Being beautiful is a hard cross to bear, says Samantha Brick. Brick wrote an article for The Daily Mail this past week lamenting the hardships she’s been forced to endure as a freakishly beautiful woman. The response has been a media onslaught of negative attention, with an unprecedented number of web hits and readers’ comments. So why are people hating Brick so much?
Brick’s Initial Article
The gist of Brick’s article is that her great beauty has led her to lead a simultaneously charmed and tortured life. On the one hand, all men want her, she suggests. Everywhere she goes, strange men pay for her taxis and trains, send her bottles of bubbly or present her with bouquets of flowers.
The rub, Brick claims, is that women hate her guts because of her looks. Other women are jealous and view her as a threat, dropping her as a friend and not letting her anywhere near their husbands. She provides a litany of examples from her life, from insecure female bosses who barred her from promotions, to friends who won’t let her near their husbands, to friends who won’t ask her to be a bridesmaid in their weddings. Accompanying the approximately 1200 word article are seven photos of Brick. Check out a few more:
Readers were outraged. They hated Brick for being so arrogant and full of herself, and suggested her personality was the real reason women didn’t want to be around her. Women denied and were offended at the notion that women as a whole hate other women for being beautiful.
They also scrutinized the pictures of Brick and said. “Her? Really. She’s not all that.” The general consensus has been that she isn’t attractive enough to have had the experiences she’s claimed and that she’s not entitled to the self-important attitude she has. So people started trashing her looks, ripping her to shreds.
Jezebel.com suggests that Brick was set up by the Daily Mail to be a troll. By posting all of those pictures, the Daily Mail threw Brick to the vultures to tear apart her looks. Basically, they set Brick up to be called ugly. And those “jealous bitches” (as Jezebel puts it) provide fodder for Brick’s argument and sidestep the real issue. Because there are different types of beauty. And whether or not you consider Brick to be attractive is not the point. She has every right to love herself and her appearance. She doesn’t have the right to make assumptions about what other people are thinking and assuming all other women hate her because of her appearance. Jezebel.com is right. This article brought out the worst in people.
Brick Lashes Back At Her Haters
Brick agreed that the negative public sentiment proved her theory. In a second article, she declared that:
While I’ve been shocked and hurt by the global condemnation, I have just this to say: my detractors have simply proven my point. Their anger underlines that no one in this world is more reviled than a pretty woman.
Our society encourages women to be humble, to eschew the idea that we might be beautiful and worthy of admiration just the way we are. I hate that. We need to be confident in and celebrate our appearances. Then again, there is a difference between confidence and cockiness. Arrogance and airs of superiority are obnoxious in both men and women. I say, love the shit out of yourself and your looks. But I draw the line when you start hating on other women. Or when you become obsessed with your appearance above all else.
The problem with Brick is, she thinks everything in life is attributable to how beautiful she believes people think she is. She subscribes to the notion that beauty trumps all of our other attributes and is at the forefront of our every thought and motivation. This diminishes women, which I have a huge problem with. And for all she talks of “sisterhood” and lamenting that women don’t support each other, by assuming we all think like her, she’s selling us all short. We’re not all that small-minded.
Brick Goes On British TV
Brick went on to make television appearances both in the U.K. and the U.S. Yesterday, she went on a British morning talk show which you can watch here. For the most part, she stuck to her story and was unapologetic. Watchers got a sense of just why people might really be eschewing her as she was slightly overbearing, and continuously cut off the psychologist guest and show’s hosts. She backpedaled a bit and admitted that the events she spoke of were stretched out over a long period of time. When asked if the treatment she described (both positive and negative) was perhaps not as pervasive as she originally made it out to be, she admitted that there were “shades of grey.”
When the host asked her if she thought she was beautiful, she wavered and said she believed in peoples’ “perception of her.” Meaning she believed people thought this of her, so she attributed it to herself. This hits home how invested Brick is in what other people think of her and how her esteem is attached to their opinions. She did rally later on to say that she believed herself to be beautiful and that in a room of ten men, all of them would find her attractive. Both the female psychologist and the female host firmly but respectfully told her that it’s not that she thinks she’s attractive that they had a problem with, but her assumption about them as women that they wouldn’t like her. When the psychologist suggested that maybe she was giving off an air of superiority that perpetually alienated her from other women, Brick summarily rejected that notion. The segment concluded with Brick reiterating she was happy she’d written the article and that her point had been proven.
Brick’s Appearance on the Today Show
Next, Brick appeared on the Today Show today and was interviewed by Ann Curry. Brick was slightly more subdued and Curry went on the offensive immediately. She asked Brick incredulously if she was serious. Curry said she assumed when she read the article that Brick was tongue in cheek but when she used “I” 60 times in the short piece, she thought that Brick was narcissistic. Brick, who previously claimed that women eschew her, now said she had a wonderful group of girlfriends and is a girl’s girls. This directly contrasts her idea that the “sisterhood” is judging her harshly and snubbing her. Not much was accomplished in this interview but to watch Curry try to make Brick look stupid and cower. I wasn’t impressed. At least with the British interview, there was a genuine attempt to understand Brick.
So who is Samantha Brick, Really?
According to her website and articles she’s written, Brick is a journalist with 20 years of television production experience. Currently, she’s a housewife in a small rural French village.
Her other articles on The Daily Mail are telling. It surprises me that her particularly brand of anti-feminist, backward way of thinking hasn’t gotten more attention before.
Brick’s Flirtations in the Workplace
This isn’t the first time she’s written about her disappointment in the “sisterhood”. She wrote one article about when she launched a women-only TV company. She claimed the result was catfights, cliques, competition over appearance, and general mean girl behavior. The business went bankrupt within 2 years and Brick blamed the all-women environment:
Though I will not absolve myself of all guilt, I believe the business was ruined by the destructive jealousy and in-fighting of an all-female staff. Their selfishness and insecurities led to my company’s demise. When I needed the so called Sisterhood, it just wasn’t there.
The article led me to think, maybe this is why she resents women. And clearly for whatever reason, she has problems getting along with them.
Brick talked in her initial article about how men treat her well in the workplace, while women eschew her. She claims it was because her female bosses were jealous. A possible alternative is her penchant for flirting to get ahead in the workplace. She writes about it in another Daily Mail article entitled “I use my sex appeal to get ahead at work…and so does ANY woman with any sense.” Brick talks about pandering to men, dressing for men, stroking their egos. She brags about how much money she’s made and the positions she’s held. Worse still, she claims we’ve all done it:
One girlfriend regularly re-adjusts her bra before going into a meeting with her male boss. Yet another female co-worker let it be known in every professional encounter with a man…that she had once worked as a Playboy bunny. Far from me being a one-off, if we women are honest, we’re all at it in our own unique, albeit secret, way.
Uh, no. I’m going to have to beg to differ with Brick on that one. Her conclusion?
Define what your best assets are: long legs, lustrous hair, or even if you have a particular talent, exploit it. It’s time to be realistic because that is the way the world works for successful women.
Brick’s Body Image Issues and Chauvinistic Husband
Brick’s articles about her husband depict a chauvinistic man who wants to control his wife and put her on display. There’s one about how she lets her husband pick out her clothes. He doesn’t like her to look messy, dress too trendy or promiscuously, or in a way that “does nothing for her figure.”
There’s another about how her husband says he’ll divorce her if she gets fat. In the article, she says
I’d like to think he fell in love with me for my mind, sparkling wit and personality. But who am I trying to kid?…I’m under no illusion—he fell in love with me because of his appreciation of the female form.
Sad. She goes on to talk about how he watches her weight and food intake like a hawk. She claims to be grateful because she’s thinner than she’s ever been.
Brick is obsessed with her weight. She admitted herself in her article “I’ll always be that fat girl: Samantha Brick has always obsessed about her weight…all because she was a chubby child.” In this article, she talks about being fat as a child, losing weight and the mortal fear she has of gaining weight. She monitors her food intake strictly and is afraid to eat at other peoples’ house where she can’t control what she is served. At 41, Brick has been too afraid of gaining weight to consider getting pregnant.
Compassion for Brick
Reading through her articles about her personal life and body image issues, I started feeling bad for Brick. Far from being the arrogant, smug woman whose articles I read and interviews I watched, I saw the scared human underneath the veneer. She’s terrified of being fat, unattractive, and feels her looks are all that she’s worth. She needs to hear from men repeatedly that she’s beautiful. She has a husband that she thinks loves her for her looks alone, and seems to objectify her.
Sooner or later, particularly as the backlash settles down, as she ages, she’s going to start to realize looks aren’t everything. And she’s going to have to start dealing with the underlying issues. I’m still not crazy about her or the messages that she’s been peddling. But she’s an insecure, misguided woman who got caught up in a media storm. The hate that has been leveled on her is enough already. I genuinely hope someday she realizes she has more to offer than a pretty face. She can love her appearance, but she needs to love the rest of herself too. And that she finds some true peace in herself.
