The Girl or Guy of Your Nightmares

What if you were grotesquely deformed and you wanted no one to see you? Yet you had a need for contact and so began to communicate on line employing another avatar. This isn’t even the stuff of science fiction. It probably takes place. One thing the on-line universe provides is an almost unlimited series of possibilities when it comes to hooking up and there are sites which cater to literally every wish imaginable. Whether cyberspace has unlocked a Pandora’s Box of paraphilias that might have been repressed at other times of human history remains to be seen. If it’s been said it’s been done and if it’s been done it’s been said goes the old saw. Yet again it’s not only possible, but probable that many secret urges that are unearthed in cyberspace come to fruition in reality. The marketplace is just that much larger. Shame naturally exists, but there will be no dearth of prospects who will find x, y or z totally permissible and if shame itself is your thing you will find plenty of candidates will to share or inflict it on you--depending on just what does or doesn’t turn you on. If Catherine the Great had sex with her horse, who is to say that in the age of cybersex there isn’t someone who has engineered sex with a polar bear or someone with a death wish who has laid in bed with a boa constrictor or even a bug. The famous Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder," told the story of a grotesquely deformed woman who actually turns out to be beautiful by the standards of the television viewer. That is the chilling climax as we stare up at the ghouls looking down at her and pronouncing the attempt to revamp her face a failure. No doubt today there are sites where women with beautiful faces can hook up with the ghouls of their nightmares or the Wicked Witch of the West types can be rescued by knights in shining armor who have a thing for what might be euphemistically be called imperfection. The surrealistic nightmare becomes a reality thanks to the cyber universe and you wake up to find the girl or guy of your dreams lying next to you, only he or she has a paper bag over their head.

The Invisible Woman

If you read the Times obituary of the actress Maxine Stuart closely (“Maxine Stuart, 94, Actress on ‘Edge of Night,’” NYT 6/18/13), you will come across a very curious and somewhat disconcerting bit of television history. Stuart appeared on The Twilight Zone only once, but her appearance was on one of the most emblematic episodes of the whole series, “Eye of the Beholder.” The episode concerns a horribly disfigured woman. Surgeons have given her one last chance. If the procedure they are attempting fails, they won’t follow up. They will have to admit defeat. Stuart’s face is covered in gauze right up until the denouement in which the bandages are removed and she’s told the operation has failed. For most of the half hour she looks like The Invisible Man. The irony is that the actress herself didn’t get to appear in the spine tingling climax when the cameras shows the patient as a paradigm of classic beauty with the doctors standing above her as gargoyles. Why? Because she wasn’t good looking enough. Like a stunt man or woman, Stuart’s substitute’s face was attached to the most dramatic moment of the whole episode. In journalistic terms Stuart was scooped. Commenting on what occurred, Times obit writer Margalit Fox said,  “That Ms. Stuart was deemed not pretty enough to play the unveiled patient in a show about beauty as a socially constructed concept was an irony not lost on her, she said in interviews.” If Stuart was not beautiful enough, nor ugly enough to play either end of the spectrum, her looks and talent earned her a permanent role on The Edge of Night.