Psych 347: Sex and Sexuality (College Sex Ed; Mind Control, Exhibitionism, Romance - BreaktheBar)

“Alright, folks,” Professor Sinclair said from the front of the lecture hall. “Sometimes the best way to learn is hands-on, and this is a Practicum course, so everyone strip down to nude.”

I blinked rapidly, trying to process what the fuck she just said. And the fact that, all around me, the other students in Sex and Sexuality 347 started to stand up to follow that direction.

The course was supposed to be amazing - it had top marks in all the categories the ‘Rate my Class’ and ‘Rate my Professor’ sites used. People in the Psych department who had taken it sang its praises. It was taught by Professor Sinclair, the stupidly hot 30-something Prof who had just made tenure after her latest research paper into sexual deviancy relating to the American incarceration system and recidivism had made waves that had hit the mainstream news and been mentioned in Congress. She was thin, looked like she could have been a model for surfboards even while wearing her work-appropriate clothes, and had an ass that didn’t quit. And the course was still overseen by Prof Garringer, who’d been the head of the department for like three decades or something and was an amazing speaker.

Just getting into the course required a written essay, an interview with both Profs, and there were only twenty spots for the one semester it ran every year. The fact that I’d gotten in had been a major accomplishment.

And now everyone was starting to unbutton their pants or shirts as if it was totally normal to do so on a Thursday afternoon in a classroom on campus.

“Hold up, folks,” Prof Garringer said, standing up suddenly. Sinclair had been running the class so far, welcoming me and the other students in and then giving a little spiel about the importance of Sex and Sexuality in the understanding of the human psyche in both theoretical and practical work. Garringer had been sitting off to one side of the front dais, seemingly happy to let the younger Prof take the spotlight until now. “Why don’t you all sit and chat amongst yourselves for a moment.” Everyone else sat down around me, and I felt a sense of relief that maybe the world wasn’t going completely screwy.

“Mr… Mathews, please follow me,” Garringer said, pointing right at me and motioning me forward.

“Oooh,” said a few of the guys in the class. I knew most of them from our other Psych courses. None of them struck me as ‘get naked at a moment's notice’ kind of people, but they’d been standing up with the rest of them.

I got up and the rest of the class started chatting as I went down the steps. The lecture hall wasn’t the standard and looked like it had been built for a science lab or something. Each level had a semi-circle ring of tables instead of rows of seats, and each table had two chairs behind it. The class only took up the first two of the five levels because of its small size.

Following Garringer, he led me to the door of the hall and out, stopping just outside the door. The corridor was quiet, no one else around as he turned to me and shut the door.

“Feeling a little confused, Mr Mathews?” he asked. Garringer was an older guy, probably in his sixties, a little short and showing his age with his black hair turning silvery. He dressed unassumingly, just like lots of other Professors, in button-down shirts and slacks. He’d left his tweed jacket inside hanging on his chair.

“Uh, yes,” I answered.

“Not used to a room full of people just standing up and starting to strip naked, hmm?” he asked, starting to smirk now.

“Wait, am I being pranked?” I asked. “Or is this a study or something? I don’t remember signing a waiver.”

“No, Mr Mathews, it’s not a study,” Prof Garringer said with a slight smirk. “Interesting theory though. I’ll be honest, it’s much more interesting and much less believable than that.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s not helping at all.”

“I’ll cut to the chase,” Prof Garringer said. “I started this class when I took over the department twenty-three years ago. Every year begins the same way - the speech Prof Sinclair just gave you is the same one that I gave her twelve years ago. The next step, as always, is for the entire class to disrobe. In all twenty-three years, you are only the second member of the class to question this activity.”

“I… can’t believe that’s a real statistic,” I said.

“Ah, but it is,” the old man said. “You see, I am what I have come to term a ‘Mesmer.’ That is, a person who can influence the minds of others.”

I blinked again, like back in the classroom. “You mind control people to get naked?” I deadpanned.

“Not quite,” he said. “It’s more nuanced than that. I cannot control someone’s mind, merely influence it. In a purely random circumstance, it can seem like I’m controlling them. If a person is faced with two doors, I can influence them enough in a split moment that they will pick the left door. Or if they are picking a number between one and one hundred, about nine in ten subjects I can influence to pick the number I think of. Over time I can build up layers of influence - the vetting process for this class gives me that opportunity, and the more likely someone is to naturally go through with the actions I influence them towards, the easier it is. The interviews last year when you were applying for this course were when I layered the first phases of my influence. As each of you entered I reinforced those early influences.”

“But it didn’t work on me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if I was being sarcastic, or something else close to it, because my scepticism was off the charts.

“No, it didn’t,” Prof Garringer said with that smirk again. “Because you have the same latent capabilities that I have. A Mesmer, I have found, cannot influence another Mesmer. As I said, I have run across this situation once before. Miss Allens decided to stick with the course so that I could teach her how to harness her skills; you may have seen the signs up for her coming election in the Fall for the Senate?”

I shook my head, not because I hadn’t seen them, but because Garringer was suggesting that Missy Allens, the rising star politician projected to unseat the long-term Republican Senator for the State, was supposedly a Mesmer.

“This is insane,” I said.

“Quite,” Garringer said. “But also very real. I’ll be blunt, Mr Mathews. Stay in the course and you will learn how to do what I do, and you will also have an immense amount of fun. So will everyone else in that classroom. I hand-pick the students every year. They are all sexually active, none of them have STDs, the women are all on birth control, none of them have significant partners, and as you may have noticed they are all also very attractive. All of these facets, along with the nuances of my influence, make them perfect subjects for a hands-on class about Sex and Sexuality.”

I did my blinking thing again. I could have sworn I never did that normally, but it kept happening when I was faced with absurdity.

“I’ll even throw you in a bonus,” he said. “Young men such as yourself are territorial, it’s part of your nature. I understand that. Pick any one of the students in that room and she will be your permanent partner for the semester. You’ll have a chance to shtup all the others too, but usually I like to keep the partners rotating. No other man shall touch your chosen partner, even me.”

If it was fake, the old man had memorised his lines well and I was in one doozy of an entrapment scenario. If it was real, and considering the reactions of my classmates to being told to get undressed, it really could be…

“Fine,” I said. “What do I need to do?”

“For now, just go along with the class,” Garringer said with a toothy smile as he clapped me on the shoulder. “Your job is simply to not make a disturbance - a big enough one could, potentially, break the influence and then things would get messy. And choose a partner for the semester.”

The doors to the lecture hall, unlike almost every other room across campus, didn’t have a single window in them so I couldn’t exactly see in - and thinking about it, that made sense if Garringer really had been running a Sex Course for over two decades. The thing was, thinking about the ten female students in the class… It was a competition. I knew a few of them, and I’d been sitting with Carisse in my assigned spot. She was on the school Volleyball team and was fit in all the right ways. Then there was Olivia, who was a busty girl of Greek heritage who was a Psych major like me. Really, every woman in the room was physically desirable in different ways. There was a goth chick I’d seen around campus a bunch, a black girl who looked like an athlete of some sort, a Korean girl, a Hispanic girl who had a sort of hippy vibe. There was even a mature student that I could only think of as a MILF - she was probably in her late thirties or early forties and had a big rack.

But there was really only ever one choice.

“I pick Amber,” I said.