Beautiful Girl

This week I find myself feeling sorry for someone I’ve never met, someone who has become a very reluctant internet sensation because of an article written simply to make ends meet.

Poor old Rachel Brick is a freelance writer who regularly gives newspaper editors ideas for articles which, if she’s lucky, will make her about five hundred pounds a time. She does this alongside hundreds of other women who have to pay mortgages, school fees and gym memberships and are in the same boat.

If they don’t get published, they don’t eat so, to stand out from the crowd, an idea has to be original or outrageous or likely to cause controversy. Better still it should be all three. Rachel submitted an idea for an article about how she has suffered in life because she’s pretty, her theory being that the sisterhood hate good looking women.

Now let’s put this in some perspective. The ever increasingly desperate Rachel, along with hundreds of other freelancers, has written articles in the past that have been completely ignored or have attracted huge yawns as readers skip to the sports pages. Who remembers when she wrote that she divorced her first husband because a psychic told her to, or that she was locked in a car by her partner because he thought her outfit was too revealing, or that her new husband says he’ll divorce her if she gets fat? The world of the freelancer is a world of silliness, embarrassment, exposition and, usually, exaggeration or downright fabrication. But that’s fine because we all skip over what’s written with a smile or grunt and move on. Rachel’s previous works of art may have paid her grocery bill but they’re now lying in landfill covered in grease from insulating fish and chips.

Knowing how these things work, this article will have been sent back and forward between the Daily Mail and Rachel several times with them constantly asking her to ramp up the misery, show more disdain for the sisterhood and exaggerate her claims.

And she has obliged. In spades.

But once the article about Rachel’s travails as a beauty was published, the newspaper’s tactics came apart. They had ramped this up so much that a blind man in a pitch black cave, wearing sunglasses and a plastic bucket over his head at night, could simply point out the flaw. Rachel just isn’t a looker.

The poor woman then had to face vitriol and nastiness from every country as the piece went viral. Most were from self appointed judges of beauty, with the nicer comments varying between “You are tall and blonde, but then so is Big Bird” and “Get some new mirrors” through to “Brick by name, thick as one by nature.”

The really nasty opinions, which ego filled internet trolls felt were fascinating, original and erudite opinions that the world was waiting to fall down and worship, included “She’s called Brick because she was hit with one”, “Sam, you are old and ugly” and, from one perfect gentleman, “If you and I were the last couple on earth the race would die out. I’d rather be gay.”

I don’t doubt Samantha will make a fortune out of her new media attention, but I also have no doubts that she’s hurting like hell, embarrassed for her family and friends, and wants to crawl away on holiday to Mars for a few years. She has had to defend herself on TV in front of interviewers who know how this all works but have to pretend they’re outraged so that they can earn their wage.

But now, to make matters worse for Rachel, her husband has got in on the act and sold an interview explaining his position on the matter, accompanied by photos of him carrying a rifle and wearing combat fatigues and an unlikely and unforgiveable moustache that the Village People would laugh at while looking for the poor walrus he’d shot to bag it.

But let me stress again. The way this works is that freelancers have to earn a living. With more newspapers laying off staff every week, we can expect this desperation to increase every day.

One person who will be spitting nails is Liz Jones, a vacuous woman who has instinctively embraced the freelance culture writing about her failures with men so often it’s beyond tedious and has earned her epithets such as negative, sneering, empty headed, hypocritical and idiotic, all adjectives she will show to her editors to prove the drivel she writes is working and they’d be silly not to commission more. But now Liz has a rival, and it’s one who’s had more publicity in one week than she has in a very long, anorexic, lifetime. I fully expect Rachel Brick’s next article to be “Why Liz Jones Is An Alien Who Fancies Me”.

People, let’s not take this all too seriously, eh? These women are just like extras in the chorus line of a bad musical. No one is expected to actually pay them any attention for God’s sake.

They’re making a living as best they know how, fully aware of the tat that’s paying their bills, whilst waiting nervously for the public to wise up and close them down.