Lipstick on the mirror

Like the grand fireplace that's really the hidden entrance to a secret tunnel in an old fashioned mystery thriller, one can stumble into being a stereotype without being consciously aware.

Unlike the dashing leading man and his beautiful accomplice, real life does not call cut on the scene nor allow the opportunity of discarding our make-believe costumes. We wear our imprinted outfits from one day to the next, acquiring accessories as we go but never usually stopping to slough our skins or remove our stage make up. The personal looking glass only ever reflects what we wish to see; the real mirror is through the eyes of others.

It is probably true that to some extent the conformity to a stereotype is a necessary attribute of functioning within a collective society. No man is an island so the old saying goes, and even those who choose consciously not to conform with conventional mores conform nonetheless with the stereotype of non-conformists of one sort or another. The conventions that we adopt - from the clothes we wear and the books we read to the pastimes we enjoy and the shops we spend our money in - are a product of both our conscious choices and our unconscious drives. And in the selection of these things and habits and actions we find, somehow, our identity.

But what happens to us when we are forced to change, either through circumstance or a fundamental shift in our personal belief system? It is perhaps at that point that we realise that the things about ourselves which we thought to be unmovable bedrocks are nothing of the kind. Our psyches, if we let them, are fluid and malleable things; we encounter difficulty, anger and challenge only when we are still resisting the change. If tens of thousands of years of human evolution has shown us one thing it is that we are extremely adaptable beings. And this applies both at a personal and societal level.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, particularly about to what extent individuals recognise the range of stereotypes to which they conform. It's also probably fair to say that there are various kinds of stereotyping at work simultaneously: the stereotype which society projects onto a person related to his or her 'visible' attributes - gender, age, manner - for instance; the stereotypes that an individual subscribes to him- or herself - belief systems, ways of behaving, relationships with others, and so on.

It's always intriguing when you have that rare opportunity to find out what others assume about you and can compare that with what you think about yourself. There is often a very large gap indeed between the two, sometimes amusingly so. But neither view is really wrong or right as such - both are valid perceptions, even if we might justifiably place more weight with our own interpretation of ourselves than that of another.

But then isn't that the basis of all great drama? What would be the point of a mystery thriller if there was no tension between what the hero believes about himself and what we can see with our eyes? And even the worst of stereotypical film baddies must have something we can relate to if we are to believe in him. With or without a costume.

The picture is a painting by the wonderful late Beryl Cook

PS - Entirely unconnected, but this cheered me up no end: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/09/nick-griffin-bnp-pelted-eggs