Samantha Brick

Samantha Brick

Samantha Brick - Journalist: 'Why women hate me for being beautiful', It's not easy being Samantha Brick. The France-based journalist explains in a column for the Daily Mail that while her 'lovely looks' often result in showers of gifts from random men, they only lead to hate from women who feel 'threatened' by her sheer beauty. Meanwhile, Internet commenters have roundly mocked Brick since her article was published.

Which is sadder: a woman who thinks she is beautiful even though she is actually average-looking, possibly even plain, or the swarming together of thousands and thousands of people to ridicule and heap bile upon said silly woman? Yep, it’s the latter. Samantha Brick, author of an ill-advised article in today’s Daily Mail headlined “Why women hate me for being beautiful”, might be a bit daft, but the outrage currently being dumped on her is downright nasty. As is so often the case these days, the ugliness of the Twitterstorm against a Daily Mail article has superseded the ugliness of the article itself.

It happens all the time. You read an article and think to yourself “That’s not nice”. And then you glimpse the rising up of the Twitter hordes to denounce said article as dumb, evil, demented or whatever and suddenly the article itself starts to look almost harmless in comparison. That was the case with Jan Moir’s piece on the late pop singer Stephen Gately. It was a horrible column, but its horribleness paled into insignificance in comparison with the twitch-hunting of Moir, the mass reporting of her to the Press Complaints Commission, and the denouncing of her as “fascistic” and a “witch”. It was also the case with poor Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old student who started writing a gap-year column for the Guardian but gave it up when, in their hundreds, Guardian commenters ruthlessly and relentlessly mocked his silly teenage pretensions. Yes, Gogarty’s writing wasn’t great, but at least he had the excuse of being only 19 years old. What excuse did grown-up Guardian readers have for aiming ugly abuse at a teenage wannabe writer?
And now it is happening with Samantha Brick. Stupid article, yes, but the Twitterstorm against it is infinitely more wicked and pathetic. Brick should change her name to “Prick”, say the Twitter hordes in their thousands. She is ugly. She is stupid. She is a bitch. She must have a “beer mirror”, says one tweeter, if she imagines that she is pretty, because in truth, say hundreds of tweeters, “she is a dog”. Nice. So Samantha Brick is self-deluded. Big deal. Lots of people are. An individual’s self-delusion is nothing compared with collective spite and collective bile, with the ganging together of bedroom-bound and office-bored tweeters looking for another easy target to rage against.

Once again, the Twitterstorm is turning out to be worse than the thing at the centre of it. Never mind asking “What kind of person writes an article saying how beautiful she is?” It would be far better to ask: “What kind of people get a kick out of joining a temporary gang of online haters and unleashing nastiness on one woman? What is it about the era we live in that means these kind of Twittermobs can emerge with such speed and ferocity? Why do so many tweeters allow themselves to be dragged unthinkingly into the tweeting or retweeting of obnoxious comments?” The Twittermob, so desperate for a cheap moral thrill and so keen to express its fleeting and flimsy adjective-heavy outrage, is a lot uglier than Samantha Brick.