Appearances can be deceptive
Last week, a very nice friend of mine stayed over at my house. As a have a large collection of women's magazines (chewing gum for the brain), my friend began idly leafing through pages of 'celebraties' photographed at various functions. She asked me if I liked Sarah Jessica Parker, so I asked her in what way did she mean this. She told me she liked SJP, "because she seems like a nice person".
Neither of us know SJP personally, in fact we have never met her. She may be an intolerable cow who has to pay rent-a-crowd to give the impression she has friends. She might be an absolute honey. But it always surprises me when anyone says they like or dislike famous (living) people they've never met. My friend doesn't 'like' Renee Zellweger, for no reason she can actually name.
The same kind of sentiments appear in letters to the editor pages in these women's magazines. "Jennifer (Aniston)/Gwyneth Paltrow/(insert name) looks like a lovely person... I recall a lecturer in Communications at university talking about judgements on appearance saying that a major problem for parents in educating their children with regard to 'stranger danger' is convincing them that people who do bad things may not look bad. Indeed, when little children are asked to draw the kind of person who might do hurtful things, they tend do draw scowling, unattractive-looking men. If you look at some of the mugshots in newspapers of convicted criminals, some do look creepy, but an awful lot don't.
Last year, a man called Bruce (can't remember the surname) was sent to jail in New Zealand after being convicted of murdering two little girls, the children of his partner. Bruce's face was bland, neither creepy nor Hollywood handsome, in fact had one not known of his crime, his face could have been described as kindly. Yet this was a man who terrified, tortured and murdered two children.
As benign as 'liking' celebraties may be, I can't help but think it is one side of the same coin that may have helped those two poor little girls trust the company of the evil Bruce.
