Samantha Brett strikes (my brain) again

While you're all busy going about your days, paying your bills and nattering about Handsome Guttermouth Ramsey over the watercooler, a covert resistance organisation taps away with determination and an almost peculiar obsession with all things infuriating.

All day long they sit hunched over their desks, firing back and forth missives and angry tirades with surprising regularity and not just a little stirring passion.

We are the Australian Feminazi League. You'll find us wherever sexism stalks freely through the media. Our recycle bins are where misogynistic articles, captions and newspaper headlines go to die.

Jesting aside, I spend a good deal of every work day writing hundreds of emails back and forth with my fellow man-hating feminasty pasties petstarr, mtk, nai and the book editor. In this way, we've waxed lyrical about panic station articles about celebrity cellulite, alpha male syndrome in Big Brother, Sam Fuckwit Newman and various unintelligible (not to mention illiterate) bigots that visit News Ltd message boards with more frequency than the aforementioned Fuckwit makes a dick out of himself.

All this would explain why I spent approximately three hours today wondering how it is that the quite obviously intellectually challenged Samantha Brett has a regular column for a well respected newspaper. More importantly, is the insane amount of commentors (or 'bloggers' as she refers to them, which is kind of like an author at a writers' festival referring to all those who ask her questions as 'writers') she has an indication that Australians have more or less sold their brains to science for the staggeringly low reimbursement of 'sucked in'?

I despair.

This week, Samantha tackles the highly original topic of how we women are PRACTICALLY the same as Ms Bridget Jones, and in fact her Sex and the City lifestyle has done nothing but damage our own prospects of finding True Love.

Taking her cues from a turgid article written in that bastion of journalistic excellence the UK's Daily Fail, Brett ponders whether or not author Gareth Sibson's theory is correct - that women these days are boring, talk too much about work and are determined to appear sexually dominant just so men will find them attractive.

Sibson's problem seems to be that in the last three years of dating, he's never managed to make it past three dates with any woman because apparently all they want to do is talk about themselves while ascertaining whether or not he's willing to commit to marriage down the track. This is especially vexing for Sibson, as at the same time they've tricked him into thinking they're independent and strong willed.

He illustrates this by making something up and pretending it happened recounting an incident where, waiting for a woman for their third date, he snooped through her notebook and found something shocking:

"What I saw scrawled across the page in a rather childish hand summed up everything about the emotional insecurity of single women today. There, in blue ink, she'd repeatedly written her first name and my surname. This was a woman who had talked nonstop about her career and her independent life from the minute we met."

my emphasis

Never mind the gross invasion of privacy (for which he seems to congratulate rather than admonish himself for - what a catch...) - was I the only one who felt slightly ill when reading the words 'rather childish hand'? So not only is she a potential bunny boiler, she's also been infantilised. Great. In response, Brett comes out with this pearler:

"As could be predicted, instead of Sibson finding her scribblings incredibly flattering, cute and endearing (as most women would do if the situation was reversed, although we all know George Clooney would have kids before that ever happened), he saw it as a sign of desperation."

my emphasis

I don't know about you, but I don't actually get off on the idea that someone might be scrawling my name all over their diary after three dates. I certainly don't find it 'cute' or 'endearing'. But then, if 'most women' are supposed to be like Brett then this is hardly surprising.

Sibson's argument is really too ridiculous to even bother deconstructing. Suffice it to say, he continues to write for a million years far too long about the lack of complexity in modern women and how their real problem is that they've bought the pop culture furphy of the independent lady hook, line and sinker and morphed into...wait for it...Bridget Clones.

Get it? See what he did there? He made a pun! About Bridget Jones! You know, our leader! The woman we all want to grow up to be!

Colour me unsurprised that Brett chose to write about Sibson's quandary and didn't rattle off a treatise on how not only has everything he's written been said before in a million different ways, but it's still bullshit. Instead, she considered the matter carefully before agreeing that yes, he was probably right. How did she know?

"Sadly, while we modern women think of ourselves as sexually liberated femme fatales who shouldn't be afraid to speak our minds, apparently we've gone a little overboard and ventured right into boring-banter territory. (I noticed this on my last date while I was passionately talking about work to which the gent turned around and said; "Okay, I'm not really interested. Can we change the topic?" Ouch.)"

Yes. 'Ouch'.

One swift and frankly rude comment did not lead Brett to think that her date was a dick of the highest degree; it led her to accept Sibson's fantasy that all women are boring and have lost sight on how exactly we go about charming and 'snaring' a man.

"So where did we all go horribly wrong? Is it the fault of Sex and the City? Have we gotten worse with all the encouragement we get from the four independent ladies who don't have qualms about analysing oral sex over egg-white omelettes and fruit salads? Have we made a detour away from true independence and into making desperate attempts to come across as spanking-mad nymphomaniacs in attempt to impress our Mr Bigs?"

And this was where my standard withering disregard for Brett crossed over into the kind of passionate hatred reserved primarily for alpha male fuckwits on Big Brother. The only thing worse than her acceptance that women HAVE gone horribly wrong is her utterly yawnsome use of that old chestnut oft quoted in boring articles about unhappy women unable to find husbands: Sex and the City.

As I furiously typed to the AFL today, will we EVER reach a fucking day when the role models available to women expand beyond Bridget Fucking Jones and the Sex and the City gals? Not only are they all completely different, they're employed as terms of reference to make women feel two things: inadequate and ridiculous. What these articles say to us is that women are trying so desperately to be the chic, well dressed superstars who click clack down the streets of Manhattan sipping cocktails and having wild sex with attractive men - but who they actually are is the sad, socially awkward embarrassment and resident frump that is Bridget Jones.

Papers aren't even trying to make a distinction anymore. Check out this pointer from The Age's website:



If they're going to insist on always conflating Bridget Jones and SITC with the antics of real women, could they at least occasionally make the captions and the pictures line up?

Apparently, there really CAN be more to say on a topic that has been so done to death it's crossed over into farce and is currently being propped up by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathon Silverman at a party somewhere in Miami. You just know that editors are like, " We don't WANT to hear about the wonderful inventions being patented by female scientists in the field of medical research! No one CARES about the lives of women who married Indian men during the Raj and how this was a brave decision given the social mores of the time! Teenage film makers? Female activists? Pah! Write something about how women are still throwing their lives down the toilet in an embarrassing metaphorical morning-after-too-many-cosmos puke because they're trying to live like Carrie but just can't get their shit together enough to not be like Bridget. PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT."


Gareth Sibson's original article contained the level of casual research and made up scenarios masquerading as scientific research that I've come to expect from the Daily Fail (and let's be clear - it's articles like these and NOT comprehensive research that create supposed social trends like 'urbane tomboy' and 'metrosexuals' and as a result subtly urge the world to fit into the labels). Sibson goes on some bad dates and thus decides that not only are all modern women crap, they're deliberately crap and more than a little bit pathetic.

If I were to resort to the same kind of generalised stereotypes and predictable falsities trumpeted by pop culture articles, I might suggest that the reality of his luckless dating record is quite different to what he believes. That it is entirely possible these women have found him so utterly boring, so charmless, so uninspiring that the thought of going on another date with him is nauseating - but not wanting to be rude, they've constructed elaborate personalities designed to freak him out and send him running. A random straw poll amongst carefully chosen people would support the premise that women are kindly creatures and wary of bruising a man's delicate ago, yet understand intimately that all men are terrified of commitment and will run for the hills at the mere mention of marriage. It would be just as accurate and as believable to the undiscerning eye as the balderdash he's regurgitated.

But Samantha Brett, a supposedly savvy woman who should know better? She takes his article and does what is so completely predictable of her.

Namely, writes one that is even worse.

Peace out (written in a childish scrawl.)