I am totally hooked by the Daily Mail Samantha Brick scandal even though I know perfectly well that the Daily Mail thrives by appealing to the worst in people, particularly xenophobia.* Note that I linked to the Telegraph instead.
To sum up, a married lady aged 41 wrote an article about how women hate her because she is so beautiful and how she can hardly wait for old age to catch up with her and remove her burden of beauty. She sent it on it to the Daily Mail with photographs of herself and her plump French husband.
If you don't know already, you can imagine what happened in the combox. And on Twitter. And on Facebook. The English-speaking blogosphere took a look at Samantha Brick, read her encomium to herself and fell about laughing with scorn. It wasn't that S.B. ranks with Angelina Jolie, for she doesn't. It's that she comes across as delusional.
She also presses two female buttons: 1. she claims women are inherently bitchy, envious and jealous, which is quisling-like slander 2. she claims she's looking forward to old age when she won't be beautiful anymore and men won't notice her, whereas that is one of women's greatest dreads.
It's a moot point whether Brick is as pretty as she thinks. I generally think I am dashing, and possibly my mirrors all lie because I usually like what I see in them, but then I see a cruel photo and I am sad. I go weeping to someone who loves me, and that someone tells me I am beautiful, and who am I to argue with that, eh?
However, even at my most confident, I would never believe women don't like me because I am too beautiful for their comfort level. If women don't like me, I guess it's because I said or wrote something that hurt their feelings. I never bought the idea that girls at school were mean to me because they seethed with envy of my "beautiful" hair, as my mother claimed.
Newsflash: women tend to admire beautiful women for their beauty. It's when a woman acts like she thinks she's so much better than all the other women around that we feel surges of dislike.
Anyway, Samantha Brick may or may not believe that she is as beautiful as she says she is, and I can see how it is certainly better for her to believe that she is. She has got scads of fame and might now get a regular column and better pay then freelancers tend to get. Meanwhile, she has taught us all a useful lesson in how to lose friends and disgust people.
*One of the weirder prejudices in British life is British resentment of the Poles. Why people who toddle happily in places marked "Kama Sutra" and "Fat Choy Fun" for their curry or noodle fix suddenly go bonkers at the sight of a sign marked "Sklep" is a mystery to me. Perhaps they have forgotten that Poles rescued Britain in the Battle of Britain. Total ingratitude.
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