As I’m writing this, Samantha Brick is trending worldwide on Twitter. If you don’t know who Samantha Brick is, don’t feel bad – she literally became (in)famous overnight.
Samantha’s story is scary, but mostly tragic, and should be used to teach children about the devastating power of the internet in general, and social media in particular.
Personally, it reminded me how very cruel people - and especially people acting en masse - can be.
You see, Samantha Brick wrote an achingly embarrassing and terribly misguided column for the Daily Fail. In it, she addressed in excruciating personal detail how women hated her for being beautiful. The column itself is the type of whiny adolescent nonsense that happens when girls call each other mean because they’re feeling particularly insecure or unloved. (Oh go on, we all revert back to that sometimes!)
The “poor me” waffle is dotted with mortifying personal anecdotes on how her day-to-day life is just littered with random men who fall over themselves to celebrate her beauty.
The backlash to this article was and still is enormous. It went viral and had, at last check, reached over a million views. And the comments and tweets that are still streaming in are, frankly, nauseating.
No one criticised her for the ludicrous point she made: That all women are jealous, mean-spirited creatures and all men are helpless to a beautiful woman’s thrall.
The extreme, vitriolic backlash was because of the pics accompanying the article.
While Samantha Bricks is a perfectly attractive blonde woman who is well-groomed and pleasant looking, the readers of the article agreed on one thing – she was definitely not attractive enough to write THAT column.
No one celebrated the fact that this woman took a moment out of a life that has been riddled with body issues – seriously, just a year ago she wrote an article titled “I will always be that fat girl” – and dared to say “I’m good looking”.
For almost two days straight, perfect strangers (mostly men) from across the world have been telling this woman that she is stupid, conceited, crazy, mentally ill, but most of all UGLY.
• Is it because she came across as being particularly unlikeable?
• Is it because the happy snaps of her are so far removed from what we’ve come to associate with glamour spreads that she looks absurd?
• Can it be that if a woman isn’t constantly hating, criticising or judging herself the world will do it for her?
• Or is it simply because a lot of us know that life is not a deodorant ad where random strangers give normal looking people flowers?
I don’t know. What are your thoughts? I think this illustrates once again how too much focus on your looks – good or bad – can really screw up your life.
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