Sam Frost is really, really pissed off.

She’s on the cover of a magazine. It’s exposure that many, many “reality” stars would kill for.

She’s being touted as a beautiful, sexy woman many men would like to date. Sounds kind of nice, right?

She’s wearing a bikini, and she looks INCREDIBLE. What’s not to like?

Here it is:

Well, if you’re Sam, quite a lot.

You see, Sam didn’t pose for Maxim’s December 2015 issue, which her photo is now busily selling for them. She posed for them last year, when she was “just” a heartbroken girl who’d been dicked around on The Bachelor. Then, she was “Poor Sam”, a gorgeous blonde who was trying to find an upside to being dumped on national TV, way before a hit franchise and Rosie Waterland elevated her to the status of Bachie Queen.

Then, posing for a national magazine with 50,000 readers seemed like a good idea, even if she felt a bit icky about it. Now, when she’s a bonafide celebrity with a real actual job on breakfast radio, she wouldn’t do that. And believe us, if she did, it would cost someone A LOT.

She says she wished she’d never done it. “For starters, I mentioned last week that I regretted doing the photoshoot in the first place. Like I said I wasn’t in a great frame of mind at the time… I wish I didn’t do it.”

But Maxim didn’t let the fact that Sam doesn’t want to be their December cover star get in the way of a good sale. They just dug out the old pictures and made them look new.

This is not a new trick. Magazines do it all the time. Celebrities change their hair colour, gain and lose weight, wear shades that don’t match the designer’s vision for the cover’s colour palette. The wonders of Photoshop can fix all of that.

They can snip out earrings and swap rings on fingers. They can blow you up to look bigger, and put lots of space around you to look small. The camera can lie a great deal in the hands of a professional retoucher.

So the whizzes in Maxim’s art department just changed Sam’s hair from 2014 Blonde to 2015 Brown. They gave her bigger boobs, they ‘tidied up’ her blemishes and body ‘issues’, and they went with it.

And Sam is NOT HAPPY.

“They’ve actually Photoshopped my hair dark, enhanced my boobs, I’m quite flat chested, and they’ve brought in my waist,” she says. “It made my blood boil.”

Fair enough, too. But Sam, welcome to the media. The media doesn’t play fair.

Your stock is high right now and everyone wants a piece of you. Every photographer and every editor who has ever shot you is digging out the pictures and checking the copyright on them. Here’s a tip: from now on, insist that you and your reps have full approval on all reuse.

The media is a greedy, greedy monster, and men’s magazines are possibly the worst of the lot. Because they are desperate.

The internet isn’t just cutting their grass, it has rolled up the turf and driven home with it.

They’re not here to celebrate or empower you. They don’t want you to like them. They just want you to look sexy and sell stuff for them. That’s the deal you made with them when you took the money the first time, and they’re sticking to it.

Maxim’s Santi Pintado told the Daily Mail, “I’m a bit shocked actually, I’m not sure why (she has said these things). When she did the shoot she loved it.

“We’ve got nothing but love for her.” Actually, Santi has love for your numbers, Sam. A picture of you in your bikini will add to his sale this month. Every man in Australia knows who you are. They sat next to their girlfriends on the lounge and followed you into Sasha’s arms. They are invested.

They don’t care that the past 12 months have made you see yourself differently, or that you don’t want to be anyone’s bikini babe anymore. They don’t care that you have deliberately changed the way you look since then to reflect that. They also don’t care that you might be perfectly happy with the boobs you have, and boosting them and reducing your waist is an insulting suggestion that you’re not good enough the way you are.

Sorry Sam, but they don’t care.

They think you made a deal with the devil, and they’re going to hold you to it.

It’s the downside of being Proper Famous and you need to tool up.

Farewell, innocence. Hello, an agent who will guard you like a prize behind a small tribe of lawyers.

Fame. It’s so glamorous.

Do you think Sam is right to be angry about the cover? 

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Check out some of our favourite photos of Sam Frost in this gallery.