When you'd been teaching as long as I had, you thought you'd seen everything. Fake excuses for not doing assignments. Real excuses that were far stranger than the fake ones could ever be. Medical emergencies in lecture theatres. Students having sex in public places. Even at 55, I had already reached that wizened old age where you could only sigh at every indiscretion, every oddity, and say, "Ah, I've seen it all before."
One place you didn't expect it was when dealing with your postgraduate students. Nearly everyone had something going on, from mental illnesses to work commitments; the true beginnings of adult life, but the impulse to do something incredibly stupid had been selectively bred out of them. They knew they were at the stage where that kind of thing could jeopardize the rest of their lives, if they weren't careful. What they did in my offices, in my presence, actually
mattered.
This mutual understanding morphed into a complacency that left me unprepared for the shock and fury I felt when finally the rules of academic conduct, spoken and unspoken, were summarily demolished right in front of my eyes.
Stephanie Meacham was among my favourite students I'd ever taught. Not prodigiously talented in the traditional sense, where rich parents pay exorbitant sums of money for extra tuition to push their beloved hellspawn's grade up, but a truly enthusiastic pupil of all things psychological, with respectable grades to show for it. She had scarcely gone a year through her Bachelor when she had developed a special interest--male psychosexuality. Exactly the sort of niche area you need if you are seeking further study. She had briefly considered going out into the world as a professional psychologist, and was on track to do just that, but ultimately she decided to cap off her academic career with a Ph.D first.
I was very glad for her, and only too happy to meet her to discuss whether I might be her supervisor. Privately, I could admit that male psychosexuality was not of much interest to me, and I struggled to understand what Stephanie saw in it. But at the very least I would be able to hear where her interests lay, and point her in the direction of a better supervisor if I could think of one.
At the appointed time, I heard a knock on my door.
"Come in!" I called.
And in she walked, dragging behind her Luke--a lecturer, a
member of the faculty for god's sake
--wearing nothing but a collar and a leash. He walked on his knees, head bowed, hands obviously bound behind his back.
I was outraged, my mouth agape. Inappropriate conduct between staff and students, indecent exposure, public pet-play... all failed to adequately convey what was happening here. This was effectively the end of
both
of their academic careers in one fell swoop. The ruination of years of hard work and mentoring and dedication. A tragic loss to a struggling discipline that needed their expertise and diligence but could not abide their conduct.
Before I could find the words to convey any of this, Stephanie spoke.
"Professor Kesselberg," she announced, "I have a revolutionary thesis on the nature of the male mind to show you. In brief, I have discovered a means for women to induce a hypnotic trance in men simply by kissing them, granting the woman previously undiscovered levels of control."
"I, you, you can't-" I spluttered, "what is the meaning of this, Stephanie?! This little stunt will cost you your entire academic fortune!"
"I am aware," she replied lightly, "but you would never have believed me if I'd simply sat down and explained it to you without evidence. In a way," she tugged on the leash, "he is my thesis statement."
I was aghast. This was
Luke
, for goodness' sake. He had taught every Intro to Psychology course for the last five years, practically a celebrity among the student body. He knew the kind of hero-worship that inspired in some of the more starry-eyed students, and he was always careful to maintain a friendly but completely professional attitude towards them. Now he was naked on the floor in my office, in complete deference to someone who had been taught by him personally.
Oh Stephanie, what have you done?!
"You will both explain yourselves, now," I ordered, "and if I am satisfied with the explanation I might not immediately have you thrown off campus."
"Professor Luke Bailey here has been hypnotised," Stephanie explained, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. She sat down at the chair in front of my desk, affecting a laid-back attitude as she continued. "He must obey nearly all of my commands, and in fact, he is trained to respond only to my voice. I don't believe he will answer if you talk to him."
That couldn't be right. I came around my desk and, trying desperately to ignore his nudity, clapped my hands as loudly as possible beside his ear. "Hey!" I yelled. "Damnit Luke, snap out of it!"
I thought I saw him wrinkle his nose, but apart from that, nothing.
"I should mention he can still
hear
you," Stephanie added, "he just won't respond. You might deafen him if you keep doing that."
I glared at her, "Why are you doing this, Stephanie? Of all the ways to spend your time, why come into my office on the pretense of applying for a Ph.D, and then... this?"
"I told you," Stephanie said with an air of deliberate patience, "I've developed a revolutionary thesis of how the male mind works. I have discovered not only that men can be hypnotised, in the layman's sense of controlling their minds, but that it can be done simply by kissing them. That's all it took to bring this one," she nudged Luke with her foot, "to his knees, in a literal sense. This phenomenon, how far it goes, and what limits it has... that is what I want to study for my Ph.D."
"Out of the question!" I bristled. "Even supposing you have found something in the psychology of, I should remind you, a member of this faculty-"
"But it's not just him!" Stephanie retorted, eyes gleaming. "As far as I can tell, it's
every
man, or it could be
any
man, depending on how you look at it. Does that not fascinate you? Does that not throw into serious contention just about everything we believe about free will? A man's will is not preordained by God, and it is not free, for upon my lips, I have rewritten it, and he wanted me, begged me to do it."
I was floored. This was the driven and passionate side of Stephanie that I knew, but I got the sense that I was finally meeting the woman behind the curtain. Was this what her drive had been about all this time?
"Alright, alright," I grumbled, striding over to my office door to make sure it was locked, then turning back to her. "How does it work?"
"You kiss a man, and then he does whatever you say," Stephanie replied, blandly.
"That's it?"
"It's not a bad starting point, considering that I've been conducting extracurricular studies with zero funding and no control group, if you'll pardon the pun," Stephanie said. "I wouldn't feel comfortable jumping to any concrete conclusions without a broad, quantitative and qualitative study of kissing and its effects."
"You want a-" I stammered. "Stephanie, that's outrageous! Think of the implications! Asking thousands of men to sign away their free will? The Board of Ethics wouldn't give it a second thought before burning all research associated with it!"
"Not just men," Stephanie deflected, "cis and trans men and women, nonbinary people, old, young, attractive, unattractive. Who knows what we could discover? We might prove brain sex exists! We might demonstrate that gender is a spectrum! We might give women who aren't conventionally attractive by society's standards a fighting chance in the dating scene!"
"I get the picture, thank you!" I almost had to shout, to talk Stephanie down from her mania. "But the point stands, nobody in their right mind would approve of it. This study you want would be canned before it even got started."
"The Board of Ethics," Stephanie mused, and there was an oddly sly note in her voice, "are they all men?"
I replied, without thinking, "Well, yes, I suppose they-"
And then her words hit me, and with a shiver down my spine, I realised what she meant. What her
actual
plan was. A plan that, for all her grandiose performance here, she didn't need my slightest input on. I suddenly saw that I was several steps behind where I needed to be if I was going to deal with Stephanie Meacham.
"You're not serious," I said flatly.
"I am completely serious," she said.
"I could stop you," I protested instinctively.
"How?"
And there was the rub. I couldn't. My words caught in my throat, and Stephanie saw it.
"Look," she said placatingly, "if my theory is right then women have been doing this, intentionally or otherwise, throughout history anyway. You can do it too. That alone should make it worthy of study."
I rubbed my temples. This was too much. "Okay," I sighed, "tell me everything."
"What would you like to know?" she prompted.
"You--we, I should say--can hypnotise men, with just our kisses?"
"There is a certain technique to it," Stephanie admitted, "but yes, that's all it takes."
