This week, Samantha Brick wrote an article for The Mail Online entitled: “There are downsides to looking this pretty: Why women hate me for being beautiful.”It had over 1.5 million hits and received nearly 5000 comments on the Daily Mail along with many more on Twitter! For starters, the headline was doing her no favours; let’s be honest no one was ever going to respond well to an article with such an egotistical beginning.
“WHERE ON EARTH IS SHE LOOKING?! I want her mirror!”
“This has to be a joke right?!! This is a belated April Fools’ Day prank….. please say it is. This poor woman is deluded. She needs help.”
Those were some of the comments left online. However, I don’t believe that Samantha deserved even a fraction of the abuse that she has been subjected to, mostly by women.
SO, does she have a point…or not? It seems to me that most people’s reasoning for the abuse she has received is that she hasn’t received it because she is pretty, but because she thinks she is pretty! The general public has decided that Samantha (looks wise) isn’t all that, and that she doesn’t have good enough looks to warrant calling herself ‘beautiful.’ It has seemingly annoyed thousands of people that someone is so self obsessed that they would write an article on their looks, but is it really that? Samantha later goes on to make her point that because she’s a pretty woman she believes she has been held back by her female peers, bosses have refused to sign forms out of jealously, and women who she thought were her friends have mocked her and humiliated her when they felt she was a threat (who are we to really say whether this is true or not eh…). She has written about the bitchiness of women from her point of view, and while I have little experience of this myself (obviously I am not seen as a threat…) I have decided that we need to get to the bottom it.
Samantha evidently has one thing that so many women, including myself, are lacking – self confidence. She clearly states that she thinks she is pretty, so why aren’t we happy for her? Doesn’t every woman want to feel pretty? Every magazine we read tells us about how to look better and feel better, about how being confident is key to getting what we what! So Samantha has cracked it; she feels good about herself and even she states that it’s not an easy feat – she doesn’t drink or smoke, she works out even when she doesn’t feel like it, and she “very rarely succumbs to chocolate.” So whether in our opinion Samantha is a stunner or a VERY average female, at least she has the confidence to believe the former.
With regards to the positive effects her beauty has had on her life, again I say good for her; we have all heard of the champagne bottles being sent over from men dressed in suits in a fancy bar (or seen it in a film…). It is the remarks about her friends abandoning her because they think she poses a threat to their husbands which have been labelled ludicrous, and yes this does sound slightly farfetched; either she doesn’t have very good friends or she does have a bit of a reputation she is not letting on about. However, at the end of the day she was writing an article for the DAILY MAIL and as much as I love the TV and Showbiz section, the articles themselves do leave a lot to be desired. It seems to be a case of the brutal British public taking this article far too literally and poor (yes, I am giving her some pity) Samantha Brick has come off very badly.
To round it up, no matter what ‘Anonymous Bloke’ tells us, we are still going to continue to think about things like our size, our height and our hair colour and we will continue to worry about how other people see us, but is it really the answer to start slating other women for thinking they are pretty? We should be happy with what we’ve got, and if YOU think it’s better than what Samantha has got then GOOD FOR YOU. Probably best to keep it away from the Daily Mail though or you will be hung out to dry…