So Beautiful, It's A Curse - Television Tropes & Idioms

While Kyohei from The Wallflower never says anything to the likes of this, he certainly fits the trope. He can't hold a job thanks to constant sexual harassment, he's had a slew of stalkers that eventually drove his family to kick him out, he used to have to be escorted to school to avoid being attacked, it was implied that he had been raped several times by many strangers as a grade-schooler and there was even one time where he was kidnapped off the street by a Host Club for the purpose of selling him to the highest bidder as a sexual slave.
One of Arina Tanemura's one-shot manga stories dealt with this: a girl named Eve who was supposedly stunningly beautiful..and hated it. She was a victim of attempted kidnapping, no girls would talk to her because she was rumored to have stolen a girl's boyfriend, and she never knows if boys are only interested in her for her looks or not. And yet she ''still'' gets beauty treatments and buys cute, expensive clothes (and works part-time jobs to pay for it all!) because "people say a cute girl who isn't fashionable must be a slob."
The lead female character of the manga Telepathic Wanderers hates being beautiful because not only do most men she meets lust after her, but, being psychic (and unable to control her power), she's forced to watch every fantasy a man has about her in her presence. (And, in keeping with what seems to be a theme with this trope, she also almost gets raped at one point in volume 1.)
Parodied in Princess Tutu. A character named Femio believes that he's so beautiful, it's a sin, because it causes every woman (and a few men) who sees him to fall maddeningly in love with him—so much so that they can barely stand to be around him! It's SUCH a sin, he constantly "repents" for it by allowing himself to be trampled by a bull called by his faithful servant. However, it turns out that he's so egotistical and so bizarre with his self-imposed punishments that everyone hates him and do everything they can to avoid him, and he's too obsessed with himself to see it.
The male lead of Koukou Debut received at least one present or letter (love and hate) a day in elementary school; in middle school was complained about by college guys and girls' parents; and once caused the girls in his class to divide into two teams to fight over him.
Fumio Usui in Karin has this problem, which makes it very difficult to hold a job because of the inevitable sexual harassment. Which she strongly resists.
- In the Ren's anime backstory, his boarding school roommate had this problem too.
Imma Youjo is an nontraditional take on Hentai that explores the hardships of a woman who is so beautiful and sexy that "Rape!" is the only thing all men (and some women) can think of when seeing her.
Lampshaded in Fushigi Yuugi as Hotohori is prone to saying this about himself.
Tamaki in Ouran High School Host Club is keenly aware of his own beauty and perfection. His image song Guilty Beauty Love starts with the line "My sin is that God has made me too beautiful."

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One of the specials in J Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars is a woman whose power is that she appears to everyone who sees her as the most beautiful woman they can imagine. This gets her lots of unwelcome attention and means that no one sees the real her, instead just being focused on their own lusts and such.
In DC Comics, Power Girl sometimes complains because everyone only pays attention to her ... attributes. Though perhaps she'd have less of a problem if she covered over the peek-a-boo(b) window in the front of her costume.
Riley Freeman, or The Boondocks.
The Legion Of Superheroes had a minor character named Charma who had an uncontrollable power to make all men love and want her and all women insanely jealous of her. She got put into the general population of a prison and was killed, all for the purpose of making her Mad Scientist boyfriend go on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge against life, the universe, and everything, starting with trying to kill the entire Earth.
Used in The Beano as an inversion of Bash Street Kid Plug's ugliness, in which the Kids have to try and "make a sow's ear out of a silk purse" by making a guest character who's so handsome he makes people faint, more like Plug.

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Helen of Troy, from Greek Mythology, was "the face that launched a thousand ships" and kicked off the ten-year Trojan War between her lover and her husband. A war in which she did not have fun; making this one Older Than Dirt.
In Puddocky, a witch transforms a young woman under her care into a toad because three princes start a quarrel over the young woman's beauty.
In Donkeyskin, the queen makes the king promise not marry until he found "a woman more beautiful and better formed than myself." In due course, the king does find such a woman: his own daughter. She has to flee to escape.
- Similarly in All-Kinds-Of-Fur and The She-Bear.
Deirdre was an Irish princess whose legendary beauty made her life suck so much (kings fought over her) that she is given the epithet "Deirdre of the Sorrows".
Psyche was so beautiful that Venus—the goddess of beauty—got jealous, and sent her son Cupid to make her fall in love with something loathsome.
- Of course, Psyche was still so beautiful that Cupid, the god of attraction, fell in love with her upon seeing her, refused to carry out Venus' intended revenge plot, and took Psyche to live in luxury. Psyche ruins paradise by ignoring Cupid's warning not to look at him at night and burning Cupid with lamp oil during a botched assassination attempt, but, after a decent amount of suffering, Cupid still loves her and convinces Jupiter to elevate Psyche to immortality...except that she has to stay in eternal SLUMBER.
Andromeda had a similar story to Psyche, with a little help from her Stage Mom, Cassiopeia, who bragged incessantly about her daughter's beauty.
Narcissus, this trope's most famous victim.
Hyacinthus was another famous victim from Greek mythology. He was so beautiful that two gods fell in love with him, Zeus and Zephyrus. Zephyrus ended up killing him in a jealous rage.

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In Stargate SG 1 at least one minor character uses this trope almost verbatim, with the justification that Goa'uld always want attractive hosts, so being too pretty is more than just a social problem.
Hilariously averted in one episode of Mind Your Language. Danièle admits to Mr Brown that she has a big problem, then proceeds to tell him that five men "are all after the one thing: my body". As it turns out this is not her problem: the problem is that, at one man every day of the week, she gets bored on weekends.
Jenna Morasca of Survivor infamously tried to invoke the trope in one Tribal Council, talking about how she's spent her life feeling like her looks are a disability as they cause people to think she isn't smart {It's not your looks that make 'em think that, honey!). It backfired spectacularly, as she said it while sitting right next to someone who was deaf.
Subverted in Monk. Natalie is talking about using feminine wiles to get information, and makes the comment that her beauty is a gift. Monk finishes her statement, "...and a curse?"
^{This is a reference to a running joke wherein Monk describes his obsessive-compulsive disorder as a gift and a curse, since it helps him solve really strange crimes, but prevents him from living a normal life.}
^* She disagrees.
Parodied in Better Off Ted. Veronica, handling a complaint from a group of black employees, tell them that she, too, knows what it's like to deal with discrimination... and then proceeds to talk about how no one liked her in high school because she was so pretty.
Veronica: If it wasn't for the modeling contracts and the comfort of college boys, I don't know how I would have made it.
From How I Met Your Mother:
Lily: Story of my life. My cuteness interferes with people hearing my message.
One of the patrons of Pushing Daisies' rent-a-friend agency was a woman who struggled to make friends because her beauty made women jealous and men only interested in her for her looks, whereas her friend from the agency was interested in her for...her money. I think it's meant to be a deliberate irony.
Cordelia in Buffy. So much. In "Out of Mind, Out of Sight," she and Buffy bond over this, oddly.
Parodied in This Is Wonderland. When Elliot is trying to chat up the courtroom's Spanish translator, he gets halfway through telling her that her beauty must have been a curse back in South America, before he gets interrupted.

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Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, heroine of masterly fanfic parody (shh, yes it is, it must be) My Immortal is propositioned by everyone she meets, leading to the, uh, immortal lines:
"Yeah but everyone is in love with me! Like Snape and Loopin took a video of me naked. Hargrid says he’s in love with me. Vampire likes me and now even Snaketail is in love with me! I just wanna be with you ok Draco! Why couldn’t Satan have made me less beautiful?... Im good at too many things! WHY CAN'T I JUST BE NORMAL? IT’S A FUCKING CURSE!"
The hero(ine) of The World Well Lost mentions falling victim to something like this, although it's not due to hir being brain-breakingly beautiful, so much as it's due to the fact that s/he's beautiful and transgendered, and some insecure straight guys react badly to this.

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Parodied in A Knights Tale, Jocelyn is chided by a bishop for giggling with her handmaiden over the antics of 'Sir Ulric'. The following exchange ensues:
Bishop: Does this not shock you, ladies!
Jocelyn: Sir, I only laugh, just to keep from weeping.
Bishop: Beauty is such a curse. Pray your years come swiftly, pray your beauty fades, so you may better serve God.
Jocelyn: I do. I pray for it all the time. Why, God, did you curse me with this face?
- She says this, one notes, in a perfect monotone. The priest is mollified.
A slight variation is hilariously invoked in Mean Girls. The high school girls have been building a trust exercise: they read out apologies for all the bitchy things they have done, then fall backwards to be caught by the other girls. The simultaneously vain and deeply insecure Gretchen Wieners actually utters the following 'apology' completely without irony (Needless to say the other girls do not all rush to catch her when she falls backwards):
"I'm sorry that people are so jealous of me... but I can't help it that I'm so popular."
Parodied in Undercover Brother.
White She Devil: "I know what it feels like to be discriminated against...they look at me, and all they see are my full breasts and my narrow waist that tapers to my pert backside. It's just not fair."
Done straight in The Ten Commandments. An Egyptian overseer lusts after a female Hebrew slave, leading the other Hebrews to comment about how beauty is a curse.
Legally Blonde plays it straight, but it's surprisingly realistic, as Elle not only finds out she only got Callahan's internship because she's pretty, but finds him coming on to her with the implication that if she doesn't acquiesce he'll screw her in other ways. Of course, she winds up totally kicking ass anyway. It's played up a bit more in the musical.
Stupefyin' Jones in Li'l Abner. See for yourself! An unusual occurrence of weaponized beauty.

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Anne Of Green Gables had a version of this, where her friend Leslie was trapped in a marriage to a man she hated, ostensibly because of the curse of her irresistible beauty. (He had coerced her into marriage by threatening to foreclose on a mortgage and throw her mother out of her home.)
Another male version of this is Joseph from The Bible. He was "a goodly person and well favored", and his master's wife conceived a passion for him. Her repeated advances being refused, she tried to coerce him; when that failed, she went to her husband and accused Joseph of trying to rape her (effectively accusing him of what she wanted him to do in the first place), and Joseph was thrown into prison.
- One could make the case that this was one of the reasons his father favored him over his brothers. Aside from being the son of Rachel, the second wife and the one Joseph's father truly loved, he inherited his mother's good looks, making his beauty indirectly the reason he became a slave as well.
The book version of The Princess Bride sort of deals with this. Buttercup laments that everyone puts her on a pedestal, it's such a hassle to maintain such beauty, nobody thinks she's smart, etc. Apparently being the most beautiful woman in the world isn't all peaches and cream.
- The Count's plan to marry & then kill her as part of a PR campaign to get his countrymen to hate their neighbors does back this up a little. As well, the fact that she got to be the most beautiful woman in the world by being lovelorn over her poor Only Mostly Dead Westley...
There's a book called Cloud Of Sparrows about missionaries going to Japan in which Emily, the 17-year-old heroine (no, wait, only nearly 17) is so beautiful (and such a raving Mary Sue for whom even the author seems to have a perverse contempt) that she's apparently a rape-magnet. So after she's been raped by her step-dad and nearly raped by some family friends' sons and leered at by every man she meets, she hates "her accursed beauty" (and that's a direct quote) and longs to escape from it. So she goes to Japan, where no one's seen a Western woman before and everyone finds her not just odd-looking but extravagantly hideous — yay! And she spends the whole plot trying desperately to stay in Japan rather than return to a land where she'll be considered beautiful again. Even when she nearly gets raped there too.
Florimell in The Faerie Queene — She doesn't complain, but she has a right to. After fleeing from 3 guys who try to rape her, a hyena-like monster, and a witch who clones her, she's kidnapped by Proteus and thrown in his dungeon until she agrees to sleep with him (which she adamantly refuses to the end). The author feels deeply sorry for all the troubles he puts her through... all because she's so beautiful.
In Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy, when Burrich gets around to discussing his backstory, he talks about his grandmother, who was a slave in the Chalced States. Apparently (paraphrased) "Beauty is the worst trait a slave can possess. Her mistresses hated her and her masters raped her." It seems like a fairly realistic version of this trope.
Justified in the book Five Children and It, where the kids get a wish to "be as beautiful as the day" but nobody recognizes them, and they aren't even allowed into their own house. (Fortunately, the wish has a built-in time limit.)
A bizarre and creepy version shows up in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which one character is so beautiful that it is physically painful to look at her. The problem is solved by cutting up her face with clamshells.
Referenced in CS Lewis's Narnia book Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy has the opportunity to read a spell from a Wizard's book that would give her supernatural beauty. The book came complete with handy illustrations showing people worshipping her, then turning on each other, fighting wars over her, and so on. Lucy almost reads it anyway, but after an illustration of an angry Lion fills the page, she changes her mind.
Rosalie from Twilight. Her beauty led her to get bashed and gang-raped as a human.
- By her fiance and his friends, no less.
- Not to mention Bella, who is attacked by a gang of rapists only to be saved by her True Love. It's actually inverted for Bella: she is so lovely and pale and beautiful that she has several guys in class suing for her prom date, but she spends most of the books complaining about how ugly she is.
Parodied in the Discworld novel Maskerade: the thin, beautiful, brainless, talentless Christine, when questioned about her scanty breakfast, tells the fat but highly talented Agnes, "It's lucky for you, you can eat whatever you want." Agnes tries to be charitable but "deep down inside, [she] thought a rude word." Of course, the book goes on to say that while being a talentless beauty can be a curse, being a talent with no beauty can be a worse curse.
- And in Thud! Tawneee, so beautiful that Sally and Angua (no slouches themselves in the looks department) feel stirrings of envy at her attractiveness, suffers from "Jerk Syndrome", and figuring this out allows them to overcome their jealousy. She is so beautiful that most men "can't believe she would notice a guy like me", so they don't approach her for fear of rejection. Which leads her to think something is wrong with her, and date pathetic losers...the kind of people who are used to rejection. On top of that, she is "thicker than a yard of lard", and doesn't think she's very attractive at all.
- And yet it's Nobby who dumps her...after Angua cleared things up for Tawneee.
Male example: Lord Byron's Alternate Character Interpretation of Don Juan (and Lord Byron himself, too, for that matter).
Karen from John Steakley's Armor, whose beauty scares almost all men away except for those (her step-father, many superior officers in Fleet, etc) who rape her and get away with it because the juries are so awed by her that they forgive the men for buckling under the irresistable temptation.
In Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, one of the early tales is about a Babylonian princess, Alatiel, who is so beautiful that no man (aside, thankfully, from her father and his loyal knights) can lay eyes on her without immediately contriving to know her in the Biblical sense. As result, she ends up becoming the mistress of some nine different men in the space of a few years, each of whom killed her previous liaison in order to claim her.
Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, is a sort of Grimmified novelization of Donkeyskin. The princess is imprisoned, brutalized, raped, and impregnated by her father; after she escapes, the subsequent Convenient Miscarriage nearly kills her.)
- While she never actually remarks on it, she does panic when her nursemaid tells her she looks so much like her mother, who had been called 'the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms'. She knows there's something really wrong with her father, even if she doesn't know what it is, and really doesn't want him to have any reason to pay her attention. (It doesn't help that her mother made the king promise not to marry any woman less beautiful than her; that makes the princess's resemblance to her mother a little squicky to more people than the princess herself, even if nobody will acknowledge it.)
A.S. Byatt's novel Possession features Maude Bailey, who finds her beauty such a curse that she keeps her head shaved for awhile, then ties her hair up in tight braids and a scarf. Arguably, the book is conscious of this trope (she has an ex-lover who used to traipse around naked and pointedly quote Yeats's 'Your Yellow Hair' at her), but plays it very straight.
Thomas Raith from The Dresden Files is a good incubus. Naturally, he has the (supernatually) good looks one would expect an incubus to have, however having sex with anyone causes that person to suffer Death By Sex, which he is unwilling to do due to being a good person and having made the woman he loved almost suffer that fate. He was also for a while unable to hold a job, as his (mostly) female colleagues would throw themselves at him.
- Which he remedies by pretending to be gay.
Alejandro Dolina, in Crónicas del Ángel Gris ("Chronicles of the Gray Angel") tells a tale of a girl so beautiful that she never had a boyfriend, because every man who glances at her dies at once. To worsen her misery, she has a (mostly ordinary) sister, with lots of boyfriends.
A weird inversion is Remedios The Beauty from One Hundred Years Of Solitude, where her beauty is a curse... for her family and the men who get mesmerized at her. Her family constantly battle to maintain her under protection because, even if she looks like an adult, she has the mental age of a preschool kid, which cause her to do and say things that are genuinely innocent but, to the ones who only see her hot body and pretty face, came out as seductive and provocative. Whatever they try to mitigate her beauty backfires, only increasing her hotness. She is completely unaware of her own attractiveness or the reactions she provokes, and when people start to die out of love of her / because they were distracted by her beauty, she is unfazed and qualifies them as simple and dumb.
The (initially) antagonist of Justine Larbalestier's How To Ditch Your Fairy isn't especially beautiful, but she has a literal All The Boys Like You fairy which makes her damn near irresistable to anything with an XY chromosome, regardless of sexual orientation; the only thing is, not only is she not all that interested in boys, she's miserably harassed and intimidated by their constant refusal to take "go away" for an answer, and none of the other girls in school will talk to her because they think she must be reveling in the attention from their boyfriends.
In the Wild Cards anthology series, Succubus is a Joker whose mutation causes her to look like the perfect lover for whoever gazes upon her. Her parents pimped her out when she was a child, and her life does not improve from there.
Commander Elli Quinn in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. After getting her face burned off in a space battle, Miles pays for it to be replaced with the best face that 30th century reconstructive surgery can supply. She is initially delighted with her new face, "but the second time a soldier made a pass at me instead of following an order, I knew I definitely had a problem."
Brought up by someone talking to the fey character (whose name I can't recall) in Lyndon Hardy's Riddle of the Seven Realms. She subsequently comes to adopt this trope as her own, and ends up in a relationship with Astron, a demon (albeit a nice one), because he's the only one who she believes can love her for herself.

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There was a Spongebob Squarepants CD, "The Best Day Ever", in which Squidward sang that his beauty was a curse.
Done more seriously and convincingly with Emilie Autumn's "Thank God I'm Pretty", which is about the impositions made upon pretty women.

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Played hilariously straight in Dungeons And Dragons: The Nymph, a fey in the 3rd Edition Monster Manual, is so beautiful, looking at one can blind or kill. She can, however, turn it on and off. (In Second Edition, whether the nymph killed or blinded was based on whether she was naked or clothed, respectively, and couldn't be turned off voluntarily.)
- She can turn it on, eh?
- The above being based on actual Greek Mythology.
In GURPS, good looks give you a reaction bonus. However, the highest levels of good looks can give you a reaction penalty if the other character already has good reason to dislike you.
- Better yet if you have the highest level of Appearance possible and add the Terror enhancement, people who look at you will scream and run or go insane just as if your appearance were monstrous.
In Scion, Epic Appearance comes in two forms - beautiful and ugly. The problems of high-level "ugly" Epic Appearance are a given, but it can be nearly impossible to deal with mortals on an even level with high-level "beautiful" Epic Appearance. As a result, there's a Knack that turns it off for a while - leaving you either generically pretty or generically ugly. The Knack's name is "My Eyes Are Up Here".
There are no specific examples in Exalted, but in a world with amorous jerkass gods, nightmarish demons, nihilistic ghosts, soul-sucking fairies, insane god-kings, eldritch abominations, and even worse entities, being attractive enough to attract the attention of one or more of them definitely counts as a curse. For example, it's explicitly stated that concubines chosen by the Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears...don't survive the night. And as the Manual of Exalted Power: Infernals puts it:
Sometimes, Adorjan falls in love. Her hatred is safer.

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A male example: in The Food Chain by Nikki Silver, the superficial supermodel Serge says this, then immediately follows it up by listing off his cursed attributes and titillating the two characters listening to his speech.
Stupefyin' Jones (see entry under Film) originated here.
Vicki Bliss, the character from the books by Elizabeth Peters, complains at least once a book about how no one takes her seriously as an intellectual because she looks like a supermodel.
Princess Eboli in Verdi's Opera Don Carlo sings an entire aria, "O don fatale" ('O fatal gift'), quite actually cursing her beauty ("Ti maledico, o mia beltà").

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Male example: Mask of the Betrayer's Gannayev asserts that that the reason he's in jail is that he's "too handsome to look upon." He's not lying either — sort of. According to the warden, Gann has the habbit of bedding nearly anything in a skirt, much to the dismay of every Overprotective Dad on the continent. There's even a set of elaborate runes lining his cell just to make sure he doesn't do it in his sleep (which he can. Gann's probably the only Spirit Shaman who uses his dream hopping powers to get laid.)
Gilgamesh's profile in the Fate Stay Night visual novel gives him Rank A+ charisma. "At this level, it is not so much strength of character, but more like a curse." Given who Gilgamesh is, this is probably a true statement. If Ishtar hadn't come on to him, for example, Enkidu probably would have survived longer. And he did look rather fabulous.
- Also Rider. She and her sisters went from normal, very beautiful women with even better hair to... well, she's Medusa, okay? Poseidon thought they were good looking and his wife and Athena got pissed about it.
Fall-From-Grace doesn't actually complain in Planescape Torment about all the attention her looks get her—that would be unladylike. But it's got to suck being a blazingly-hot demon that normally gets its jollies through seduction and having willingly taken a vow of chastity...

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Wapsi Square has a short arc featuring the main character, who's improbably busty and thin, and another character working as a model, who is also improbably thin, lamenting how people can't take them seriously. Since it begins with the main character's friend dismissing the model as ditzy, it does serve as a decent Aesop about not judging someone by how they look. However, the main character blames some self-esteem issues on how she is too ideally shaped, inverting the norm in a way that can be frustrating.
Male Example: This trope is a genuine, life-ruining problem for Holden of Arcana. In addition to heightened physical beauty, Holden is also under a magical curse of unknown origin that makes people fall in love with him. But not just some people; practically everyone he encounters. Sounds like a cakewalk, but after having his psycho vampire stalker slaughter his current boyfriend and threaten to kill his brother in order for them to be together, the situation becomes a hell of a lot more heartbreaking.
- There was a reason for that, actually. Turned out Holden was actually the Harpy prince that was being sought after, he just didn't consciously know it until towards the end of the story. Apparently Harpies in this world have that particular glamour about them.
Played horrifically straight in Marilith: In a flashback of Psycho For Hire hitwoman/mob enforcer Valentino's Start Of Darkness, it's shown that she was the daughter of "purged" dissidents in the last days of the USSR. Along with other attractive young girls in the same situation, she is shipped to a secret gulag/training camp operated by party hardliners who want to mold them through Training From Hell into assassin-spies to compromise, blackmail or eliminate key individuals to stop the country's slide towards implosion. The grizzled, bearlike old general in charge of the camp mentions while discussing the plot with a co-conspirator that only God can give such a curse as beauty (the reason those girls were chosen in the first place). Then, as a part of training, the general brutally and repeatedly rapes the girls, starting with Valentino. No wonder she's a sadistic maniac...
Hellsing's Seras Victoria occasionally complains about the effects of her rather stunning figure in And Shine Heaven Now. Her Love Interest counters that he can enjoy her company and respect her as a person and appreciate her chest.
Played with on this Loserz strip with Alice complaining about men looking at her breasts all the time, but refusing to wear more modest clothes because she's so hot it wouldnt make a difference. According to her anyways.

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The ostensible villain of the world of Death By Cliche wears a mask to hid his face not because he's ugly, but because he's so beautiful that anyone who sees it full-on promptly has their eyes melt, shortly before they drop over dead.

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Minerva Mink of Animaniacs seems to enjoy all the attention after all... except when she tries to get something normal, like shopping for groceries or filing her taxes, but can't because every male around her is panting and howling. Incidentally, this is a lot of fans' reaction, too.
- Of course, the only males who don't have this reaction are those she's actually quite attracted to.
Kim Possible had an episode with a Hot Scientist who couldn't get her work taken seriously because she looked like a model.

Close Western Animation

A little sadder in Real Life. How can you be sure if people like you because you're you or because you're pretty? It may be hard to make friends too, due to "pretty people = The Libby" preconceptions. That being said, if you whine about how pretty you are, ain't no-one going to pity you, girl.
- There is a direct correlation between the sympathy felt for this "curse" and the amount said beauty is currently exploiting said curse. "Oh, why oh why must men constantly stare at my Wonderbra-enhanced popping-out-of-my-top breasts? And why must women be so full of envy at the pretty face I spent only 3 hours perfecting this morning??"
- In the line of lack of sympathy: Brazilian band "Cansei de ser Sexy" got their name after their founders read an interview of Beyoncé where she stated she was "tired of being sexy", and they found the phrase so inane that they translated and adopted it. The fact that the band is composed mostly of very attractive women only adds to the irony.
I would say Marilyn Monroe was a real example of this. According to her bio, she was molested as a child several times and she was also typecasted as Dumb Blonde (even though she made a career out of it), and her final years of life were marked by illness, personal problems and a reputation for being unreliable and difficult to work with.
- She eventually married Arthur Miller of all people in an attempt to be taken seriously as an intelligent, substantive person.
- Jayne Mansfield —who was an amateur musician and, by most accounts, quite an intelligent woman— was treated similarly by the film industry.
In ancient Sparta, a citizen could murder a Helot - the working class who outnumbered their militaristic overlords many times over - for any reason. Killing a Helot was in fact an acceptable shortcut through the final exam in their military training. Many Helots were cut down for being too attractive.
Perhaps this is a subtrope, but women who are well endowed often get treated as if they were sexually promiscuous, even if they aren't. This is made worse by the fact that if they have truly huge breasts (we're talking Gag Boobs territory), loose clothing makes them look fat, and tight clothing makes them look slutty. No wonder Soleil Moon Frye (Punky Brewster) had hers reduced.
- Don't forget the difficulty of finding bras that actually fit. Or the purely physical problems of weight and bulk; a lot of large-breasted women have back problems.
Apparently an attractive young woman in Germany boarded a city bus and was threatened with being thrown off for distracting the driver. I'd put up the Reuters link but it seems to have expired due to age.
It is believed that some body mutilation traditions for females in tribes were specifically created to make them unattractive and thus have less chance of them being raped and/or abducted in case of war.
- Er, it was only "believed that" in Victorian Britain, Science (or just asking them) has Marched On over that myth. The "mutilations" were generally to make them more attractive to cultures that had non-Western standards of beauty.
There are several different phobias that can cause this to happen in some people's minds, such as agraphobia (fear of sexual abuse) and erotophobia (fear of sexual love). There may also be the fear of being seen as a sex object (Rulethirty phobia?).
Jessica Beil and Megan Fox both claim to be this. This Troper is not buying it.
- On the contrary, this troper met Jessica Beil... she practically glows in person, it's unnerving. Also, Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco. DISTURBINGLY pretty.
  - To clarify, I'm not disagreeing with the "So beautiful" part. They both are gorgeous. I'm diasgreeing with the "its a curse" part.
  - One could expand this to anyone in the entertainment industry who complains about their attractiveness, while gleefully enjoying all the fame and fortune it provides them.

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