Wichita Falls lacks natural waterfalls—they were washed away in a nineteenth-century flood, then rebuilt to drive tourism a hundred years later. But it is home to a four-story building called the “world’s littlest skyscraper,” as well as the sort of people who say “littlest.”

It’s also home to the somewhat erroneously named Midwestern State University, as well as its four-person sociology department, led by fifty-eight-year-old Beverly Stiles. And, therefore, Wichita Falls also encompasses Beverly’s research, which is on all kinds of social deviance. Including the sexual kind.

The university building where Beverly works resembles an old Spanish mission. She invited me to join her and her research collaborators to parse some data she was reviewing about the university students’ views toward people with disabilities and physician-assisted suicide.

The study was being performed as part of a small class that Beverly teaches so that students can learn to do research and get their name on published results. She doesn’t get paid for this time, and at a larger university, she suspects she wouldn’t be able to do this kind of work.

To be sure, the data was not a random sample of the student body. But some of the responses were a little grim. Of the ninety-two students who were asked, more than half agreed that it’s not possible to have a normal relationship with someone with AIDS; two-thirds said it would be difficult to trust someone with AIDS; and 62 percent said there are no effective treatments for AIDS.

Still, Beverly was surprised by a couple of the statistics: nearly a third of the respondents said they don’t have a religious community, and the most prevalent political orientation was “moderate.”

Beverly seemed enthralled. “I can’t believe I get paid to do this,” she exclaimed—meaning she’s overjoyed to have her dream job.

We later met up to talk in Beverly’s office, which is crammed with papers and books, one of which had a spine that read, simply, “ABORTION.”

When you speak to Beverly, she immediately ceases talking, leans way in, and listens like you’re about to issue a critical pronouncement. I told her that it was in a gender-studies class in college that I first encountered a woman who didn’t shave her legs. I became immediately and deeply afraid.

“Like, ‘What is this all about?!’” Beverly said excitedly. In her gender-studies class, they discuss how leg-shaving originated.