Dear Men...I Promise We're Not All As Mental As Samantha Brick Has Made Out.

Dear Men of the World,

It may have come to your attention in a recent Femail article that Samantha Brick believes us women are all jealous, insecure harpies that spend our every waking moments studying our reflections, bewailing our imperfections and viciously despising any more beautiful rival that strays into our path. You see, all that Nobel Prize winning, career climbing and generally running the world that we do can never been enough because we are not being universally fawned on for our skilful use of the cosmetics industry to compliment the accident of genetics that is our face.


However I assure you we are not all that mental. Some of us have even developed enough insight to recognise that the way we look is not, or at least should not be, our defining feature and have enough grace to not care that much. You see some of us, unlike Ms Brick, have even developed enough personality to not need to rely on our looks as a reason why people don't like us.


For my part, I do not consider receiving a free glass of champagne from an airplane pilot for being pretty as a boring regularity as I possess enough gratitude and humility to take it as an unexpected compliment. I too have been called 'beautiful' by both kind and creepy strangers. When I was five a man on a tram in San Francisco told my mother that I was a beautiful little girl, gave me some money and hopped off to never been seen again. When I was seventeen I was followed through a market in Xian, China by a 'blinking' man who I later worked out was trying to wink at me as the Western custom had not transferred properly. I was also given a paper rose by a man in a pub when I was eighteen who said he'd made early in the evening and I was the only girl he'd seen worth giving it too (the romance of this gesture however is rather lost on the fact that it occurred in a Wetherspoons).


However I do not see these three isolated incidents as a sign of my aesthetic superiority to other women, more a sign of being 'mildly attractive' in common with around about 95% of the female population. I do not expect women to hate me for telling these stories, when they do I assume its due to the fact I'm the kind of girl who spends 75% of her time with boys rather than because of my face.


Although it is true that when I see a pretty girl I do sometimes think 'wow she's pretty, what a bitch' this sentiment does not normally last longer the time it takes to think it. You see men, we are often irrational, emotional and do have a tendency to hate each other but were not all that shallow.


I wonder if Ms Brick ever wondered if rather than hating for her looks, women hate her for her?

Yours sincerely

An only 'semi-mad' woman.