Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

By then, school was out for the summer and I began my new job at Home Depot, which I’d applied to because it was the highest-paying retail store in the area. At first, I hated being a cashier. There were so many different types of customers: contractors, construction workers, couples buying their first homes, retirees, even college students. As with any job that deals with the general public, you come across both mean and kind people. Unfortunately, the most aggressive and mean customers usually stand out. Once, during my first month, when I asked a woman, “How are you?” she screamed, “Bloated!” My coworker made me laugh hysterically after he said to a customer that was screaming in his face, “Sir, you’re an asshole.”

About a month after Randy and I argued, I once again heard Carmine’s voice in my mind. It was strange because I had thought that all of those voices were permanently gone. I had stopped taking Zyprexa in April of that year, and Dr. Roberts left it as “no news is good news.” I never went back to a psychiatrist after January 2003. Carmine was still there, and we were able to have clear, detailed conversations, just like two people in real life. The voice told me about Eric, Randy, and Carmine’s girlfriend, the same girl he dated in high school. The episodes were happening infrequently, so I didn’t tell my mother or return to Dr. Roberts.

In the fall of 2003, I was apprehensive about going back to SUNY. I wouldn’t have Randy to spend time with in between classes. I had made a new friend who worked with me at Home Depot, and he was the complete opposite of Randy. Corey was a year older than me and was a sociology major at UAlbany. He had been raised in the projects of Brooklyn, but he didn’t have a gangsta attitude or crude exterior. He struck most everybody as an ordinary kid from the suburbs. During his years in Brooklyn, he had been in fistfights and been physically threatened. When he was twenty-one, he was robbed at gunpoint. Corey was quiet but had a dry and well-developed sense of humor. Besides knowing Corey from work, we also shared one class together, Sociology of Sexualities. The goal of the class was to learn about sexuality in American culture and to understand different sexual movements and how sexuality influences major American institutions, such as families, schools, and the media.

The class didn’t go as expected. When we were at work, we usually discussed Melissa Featherman, the graduate student who was teaching the class. From the minute that Ms. Featherman stepped into class, she intrigued her students. She was in her late twenties, overweight, and always dressed in tight clothing. She wasted no time in explaining sexually explicit topics, especially insights from her own sex life. She talked about how she hated waiting in line to buy condoms when two old women were starting at her. Many of the students didn’t want to listen to an overweight woman talk about sex. But as the semester evolved, we learned that traditional vaginal sex wasn’t all that Ms. Featherman was having.

Before classes began, I had met another graduate student who told me that Ms. Featherman had once attempted to start an S-M (sadism and masochism) club at the college—unsuccessfully. I first chalked it up as a rumor, but by the middle of the semester, Ms. Featherman was bragging to us about her extracurricular interests. She told us that she was the president of the Power Exchange, an S-M club that she unsuccessfully tried to start at the college. One day she sat outside the campus center looking for people to join. Nobody did, she said, but some girls stopped by and asked her where they could find dildos. Next, Ms. Featherman told us that there were a lot of misconceptions about sadists and masochists and that everything she did was safe and consensual. Through her experience with S-M, Ms. Featherman found that some individuals were hard core (they used whips and chains), while others preferred using more pleasant objects, such as feathers and ice cubes. During another class, Ms. Featherman said that a lot of people she knew said that S-M wasn’t about the sex. To them, she said, “Bullshit.”

Toward the end of the semester, the class watched a movie titled Fetishes, which documented this phenomenon. In the movie, a naked man crawls on all fours as women whip him and beat him. Another time, one of the women (a mistress) smokes a cigarette and uses a man’s mouth as an ashtray. She later puts her cigarette inside the man’s mouth and he swallows it. Many scenes showed women whipping naked men, some of whom found it so enjoyable that they climaxed.

One student asked Ms. Featherman if we were going to be tested on the video, but she told the class, “I wouldn’t know what exactly to ask.” Some girls walked out because they were so offended. Another boy joked, “Well, I’m going to have to rub one out after that.”

After the movie, a discussion about the film took place on the classroom website. One girl, Fija, responded that even though S-M behavior is deviant, it is important to remain nonjudgmental. The same girl made a comment earlier in the semester that Playboy was wrong and evil because it degraded women. So, according to Fija, we shouldn’t be judgmental about women hitting men with whips until they leave scars, but photographing a naked woman is wrong and immoral. Even though Ms. Featherman made some eccentric comments, she also made comments that were conservative and pro-abstinence. She told her students that she waited a long time to lose her virginity and that she was glad she did. I could not have survived this class without my friend Corey. I think I would have been too afraid to go class if he wasn’t in it.

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