A few weeks ago I read an article about Shin In Geun, the first person known to escape from a North Korean prison camp. Up until today I thought he had probably the hardest life I’d ever read about: institutionalised, tortured, controlled. And yet today that crown has been stolen. Stand back Shin: Samantha’s here.
Yes. Samantha Brick, handily named for the item you most want to throw at her, has written today in the Daily Mail about her own torture: being too pretty. Her ethereal, transcendent beauty leads women to hate her (although, as per an earlier article, luckily it’s also brought her enormous wealth) and this makes her sad.
Not sad enough to stop working out and eat her own bodyweight in chocolate, though, which has always been my preferred method of preventing men from throwing themselves in front of me as I walk down the street. (It was getting annoying having to step over the bodies.) And not sad enough to wear a bag over her head, which would presumably solve many of her problems, although it might create some new ones.
I’m sure that being pretty does bring its own problems. But like complaining about having too much money, it’s not really a great idea to go public with your issues in this area. There’s really no way of coming out of it well. Particularly if you’ve already written about how great it is being attractive, which was the point at which any lingering sympathy I’d had trotted off into the distance, muttering darkly to itself.
And yet perhaps I should sympathise. Brick is a product of her environment, and I can only imagine that said environment was startlingly shallow and image-obsessed. More generally, she’s a product of a society which does have a very polarised and contradictory view of women’s appearance. Moreover, Mail writers are apparently often manipulated into writing what the paper wants. Maybe Samantha Brick is a modest, unassuming woman who is about to sue the Mail for gross misrepresentation.
Maybe not. But possibly I shouldn’t actually pick up that brick.