Wednesday 4 April 2012

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Woman writes article - I'm gonna paraphrase it but the rough gist was: women hate me for being beautiful. I am so beautiful. Women hate me for this. They are jealous. My friends don't trust me near their husbands. I am so hot. I'm hotter than you. Be jealous of my good looks, but pity me for how jealous ugly women treat me.

Here's a brief synopsis of what the general response was: You have a bizarrely inflated sense of how beautiful you are. You look slightly above average, but you're not in the top 10% even. You are not as exceptional looking as you think you are. If women hate you it could be because you aren't any good at hiding the fact that you think you're more beautiful than everyone else and that this somehow increases your inherent worth as a person.

Obviously there was a mix of reasoned 'oh my goodness look at this woman she's incredibly deluded, is this a joke?' to the standard internet hatefest. To quote a couple of comments from the Mail's site: "She has a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp!" and "a stick of TNT strapped to her mouth sounds like a magnificent idea!" Not particularly nice.

But of course this did not deter out heroine, who decided to silence her critics today with more nonsense.
The past 24 hours have been, to be blunt, among the most horrendous of my life. But then, the 4,510 (at the time of writing) people who have left comments on Mail Online, and the thousands who have done the same on Twitter, would probably say that it's all my own fault.Yesterday, I wrote an article in the Mail, posing the question: Why do women hate me for being beautiful? The response it provoked has been extraordinary in its volume and vitriol, and beyond anything I could have imagined when I first started work at my keyboard.Of course, I knew when I came up with the idea that it would provoke debate. I'd even prefaced the idea by explaining to the editor that I was fully aware I was setting myself up for a fall. I knew this was sensitive territory at which women would take umbrage — but I thought it was a taboo that needed shattering.Yet even I could never have imagined the fury my piece would spawn and the thousands  upon thousands of nasty comments I've been subjected to since it  was published.
She just doesn't seem to understand that if she says 'everyone hates me because I'm so beautiful' in such a way that makes people hate her, there is no way she won't arrive back where she started - thinking it's her looks that are the problem. It's always sort of scary to see someone reach adulthood without gaining a shred of self-awareness. It's obvious that she is not going to figure out why it is that people have responded so negatively, and at this stage I've started to feel sorry for her.

The Mail were pretty irresponsible for publishing this. Why do we cry 'cruel circus' when year on year there are swathes of deluded vulnerable people wheeled out to sing on the X Factor-type 'talent' shows, yet we don't bat an eyelid when they are given a platform to humiliate themselves in national newspapers?

They've made this woman the nation's laughing stock and we've all taken the bait. We can laugh at her for being stupid, we can sarcastically refer to the 'quality journalism' on offer, but all we're doing is driving more traffic to their site and/or helping them sell newspapers.

And I'm obviously part of the problem for writing this article, but someone had to say it.

2 comments:

  1. Women are often martyrs to their beauty, Bricky can't help her beauty. After all a brick without beauty, is like a fish without a an ipad.

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