Last week, Samantha Brick published a now rather infamous essay in the UK Daily Mail, on the “downsides” of being as beautiful as she is, or feels herself to be. Her point was that women had treated her badly, ignored her, or trashed her socially, because of her beauty and good looks.
She opened a Pandora’s box. The awkward thing that I think the cynical editors of the Daily Mail anticipated and even hoped for, is that the more than 5,000 overwhelmingly negative comments about the article often pointed out that Samantha wasn’t really a fitting ambassador from the realm of the beautiful to the realm of the average-looking. Also, Trolls objected to Samantha’s smugness, her shallow notion of beauty, and her cynical view that women would treat her badly, or differently, for what boiled down to jealousy over physical appearance.
Her piece made me curious about the matter of jealousy among women, or Platonic jealousy.
As a preliminary step, I’ve created an anonymous online survey on this kind of jealousy which, Samantha argues, causes women to have difficulties with other women.
Is Samantha on to something? Does jealousy among women fester under the surface of female friendships, or have we moved beyond it? Has envy secretly caused you to treat a woman differently—or do you suspect that you have been treated differently because a woman was jealous of your beauty, brilliance, figure, popularity, career successes, education, life achievements, sex life, family life, wealth, piety, altruism and unimpeachable character, or other factors?
You can answer and confess honestly. You won’t get flamed for speaking out. I’ll write a column on what the survey reveals in a few weeks.
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