Zapp Brannigan
Captain of the Nimbus
Well I know that other people have this kind of low self esteem too and not physical low self esteem, so it's not some weird phenomenon.
Not to psycho-analyze but it probably has come from stuff that happened during my childhood with friendships and being rejected by people and such. I've grown up being careful with friends or not wanting to bring up topics so as not to annoy my friends. Sometimes I've assumed just because a friend hasn't called me in a while they've decided they don't like me--I find some thing I did in the past that was probably the reason.
Physically, my parents always told me I was beautiful and complemented me as a child so I never had any self esteem issues there. My parents couldn't be there for my inner-relationships with other people though.
I'll give you and anyone else a freebie on this one: A lot of people may see someone that's really physically attractive and immediately make a whole host of assumptions. If you are being treated badly in the ways that you said, it could stem from the guys thinking that you're going to be coming around to walk all over them, try and use them, and to generally treat them as props in whatever scheme they're imagining you're trying to impose on them. If it's women that are giving you grief in the way that you stated, it's probably jealousy, more than likely stemming from the fact that you'd be taking the guys' attention, looking down your nose at them, and otherwise treating them badly like the "popular girls" more than likely did when they were in middle school.
If this is the reason, there's no reason to feel badly for being you if you're good to people, so on an emotional level, if you're not making any overt acts to make people feel bad or hurt them in general, you shouldn't have low personal self esteem.
This of course assumes that there was no reason that they should think of you this way or treat you the way that they do, but I'm just wingin' it here...
Why is your confidence in your smarts low?