Samantha why do women hate me

We are encouraged to improve ourselves through exercise, fasting, surgery. But we are prohibited from getting comfortable. The worst thing we can do, as women, is to relax into our skin. Our crowded teeth. Our saggy knees. The worst thing we can do is to think we look lovely. These First Person Pretty pieces inevitably lather up into comment threads of people saying they're ugly.

But the things happening below the line are dark and odd, things not entirely as they seem. The commenters who claim the writer is anti-feminist do so without questioning whether they're being tricked into the attack.

There is jealousy. Not necessarily as other commenters will say of the author's looks, but of the way she feels about her looks. It's not her beauty we covet, it's the confidence that comes with it.

These pieces manipulate the arguments the publications have started elsewhere in their pages. They spread out all our insecurities as if on a lightbox. Would it have been a different story if she fitted a more accepted ideal of beauty? If she was thinner, perhaps. More coy. It made me realise, certainly, that because female self-loathing is assumed a story like hers stands out. Confessional journalism , of the kind Brick has written in the past, usually hangs on the journalist's pain, diets and doubt and debt.

The idea that we don't want to look like her but in fact want to feel like her is a really interesting point.

So it's not the slim body, "the official body", we covet, it's the confidence that seems to come with it? You say "envy doesn't need to be a disaster". Do you mean by discussing it we offer each other support? If we discuss envy not in terms of what the other has but what we feel we can't activate for ourselves, then yes our friends can help us to try to pursue our own desires and to see what of our own conflicts stand in the way.

Our conflicts, women's conflicts, often arise because of feelings of unentitlement. We may not be sure we deserve or are worthy and that can be what motivates the envy of someone who appears so able to be comfortable. How does all this relate to women's self-dislike? Misogyny isn't something that exists only outside us.

Patriarchy couldn't work if it did. Sadly, we carry our own ambivalence about ourselves and other women which can get easily activated in those hateful stories about the "bitchiness of women".

Not surprising, given that by and large women still raise children. They are the authority figures who say yes and no and yet have complex relations to power outside the family. Girls absorb this growing up and make their identity in regard to it. From the start of life, femininity is challenging for us all.

Yes, you're right. Even when we know we shouldn't care so much about appearance, most of us do feel a fluttering anxiety about our own.

Disquiet, a discomfort in our own skin. Part of the anxiety could even be, perhaps, the worry that it's true — that we don't like attractive people. That, despite ourselves, we will jump at the opportunity to knock her off her pedestal. And this piece lays every element of that problem out so nakedly. Is the source of envy the perception that those who are or who believe themselves to be beautiful have a certain, unbuyable power?

On many occasions, things have got very, very awk. And it is not just jealous bitches who have frozen me out of their beds. Insecure female bosses have also barred me from the work toilets, forcing me to urinate in potted plants around the office.

And, most poignantly of all, not one girlfriend has ever shaken my hand and called me their hero. Especially my appearance. But no. Unfortunately, women find nothing more annoying than my impression of Laurence Fishburne. Take last week. I was out with my pert bosom when a neighbor passed by in her car.

I waved my breasts—she blatantly made the jerk-off sign at me.