, Tunbridge Wells, Plymouth Hoe, York, Thanet, Birmingham, Newcastle, Cardiff, Preston, London, and Manchester. There was even an attempt to bomb the Bank of England, using a device containing about two ounces of gunpowder, a quantity of hairpins, and a small electric battery, attached by wire to a small chronometer watch, set to explode the bomb at eleven o’clock.

At many of the attacks, copies of the Suffragette were found scattered, or postcards scrawled with message such as “Votes For Women!,” “More To Come/Give Us The Vote,” “Votes for women, and damn the consequences,” “In honour of Mrs Pankhurst,” “Burning for the Vote!,” “Beware of the bomb, run for your lives!” or “Votes For Women R.I.P.” A bomb discovered at the Lyceum Theatre, Taunton, was revealed in the press to have the words “Votes For Women,” “Judges Beware,” “Martyrs of the law,” and “Release our Sisters” painted along its side. At the Smeaton Tower, an old lighthouse on Plymouth Hoe, a bomb — a circular tin canister, containing explosive material and a lit but defused wick — had been painted with the words, “Votes For Women. Death In Ten Minutes.”  Every attack was reprinted in detail in the Suffragette; Christabel was determined to use the paper to heighten the passion and commitment of those instructed to carry out these attacks.

Kitty Marion Selling Birth Control Review

(Original Caption) New York, NY: Kitty Marion ready to sell Birth Control Review in the streets of New York. Photograph, 1915.

Our Children Our Shame

The recent torrent of headlines about child sex abuse has poured forth from all over the country. In Minnesota, 24 adults were indicted for sexually abusing children. The ages of the victims ranged from 2 to 17 years old; in some cases, they were the children of those charged with crimes. In New York and California, reports of sex abuse at nursery schools and daycare centers have started an outcry for greater regulation at such facilities. Also in California, a woman accused of running the world’s largest child pornography mail-order business was convicted and sentenced to prison. And from nursery schools around the country, young children—2, 3, and 4 years old—are overcoming their fears and are telling the world how they’ve been sexually abused by those who have been charged to care for them.

We are seeing these headlines almost every day. And further reports of the outrage are coming from sources other than the news media. In 1983, the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice estimated that more than 1.5 million Americans under the age of 16 were involved in prostitution or child pornography. The department also believes that thousands of unsolved murders of children were related to their involvement in the commercial sexual marketplace. Medical researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles have discovered an alarming number of cases of venereal disease among children under 5. 

The reaction of many to these stories has been almost hysterical. Parents have become frightened about the prospect of leaving their children in the care of schoolteachers and daycare workers. A woman in Los Angeles, shaken by the recent spate of child sex-abuse headlines, notified the police when her nursery-school child returned home from school with a sweater button missing. She was certain that her daughter had been molested. She was wrong, but who could fault her for being alarmed? 

On the other hand, there are those who fear that we are overreacting to the headlines. Stan J. Katz, a psychologist who conducts evaluations in child-abuse cases for the Los Angeles Superior Court, believes that the nation has become hysterical and irrational about the issue of child sex abuse: “The public impact of constant news stories about molestation has been greater than any of us would have predicted. It is this shock that has created a hysterical atmosphere and driven some people to go on witch hunts to find sexual abusers.” 

And then there are some others who have reacted to the headlines—the pedophiles themselves. Rarely as individuals, but often in the newsletters of organizations that promote and celebrate their sexual interest, child sex abusers have spoken out and attacked their critics. They like to portray themselves as the oppressed, the victims. NAMBLA—the North American Man-Boy Love Association—is the most articulate and best organized of such groups. “So, when you kiss the boy you love,” they have proclaimed, “when you fondle him in your sleeping bag beside the fire, even when you like [sic] naked beside a boy you have never dared touch, you have gone beyond the pale. You have placed yourself outside the normal protections of courtesy, civility, humane treatment and legal rights.” 

In April 1983, Penthouse published its first article on child sex abuse, “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind.” We investigated various aspects of the problem—child pornography, incest, pedophiles and their organizations, violence, and law enforcement—and discovered some shocking news. Everyone we spoke to, police officers, psychiatrists, victims, and victimizers, had convinced us that a widespread and underreported form of abuse was being perpetrated upon our children. A year later, the media began bombarding us with the current horrors of child sex abuse. Had the problem gotten worse? Is it only a problem created by the media? What we discovered, and what this article will report, is that the crime of child sex abuse is far more widespread than anything yet reported. 

The recent headlines concerning child sex abuse leave the impression that there is a randomness about the crime—a scandal at a nursery school in Manhattan Beach, California; allegations of child molestations 3,000 miles away at a daycare center in the Bronx, New York; adults trading children to other adults for sex in Minnesota. It is a misleading impression. In fact, millions of children across the country are sexually abused each year. Estimates by experts put the figure at 20 percent, or one out of every five children under the age of 16. And it is not a new phenomenon. It has been this way for a long time. 

Ralph Bennett is a man with a thankless job. He supervises the Sexually Exploited Child Unit at the Los Angeles Police Department. He has investigated thousands of child sex-abuse cases over the years and sees no end to the problem: “I don’t think there are any more people committing the acts today than, say, two years ago when I talked to you. No one knows the scope of pedophile activity, because it is a very much underreported crime. It involves children, and children in abusive situations oftentimes don’t come forward for maybe weeks, months, years, or never come forward. No one really knows the scope of it, but our work load here remains pretty constant….

“It just gets depressing at times, because the problem is always going to be here. I can’t really make that much of an impact on the problem. On an individual level, yes, and it’s encouraging to get some of these kids out of this situation and put these guys away. But it is so minuscule, what I am really accomplishing. I know there are so many more kids whose lives are being totally ruined. When you see this in young children, it is depressing.” 

Bennett’s feelings of frustration are justified. Pedophiles come from all walks of life. “I’ve gotten child sex abusers who were doctors, lawyers, just about everything,” a researcher and therapist once told us. “The only thing that I haven’t seen was an Indian chief.” At a visit to a sex offenders prison in New Jersey, we spoke with former policemen, clergymen, and doctors who were serving time for the molestation of children. They were from the rich, the poor, and the middle class. Yet this disparity among pedophiles masks the fact that many are organized and in constant touch with one another. These are not random crimes committed by deviants isolated from one another, but rather they are crimes perpetrated by individuals who often aid and abet—and in almost all cases, morally support—their fellow pedophiles. 

Furthermore, contrary to many people’s expectations, these criminals do not see their activities as antisocial behavior. Because they believe that what they are doing is positive and good for children, they have organized themselves as advocates for what they call “intergenerational sex.” 

The danger here, as Ralph Bennett explained, is not that they can convince the average American that they’re right. “The danger I do see in that type of organization is, first of all, they reinforce what pedophiles are doing. That, I think, is very damaging. Secondly, they do have some influence in getting laws changed, in a very subtle way. They don’t do it in a way that the average person knows what is going on, because the public doesn’t even know these organizations exist. One example is how hard they have been trying to lower the age of consent, and actually eliminate it.” 

Every statement made about pedophile organizations by Bennett is supported by evidence. A look at the literature put out by these organizations reveals just how acts of child molestation are encouraged in their writings. 

“Because of our efforts, the day will come, and come soon, when children will have sex freedom (provided contraceptives are used) of a bisexual nature with other children and adults. They will be allowed to happily participate in kid-porn activity.” 

This pronouncement was published in the bulletin of the Rene Guyon Society, named after a French psychologist who conducted research on childhood sexuality. The Rene Guyon Society is a pedophile organization that parades its slogan, “Sex by year eight or else it’s too late.” Although its spokesman, Tim O’Hara, denies its members engage in illegal sexual activities with children, the father of an abused and murdered child claims that the society’s 5,000 members openly admit to having “deflowered” children under 8 years old. The society spends a great deal of its time encouraging pedophiliac activities among its members. They have even gone so far as to instruct pedophiles on how to participate in anal sex with 4-year-old children: “Decade of Anal Sex Research Ends. One half hour after a bowel movement, no rectal matter remains in the anal cavity. The cavity is large enough at age 4 for boys and girls to painlessly hold an adult’s penis—an act they constantly desire from adult males they love.” 

Shockingly, there is nothing illegal about the material published by the Rene Guyon Society. As blatant and obvious as it is, nowhere do its writers actually tell readers to go out and molest a child. But this literature does demonstrate the existence of a nationwide conspiracy. Kee MacFarlane, director of the Child Sexual Abuse Diagnostic Center of the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles, recently told members of Congress in a special hearing on daycare programs that such a network among pedophiles does exist: “I believe that we’re dealing with a conspiracy, an organized operation of child predators designed to prevent detection.” MacFarlane told members of Congress not to be deceived by the current headlines revealing child sex-abuse scandals in nursery schools. “The preschool, in such a case, serves as a ruse for a larger, unthinkable network of crimes against children.” 

The evidence is overwhelming that pedophile organizations exist to promote, organize, and encourage others to commit crimes against children. Is there any other reason why the Rene Guyon Society’s newsletters carry the blurb: “Children keep family sex secrets”? 

Recently an organization was put out of business for publishing a magazine called the Person to Person Directory. For years, its publishers were able to bring thousands of pedophiles from all across the nation together in recruiting children for sex and child pornography. Each month its publishers would run dozens of ads that read: 

“Man, 41, wishes to meet people with similar interests in girls 6 to 12. Desire letters from woman with young girl, or anyone with open mind.” 

“Lolita lover with 13 year old [sic] lover that looks 9, wishes correspondence with woman or couple with daughter 5 to 13. Meetings possible.”

“Young Married Couple 21 & 26 plan on having 4 to 6 children. Become friends now and ‘grow with us.’ Desire couples with children, photos, literature.” 

“Have Peek-A-Boo shots of Tomorrow’s Ladies. I’m interested in the little strippers of tomorrow.” 

When law-enforcement authorities finally closed down this operation, its subscriber list had grown to 10,000. Nobody knows how many children were sexually abused because of its existence. And the Person to Person Directory was not an isolated case of a contact magazine published to encourage and expedite pedophile activity. Last year, authorities disbanded a Colorado pedophile group that published something called The Broad Street Journal, which claimed to be “The Nation’s best and most popular ad listing service.” For one dollar an issue, men interested in young boys could scan ads that typically read: “Gay, young, male-33, wishes to hear from and meet young gays 11-15, photo a must.” 

There is little that pedophiles and their organizations will stop short of doing to promote and encourage sexual abuse of young children. The Howard Nichols Society, based in Austin, Texas, serves a dual purpose for pedophiles around the nation. Members and readers are constantly reassured that what they are doing is normal and in the best interests of children.

One of the society’s early publications discusses the question, “What is Pedophilia Anyway?”:

What ages of children attract pedophiles? 

Pedophiles are usually attracted to prepubescents, people from about age 8 to puberty, although many pedophiles have had enjoyable relations with younger or older children. 

Aren’t pedophiles interested sexually in all children? 

Most pedophiles are able to consider any child as a possible sex partner. 

But aren’t pedophiles afraid of or unable to sexually relate to other adults? 

Many do not have sex with other adults because sex with children is better: it can be more intense, more satisfying, more productive, and more fun. 

Shouldn’t pedophiles be cured or at least treated? 

Since there is no disease of pedophilia, there is nothing to cure. 

How do pedophiles feel about incest? 

Generally, there is no reason to prohibit families from sharing physical affection and sex. 

Don’t pedophiles exploit children by forcing them to pose for pornographic pictures? 

Many take pictures of their partners for the same reason others take pictures of their children: because they like them and have affection for them. Pedophiles will take pictures of themselves and their partners doing the things they mutually enjoy—going places, being silly, having sex. Children and many adults like to pose and clown for photos and they enjoy sharing the memories. One can see children’s faces reflecting intimidation, uneasiness, and embarrassment more often in family albums than in the collections of pedophiles. There is nothing wrong with taking pictures of good relationships, sexual or otherwise. 

After the Howard Nichols Society finishes reassuring and encouraging pedophiles, it then provides instructions in procuring and having sex with children. The examples taken from this “primer” show that pedophiles are not acting out an uncontrollable and unconscious sexual impulse. It is a deliberate, conscious, and conspiratorial activity. It is nothing less than the rape of children.

Here are some excerpts:

(1) The important thing about meeting kids is that it happens best when you meet in places or in doing things that interest both of you.

(2) You can get to know kids through your job. It can be tricky if you’re in an authoritarian role, such as a teacher, because it is hard to tell if some kids are being friendly (or rude) just because of your position.

(3) Friends are a good source.

(4) After you get to know each other and start having a sexual relationship, you can go to unknown and secret places. 

(5) How to Have Sex With Kids: Ways to start sex vary and it ought to be relative to the situation. Sometimes a kid will make the first move, sometimes the adult…. Sometimes a touch—and not always on the genitals either—or a word or two will be enough.

The network of pedophile groups and organizations extends internationally. London’s PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) sends out its message across the Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. In France, pedophiles are encouraged by GRED (Groupe de Recherche pour une Enfance Differente). In the United States, San Diego’s Childhood Sensuality Circle preaches the message that children thrive best when they are able to have sex with one another and adults. But one organization has constantly been the most vocal: the aforementioned North American Man-Boy Love Association—NAMBLA. 

NAMBLA is well-organized, heavily financed, and an articulate voice for the promotion and legalization of pedophiliac activity in this country. It boasts a membership composed of doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, and businessmen. Its members and supporters have in common a predilection for having sex with young boys. Because this activity runs counter to the laws in the states it operates in, NAMBLA’s main concern and service for child abusers lies in defending them in the courts. In addition to financing the legal battles of pedophiles, NAMBLA lends advice. For example: 

“Prepare the boys for questioning by the police. Explain to them that police will lie to them about you, that police will threaten the boys with arrest and other troubles, that boys need not ever say anything at all about their sexual lives, that they need not go with the police or answer any questions…. I suggest preparing the boys for the brutal experience of police abuse, and then making sure they are fully and emotionally prepared for their relationship with me [sic]. 

“Finally, all men who love boys must take steps in advance to deal with sudden police raids. Have an attorney ready to meet you in the middle of the night. Find an attorney who has a progressive record on civil liberties issues.” 

In reading the legal advice offered by NAMBLA to its readers, one may imagine that they are advocating the protection of some constitutional right. But the right that NAMBLA champions is that of having sex with five-, six-, seven-, and eight­year-old children. Those who have the temerity to attack NAMBLA for its activities and advocacy are dealt with severely. NAMBLA slings anti-Semitic epithets and vitriolic personal slurs at its enemies through its NAMBLA News. NAMBLA knows the names of those who are fighting child sex abuse and goes after them. 

Judianne Densen-Gerber, for example—a psychiatrist, attorney, founder of the drug-rehabilitation program Odyssey House in New York City, and the mother of four children. For many years, Dr. Densen-Gerber has been aware of a pedophiliac conspiracy and has done her best to awaken the public and authorities to the extent and seriousness of child sex abuse in this country. Obviously, she is an enemy of NAMBLA. This is how they attack her in their newsletter: 

“That the New York press (even the left­wing Guardian!) still swallow Judi as a legit source proves their gullibility—and their complicity in the ongoing witch hunt. Judi’s abuses have time and again been publicly documented. Yet, like the proverbial bad penny, she keeps turning up. And like any other brazen loud Jewish kvetch, she won’t close that motormouth filled with lies. Every time that fat trap opens, she jeopardizes public safety. 

“It is my fervent prayer each night—to whichever god will listen—that some day, the legions of drug addicts she cages and spits on and humiliates at the Odyssey House will rise up in a spontaneous fit of righteous fury and quickly put an end to this blathering, dark, demented daughter of dead Moses.”

The police are especially feared and hated by child sex abusers. And if one cop stands out and personifies this fear, his name is Lloyd Martin. As Ralph Bennett’s predecessor as head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit, Martin was zealous, aggressive, and vocal in pursuing child molesters. Martin has seen what one hopes very few of us will ever see: the victims of pedophiles. He witnessed the emotional trauma and the horrible physical damage done to the children by pedophiles. He went after them and earned NAMBLA’s wrath:

“At one point, I wanted so much to be the personal nemesis of Martin. A militant faggot with pen-in-hand bringing down a crooked, pro-fascist Christer cop who hangs boys over cliffs and threatens them with death unless they name boy-lovers! 

“Freaks like Martin can be dangerous. On the bright side, Martin is so obviously greedy, so demonstrably stupid, aggressive, and obsessed, it is clear his fate will be something between Willy Loman and Jack Ruby.” 

While the pedophiles are very cautious in their newsletters to avoid overtly admitting that they have committed illegal acts, they are very open, indeed boastful, when communicating with one another. Pedophiles correspond through the mail with one another, freely describing, even to strangers, their sexual experiences with children. Often the children are described as their own.

For example, the following letter was written from a pedophile in Texas to a pen pal in California. “First, I ought to give you some background on myself and ask for some of the same from you. I am 37 years, married to a lovely understanding wife of 29 [sic] who knows about my interests in the younger set. We have two children. Heather, age 4, and Harris, age 2, almost 3. My wife and family are nudists and a club is outside Austin. Heather and Harris were both born nudists and that is the way you will find them anytime you come to the house. Heather usually does not wear anything to bed and asks me for a special goodnight kiss. She likes her vulva licked and sucked. Harris likes his penis sucked but not as often as Heather. I have enjoyed pleasing both of them.” 

Another sickening exchange occurred between two pedophile pen pals in Florida and California: “How I envy you all being able to get together and freely talk about our common interest. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to Robie’s tapes. The tape that Robie sent was of a little girl and her male babysitter, and it is FUCKIN FANTASTIC!!!! I couldn’t believe it. Yes, my girls were scheduled to be in the next issue of Nudist Moppets. 

“I have a number of photos of Tami (7) and LeAnn (6) and would like very much to swap them with you for photos of your little friend(s). All I ask is that the photos show that sweet little slit that little girls are blessed with, and if possible, the first name, age, and general location.” 

While one would be hard put to find an “adult” bookstore that stocks and sells child pornography, the public would be deceived if it believed that there is less kiddie porn in existence today than before it became a crime, in 1977, to produce and sell such material. While child pornography from overseas is available (Bennett says most of the material is produced in the Netherlands), the greatest amount comes from American pedophiles themselves. They are obsessed with taking pictures of young children, often in the act of having sex with adults. As one of the letters above indicated, pedophiles maintain their relationships with other pedophiles by exchanging photos and movies of their young victims. Bennett explained: 

“The biggest source of child pornography is the pedophile. First of all, they have these pictures for years sometimes, and when the kid is 25, they still have these pictures to fantasize with. Also, they can use these photos to seduce other children. And they can trade them, they can sell them, they can do a lot of different things with them. Private child pornography is a thriving business, although I don’t think ‘business’ is the proper term.” 

To demonstrate his point that pedophiles are producing the bulk of child pornography in this country, Bennett allowed me to see the collection of the material seized by police officers. His files contain pictures of literally thousands of children in various sexual acts. Most of the photography by child sex abusers is taken in homes or motel rooms. In fact, Bennett’s officers had recently arrested a character who hung around Hollywood Boulevard looking for young girls. Many of them were runaways. The suspect offered them drugs in exchange for photographs of them and sex. When he got them to his hotel, they would pose with him and other adults in various sexual activities. At the time of his arrest, the police found bags full of photos of dozens of girls. Many of the girls had not reached their 15th birthdays. 

Another example involved a pedophile who had more than 600 photos of very young boys engaged in oral and anal copulation. The pedophile, who was eventually convicted, would gather information from other “boy lovers”—names, mailing lists—and put it in a computer. He then was able to sell his homemade photos to individuals across the country. 

The amount of so-called private pornography in this country is enormous, judging from the collection in the possession of the Los Angeles Police Department. In Penthouse‘s earlier article on child sex abuse, we had noted that a great deal of this material was produced by the parents of the abused children. Authorities stress that while commercial child pornography is rarely available, the existence of homemade kiddie porn remains a serious problem. 

Recognizing the serious problem of child sex abuse is not enough. If we are going to protect our children it is critical to understand what has been done about the problem, what is being done about it, and what more can be done to fight the predators. While most of the answers to these questions relate to the police, the courts, and the legislature, the role that parents play in protecting their children is also at issue. 

For quite some time now, many young children have had to be left with strangers so that their parents could work. Most of the time parents know little about these people. “I think, going back years ago,” Ralph Bennett explained to me, “we had more of an extended family. If there was a mother or father working, there was a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle; somebody to take care of that child. Well, today we don’t have that; in fact, in many cases we don’t even have a nuclear family. It may be a one-parent family. Well, that parent’s got to work and so that child has to be somewhere, out of the family’s control. I think this makes kids more vulnerable. I think that these children are more at risk, and the kids that we are seeing in here do not as a rule come from a good, strong, two-parent-family situation. Now, obviously, there are going to be exceptions to this because in all of these preschool and daycare centers we can’t say all the parents were negligent. But daycare centers and nursery schools are becoming more prevalent because of the breakup of the family arrangement we knew in the past.” 

In no way do Bennett or other authorities who are familiar with the problem of child molestation point a finger at preschools as the main cause of our child sex-abuse problem. What they are concerned about is that the opportunities are far greater for harm to children who are spending more and more of their day with strangers. And, at least until very recently, there has been little adequate screening of the individuals who work in any capacity with children. This includes teachers, playground workers, and volunteers in the Boy and Girl Scouts and similar organizations. 

“I’d say that about 25 percent of pedophiles brought in here have prior records,” Bennett explained. “Security checks of individuals applying for these jobs is a good idea. We’ve had that law in California for two-and-a-half years. If an individual applies for a job with a daycare center, Boy Scouts or Big Brothers, or any type of youth-service group, that group has the right to check with the Department of Justice in Sacramento to see if that person has a record of sex offenses. Not that they’re going to discover it, because 99 percent of the time when they do check these people through the Department of Justice they don’t come up showing a record. It is a good law because those people who do have a record of offenses will be dissuaded from applying for these jobs.” 

While nobody would challenge the sincerity of police officers in pursuing child sex offenders, there are some who believe that law-enforcement officers are not trained to adequately fight the problem. “They really don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to go about doing an investigation of this sort,” Bennett believes. 

“We had a case in Pennsylvania and contacted everybody we could think of back there, from all kinds of police jurisdictions. We couldn’t get anybody to help us. The same thing in a case in Arkansas. We got a guy out here in Los Angeles who’s a schoolteacher. We got a search warrant on his house and recovered photographs of young boys. We found out that these photographs were taken in Arkansas and identified some of the kids back there. We got in touch with someone from that jurisdiction, asked them to help us, and we didn’t hear one word.” 

We’ve noted several times that child sex abuse is an underreported crime, and that is one important reason why some police agencies are not prepared to act in these situations. “Many people, not necessarily police persons,” Bennett pointed out to me, “are of the opinion that if there are no complaints you don’t have any crimes. There is not a lot of proactive investigation in this area. Unless you go looking for them, there’s a lot of them that you’re not going to discover. 

“One of the reasons I think that we’ve been successful in this unit in getting convictions…is because if we get one child who complains, we know that there are other children involved as well, and we go looking for those children.” Often, if one child makes a complaint it is very difficult to get a conviction, especially if the abused child is very young. ”And if you don’t look for other victims, you probably won’t have a case.” 

Getting child molesters convicted has also proven very difficult. Recently, the legislature and the courts have improved upon the situation. Linda Fairstein, chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the New York County District Attorney’s office, believes that the recent change in the corroboration requirement has made it easier to put child sex offenders in prison. The requirement of corroboration in molestation cases meant that the word of the victim was not sufficient for conviction. But how does one get independent corroboration of a crime that is usually done in private? Legislators have become aware of that fact, and with the exceptions of Nebraska and the District of Columbia, the corroboration requirement no longer exists in the prosecution of child sex abusers. 

Linda Fairstein told Penthouse of another difficulty in the prosecution of child sex molesters: “Many of them are people who, to us from the outside, seem to be ‘normal’ people. They don’t look like criminals. They are people who are well­dressed, well-educated, often professionals. Therefore, when a child says, ‘Johnny did this to me’ or ‘Uncle Joe did this to me,’ the first reaction of the adult is disbelief of the child because that person, the adult offender, doesn’t seem to be what we consider a molester. So it’s a problem of convincing the jury of the same thing—that the defendant who looks very proper might have the problem that causes him to commit the act.” 

Jurors, Fairstein continued, “don’t see children as objects of someone’s sexual interest. They can’t conceive of someone being interested in a nonconsenting relationship to begin with.” 

Fairstein agrees with people like Ralph Bennett who believe that, once convicted, child molesters should receive harsh sentences. She feels that because there is no known therapy to treat child molesters, offenders should at the very least be isolated from the community. Child molesters show no remorse over what they have done, and to allow them back in the community would only endanger children, Fairstein said. “When they are questioned by us they justify that what they’re doing is better for the child than what anybody else does.” 

Daryll Gates, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, has tried for many years to awaken the public to the widespread problem of child sex abuse. Gates told Penthouse what he believes must be done to combat this crime: “Educational programs must be developed for the children, their parents, and the community. Children must be made aware of the potential for molestation in their neighborhood, schools, and even their homes by persons familiar to them. They must be encouraged to report instances of molestation to their parents, teachers, or others in authority. 

“Parents must learn to be sensitive to changes in their children’s moods and behavior, patterns which might indicate molestation. The community as a whole must take responsibility for the safety of all children. Residents should be aware of strangers loitering about schools and playgrounds. They should not remain complacent when they see someone cruising the area attempting to make contact with children. Such instances should be reported immediately to local law-enforcement authorities. 

“The focus of family law should be changed from family unification to protection of child victims in cases in which family members are involved in the sexual abuse of the child. 

“Finally, the legislature must provide the resources necessary to mount an effective campaign against child molesters and sexual abusers. It is unrealistic to expect understaffed police, probation, and social service departments to successfully combat this problem.”

Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber began a program in January 1984 that should prove to be an effective weapon in the war against child sex abusers. It is called PACT (Protect America’s Children Today)—a grassroots organization for people to help prevent situations in which their children might become victims. It offers information for children as young as 3 years old as to how they may protect themselves against child molesters.