Spinny’s back, and rantier than ever…Samantha Brick watch out!

I’ve had a month off from being Spinny but you know what, I still was Spinny, and Spinny things would happen and I had NOWHERE to talk about it. So I’m back.

Also, you sent me so many emails and DM’s that I felt as if I was somehow letting the side down by letting Spinny slip away.

Also, to be absolutely truthful, I was going through some stuff.

Some of that stuff is on-going, the other stuff, not so much.

And finally, the issue that forced me back to my keyboard…step forward one Samantha Brick.

I couldn’t bear to let this shameful, baffling and frankly embarrassing footnote in the history of women an journalism pass me by without comment.

So as I sit here in my new jumpsuit, eating rice cakes and watching Small Time Crooks, I have to ask, ‘What was she thinking?’

To re-cap, in case you’ve been living under a rock, freelance journalist/TV producer Samantha Brick wrote an inflammatory, and somewhat arrogant, article which was published a couple of days ago in the Daily Mail, entitled, “There are downsides to looking this pretty: why women hate me for being beautiful”

Now, I’m not one to knock someone’s confidence but with the best will in the world, Brick, like most of us, scrubs up well, but is by no means a stunning beauty. In this town, she wouldn’t get a job at Trader Joe’s. Okay, I’m being sarky but you know what I’m saying, Go look at the original piece here.

Her article should be a joke but it’s written totally without humour. Brick, who is now 41, believes that women hate her because of the way she looks. And since publication, she hasn’t come out to say that the newspaper misquoted her.

It’s baffling. Why even print this self-serving, pointless, arrogant nonsense and then trumpet it across the front page of the website for the best part of a week?

Who’s to gain, other than a room full of wheezing misogynists?

I suppose we’re all talking about her, so maybe she was after – and has found – her 15 minutes of fame? Good luck with that Samantha.

Hadley Freeman in yesterday’s Guardian surmised that it’s the Daily Mail who are at fault – she says they hate women. I would agree with that. If they’re not talking about a woman being too old, she’s too fat, too thin, too pregnant, not pregnant enough, too tall, too smart, too wrinkly etc etc.

What I don’t understand is that Samantha Brick has been working in the media for a long time. She can’t be completely naive.

So why write this? I know what the papers pay and it’s not enough to justify this kind of self-flagellation. If you’re going to bare all to the masses at least ensure you can pay off the mortgage.

She’s had a good career, or so her website would have you believe, and she now lives in France with her camo-wearing, gun-toting French husband, who apparently once told her that he’ll leave her if she gets too fat.

Pause.

So what we have here, in essence, is an insecure woman who is past 40, struggling to find a foothold in life as she enters a pivotal new chapter, trying to make a living as a freelance journalist in an industry that is dying.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I wouldn’t let that paper near this blog, my thoughts or my integrity.

And maybe that’s what’s missing here. Integrity. From both sides.

Spinny out.