Unless you only learned to read this morning, you will have read Samantha Brick’s “Why do women hate me for being beautiful?” article last week and the hundreds of follow-up features and counter-arguments. I don’t even really want to get into that, except to agree with the Jezebel article entitled ‘Yes, Samantha Brick is obnoxious, but the Daily Mail is trolling us all’.

The Mail’s hand in this seems to have been forgotten – and right now those hands are probably being rubbed together in glee.

The Mail deliberately commissioned a rather plain woman to write a feature attacking other women for attacking her for her looks. They then illustrated the feature with gratuitous photos of this rather plain woman as flagrant bait to their readers, who then viciously attacked her for her rather plain looks. The rather plain woman then followed this up with an article attacking her attackers for attacking her looks. The readers continued to attack her looks. And so on and so on, resulting in more clicks on that one Mail Online story than most news sites get in a day.

The Samantha Brick debacle is just an extraordinary example of the Mail Online’s modus operandi.

I should point out that these are my own views and not those of Wannabe Hacks. I should also point out that this post is not concerned with the Daily Mail’s news section. I don’t read it myself but I’m told it does a good job. As an aspiring women’s writer, I am concerned with the Showbiz and Femail sections’ poisonous ‘sidebar of shame’. Prepare yourself for a whole lot of caps lock…

Despite the Daily Mail, and most of its readership, being based in a country mired in drizzle and dreary weather, I’d wager that at least half the pictures on the sidebar feature women in bikinis. And each picture is accompanied with a critique of the woman for being too fat/too thin/too slutty/too frumpy/too old.

Most offensive is a feature IN THE FEMAIL SECTION entitled ‘What Courtney Stodden did next: Teen starlet hops into the woods on a racy Easter Egg hunt – bunny ears and stripper heels’. Courtney Stodden is a seventeen year old girl famous only for marrying a man three times her age and wearing next to nothing. She’s not even really famous outside the United States. Yet the Mail has lavished us with no less than fourteen photographs of this SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL wearing an offensively small bikini, sticking her arse out of a jeep bonnet and posing seductively with a carrot.

Now the problem is, the sidebar of shame is key to the Mail Online’s success. Even I find myself addictively clicking from story to story on my lunch breaks. The overwhelming response to Samantha Brick’s article shows that there is a depressingly huge market for women critiquing another woman’s looks. If that’s what the people want, you might argue, then why shouldn’t the Mail give it to them? Such was Rupert Murdoch’s attitude when he revolutionised our press with the Sun in the Seventies.

Well, “the people” also want drugs and five day weekends and to drink ourselves stupid, but we don’t just get given that (at least, not all the time). Newspapers may be a business but they are also a public service and they have a duty to set a responsible agenda for their readers.

I am sick of reading that a woman has “poured herself into a skin-tight dress” or “squeezed herself into skinny jeans”, as if women were made of some sexy viscous liquid or sausage meat, rather than being AN ACTUAL HUMAN.

This is not news. This is not journalism. This is dehumanising women and tearing apart their bodies before throwing them to the dogs (your delightful commenters). This is retrograde misogyny and sexualisation as light entertainment. And I’m sick of it.