LOS ANGELES -- Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, including posing for sexy magazine covers, playing a high school seductress on TV's "Dawson's Creek" and a recent off-Broadway role that called for nudity, Michelle Williams says she is not what you assume she is. And what you probably assume is that the 18-year-old actress with the bedroom eyes and pouty lips is just another Hollywood sex symbol. "I am not the breasty blonde with the come-hither stare," she said during a smoking break on the balcony of her Los Angeles hotel suite, where she was publicizing her new movie, "Dick." "It hurts to see yourself represented in that way. I never see myself that way, and I don't think it's a proper image to put out there for young girls." "And I hate that sexuality is perceived as a woman's only means for success. That's not what I'm about, and I don't know why everybody in this business is trying to mold me into this sex symbol. That is not who I am." Williams is particularly sensitive to what she sees is a stereotyping of her image after what she termed a "disastrous" cover shoot for a magazine called Maxim. On the current cover, the actress is shown looking sultry in a red slip. "It was a 10-hour shoot that was all about my breasts and my body," she said, her voice rising in anger. "It was all about getting me into the shortest and tightest dress that they could conjure up." Several days later, Williams said the magazine called and requested a reshoot. "They said I looked like I was crying in all the photos, but I refused to go back and put myself through that again." The magazine ran the photos anyway, and those same photos ran in another national magazine, adding more fuel to her growing reputation as a sex symbol. Williams said the only thing she can do to divert attention away from her sexuality is to seek out roles that do not play on her looks. In the political spoof "Dick," she gets the perfect opportunity to alter public opinion of her. She and Kirsten Dunst play innocent and ditzy teens who accidentally become key figures in the Watergate scandal. The high schoolers meet then-President Nixon (Dan Hedaya) during a school field trip to the White House. He is taken by their bubbly personalities and appoints them official White House dog walkers. With each successive visit to the White House, the girls get more and more involved with all the president's men, including chief of staff Bob Haldeman (Dave Foley), national security adviser Henry Kissinger (Saul Rubinek) and presidential counsel John Dean (Jim Breuer). It is just a matter of time before they run into Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch), who are portrayed as bumblers who transform the girls into major players in the Watergate mess. Although Williams said no research was required for the role because the girls were supposed to be naive and uninformed, she already possessed a wealth of knowledge about Watergate and the Republican Party. Her father is a Republican, she said, and even ran for state senate twice in her home state of Montana (her family moved to San Diego when she was 9). "I grew up in a political household, and my father always encouraged me to have an interest in politics. I was well aware of Watergate before this movie, although I never imagined I would one day play a teen-ager with a crush on Richard Nixon." The big question, of course, is whether her father has seen the movie, and what his reaction was to a movie that pokes fun at a Republican president. "No, he hasn't seen it yet," she said, "and I'm not sure how he'll take it. Maybe he'll like it, and maybe he won't. "At the very least," she added, "he'll have to like that I'm playing a sweet and precious little girl. I don't think he's liked some of the roles I've played in the past." One of the reasons Williams is having trouble shaking her sexy image is the media obsession with the fact that she legally was emancipated from her parents at 15. When young actresses file for emancipation, usually to free them from work restrictions placed on child actors, there is a belief by some in the media that the actress must be tough, hard and mature beyond her years. In the case of Williams, that belief is not far off the mark, at least as far as her advanced maturity is concerned. By the time she was 15, she already had appeared in one film ("Lassie") and had earned enough money through commercials and episodic TV work to rent her own apartment in Burbank. Williams, who was last seen in the horror film "Halloween: H2O," admits that she was conflicted back then about being on her own, and much of that conflict still exists at 18. "It's that woman/child thing that I've got going on inside my head," she explained. "I have always felt older than I am, and most of my friends are considerably older than me. I just never related to kids my own age. "When I was 15, I felt mentally like I was 30, but I felt socially like I was still 8 years old. Those kinds of thoughts are still there. In my work, I feel very mature, but in my life, I'm not sure. I'm trying to do more kid things lately, like going to Disneyland and Magic Mountain. "That's where the conflict is; it's easy for me to feel like an adult, but I need to work on the kid in me. You can't really become an adult until you've resolved the kid part." Williams is filming an HBO movie in which she plays a lesbian (she says that her dad is not happy about that at all), and she still has four years remaining on her "Dawson's Creek" contract. She said she will use each summer hiatus during the run of the TV show to continue doing films (her next movie is called "But I'm a Cheerleader") and stage work (she made her off-Broadway debut earlier this year in "Killer Joe") that showcase her ability to be more than a mere sex symbol. "When interviewers ask me who my favorite authors are, and I mention Ayn Rand and Dostoyevsky, they laugh," she said. "They won't print that because it doesn't mesh with their image of me as a sex symbol. "Well, it's horrible when you're not taken seriously. I don't know why this image of me persists. Is it because I'm blond? It's very frustrating. "I can't imagine why anyone would want to be a sex symbol," she added. "It's so surface, so uninteresting and so boring. Sex symbols are a dime a dozen; you can find one on any street in Los Angeles."