How the World Knows Samantha Brick

I'd never heard of Samantha Brick until today. It was a name I heard thanks to the Tosh.0 blog entry which appeared on my Facebook wall. From there I followed a link to her Daily Mail article, which was being subjected to the typical politically incorrect jokes by the Tosh.0 community. It was an article I never thought I'd read outside of The Onion. Thanks to this article I not only know who Samantha Brick is but I also somewhat wish it'd stayed that way. This article has gained nearly two million hits within its first two days alone and nearly 5,000 comments have been posted on the web page alone, most of which are negative and unfortunately accurate criticisms of Mrs. Brick, whose name fits suitably with her level of consciousness.

The article, which is itself written like a satirical piece, reveals a completely vacuous woman, who not only has deluded herself into thinking she's one of the most beautiful women in Europe, it would seem, but who is also tragically tied to a man who fuels her narcissism. Samantha often comes across as a character, claiming in several anecdotes of questionable validity that women lambast her for her beauty. Apparently women in Europe automatically hate you not because you're ugly inside or out but because you're better-looking than them. “Take last week, out walking the dogs a neighbour passed by in her car. I waved — she blatantly blanked me,” Brick states. “I approached a mutual friend and discreetly enquired if I’d made a faux pas. It seems the only crime I’ve committed is not leaving the house with a bag over my head. She doesn’t like me, I discovered, because she views me as a threat. The friend pointed out she is shorter, heavier and older than me.” It's almost hilariously unbelievable how people act around her, how someone would hate her—a friend at that—simply because she's more attractive, which I might add is strange, because while she's not conventionally hideous, she's certainly not gorgeous by most standards. Hell, I wouldn't say no if she wasn't so blind and shallow. Yet somehow she's been able to convince herself she shares the same level of glamor that Angelina Jolie does, which she makes blatant in a follow-up article to this one. In that article, she claims that if Angelina Jolie exclaimed out loud that she was beautiful then the public would react nastily, unlike if Brad Pitt said the same about himself. Just to give you an idea of how smug she really is when it comes to her appearance, even if she also says she hates smugness.

Along with her supposed “misfortunes” caused (in her view) by her beauty, Brick also mentions, with a kind of snide arrogance, instances where her looks have gained her many free gifts. “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.” Brick briefly talks about at least a dozen of these moments where generosity was paid by men, simply because of her beauty. She goes back and forth between bad times and good, in which she always points out painfully how beautiful she believes she is, trying to play the victim card. It's like even if she is beautiful and has a generally pleasant life she can't be content and needs to complain.

Brick has written dozens of articles, all focused on either her weight or her looks. One feminist article attacks the media for being sexist by exploiting women in the workplace, and then in a later article she boasts about how women should use their sex appeal to get further up the corporate ladder. She is so lacking in self-awareness that she completely ignores her own hypocrisies. And then we get to her husband, the Frenchman who she says in a later article told her that he would divorce her if she gained weight, with an article devoted to that point starting off with a picture of the man with his shirt tucked in, revealing a drooping beer gut and certainly no chiseled looks. It would seem to me that this couple is completely enveloped by shallowness used to mask their deep-set insecurities, but then again there could be a much more intelligent, self-deprecating move to make her some money by writing a piece asking its author to be wounded and widely ridiculed. Of course Brick mentions how she deplores those who are too self-deprecating in her retaliatory article, in which she simply attacks the negative reactions by, once again, questioning why the public attacks her because of her beauty, missing entirely the message the public attempted to send out.

The sad thing is I see women like this every day, and men too, as Chicago is filled with the narcissistic self-absorbed whose only cares in the world relate to their attractiveness or their own satisfaction. They're the kind who take hundreds of pictures of themselves obsessively, some publicly accepted as beautiful and indulging in vanity, others clearly trying to conceal self-esteem issues. Brick's big mistake is sad in that she writes aggressively that her beauty would find more reception in America, specifically LA, while Europe despises those who are good-looking. It's clear her delusions have simply led to further unhappiness than she needs to experience, and because she cannot see beyond herself she has no sense of reality, no sense that in most places with Western culture people really aren't different; a majority of negative comments directed toward her have come from America, which she fails to recognize. She says that people go after her because she's better looking than them, when she obviously never looks at other people herself. In one article she claims her first husband was gorgeous, and of course on their honeymoon she overheard him mention to some guys that he was alone. If her anecdotes are true, then she must be fending her friends off because of her overt arrogance. There's no way it can simply come across in writing. I wouldn't be able to last long in the presence of Samantha Brick and I'm sure, if she really is as self-indulgent as she comes across, I'd want to use her last name to bash my skull in at some point in a conversation.

If I could satirize Samantha Brick in a novel, I would, but she already is satirizing superficiality in a way that is beautiful itself, and she appears to be doing so perfectly unwittingly. There is no facet of society outside of fiction that can convey the narcissist of today as well as Samantha Brick has. And while Charlie Sheen may have used his celeb status to illuminate his faults and delude himself into believing he's invincible, Samantha Brick has used her delusions about her (in all honesty) unimpressive life to gain infamy online, but like Charlie Sheen I'm not entirely sure whether or not the efforts were inadvertent in stirring the public, even if in Sheen's case it certainly became deliberate. Samantha did however hint at how she'd be willing to leave her friends “in the backburner” in favor of getting ahead in business, not to mention her desire to exploit her "sex appeal," so it wouldn't totally surprise me if she's willing to shame her family in order to pay for her next car.

I'm sure the Daily Mail editors responsible for letting Samantha Brick go forward with this must have been laughing their asses off every time she turned her back to them (and groaning as well given her visible personality) and when placing a photo of her right beside Angelina Jolie suggesting they're equal in appeal. While a few women online are defending her constant confidence boosts as shimmering examples of honorable progressive feminism which have been exploited by the media, in reality she is an embodiment of how selfish much of the world is today and how dangerous it can be to reveal that selfishness when you're devastated by just a few hits, enough to write another article devoted to defending what you've already defended. Samantha Brick is a wonder and as of today a target of fascination and frustration, and all I can say I envy her for in the end is her ability to make the kind of money she does when all she can seem to write about is herself in endless repetition and her honestly sad marriage.