The World Loves a Pretty Girl

And loves even more a pretty girl who will talk about how not-pretty she thinks she is:

Anne Hathaway looks as unequivocally gorgeous and radiant as ever on the March cover of InStyle—though she's probably the only person out there who doesn't see it: "I think I've got really weird features. I have very large features on a very small head," she tells the magazine. "But, you know, I'm not going to beat myself up. It's my face. I'm not very pretty. But that's OK because I do know that I look like myself, and I think at the end of the day, as nice as pretty is, authenticity is more important."

Quite obviously, I don't want this post to be a referendum on Hathaway's attractiveness (by any reasonable measure, she conforms quite closely to the current beauty standard, and that's all that's relevant), and I don't intend to imply in any way that Hathaway doesn't have the explicit right to her own feelings, whatever they may be, about her own appearance.

What interests me is only that I've read this same article before, with some other beautiful young ingenue talking about how not-beautiful she really is. Julia Roberts, Renee Zellweger, Cameron Diaz, Megan Fox, Jessica Alba, whomever, waxing pragmatically about their "flaws"—goofy grin, bad skin, unruly hair, one eye slightly higher than the other. I once saw an interview with Evangeline Lilly where she revealed getting her "uneven" teeth shaved down three different times only to realize it was her lip that was crooked.

Why do we like this formula so much? Part of it, I imagine, is the idea that we want our unattainable female icons to be impossibly beautiful, but self-consciously modest about it. Perhaps, to suggest that they are as distant from their own beauty as we are, that they don't really inhabit our fantasies.

But then there is this, this very import thing: We consider it humanizing to read about a female star who obsesses about her perceived imperfections.

To be a female human is to wracked with self-doubt.