In his hot pink tie and starched white shirt, Ted Cruz strolled through the palm tree-flanked Border Patrol station of Edinburg, Texas, this week, before taking his place at a wood podium to caution his audience about the threat illegal immigrants pose to the Land of the Free .

"One hears from the ground that the security threats remain significant and that we need adequate manpower, adequate tools to secure our border and protect our nation," he told reporters who'd gathered for his visit to the small town in the Rio Grande Valley.

Standing on the glistening grassy lawn, the Texas Republican warned that cartels controlled the area, and said more "boots on the ground" were the only way to stop the flood of migrants streaming in from Latin America. "It's important for every presidential candidate to address seriously the problem of securing our border and to have a serious plan and to demonstrate a willingness to enforce the law," said Cruz, who just happens to be one of those candidates.

By now, this border grandstanding is familiar—a requisite bit of political theater for Cruz and any of the other 9,000 Republican thinking about running for president. With the 2016 race underway, the candidates have warned loudly against the issue of illegal immigration, clamoring for border fences, moats, and armed drones to protect the 1,945-mile border, and shouting down anyone who doesn't see that US immigration policy is first and foremost about fortifying our country from the flood of Mexican and Central American newcomers who shatter American peace and prosperity.

Related: Ted Cruz Is a 9/11 Country Music Truther

"You can't have an open border and a welfare state. Well, we've got both," Kentucky Senator Rand Paul scoffed to an Arizona radio host last month. "We have a completely open border and an enormous welfare state."

Mike Huckabee voiced a similar sentiment on his campaign website, warning that we'll all turn into nihilists if the US fails to secure the border. "Without a secure border, nothing matters," he writes. "We have drug cartels running reckless on our southern border, and the Washington establishment wants to reward illegal immigrants with amnesty and citizenship."

Their solutions for how to fix the crisis are also predictably extreme: Rick Perry, who kicked off his second presidential campaign last week, likes to boast that as governor of Texas he spent $800 million to send extra state agents in the southern region, a policy that his successor extended this week. Rick Santorum is also still at it,suggesting in an interview with Breitbart News this spring that the US erect a Gaza-style barrier with "barbed wire, a screening fence, and a patrol road along it" for the "out of control" border.

But for all this right-wing obsession with "amnesty" and incursions on the southern border, Republicans don't seem to have noticed that immigration to the US has changed dramatically—and that the problem they so aggressively promise to solve may not be so much of a problem any more. Because for the first time in decades, most of the people trying to migrate to the US aren't coming across the southern border at all, but from Asia, primarily India and China.

According to a recent report from the US Census Bureau, 40 percent of new immigrants coming into the US in 2013 were from Asian countries, while just a quarter hailed from Latin America. Out of 1.2 million migrants total, about 147,000 of them were Chinese, 129,000 Indian, and 125,000 Mexican, the census found.

The numbers represent a dramatic shift. For decades, Mexico was the biggest source of new migrants to the US, outpacing India and China sixfold in the early years of the 21st century. Since 2007, though, immigration from Mexico has steadily declined, and illegal crossings have hit a 40-year low, as Mexico's economy has improved and the Department of Homeland Security has ramped up its capabilities at the border. Meanwhile immigration from Asia, especially India and China, has ticked up rapidly.

"The most recent wave of immigrants has largely been from Latin America, and to a lesser extent, Asia," the census report explained. "Whether these recent trends signal a new and distinct wave of immigration is yet to be seen."

What this means for immigration policy also remains to be seen. For one thing,Asian immigrants follow a significantly different trajectory to get to the US than their Latino counterparts. While about half of immigrants from Mexico and Central America arrive in the US illegally, just 13 percent of Asian migrants are undocumented, according to a May study by the Migration Policy Institute.

Asian immigrants also tend to be more affluent and suburban, and join the workforce in different segments of the US economy, including in high-skilled jobs, said Randy Capps, who runs US programs at the Migration Policy Institute. The influx of skilled immigrant workers from Asia could put added pressure on Washington—and on the 2016 presidential candidates—to shift their focus away from undocumented workers, he said, toward a broader overhaul of the legal immigration system, including reforming the caps on temporary and permanent visa programs.

Watch Episode 5 of The Business of Life: What's the Price of US Citizenship?

Of particular interest for the 2016 candidates is the H-1B visa program for highly specialized workers. Business leaders (and campaign donors), particularly those in Silicon Valley, have been lobbying Washington hard to reform the program, which is currently capped at 85,000 visas annually—a quota that is usually filled in just a few days.

"There's almost a consensus that we need more highly skilled workers particularly in math, science and healthcare," Capps said, noting that immigrants from India and China currently receive the bulk of H-1B visas. "Like most affluent countries the US [average age] is getting older...and without younger workers through immigration we'd have trouble supporting our growth."

Another area where candidates may start to focus is on the US system of per-country visa caps, which allocate about 25,000 annual visas to immigrants of a given nationality, regardless of the size of their home country. The rule was originally intended to prevent discrimination against particular nationalities, but also puts large nations like China and India at a distinct disadvantage.

"This was a way [for the federal government] to force equality but what that does it mean?" said Phil Wolgin, associate director of immigration policy for the Center of American Progress. "India and China are treated same way Luxembourg is treated."

Pressure to shift the immigration debate could come from the ballot box. Like most other minority voters, have tended to lean Democratic in recent elections, with 73 percent casting for Obama in 2012 , a trend that might be attributed to the high concentration of Asians in deep-blue California and the Northeast.

Currently, though, Asians make up just 5 percent of the US population, and as such have had only a marginal impact on national politics. But as their numbers multiply, so does the group's ability to shift a presidential race. And experts say the group could turn into a swing vote, particularly given rising suburban affluence among Asian Americans.

"In the not too distant past Asians swung toward Republican, in the 1990s," said William Frey, a demographer specializing in migration and fellow with the Brookings Institute. "They still don't vote [Democratic] in huge margins like blacks do so they could swing depending on the candidate." He added that Asian voters could even start to swing the vote in a few key states in 2016.

"Nevada and Virginia are swing states where the Asian population is growing, and these are battleground states," Frey said. In Nevada, he noted, the Asian population is about 8 percent, enough to tip the scales in a tight race.

But even as the US immigration landscape shifts, 2016 candidates aren't likely to abandon the idea that hordes of Latinos are scampering and swimming across the border to sell drugs and sign up for Obamacare. The border is an incendiary political symbol, lodged firmly in the conservative imagination, and as such will probably remain a top priority for Republicans trying to gin up the base in an election year.

"There's a general perception by a lot of people in country that the country is still being overrun by immigrants," said Frey. "Since we have large population of Hispanics they misinterpret it as being because of an influx of new immigrants. But rationally right now it doesn't mean that much because illegal immigration has curtailed."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

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Screencap via KXLY TV

On Thursday night, a story on local news in Spokane, Washington exploded onto the internet with the viral power of The Dress plus an added layer of gravitas and political volatility: a white woman named Rachel Dolezal has been pretending to be black—or at least something other than 100 percent lily-white—and running a chapter of the NAACP since January.

On Friday, she told the Spokane CBS News affiliate "I do consider myself to be black." She also said "It's more important for me to clarify that with the black community and with my executive board than it really is to explain it to a community that I quite frankly don't think really understands the definitions of race and ethnicity."

In addition to presenting herself as a black civil rights leader, and claiming she was black since 2007, and teaching university classes on race relations, Dolezal has cast herself as the victim of an extensive campaign of hateful comments and intrusions into her life. Much of the harassment now appears to be either exaggerated or completely fabricated.

Dolezal has now had a full background check conducted haphazardly by the internet. Her birth certificate is available for public perusal, as are her wedding photos, along with photos from her childhood in which she appears to have blond hair and a noticeably different skin tone. Her Facebook history has also been mined for questionable posts.

Her older posts aren't currently available, but some of her activities have been preserved by scrupulous internet users.

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Facebook screencap via Buzzfeed.

In January of this year, the Spokane NAACP posted an announcement about her father attending the ribbon-cutting of a new local office, and attached a photo of Dolezal standing with an older black man.

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Facebook screencap via Buzzfeed.

A month after 12 Years a Slave was released, in November 2013, she posted a set of tips for black people who wanted to see the film in a theater.

She's also been criticized for taking some risks with her appearance that would be bold if she were black, but coming from a white woman are insensitive at best, and just plain racist at worst.

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Image has since been removed from Facebook

The story actually broke on Wednesday, when a TV reporter named Jeff Humphrey from Spokane's ABC News station conducted a somewhat drawn-out interview with her. He began by discussing her history of social justice work and the racially-motivated harassment she's experienced, before building to questions about her background. Watching it, you can see Dolezal's slow realization that she's being interviewed by someone who knows her secret, which is that her parents are both super white.

Humphrey finally confronts her point-blank about it eight minutes and 15 seconds into this video:

In the clip, after asking if her dad made it to the ribbon-cutting ceremony in January, Humphrey—picture of her "father" in hand—says, "I was wondering if your dad really is an African-American man." Dolezal, dumbstruck, says that she doesn't know what he's implying, so Humphrey clarifies: "Are you African-American?"

"I don't—I don't understand the question of—I did tell you that yes that's my dad. And he was unable to come in January—" she says, before taking her microphone off and walking away.

Now Dolezal is being investigated by the city of Spokane, Washington, for violating a code of ethics relating to information she provided when she applied for a local police oversight commission and checked off the box marked "black" for her race.

It's worth noting that violating a code of ethics isn't illegal, and Dolezal hasn't been charged with a crime.

The NAACP appears to be standing by her, having issued a supportive official statement:

NAACP Spokane Washington Branch President Rachel Dolezal is enduring a legal issue with her family, and we respect her privacy in this matter. One's racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership. The NAACP Alaska-Oregon-Washington State Conference stands behind Ms. Dolezal's advocacy record.

Dolezal is "credited with re-energizing the Spokane chapter of the NAACP," according to the Spokesman-Review.

The initial Spokane ABC News investigation, however, hadn't questioned her efficacy as a leader. It was looking into her claim that someone had sent her racially-motivated threats. Hate mail she claimed she had received in February hadn't been on the Postal Service's radar, leading inspectors to the conclusion that an envelope she claimed had been mailed to her P.O. box had actually been put there by someone who opened the box with a key.

The envelope in question was one of a series of letters from someone called "War Pig (Ret.)" who rambled incoherently about race, crime, and the new world order. The letters are bizarre, and while the postal service concluded that some seem to have been planted there, others apparently originated in Oakland. One letter from "War Pig" includes an apology. The letters reportedly didn't contain threats according to a police report, although they did contain printed out photos of lynchings, and references to some famous hate crimes from the 1970s.

Then, in April, an older couple, possibly lost, walked into Dolezal's house from an unlocked side door and told her son they were supposed to dogsit for someone. Dolezal posted a very freaked out message on Facebook about it:

"I'm furious. Furious. Two white adults broke into my home while I was testifying at City Council tonight. Scared my 13 year old son to death. So glad he's unharmed. Another police report... Reviewing surveillance footage. This is scary.

In a police report, Dolezal's son said, "No, I wasn't scared at all. They looked confused. They looked like normal, middle class white people."

Later, Dolezal may have synthesized the two events in a Facebook post, which referred to, "War Pigs, the group that has been sending death threats to [her] and possibly involved in home invasion and other security breaches at [her] residence," according to Inlander, the local alt-weekly.

The confusion over hate mail and threats calls into question no fewer than 12 other instances in which Dolezal claimed to have been targeted by racists. Some of those have involved nooses supposedly being dropped around her home. Police have investigated those incidents but have never identified a suspect. Filing a false police report is a "gross misdemeanor" in Washington.

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Then her estranged parents opened up about it. Dolezal's mother told CNN she "has not explained to us why she is doing what she's doing, and being dishonest and deceptive with her identity." Dolezal's parents adopted four African-American children who became her adopted siblings when she was fully-grown, and that was when Rachel started to "disguise herself," according to the Spokesman-Review. They say their lineage is Czech, Swedish, and German.

In 2000 she married a black man named Kevin, and in 2007 she began calling herself "black." Then she slowly lost contact with her parents.

On Friday, when asked what she'd like to say to her parents, she told CBS "I don't give two shits what you guys think. You're so far done and out of my life."

During her work with a group called the Human Rights Education Institute (HREI) in neighboring Idaho, members of local civic organizations associated with the HREI had become suspicious of Dolezal's background. According to the Spokesman-Review, at some point someone hired a private investigator.

Kurt Neumaier, a board member of one of those civic organizations, the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, dealt with complaints from Dolezal during her three years at the HREI. He told the Spokesman-Review that he doubted the validity of a number of Dolezal's complaints.

For instance, she claimed that someone had drawn a swastika on the door of the HREI at a time when the security camera had "mysteriously turned off." There were other complaints, he said, but "None of them passed the smell test," he told the Spokesman-Review.

Dolezal gave statements to the Spokesman-Review when they contacted her. They weren't apologies. In response to questions about what her race was, she said, "That question is not as easy as it seems." In what the Spokesman-Review thinks is probably a "reference to studies tracing the scientific origins of human life to Africa," she also pointed out that "We're all from the African continent."

Some early tweets about Dolezal were supportive, going so far as to call her " transracial." In the light of day, that viewpoint doesn't appear to have prevailed. According to Britt Middleton at BET, there are some obvious contradictions involved:

The sobering reality is that, unlike white people, we can't paint the brown on for as long as it serves us. We have been enslaved, beaten, belittled and even killed over our Blackness. We've also become stronger advocates for equality because of it.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

We're now almost done with the third season of our show VICE on HBO. Among other stories, we've taken a look at climate change in Antarctica, American militias taking the law into their own hands, and the cocaine highway that leads from the streets of Venezuela to the sinuses of European teenagers.

We just aired a new episode where Suroosh Alvi went to Saudi Arabia to investigate the country's complicated relationship with terrorism. We sat down with Alvi to debrief the trip—check it out above.

Watch VICE Fridays on HBO at 11 PM, 10 PM central or on HBO's new online streaming service, HBO Now.

Normally, touting a film as being "65 million years in the making" would be a sign of bad business. But in 1993, that tagline was plastered against a stark black background, with that now omnipresent logo—a T-rex skeleton in profile—hanging above it. Jurassic Park wasn't just a movie: It was the movie. If Jaws served as the archetype for the summer blockbuster, and Star Wars helped define the idea of a successful film franchise, Jurassic Park reshaped entire industries. Its then-cutting edge effects and computer graphics (CG) work helped push the relatively new technology to the forefront of Hollywood. Its merchandise helped solidify the 1990s as the last era of sincere cultural branding. And more than anything else, the story of Jurassic Park sparked larger conversations about the insidious nature of science playing God.

But what makes Jurassic Park most interesting is the strange interplay between what's happening on the screen and what's happening around it. If you were to describe Jurassic Park—a group of experts work to create the most lifelike dinosaurs mankind has bared witness to, all in an effort to entertain them through a mix of both science and spectacle—it would be hard to tell whether you're discussing the film's plot or Spielberg's production. The modern blockbuster's DNA has since been fundamentally altered, with more emphasis than ever on branding merchandise, broad appeal, global returns, and special effects.

Yet here we are, with a new chapter in the series to pore over, and if you've been paying attention to Hollywood's penchant for rebooting anything people once gave a shit about, this shouldn't surprise you. Jurassic World hit theaters yesterday, the fourth film in what is shaping up to be a resurrected cash cow. Yet, it's still the original that stands tallest, roars loudest, and spews the most acid in Newman's face. Somehow, 1993's Jurassic Park manages to look less dated than its own 2001 sequel. The original did something right.

"The original Jurassic Park was the perfect example of how you could combine two radically different technologies effectively," said Gustav Hoegen, an animatronic designer from the legendary Pinewood Studios, in an interview with VICE. "It's still the industry standard today, both in how it blended the two, and in how the animatronics and CG looked in general. I still think it's some of the best CG ever done, even by today's standards."

Hoegen has worked on a number of high profile films, including Ridley Scott's Prometheus and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Over the course of Hoegen's prolific career, most of the films he's worked on have used the same blend of practical and digital effects that Jurassic Park helped spearhead.

One of the key players in Jurassic Park's legendary melding of mediums was Phil Tippett. Tippett, who also worked on the first two Star Wars films, was the visual effects supervisor on Jurassic Park. To hear him talk about the production of Jurassic Park is like hearing somebody describe an arduous trip in a foreign country.

Dinosaurs are tightly woven into the symbolic fabric of childhood. Velociraptors are always relevant.

"We just did our best. We knew what things should look like, but we didn't know exactly how to get there," Tipped says. "Everything we thought we could do was empirically dictated by the processes we used, and at that time there just weren't a lot of computer graphics animators that had done this type of thing."

Initially, Tippett and the team mounted techniques that had been used since the early 1930s, combining computer controlled stop-motion puppets with on-set miniatures. Up until the early 1990s, CG-specific companies like ILM were largely using the technology to capture surreal or hallucinogenic effects (think the liquid metal T-1000 in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day). So when Tippett arrived on set, he imagined a much more conventional shoot.

"We thought we'd use [computer imagery] for a couple wide shots so that we could have some long-distance looks at the dinosaurs," he says. "But as the production continued—and the more the computer graphic began to read well—it eventually became clear that this was the direction the film was going in."

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One of the many commercial spin-offs of the film, an actual Jurassic Park. Photo via Flickr user Daniel Brentley

Though the technology would allow Spielberg to disengage from the physical world and indulge almost completely in his imagination, his vision of Jurassic Park was still one in which science ruled supreme. In order to ground his film in reality, he enlisted the help of Jack Horner, famed American paleontologist who has served as technical scientific advisor on every film in the series. Horner hadn't read Michael Crichton's original book, but when Steven Spielberg called him up on the phone, he didn't hesitate to come onboard.

"I didn't really know what he was talking about," Horner confesses with a laugh. Still, "It sounded like fun, so I agreed to do it. I probably spent six weeks total in Hollywood, and three weeks of that was on-set with the dinosaurs."

Horner was involved in the film's pre-production, and advised with the script and storyboards to help the film lean towards accuracy as much as possible (though whether blood could be extracted from a pre-historic mosquito remains to be confirmed). Additionally, he worked with model makers in order to ensure that the animals looked as accurate as possible. This meant working closely with the legendary late Stan Winston, as well as with the puppeteers on set. "But mostly," Horner told VICE, "I just sat next to Steven Spielberg and answered questions."

One of his most important on-set collaborations may have been his advising all scenes with animatronic dinosaurs. As Hoegen explains, animatronics are a difficult breed of effects work because they have one fundamental roadblock: Fluidity is not organic to machinery.

When Jurassic Park was released in 1993, you would think a dinosaur had just become President.

"The human or animal body is such a beautifully designed machine," he says. "All the joints are loose, they're hanging off tendons, and nothing is really hinged like a machine is. So how do you make [a machine] lifelike?"

Traditionally, animatronic experts begin by closely inspecting species that most closely resemble their fantasy creatures, assessing everything from muscle structure, broad characteristics, and the way they generally move. This same analysis factors into computer generated designs as well. For instance, the design of the Gallimius, which feature promptly in the film's famous stampede scene, was largely based on the movement and bird-like qualities of the ostrich.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/nM-RPO10aPY' width='560' height='315']

Of course, much like in the film itself, mankind's advances didn't come without a price. When Tippet was brought on set to help design the T-Rex, he assumed it would be for his skillset in stop-motion and practical effects. Instead, he was asked to assist in the production of technology that could, in effect, replace him entirely.

"I thought it was all over for me at the time," Tippett remembers. "I had no value in the process, because I didn't have any knowledge of computers." But once production got underway, and the computer animation came to the forefront of the film's aesthetic, Tipppett found himself troubleshooting entirely new issues.

"When you have to work around the reality of a shoot, there is a whole new subset of things you have to do," he says. "Because these are actors that are playing in real spaces during real times of day, so you're on locations with specific natural lighting that bounces off of the tangible world."

The surprise wasn't that Jurassic Park tantalized children, but rather that it did the same to adults.

When Jurassic Park was released in 1993, you would think a dinosaur had just become President. The hysteria was otherworldly. The film became the highest grossing movie of all time, beating out another Spielberg classic, 1982's E.T., which had itself beat out the first Star Wars. Jurassic Park maintained its historic domestic record for an additional four years until it was surpassed by, of course, the 1997 Star Wars re-release. If for a while there it seemed like Spielberg and Lucas were the only living filmmakers on the planet, it's probably because the world acted like they were.

The full breadth of the film's influence has wormed its way into surprising spheres. In a Reddit AMA, Matthew Carrano, curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, stated, "Every major museum has now renovated their dinosaur exhibits. They've all re-hired dinosaur paleontologists. For many decades, most US museums didn't have any dinosaur paleontologists on staff, but now they all do. So I can, in part, thank Jurassic Park for the fact that I have a job."

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Original logo courtesy of Universal Pictures

The hype was not without its detractors. Horner—who is himself using chickens to retro-engineer dinosaurs in real life (yes, seriously)—remembers that even with the film's emphasis on relative scientific accuracy, the public had other plans.

"When we premiered Jurassic Park in Washington, D.C. back in 1993, there were protestors outside the theater, protesting genetic engineering," he recalls. "People at the time didn't even understand what cloning was. The two have nothing to do with each other."

For more VICE on film, check out our interview with the director of Mad Max: Fury Road

Still, for all its contributions to both filmmaking and the zeitgeist, Jurassic Park remains a surprisingly polarizing text. It may be Spielberg's most famous work, but it's hard to argue that it's one of his best. For starters, Spielberg's attention was more than just elsewhere: it was in Auschwitz, since he was editing Jurassic Park during the emotionally trying shoot for Schindler's List. As film critic Tom Shone notes, it shows.

"I think that [Schindler] was where his heart was at that point," Shone told VICE. "It doesn't feel like it has all his enthusiasm, all his energies. As miraculous as some of it still feels like it is, it feels a tiny bit like he's directing it with his left hand."

Yet what really endures is the film's larger ripple effect in the industry at large, the most pronounced of which was the ubiquity of the film's merchandise. Every element of the film's world was quantified and categorized into a series of ancillary products. From video games and theme park attractions, to clothing and memorabilia (which has since become a niche collector's market), and, of course, the toys.

Hollywood, like most industries, is now dependent on foreign markets to accrue big budgets, and you largely have a T.Rex to thank for that.

"Obviously, the film works on this kind of meta level, where it's about a theme park that changes dinosaurs into toys," says Shone. "And we see the park's gift shop and merchandise, emblazoned with the same logo. So there was already this kind of corporate in-joke going on, yet the merchandise boom of the film was obviously incredibly successful."

After all, dinosaurs are tightly woven into the symbolic fabric of childhood. As a result, velociraptors are always relevant. The surprise wasn't that Jurassic Park tantalized children, but rather that it did the same to adults.

Shone would know. He wrote the book on Spielberg, literally. Blockbuster: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer chronicles the evolution of the Hollywood blockbuster, from happy accident to new world order. As he notes, this was Spielberg's first and only real triumph in the merchandise market.

"There is this immense gray area of films that feel like they might lend themselves to merchandising, but don't, and a notable failure was E.T. The film was over-merchandised at a time when people were still genuinely touched by the film and the character, and they didn't want him to be turned into a toy. It was considered kind of sacrilege."

More than anything else, Jurassic Park crafted an entirely new model of American Blockbuster, which is one inherently less interested in America. As a 1993 article in the Los Angeles Times declared, Jurassic Park's most noticeable box office gross didn't come domestically, but overseas, most notably Japan. According to Shone, 1993 would become the first year in history where the international grosses of films began to outstrip the domestic tally. When you see The Avengers swooping through skyscrapers in Hong Kong, or the Transformers barreling through Beijing, you can bet its because Hollywood has gotten wise to the fact that the biggest audience for American films aren't, in fact, American. Hollywood, like most industries, is dependent on foreign markets to accrue big budgets, and you largely have a T. Rex to thank for that.

Jurassic Park serves as a kind of self-reflexive story, one that centers on the exciting development of new technology and its tendency to get out of hand—with dinosaurs as with Hollywood. The stakes are lower, of course, the scope shrunk down to human size, but the long term implications are similarly both thrilling and lowkey horrifying. It's hard to remember what Hollywood was like in the days before Jurassic Park re-configured its DNA.

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Death: everybody does it, nobody wants to talk about it. It's usually not until we go through some sort of unexpected loss that the reality of death's inevitability sinks in. For me, that moment happened a few months ago, when I lost a close friend. At 26, I realized that I'd spent very little of my life considering the reality of death—and suddenly, I was confronted with it, without the choice to turn away. And I wanted to learn more.

Turns out, there's an industry built around coming to terms with our mortality. When I heard about the concept of a "death doula," I was transfixed by the idea: They are people who make it their job to inform us about death and guide us through grieving. Laura Saba is one of them. A self-described "mourning doula," Saba was originally trained as a traditional doula. (The word comes from the Greek term for "a woman who serves," and is today used primarily for professionals who support mothers during and after birth.) After training as a birth midwife, Saba now helps people find comfort in death rather than birth. She has even started her own "mourning doula" certification process, doling out qualifications for a group varyingly described as end-of-life doulas, death doulas, mourning doulas, and "death midwives."

VICE spoke with Saba about what it takes to become a death doula, how we can become more comfortable with mortality, and how it feels to "be on call for the universe."

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"The Deathbed of Philippes de Commines" via Wikimedia Commons

VICE: What made you realize that you wanted to become a mourning doula?
Laura Saba: I was actually working as a mourning doula before I even realized it. When I was 11, I came home from school and found out that my neighbor had had a stroke while she was getting cookies out of the oven. It was terrible: She fell face first on an open oven door. I experienced a lot of loss through my youth. During 9/11, I knew 41 families that lost somebody. I began working as a birth doula, while volunteering in hospice, because I was seeking a balance. Especially after 9/11, I wanted to be there to help people.

And then the work kind of crossed over: I [assisted] more than 1,200 families with their births, and when you have those numbers there's going to be a few stillbirths. I found that if there was a stillbirth or miscarriage, I was using my own skills and resources from the volunteer work I had done at hospice. I had become a mourning doula without realizing it. There's so much similarity in the doula roles. The way in which we provide support for birth and death is very similar. Of course, the information is different, but the type of support is very much the same.

The mourning doula can educate on almost any burial option, from being buried in space to having your ashes mixed into tattoo ink and being tattooed on somebody.

What is the difference between an end of life doula, a death doula, and a mourning doula?
End of life doulas work with everybody, healthy or sick and a lot of them get called by new parents or newly married people who are looking to get all of their ducks in a row, whether it's if you were in an accident tomorrow what would you address, what kind of paperwork do you need for custody, life support questions, organ donating...

The death doula starts out working for people who are in hospice or were going to die at home, who wanted to have as little intervention as possible around their death. These doulas work with clients in the long term, getting to know them, doing a life review with them, exploring what types of support they might need at their death vigil.

Mourning doulas work with people from the time someone dies, so maybe you worked with someone as a death doula and now you're helping the family [mourn]. The biggest goal is to serve the family in such a way that they can have the space to breathe fully and freely, while having someone there to advocate for them. The mourning doula can educate on almost any burial option, from being buried in space to having your ashes mixed into tattoo ink and being tattooed on somebody. Mourning doulas don't actually plan the funeral for you, but they can walk you through it and help save you thousands of dollars. The mourning doula can protect you from being taken advantage of during a grieving moment. It's very easy to take advantage of someone when they're grieving and up-sell them on special caskets that can protect the body better when that's not actually true at all.

Are death doulas on call 24/7 when someone is dying?
Because a lot of people are scattered all over the states, someone will get a call that their mom or dad is dying in a hospital in New York while the child is in California, and they're envisioning "Mom or Dad is going to die alone, what if I can't get there in time?" We find that an overwhelming number of [death doulas] are called in this last minute way. Most of the time, it will be something random like a heart attack. Or maybe they thought someone had six months but then it happened a lot faster, like three weeks later, and no one was prepared. Nurses are busy tending to their patients, doing things on the floor and whatnot. You'd want somebody to be there [for emotional support].

Related: Death in a Can

When did death become such a taboo subject in our society?
Years ago, children used to help their families prepare the body for funerals. In Victorian times, they would do photographs of the whole family with the dead person dressed and sitting, propped up to look like it was a regular family portrait. It's only in more recent times that things like modern embalming started. Modern embalming started during the Civil War solely to bring soldiers back intact so their families could grieve. Before that it was all home funerals. Now, when someone dies, you put them in a coffin and bury them right away. We don't process death at all.

You're being invited into the most intimate part of people's lives. You are on call for the universe, not a time clock.

What has been the most difficult thing about your job?
I had a client, with a wife and four children, and his mistresses wanted to view the body at the funeral. Two of them had children with him, none of whom the wife knew about. They all threatened to come in, [saying that] they had rights too, and the funeral director ended up arranging private viewings. It was out of my hands because the funeral director was taking over and I was really grateful because I didn't even know what would morally be right or wrong there. It was complicated.

What's the best part of being a death doula?
When a family is grieving loss, and they hug you and tell you that you helped them to be with their child and to provide the space and the comfort that they needed in those last hours and that it made all the difference, it just turns you inside out. Even at the funeral, people will say that they were able to say goodbye in a deeply meaningful and authentic way.

The other is when I work with the dying and I do the life review process with them. People will just share their high points and low points, their big memories. And I train my students to do this too, we search for a storyline, for themes, because most people see the events in their lives as scattered events, and if you look, there's often a story, like "You were the underdog and you always persevered!" When you are able to help somebody see the theme in their life and have them feel in their final days that there was a deeper meaning in their life than they ever realized, they can see their death as the final chapter in this story on Earth, and a story that actually makes sense.

You're being invited into the most intimate part of people's lives. You are on call for the universe, not a time clock.

Follow Rula on Twitter.

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No, kickboxing is not the answer to rape culture. Photo via Flickr user David Shankbone.

If you skimmed the headlines of some major Canadian news outlets this week, you'd be forgiven for thinking women had learned to prevent rape simply by learning self defense.

"Teaching women self-defence still the best way to reduce sexual assaults: study," reads a Globe and Mail headline.

"Women trained to resist sexual assault far less likely to be raped: study" said CTV's headline on a story about the research.

Sorry, no, kickboxing hasn't solved sexual assault.

Although to be fair, the Globe and CTV stories are more carefully written than their headlines.

The new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine garnered a lot of attention this week after researchers announced they found a promising way to cut women's risk of completed rape almost in half—with a relative risk reduction of 46.3 percent—when compared to women who were given brochures on sexual assault.

The 900 women who participated in the study were split into two groups: a group that took the resistance training, and a control group that was handed brochures similar to those in campus clinics and counselling centres. A year after the interventions, the risk of completed rape was a significantly lower 5.2 percent for the resistance training group compared to 9.8 percent for those who received brochures.

Twenty-two women would need to take the program to prevent one additional rape within a year, Dr. Charlene Senn and her co-authors concluded.

That's fucking huge.

But anti-rape advocates are concerned some headlines have misconstrued the nuanced research, and can be interpreted as putting the onus on women to protect themselves from rape—an idea front-line advocacy groups have been working against for years.

Before she hopped on a plane Thursday, consent educator and "award-winning feminist buzzkill"Julie Lalonde warned against a lazy reading of the headlines.

The crux of Dr Senn's project is this : The onus is on all of us prevent sexual violence & women have the right to assert their boundaries.
— Julie S. Lalonde (@JulieSLalonde) June 11, 2015

"The conclusion is not more self-defense classes for women, in the traditional sense of the word," she told VICE over the phone Thursday after disembarking said plane. "The conclusion is not: 'See, women can and must prevent rape.' That is not the conclusion of her work. that is a lazy reading of what is actually very nuanced research which challenges a lot of the narratives that are in place."

"I'm so worried that the media is feeding into this narrative of once again, if a woman is sexually assaulted and she hasn't taken a self-defense class, then it was her fault because she could have prevented her rape and didn't," she continued.

What you may not have read is that, according to Senn and her co-authors, other workshops designed to help women resist rape have had inconsistent effects. However, this specific workshop—which involved a component of self-defense training, but was not solely a self-defense class—was found to reduce completed rape, attempted rape, attempted coercion and nonconsensual sexual contact.

Though it reduced all other forms of rape, the workshop did not significantly decrease coercion, the researchers found.

"Coercion was considered to have occurred when perpetrators used pressure or manipulation (e.g., "threatening to end the relationship" or "continually verbally pressuring me") to induce compliance in nonconsensual penetrative sexual acts," the study states.

The study involved 893 women—442 of whom were assigned to a control group given sexual assault brochures, and 451 of whom attended the resistance training groups.

The resistance training involved a four-step program.

The first unit taught the women to assess and problem solve risk of sexual assault by male acquaintances.

The second stage helped increase their speed in recognizing the danger in coercive situations and overcome emotional barriers in resisting advances by men they knew. In this stage they practiced resisting verbal coercion.

The third stage was self-defense training that focused on sexual assault by acquaintances, and attackers who were larger than the women.

The fourth stage, "sexuality and relationships," gave the women "a context to explore their sexual attitudes, values, and desires," and helped them develop strategies for sexual communication.

So no, it wasn't only self-defense training.

And the study's authors acknowledge more research is needed "to identify the elements that are critical for efficacy" so they can make a shorter version of the workshop that can be used widely.

My takeaway is that this workshop can empower women to assert their boundaries and defend themselves if needed, but it's not only about self-defense. It's also about teaching women to recognize and respond to common dangerous situations, which more often involve people they know—not strangers in the bushes.

Known as the "red zone", women in university are at heightened risk for sexual assault in the fall semester of their first year. A new poll by the Washington Post found 20 percent of women and five percent of men who attended college in the past four years report being sexually assaulted.

Historically, society has placed the onus on women to prevent sexual assault: Don't walk home alone at night, don't wear short skirts and all that. In recent years, public pressure from rape survivors and their allies has forced universities, police and politicians to look at the issue differently.

Slowly the onus has begun to shift away from women to prevent attackers from raping them and instead onto attackers to not rape women.

Consent and bystander intervention programs are also on the rise on college campuses.

It's in this context that Senn and her co-authors researched the efficacy of a resistance program to prevent sexual assault.

The workshop they developed is one more tool in the rape-prevention toolbox.

Lalonde told VICE she hopes universities will recognize Senn's nuanced approach and adapt her workshop for their campuses.

"Charlene Senn has developed this model—pick it up," she said. "This is my call to other campuses. You don't have to reinvent the wheel—she created this program, you know, fund having the equivalent on your campus."

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

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This guy probably isn't a sociopath, but let's hope he kisses like one. Photo via Flickr user Paul Terefenko

"Over time, you may sometimes just feel it in your gut," says Dr. Stephan Snyder, a New York City sex and relationship expert, of dating sociopaths—that is, individuals diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder (ASPD). "A creepy, cold feeling," he continues. "Sometimes you'll sense it in how they react to others. Sometimes you'll catch them behaving heartlessly to someone, when they don't know you're watching."

They're charming, manipulative, and quite frequently, absolutely fantastic in bed. Sociopaths exist—and if you're anything like me, you may have banged one in the past. Men and women with ASPD may not always come out swinging an axe while dressed in a raincoat to avoid dirtying their well-tailored suits with your blood, but you may have found yourself neck deep in a web of lies and risky behavior that, once on the other side, left you seriously wondering what the fuck you were thinking in the first place. Like other personality disorders, the diagnosis criteria covers a spectrum and ranges from Patrick Bateman to quite possibly, you. According to psychologist Martha Stout's 2005 book, The Sociopath Next Door, four percent of Americans are sociopaths. Men are, unsurprisingly, three times as likely as women to have diagnosed antisocial personality disorder. (Or maybe women are just better actors.)

To learn more about dating sociopaths, I spoke with Dr. Anne Brown, therapist and author of Backbone Power: The Science of Saying No, about denial, seduction, and why to stay clear of Wall Street. Dr. Brown treats sociopaths—some in prison—as well as patients who have been doing the dirty with them.

VICE: What are some warning signs you could be dating a sociopath?
Dr. Anne Brown: Probably the number one sign is that they don't keep agreements. And there'll be stories that don't always add up—like, they tell you they have a Corvette [and you never see it.] Then there are stories to explain the stories, when they don't come true.

How do these people maintain such a web of lies?
Well, they don't really see it as lying. They don't have a consciousness that says, You're lying now. They actually believe at the time that they're telling the story that it will be true. If you and I lie to each other, odds are we'll go, Well, I just lied. I wonder if I'll get away with it. But if I'm saying to you, "Oh yeah, my uncle has a big condo in Miami and we can go there," then that's what he thinks is going to happen. And then he'll be like, "Oh, I couldn't get ahold of my uncle." Now we don't know if there's a condo, or if there's a person he might have met that has a condo. Everything is not what it seems.

"Take a look at Wall Street. We've got a bunch of them there." —Dr. Anne Brown

There has to be some point when you can start to see through the facts.
They're so charming. You like being with them. If you really want to be with that person, you're going to make up stories and start to defend them. Sociopaths say what they need to get what they want. I worked in a jail once and the stories they would tell me—they would rent out apartments that they didn't own. Now, I couldn't even think that up.

Are sociopaths capable of more genuine, human thoughts and emotions?
I don't think there's awareness. That's not where they live. They say whatever they want to get what they want. You've got to remember that part. They are opportunistic. They are going to win until they get caught.

Related: Love Is Pain

Can ASPD help someone seduce you?
Yes. There's absolutely no question. We used to say, "If you as therapists find yourself reaching in your pocket and giving your client money, it's probably a sociopath." They're very seductive, very charismatic, can be very likable. So that's the talk part, but notice the walk part: Do they keep their agreements? Can you count on them? Do they honor you? The answer to that is probably going to be no.

What do you put yourself at risk for dating a sociopath?
If you care about monogamy, I wouldn't trust that you're going to get that. The person's an opportunist. Agreements don't mean anything—you're at risk for being betrayed if you have agreements about sexual fidelity, and there's your health. If you trust them and pick up and leave your career and relocate for them, they could abandon you and be off with the next person.

Is there a risk for real physical abuse?
There can be. If you don't have regard for the rights of someone else, if you don't have regard for my rights, you can hit me if I upset you. There was a wonderful example of a man who had to get home in a hurry, and he didn't have a car, and the next bus was an hour long. So he had a gun and held up a woman and took her car.

"The person's an opportunist. Agreements don't mean anything." —Dr. Anne Brown

What would you say to a patient who you believe is in a relationship with a sociopath?
I can smell the bullshit. I can taste it. I can see it. So if you're telling me, "He's so great, I paid for dinner, he's moving into my place, and I loaned him my car..." I'm going to be like, "Wait a minute. What about him taking care of you?" And then you're going to say, "We had a date Wednesday night and he didn't show up because he told me somebody had a flat tire..." and it's going to be an outrageous story. And I'm going to say, "You can keep going, because he's really got you. He's charismatic, he's telling you what you want to hear. You're putting up with bad behavior, but you like him, he's funny. The sex might be great, but I don't think you can hang your hat on this."

Yes! So sex with sociopaths can be really good?
It can be, but I've got to say, sex can be more about him and he'll fake what you want. It's always going to be about the sociopath.

Can sociopaths ever go on to have a functional relationship?
I'm not going to say the prognosis is good. I would say this: Dating a sociopath, that's an oxymoron. If you have any standards for your boyfriend or girlfriend, you don't want to pick a sociopath. It's not your job to get them all in shape. Most women and some men think, Oh, they'll change for me. No, no. That's not who you want to pick. That being said, take a look at Wall Street. We've got a bunch of them there.

Follow Sophie St. Thomas on Twitter.

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Check out Esther Pearl Watson's website and Instagram, and get her books from Fantagraphics.

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Photo via Flickr user Robb Hohmann

Everyone seems to agree: Student debt sucks. But even after we spoke to an expert about what would happen if we just stopped paying our loans, nobody seems to know what we should actually do. One possibility, promoted by the Debt Collective and embodied in the Corinthian debt strike, is that we all just stop paying our student loans together. As marked progress is made by the 100 Corinthian College students refusing to pay back their loans in the face of a corrupt, for-profit university, other graduates are beginning to wonder if a big, collective "Screw you" is the right answer to those monthly emails reminding us of outstanding payments. If a whole generation has fucked credit scores, won't landlords have to rent to us anyway? If everyone under the age of 30 just accepts their allotted five figures of debt as a permanent reality, won't the government have to listen? Won't some compassionate old guys on Capitol Hill have to intervene and stop the madness?

Maybe, but in all likelihood, we'll never know. The prospect of collectively defaulting on our student debt is sexy, but elusive. People act out of self-interest, and while another million students will default on their debt this year, it's unlikely they'll do so as a collective union. Instead, one in three young debtors will throw in the towel alone. To learn what might happen if they organized instead, I spoke with Professor Andrew Ross of New York University. Ross is a professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and a key player in the debt resistance movement. One of the founders of Occupy Student Debt and Strike Debt, Ross is a member of the Debt Collective and an advocate for debtors' rights and debtors' unions. He's also the author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal. I spoke with Ross about the cold hard reality of sticking it to the man, the end goal of the debt strike, and what would happen if we collectively kamikazeed our credit scores.

VICE: So, let's cut to the chase. What would happen if we took collective action and all stopped paying our student loans?
Professor Andrew Ross: If you look at the rates of student debt default, one in three student debtors are in default. So it's already happening on a mass basis. It's just happening individually, so you don't necessarily see any political impact. But millions of students are in this predicament, and they simply can't pay back their debts, even if they wanted to. It's not a question of meeting your responsibilities: These people simply cannot pay back their debts and will never be able to. So we are in that kind of situation as a society where we have turned higher education into the cruelest of debt traps. It should be a social good. It should be a social right, in my opinion. And it's turned into the cruelest of debt traps from which only students from well-heeled families can escape.

Now, in the Occupy Student Debt campaign we had set a goal of finding 1 million students who would agree to collectively default, back in 2011. We didn't get anywhere near those numbers for all sorts of reasons, but 1 million student debtors did actually default that year. They just did so individually; if they'd collectively defaulted as we had planned, then we would be having a different conversation. We'd have had a political impact. And that's why we decided after several years to start much smaller. We started the Debt Collective with a much smaller group, but we've already had quite an impact with that small group, these 100 or so students who went on debt strike. Although what the Department of Education announced this week was highly problematic, and we have a lot of criticisms of it, that wouldn't have happened without the pressure from this debt strike. It's only the beginning, and it shows that collective action produces results.

We have turned higher education into the cruelest of debt traps. It should be a social good. It should be a social right.

What kind of political result do you think is actually feasible, if millions of students stop paying their loans?
A strike of any kind is a tactic. It's not a solution. It's a tactic towards a goal, and the goal here ultimately is for the US to join the long list of industrialized countries around the world that make it their business to offer a free public higher education system. None of these other countries are as affluent as the US; there's no question that this country could afford to do so. In fact, we produced an estimate not that long ago about how cheap it would be for the federal government to cover tuition at all two and four-year colleges. There are several estimates in circulation, and a few years ago that kind of proposal was dismissed out of hand. But now we're beginning to see it pop up on Capitol Hill in various forms. It's a proposal that's part of Bernie Sanders' campaign for president. It's a proposal that pushed President Obama in the direction of making community colleges free, at least for two years. It's becoming a little more respectable to talk about [solutions for student debt], on Capitol Hill and in the public sphere in general. None of that would have happened without a student debt resistance.

Check out VICE News on The Student Debt Sentence

Is the goal here mass debt forgiveness or free public education? Is it more a selfless act for current debtors, if the primary concern is future generations and it's going to seriously fuck up their own financial situation to default?
I think both. At this point, to go on debt strike, you have to be pretty into it. The Corinthian students have a very strong legal—and even stronger moral—case to have their debts discharged. There's a lot of personal self-interest driving that. And there's obviously strength in numbers, which is the rationale for any collective action like this. You're less at risk. You're less exposed, if you have a lot of company. We filed more than 1000 defense of repayment letters on behalf of Corinthian students so far. We would do more if we had more resources. There's a certain amount of personal self-interest but when you join a campaign like this, there's always a higher goal.

What sort of concrete political change do you think these strikes can bring, if done en masse?
We have a long term view of this. Building a debtors' movement takes a while, and we learned from our experience a few year ago you have to go a little more slowly. Occupy Student Debt, that campaign was in the heyday of Occupy. We thought anything was possible. Things could happen very quickly and virally. Organizing is very labor intensive and you really have to build it stone by stone. The risks are there for a reason: They bolster the credit of the creditors.

The relationship [between debtor and creditor] is incredibly imbalanced in favor of the creditor. There are laws that make that the case. Those laws can easily be overturned in all sorts of ways, by making personal bankruptcy available, for example. By insisting that the Department of Education live up to its more noble principles of providing education, rather than regarding higher education as a vehicle for profit. The moral principles upon which the campaign rests are sound. They're very high-minded ones. They're ones that you build a movement on. A long-term debtors' union has to be one that's driven by those principles. If you think of the early days of the Labor Movement, there were incredible risks involved for the workers who went on strike. This isn't dissimilar. The laws are often stacked against any set of workers who try to organize. That doesn't mean [the laws] can't be changed. That doesn't mean that we can't win through collective organizing.

The relationship between debtor and creditor is incredibly imbalanced in favor of the creditor. There are laws that make that the case. Those laws can be overturned.

The Corinthian case is pretty clear cut, but what about cases like mine and other students like me? I received a full scholarship to a great public university, but chose to attend a private university. I got a great education, but now I have $35k in loans to pay off. And you work at a very expensive private university yourself.
We don't place blame on debtors, ever. If you're in a debtors' movement, you don't blame debtors. The blame is systemic. We have a system of higher education in this country that privileges private goods at the expense of public goods. Although you went to a private university and racked up loans, they were probably federal loans. There isn't a firm distinction between the private sector and the public sector. If you look at the for-profit sector, it couldn't exist without the public purse. NYU couldn't exist without the federal loan provision, at this point. I reject the blaming and I reject the clear cut distinction between public and private. If public universities and colleges were tuition-free, we would see a lot of changes in private universities.

So is mass debt forgiveness off the table?
I don't think anything is off the table. But the important thing is how you organize. The Debt Collective wants to create a network of proto-debtors' unions. And people will join those unions depending on what kind of debt they have, who their creditor is, where they went to college. If people want to engage in collective action around debt strikes, it makes most sense for them to have people who share the same circumstances as their peers. That means the same creditor, maybe the same college, maybe the same region. We started out with Corinthian because they met all the requirements for a group of debtors who could see it was in their interest to act collectively.

Follow Jennifer Schaffer on Twitter.

True or false? When seeking the perfect job, focus on those things that you enjoy doing for free.

I answered "true" to that statement during my last semester at Princeton when I began hunting for the perfect career. It informed my choices distinctively. Everyone around me was planning to move to Hollywood to try their hand at acting or preparing for grueling interviews with investment banks and consulting companies in New York City. At a school like Princeton, everyone speaks loudly about their ambitions and accomplishments, while our struggles and insecurities are barely whispered, even to ourselves. I was about to be released from Princeton, after being molded into the proper Ivy League renaissance woman ready for gainful employment. At least, that was the expectation. However, my professional future turned out to be more unorthodox than even I anticipated.

My decision to start dating men for money was a surprisingly easy one to make. I'd always been fascinated by stories of escorts and sex workers and had seen them as kindred spirits in the realm of libertinism and debauchery. I dimly understood that sex unlocked parts of us that we keep hidden, and I saw sex work as a foray into therapy. Since I was graduating with a psychology degree and had a reputation as an aggressively sex-positive slut, sex work seemed an obvious choice.

"Sugar dating" isn't completely distinct from any other kind of sex work. Prostitute, escort, stripper, sugar baby—in the end, men are paying you for an emotional and physical experience. Differences in names have more to do with the person doing the labeling than the professions themselves. Personally, I dislike the terms "sugar daddy" and "sugar baby." I don't like the dynamic they imply. These men are not my father and I am certainly not a child. I prefer to consider myself a "sugar cunt" and my clients "sugar dicks."

When you have an ongoing relationship with someone, as many sugar cunts do, certain familiar dynamics do develop. But in terms of the job description, that's one of the most attractive parts of sex work: you make your job into what you want it to be.

In the beginning, my peers were mostly amused at my declarations to be a sugar cunt, probably because they didn't take me seriously, though several of them expressed concerns for my emotional and physical well-being. Although, I bit my tongue when it came to my own concerns about their career plans, because who am I to judge?

As it happens, some of my favorite clients held down the exact jobs my classmates would take on. Usually it's finance or law, with entrepreneurship coming in as a close third. I feel lucky not to experience their stresses: maintaining their lifestyle, working hard enough, carving out pockets of time for their actual lives. I prefer the uncertainty of where I'll sleep tomorrow night over the tyranny of a company motto.

The trajectory of my sugar cunt career closely mirrored that of most entry-to-boss travails that my friends were undergoing. After we graduated, I lived with a friend in my hometown in Florida. While she struggled over which job offer made the most sense for her, I was scheming about how to hustle money. My beginner's luck was strong and I attracted three potentials when I signed up on Seeking Arrangement—the most famous sugar dating website, boasting "thousands of members" and "dating on your terms." I went through with two of the dates; one guy stood me up at a bar.

The trailer for Daddies Date Babies, the upcoming documentary featuring Tess Woods. Directed by Parinda Wanitwat

My focus, at the start, was to get as much money for as little work as possible. Paradoxically, this led to underpayment for overwork. I spent much more time and emotional energy than I wanted with the initial men I met. One guy was a short, doughy bunny with sandy hair who ran a company that wrote essays for college students. He also carried a chip on his shoulder that was larger than he was, and the weight of his baggage exhausted me. The other was a married lawyer, perfectly courteous and sweet, who just wanted some sexual attention after his wife had stopped providing it. My sugar dicks were cliché as they come. I didn't realize that I would be giving more than sex to these men, that they weren't really paying for my body, but my attention. My validation. The light in my eyes that recognized the light in theirs.

It was enough to make me take three years off sugar dating and try my hand at service and desk jobs. I moved in with a guy I'd met at school and spent two years with him in Chicago, letting him pay for rent and food as I worked as a bartender and temped just enough to cover my weed habit. It's funny how the relationship I had that could be most accurately categorized as sugar dating is one where we both were desperately in love. We didn't realize we were trading attention for validation from each other. I helped him feel human in certain ways, and he helped me feel human in others. The aftermath of our breakup opened my eyes to the transactional way that most of the people around me seemed to treat their relationships. My boyfriend and I had fallen into a symbiosis, where we each needed each other's support—otherwise, we fell apart.

I priced myself pretty cheap—$500 per meeting put me in the sweet spot of men who were willing to pay but were too shy to be demanding.

At the same time, as I ascended from entry-level to moderately experienced at being a sugar cunt, I came to understand a bit more about why sugar dating had been so attractive to me in the first place: Done right, you get all the perks of running your own business without the need for startup capital or marketing.

We always discussed money at our preliminary "get to know you" date. I priced myself pretty cheap, both because the idea of asking for $1,000 per meeting seemed absurd to me and because I found $500 per meeting got me into a bit of a sweet spot: Men who were able and willing to pay immediately but who were too shy or new or kind to be demanding. I got messages from some men promising thousands of dollars per meeting, but their personalities usually scared me off. My income stream has been steady, and my rate hasn't changed much since I started, but I've never been coy about asking for the money. I rarely had to ask for it once a price had been agreed upon. My experience with sugar dicks is they're either trying to scam you, which you know right away and avoid, or they're anxious to pay right away. Many of them truly believe that they are doing me a favor, and maybe they're also convincing themselves that this isn't really a transaction, but an exchange within mutual attraction and regard. I don't care what they think. If they can't be honest with themselves about the nature of the game, that's their problem—although it often becomes my problem too, when they break it off because they have too many feelings.

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Photos courtesy of the author

I get a lot of questions about the nitty gritty of the business. This rabid curiosity often betrays the storybook sense of mystery and charm that other people see in my line of work. The money discussion between a buyer and seller takes place between a sugar dick and sugar cunt the same way any freelancer gets up the nerve to price their work. Business is business, and it feels that way no matter how sexual the business is. After the first time you ask for money, it seems natural.

Looking back on my heyday as a sugar cunt, I think I wanted to simplify my life enough so that I felt in control of all the moving pieces. If even my closest and dearest relationships operated on the same power dynamics that I saw in the office, it seemed logical to unify them under one hub. I hadn't been in my lovely marketing job at a lovely company with lovely people for a year before it all became too comfortable to bear. The monolithic schedule dictating my life grated savagely on me, and my mind turned again to thoughts of the hustle. Maybe I just hadn't been going big enough—north Florida was a small pond, after all—so I cast about in Chicago for potential clients. I expected to make money easily. I felt that I was armed with some experience of life, relationships, money, sugar dating, as well as alt-Barbie looks. My OKCupid profile became so popular, I had to turn off notifications to preserve my battery life. I thought I was about to take the Chicago sugar dicks by storm, turn their world upside down, and shake their money into my purse.

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But I didn't meet a single man who paid me in Chicago. The well was rather dry. I don't know if the desolation of winter had anything to do with the lack of interest, but my intuition and literature studies tell me it was hubris. Instead of a worshipful sugar dick who gave me whatever I wanted in exchange for very little, I wound up quaking in a taxi, wondering how close I'd come to death.

One of the men I met up with was the personification of all my friends' worst fears. He lied about his job, his apartment, and his name while interrogating me about my birthday and background, to see if I qualified to be pinned to his board. He took me back to his apartment against my better judgment, where we role-played abusive father and obedient-but-scared daughter as he bathed me with baby soap and powdered my ass. He clapped his hand over my mouth and told me, "There is much love in abuse." Over his shoulder, I read the title of his manuscript-in-progress, The Baby Doll Murders, as he told me his elaborate plans of starting a harem with women of all backgrounds and specific zodiac signs. "I'll give you a little sister to play with," he said. "You can do to her all the things I'm going to do to you." He asked me to stay the night but I demurred, and he texted me as I left, "I want you to do this because you love me, not for money." I answered, "Yes, daddy," and ignored his other messages.

Related: San Francisco Sex Mecca

After that, I gave up on the sugar dating scene in Chicago. I met and started working with a guy in New York as a dating coach, parlaying my experience with attracting and interacting with men into advice for their social lives. Eventually I moved to the city to go into business properly with my partner, whom I'd also begun dating. Unfortunately, our relationship and the new plans for the company ended abruptly at the same time. With $25 in my pocket and my entire life in three suitcases, I stood in the rain by a subway entrance and refused to let the tears burning my eyes escape. I needed every drop of that fire to keep going.

The summer I spent in the city was a transformative experience for me. I tried to get on my sugar dating hustle, but I was hesitant to meet anymore. I realized that I couldn't trust my internal rudder to steer me towards anything healthy or safe. Based on my past, I was attracted to people who made me miserable. Because I was so cautious, I only met one sugar dick in New York. He was a decent companion: fairly interesting, courteous, kind, and generally nice as hell. Canadian, of course. I've never met a Canadian I didn't like. The only problem was that his payments were smaller than I needed and took longer than they should, so I wasn't sad to say goodbye when he finally paid me out.

They were emotional parasites, eating my orgasms to feed their ego.

Since New York was not lucrative for me, I jumped at an opportunity to move to Southern California. When I got there, I swore off the hustle, but after six months I needed cash and place to write. I crashed with my friend in San Francisco and logged onto my Seeking Arrangement profile again. It felt different, this time. The freedom, flexibility, and speculative nature of sugar dating still attracted me, and I was confident that I could play the game to my advantage.

In San Francisco, I've had my pick, more or less, of the type of man I want to date. My sugar dating life this spring was been more interesting and rewarding than ever before. I've answered messages and bookmarked profiles I liked with my morning coffee, and then met whoever I was seeing that day for lunch or drinks in the afternoon.

Although, I've finally mastered being a sugar cunt, I wouldn't say that the life is glamorous by any stretch of the imagination. The money's been good, but the pretty jewelry has becomes less enticing the more I realize that it's really a ball and chain. None of the sugar dicks I've dated have stuck, either because they felt too strongly about me and couldn't reconcile the payment with their emotions, or because I felt like they were emotional parasites, eating my orgasms to feed their ego.

Their fadeout has corresponded with my waning interest in the business of sugar dating. I've learned that a job is a job is a job, and I'm just sick of working for other people. I got into this hustle to stay out of lines of work where I would feel trapped, stuck in an office, exhausting myself on a corporate hamster wheel. I never wanted to feel controlled by my work, whatever work it was. Someone is always happy to be your boss, if you let them. I feel like it's time I stepped into those shoes.

Follow Tess on Twitter and check out her website.

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Crystal Caves employee Jess with the now meteorite before it was stolen.

A large and valuable meteorite has been missing from a Queensland museum for over a week now, after it was stolen last Monday morning.

In the early hours of 8 June, two men broke into The Crystal Caves museum in Atherton, QLD and stole a rare 11-kilogram meteorite. CCTV footage released last week showed the men smashing a glass door, with one man entering the store for just seconds before they both fled.

In the week since, nobody has come forward with any information while the police investigation has also failed to provide leads. Museum manager Ghislaine Gallo expected the meteorite to be returned by now. "I thought if it was going to come back, it was going to come back straight away. I don't know why, I guess it's just a hunch," Ghislaine said.

Ghislaine said she is still confident in the police investigation. So far, this has included checking out local bars to see if stories are circulating. "They've spoken to some transient people in the area, backpackers and that sort of thing to see if they've seen or heard anything. They frequent the pubs on a Sunday night as well," Ghislaine said.

After seeing footage of the incident, Ghislaine said she has no doubt that the meteorite was the subject of a targeted theft. "They were definitely coming for it," she commented, noting the thieves ignored gold nuggets in the next cabinet.

Because of its nondescript appearance—it's roughly the size and shape of a football— Ghislaine is sure the thieves would have to be familiar with their target. To the untrained eye the object "is craggy and a brown, rusty colour. So a bit like a lump of mud."

Despite underwhelming appearances, the meteorite does hold a considerable value. Reports have priced it at more than $16,000. But there is speculation that it could be worth as much as $50,000 if broken up and sold in a black market situation.

But Ghislaine is appalled at the idea of it being broken up: "Anybody who has any respect for mineral specimens would never break up an entire specimen. To me that's like taking the Mona Lisa and cutting it up into pieces to sell."

She feels the thieves were employed by a private collector. "I think they were either paid by somebody else to go and steal it, or they stole it already having a buyer for it," she said. "There are fanatics out there who are just obsessed with stuff from outer space, you know, 'it's extraterrestrial, I need to have it.'"

Ghislaine's own father—René Boissevain, a mineral enthusiast and founder of The Crystal Caves—pined after the meteorite for decades. Originally discovered by prospector Stuart Foster in 1973 while searching Western Australia's Wolfe Creek meteorite crater, it was finally donated to the museum two weeks ago.

Understandably disappointed over losing the meteorite so soon, Ghislaine continues: "I felt sick with the thought of telling Stuart who had finally entrusted us with this and now we get it flogged from our shop within a couple of weeks". Noting the irony that no one paid the meteorite much attention over the past 40 years, until the museum started promoting its existence.

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She acknowledges the interest the meteorite drew on display was unfortunately what also drew the thieves. "I've attracted attention to this thing because I wanted people to come and see it, and I've obviously attracted the wrong kind of attention. But you want to share stuff, don't you," she adds. "When you get something new, you want to tell everyone about it. That's why you have a museum."

In the week since the theft, the CCTV footage has been shared extensively, and there is still some, albeit small, hope that the men will be recognised or that people with information will come forward and the meteorite will be returned.

"At the end of the day, that's what I want—I want it back. There's no point putting in an insurance claim because I can't buy a new one—I want that one back," Ghislaine said.

"And if we get it back, I've promised Stuart I'll look after it."

Follow Hannah on Twitter: @hannahscholte

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