The Star Next Door.(Sarah Jessica Parker)(Interview)

Byline: Brooke Hauser PHOTOGRAPHED BY TOM MUNRO

She hasn't fixed her nose, she lets her roots grow out, and she doesn't care if you don't find her sexy. Sarah Jessica Parker has fashioned an empire from being herself.

Am I the unsexiest woman, like, in the world?" Sarah Jessica Parker wonders aloud, her girlish voice tapering into an incredulous squeak. "My God--I'm the unsexiest woman in the world!" That, Parker says, was her reaction when she learned that Maxim magazine had anointed her the Unsexiest Woman Alive.

On a recent rainy afternoon in Manhattan, settled into a couch in her trailer, the actress recounted how, in the days after the dis, friends rallied to her support. First there was the loyal grip who broke the news. "I'm never reading Maxim again, Sarah!'" says the pint-size Parker, channeling a large, gruff man with a New Yawk accent. Her publicist offered this insight: "'It's because you don't have a fake nose and fake breasts and collagen and Botox,'" Parker recalls, laughing. "Well, that's cold comfort!"

Other actresses might dismiss the insult with an impenetrable "no comment." But Parker, who comes across as both ladylike and scrappy, invites the listmakers to expound: "My instinct was that it felt personal. It was really about 'We don't like her.' Who were the judges and critics? I would like to ask them, 'What exactly is it that you personally find not sexy about me?'" she says, her chest flushing red. "Is it my figure? Is it my brain that bothers you?"

Parker isn't easily miffed. However, the 42-year-old wife and mother knows how to defend herself with style. She doesn't try to censor her critics. ("That's the beauty of this country--we can have different opinions and coexist and be amused by each other and hurt and offended.") She doesn't call them out for what could be seen as blatantly misogynistic attacks on a group that includes three moms--in addition to Parker and Britney Spears, Madonna was on the list for her "rapid postnuptial deterioration"--and actress Sandra Oh, who was singled out for her "boyish figure" and "cold bedside manner."

No, Parker only suggests that any man who prefers an airbrushed woman to a real one is just kind of...boring. "My impression is that what they find sexy doesn't make them very interesting or unusual or special," she says, with a shrug. "That makes them common."