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| What the fuck is the internet? |
If you haven't already read her best treatise on herself (there are many), I highly recommend it. The gist of it is this: being beautiful has its perks (and I am beautiful, by the way), but it's a curse, because other ladies hate me and assume I will steal their husbands. It's worth reading for a genuine laugh out loud, because she essentially obnoxiously complains about how obnoxious she is as a person, and then concludes, without a shred of irony, that people dislike her because of her looks. Its actually an excellent example of the old adage "correlation does not equal causation" on a micro scale. You may be beautiful. People may not like you; they may be ladies, and they may even feel like you're preying on their husbands. But perhaps there's a third variable here: you're a self-involved douchecanoe with a horrible personality.
Anyway, this is apparently becoming a trend (more details on that in a bit), and I will henceforth call this particular high-art of trolling "bricking". While I don't think we've seen the back of it, no one could ever do it as well as Samantha Brick did, and she deserves to be verbed for this. It's practically performance art. The latest brick comes from Laura Fernee. Laura was boldly doing smart important things like science until her attractiveness became so problematic in her work environment that she had to quit, and she is now proudly supported by her parents, who will pay her no matter how beautiful she is! And as with the original bricker, the Daily Mail has done a bang-up job profiling Fernee.
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| Right Said Fernee |
There are two major problems with bricking: one is a lack of self and social awareness on the part of the bricker, and the other is the dismal, myopic responses from brickees. Both are symptomatic of a complete lack of awareness of an issue I think is quite obviously central to feminism: women aren't so keen on being constantly evaluated as objects of (un)attractiveness before and above all of their other qualities.
First, brickers, especially like Fernee, missed a gigantic boat that's been making runs back and forth over the river of social consciousness for decades now: it's called sexual harassment. Fernie is not plaugued with an overabundance of attractiveness, her co-workers were plagued with a lack of modern workplace etiquette. She's making a horrible attribution error in terms of what the problem is here. It is not her attractiveness, it is the fact that any aspect of her appearance has anything to do with her work as a research scientist.
What I want for her to have done rather than quit is to have filed a formal complaint about the comments and actions that made her uncomfortable, which somehow magically led to the other adults in her workplace being like "Oh dude, sorry, I didn't realise that was making you wildly uncomfortable and giving you anxiety attacks about coming in to work, I'll cut that shit out". And then they all went out to beers and everything was cool! But because this is never how sexual harassment claims pan out, I can understand why she just quit. It would have been great if she then used this as a springboard to go on talkshows and discuss how sexual harassment is epidemic, and the systems in place for dealing with it are not only inadequate, but often implicitly punish the complainant or harassee, and this needs to be changed. Failing that, the best course of action would have been to not open her gob about how beautiful she is, or at least just not talk to the Daily Mail (but I guess it wouldn't have been a proper brick otherwise).
One probable reason she didn't take the "publicise my sexual harassment" route is because talk shows would not have given a shit, which is just another symptom of the problem. No one cares about the narrative that describes the actual problem. A vain-sounding woman who we can talk to and maybe, if we're lucky, take down a few notches, but at least tear into on the internet? Sign me up! Someone moaning about being sexually harassed to the point where they felt they had to quit their job, while whoever was harassing them just keeps on keepin' on? Who cares. I suppose Fernee's forthcoming book will have more insight, but based on what she's said so far, she frames the entire problem in terms of herself (or maybe perhaps just jobs in general? Apparently after this one experience, a job is "no longer for her"). But she never frames it in terms of the workplace where she experienced what was most definitely harassment, and apparently no one has told her that not all workplaces are like this. The whole thing is just sad - the fact that somehow this is about her (what kind of job was it? how much does she spend on clothes?), and not about the situation, is what makes it so painful to watch.
Which brings me to the other sort of watching bricking brings about, the meta kind of watching: the reading the comments kind of watching. And this is where the audience to all this bricking, quite predictably, misses the point entirely. The most common response is "You're not even attractive anyway!" Oh, CHILDREN. What is wrong with you? The point is it doesn't matter how attractive they are, because their attractiveness only matters insofar is it's declaration amounts to wearing a sandwich sign saying "Warning: Self-Involved". What makes Brick's original article cringe-worthy is not that she's no Cindy Crawford, it's that she sounds like the most obnoxious person you've never met. It's laughable because she's somehow missing the obvious fact that people probably don't like her because she's awful, not because she has pretty hair (whether or not she actually has pretty hair).
In Fernee's case, these same sorts of comments feel even more like plain mudslinging. Not because Fernee is more or less attractive than Brick, but because she's not nearly as loathesome in her attitude. She seems more blissfully naive about the actual problems at hand than self-pitying; she seems to genuinely feel like there is something wrong about her preventing her from holding down a job. She's wrong and kind of dumb for thinking that, but bricking feels a lot more sad and a lot less hilarious on her than it does on the original Brick.
Anyway, I'm sure the Daily Mail will continue to lead the world in brick-laying. They should really find a he-brick, I'd love to see how that plays out.
