brazenly veracious

A woman who wrote into Salon in response to an article about little girls' attraction to girly, pink, fairy-princess products, said that she felt the fairy-princess mystique was damaging, because she never really got past her unrealistic expectations and Prince Charming fantasies. She wrote:

I believe a large part of what now allows me to be happy in reality is that I wound up, solely by chance rather than merit, securing a number of those fairy-tale elements in my actual life. I happen to be skinny and reasonably cute; I happen to have married an attractive guy I love who makes a lot of money. If I had instead grown up to be an ugly duckling who had no man, I would probably feel like crap, even if I were a rocket scientist.

On a semi-related note, on a recent trip to Barnes and Noble, I paged through the how-to book based on the reality show "The Swan." Hard to object to the book itself -- it's basically a workbook for improving your relationships and pursuing your goals -- except that it contains full-page before and after photos of the contestants on The Swan, virtually all of whom had massive plastic surgery, which is never really mentioned in the book, except for an example about how one contestant wasn't fully dedicated to pursuing her goals because she refused to wear her chin strap after surgery, and "fell asleep at the gym."