Tom Hiddleston encounter only became news because I am young, female and blonde - by Amy Price
WHEN paparazzi photos of me chatting to Tom Hiddleston at a Gold Coast cafe filled my Twitter feed under the headline âfilling that blank space?â I felt the blood drain from my face.
As a young entertainment journalist, I try to dodge any incidents that could jeopardise my integrity and professionalism.
Having recently moved from News into the Lifestyle section of The Courier-Mail, it was my job to write about and interview the stars of Thor who were filming on the Gold Coast and briefly in Brisbane.
So, when I saw Hiddleston sitting at a café in a chance meeting on a day off at the beach, I struck up a conversation as he kindly offered a surprising recollection of who I was.
THAT picture: Courier-Mail reporter Amy Priceâs conversation with Tom Hiddleston certainly got tongues wagging. Picture: Coleman-Rayner
As I walked off I caught a glimpse of a man with a camera stowed away in an adjacent store and laughed at the prospect of being cropped out of some pap shots.
But soon the photos â which included me chatting to the actor while covered in a fine layer of sandâ were plastered over the internet as the âmystery blondeâ in Hiddlestonâs life following his split with Taylor Swift.
I was suddenly the subject of memes and absurd rumours in The Daily Mail and Womanâs Day, who slapped me with labels such as âpretty blondeâ and âmystery womanâ and interspersed them with Clipart love hearts and catchy captions like âfancy meeting you hereâ and âparting is such sweet sorrowâ.
Confidentialâs Amy Price.
âTom definitely upped the charm,â the Daily Mail journalist wrote. âThe Avengers star certainly appeared to be flirting it up with the stunner.â
Along with being astounded by how many people recognised the back of my head and developing a newfound respect for the impossible lives of celebrities, I quickly realised I had to grow a thick skin.
It is an uncomfortable reality that people will be judged on their appearance, and trivialised for being a young blonde female when a male wouldnât be cast in the same light is certainly not the worst.
But, as I shared a laugh with colleagues and friends dying to know what I showed him on my phone, I hid the beetroot red in my cheeks. The world had been granted the chance to judge my beach shorts and joke about my personal life and I had to accept that this happened to me because I am a young woman.
The Daily Mailâs version of events.
That was why a man behind the glass thought to take photos of me and sell them. It meant gossip journalists had a reason to tag them with salacious headlines and for those photos to become a talking point. Ultimately I knew my professional relationship with the Thor actors might be dashed to dirt for merely doing my job.
While it may seem inoffensive, for me it was part of an uphill battle I have faced to be taken seriously in a world that would happily put me in a âpretty blondeâ box.
As an intern at a series of other media outlets, I was told by respected men about the importance of âlooking goodâ and once even told I would soon discover the âtrue meaning of workplace sexual harassmentâ.
I dodged flippant jokes about how âtalentâ might react to me and had men reply to my tweets with pictures of their appendages. I usually grin, bear it and get on with my job.
But my fear is that these photos in unflattering beachwear will live atop my Google search results like a digital ghost and I will have to do something remarkable in my career to save being remembered as Tom Hiddlestonâs âmystery blondeâ. For now, Iâll stick to checking nearby bushes.
As for what I showed him on my phone, Iâll leave that as another blank space for the tabloids to fill.
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