Samantha Brick: Seriously?

If you haven’t heard of Samantha Brick, consider yourself lucky. She wrote a couple of pieces last week for the Daily Maillamenting the wretchedness of being beautiful – so beautiful, in fact, that other women are mean to her, and her life is just oh-so-awful.

“Throughout my adult life, I’ve regularly had bottles of bubbly or wine sent to my restaurant table by men I don’t know. Once, a well-dressed chap bought my train ticket when I was standing behind him in the queue, while there was another occasion when a charming gentleman paid my fare as I stepped out of a cab in Paris … But there are downsides to being pretty — the main one being that other women hate me for no other reason than my lovely looks.”

I’ll just be upfront and say I thought the whole thing was a ploy to get traffic to the Daily Mail site. No one thinks like this. Hell, no one writes like this. This is all one epic act of trolling. Right?

Right?

Far be it from me to slam a woman for being confident about her looks; most of us learn to berate ourselves at an early age, or at least compare ourselves to photoshopped, unattainable standards of beauty. But there’s a thin line, and Samantha Brick didn’t just cross it – she ran over it and set it on fire. It’s one thing to feel good about yourself; it’s quite another to tell the world how fabulous you are and how hard life is for you because you’re so fabulous. It’s like Kim Kardashian whining about never having any privacy (note to self, I don’t follow Kim, so I don’t know if she does this, but it would be like that).

Brick’s long, rambling essay about how fine she is and how impossible her looks have made her life smacks of a certain kind of arrogance that no one really wants to hear. I mean, even Hollywood stars – some of the most beautiful women in the world – remark that they aren’t always happy about their looks, or that they “feel average.” At the very least, they’ll acknowledge how fortunate they are and leave it at that. Maybe they’re just saying that so the rest of us won’t hate them. Who knows? The point is, they understand that being humble will get them further than bemoaning their devastating good looks. Newsflash: the average people of the world don’t want to hear how difficult life is for the beautiful, the wealthy, and the powerful. Realistically, we know you all have problems, too. But you’re gorgeous, so stuff it and pretend to be happy.

I do wonder if that’s the point the article was trying to raise, or if it got lost somewhere in the shuffle. If the article was trying to stir up some conversation about how women perceive themselves and how attraction is or isn’t a drawback…well, it pretty much fell flat. Yes, people are talking, but most of them are talking about how ridiculous Samantha Brick is, or how she isn’t all that attractive (for what it’s worth, I think she’s a nice-looking woman), or how delusional attitudes will get us nowhere. I do have to wonder if her attitude on paper translates to real-life encounters. Maybe women aren’t put off by her beauty…maybe they just think she’s a bitch.