Has Samatha Brick been treated unfairly?

Samantha Brick's contributions to British newspapers have gone unnoticed until this week.

Minimal reaction, if any, was provoked by the article in which she revealed her husband had locked her in their car until she agreed to change into an outfit he deemed appropriate. The admission, in another piece, that she was "too scared of gaining weight to consider getting pregnant" became proverbial fish and chip paper.

Twitter was not troubled by her revelation that she had spent euros 30,000 on psychics, or that she had divorced her first husband on the advice of one. Nor did it seem particularly inflamed by the news that her second husband had threatened to divorce her if she ever got fat.

In a world where female self?loathing is perfectly normal - expected, even - these national newspaper articles slipped under the radar of a general public who would probably not be surprised to read a piece by a woman who admitted to gouging out her own eyeballs so that she no longer had to look at herself in the mirror.

And then, on Tuesday, Samantha Brick wrote that she thinks she is beautiful and that other women are jealous of her beauty. On paper, in black and white, this might seem like the least offensive article of the many she has written. But we no longer live in a black-and-white paper world - we live in a colourful internet one.

And so it was that Samantha began trending on Twitter. More than 5,000 comments were posted online under her article, another 5,000 under a follow-up article about the backlash. Everyone was too busy enjoying the sensation of frothing at the mouth to realise how meta things had become at this point.

"F****** arrogant s*** has been hit with a brick in that nose of hers!!" tweeted one understated soul, in a clever play on Samantha's surname that only several thousand others had thought of first.

The story here seemed to be something along the lines of: Woman admits she doesn't detest herself, world wobbles on its axis!

Brick went viral, a term that once referred to herpes but now refers to the process by which people get book and record deals. People doctored her picture to include such pithy phrases as "Hi, I'm Samantha Brick, and Photoshop was invented so you could be as beautiful as me!"

So-called celebrities took time out of their busy schedules to heap scorn upon her. "I have just filed for divorce and put my kids up for adoption," tweeted Dom Joly. "The reason? The vain hope that I might one day meet Samantha Brick."

Around the world, people discussed whether she was beautiful - in Amsterdam, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. Barbara Walters, presenter of The View, told the programme's four million US viewers that "at the risk of being really not so nice, she's got a problem. She's not that beautiful. OK?" OK!

Yesterday, Brick went on This Morning, where she joked to Eamonn Holmes that 10 out of 10 men fancied her. Along with his co-presenter and a psychologist who should know better, he savaged her like a bloated lion would a graceful gazelle. "Why do you believe that you're good-looking?" he demanded, in the tone he might use to interview a National Front member who had announced that all Polish immigrants should be boffed over the head and killed with their plumbing instruments in a massive ceremony in the centre of Trafalgar Square.

Brick felt the reaction proved her point, and it certainly proved part of it. Women - and men, more pertinently - do hate her, though not because she's beautiful. They hate her because she has the temerity to believe she might be beautiful, even if she is, in the words of one online commentator, "not all that".

It would seem that in the world of confessional journalism, you can write about your divorces, your depression and your deepest insecurities without anyone batting a weary eyelid. But to admit you might quite like yourself is a confession too far.

Last year, Kate Winslet experienced a similar reaction when she admitted in an interview with US Glamour magazine that she doesn't hate herself. "I don't have parts of my body that I hate or would like to trade for somebody else's," she said. At the same time, the magazine released a survey in which 97 per cent of its readers admitted they had negative thoughts about their bodies every day. Because Winslet was part of the 3 per cent who didn't, she was treated like some traitor to the sisterhood.

Those of a crueller nature will probably point out that Brick is not Kate Winslet, and even Brick herself admitted in her piece that she was "no Elle Macpherson". But that in itself reveals a truism about women - that we are quick to judge ourselves by ridiculous parameters and put ourselves down.

Even Brick's so-called confidence must come with a caveat, and the thrust of her piece - that other women are threatened by her - would suggest to even the most casual of armchair psychologists that she probably feels threatened herself.

The consensus on Twitter seems to be that at best she is compensating for low self-esteem, at worst that she is mad, which makes the subsequent bullying vitriol far uglier than anything Brick could write. William Golding must be spinning in his grave to see the imaginary world he created in Lord of the Flies brought to life online.

Brick's greatest sin, really, is to come across as arrogant, but that is a crime men have been guilty of for years. It is apt that film bosses have bought up all the advertising spots next to Brick's article on the Daily Mail website to promote the new Julia Roberts' movie, Mirror Mirror, in which the actress plays the evil queen of Snow White who asks her reflection who is the fairest of them all. A canny marketing trick there, but yet more proof that female vanity has been seen as wicked since the days of the Brothers Grimm, and most likely long before.

Liz Jones is the former queen of confessional journalism, the woman who really kick-started the genre with her articles, and subsequent books, about her divorce, her eating disorders, her facelift, how her love for animals far outshines her love for people, and most certainly for herself. She is the writer everybody loves to hate, our guilt assuaged because she readily admits to hating herself too. And then along came Samantha Brick, neatly turning that schtick on its head with her breathtaking self?confidence.

Yesterday, Jones, who is 53, made a valiant attempt to reclaim her crown with a piece in which she announced she was turning into the beautiful, youthful Duchess of Cambridge. It was an impressive bit of bandwagon jumping.

Brick has realised that there is only one thing people love more than kicking a woman when she is down, and that is bringing that woman down in the first place. Either way, it all looks pretty ugly to me.