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Published July 24, 2026

She Must Be Ugly

Thoughts on Making Art as a Woman
Page 1: Text: In 2015, I drew an image that would have a bit of an infamous reputation. Image: Woodall sitting with her back to the reader. She is bent over a desk, scribbling over a sketchbook as her cat watches.Page 2: Text: My “Catcall Kill Kill” sticker. Featuring a cool punky femme looking over her shoulder with a baseball bat. The text bubble motif is a reference to classic JRPGs which I grew up on. Image: A woman with her back to the audience, her head turned so we can see she is glaring at us. She is wearing punk clothes and gripping a baseball bat, with a video game style dialogue box beside her that reads “You have been catcalled. What do you do?” and a smaller dialogue box underneath that reads the options: “kill, kill, kill.”Page 3: Text: With the majority of people I’ve met really love this image, I noticed a bit of a strange pushback to it, typically online. Picture: Six speech bubbles all overlapping to form a conversation. They read out 1. “She must be ugly,” 2. “You know this person looks like a poison dart frog,” 3. “Projecting much?”, 4. “This girl must be hideous,” 5. “You know the person who made this doesn’t get catcalled,” and 6. “Artwork by a blue-haired liberal.”Page 4: Text: When I first encountered this reaction, I won’t lie, it really upset me. It made me paranoid and I wondered if they were right. Like many women, I struggled with my self-image in the past, especially when I was younger. Picture: Woodall staring at herself in the mirror anxiously. “Ugly” in hot pink floats around her, filling the space of the mirror.Page 5: Text: The pain of being called “ugly” is something I think many girls and women can trace back to early childhood. The worst thing you could call a little girl on the school yard was “ugly.” Sure, boys got called ugly too, but I think it held a different weight. Picture: A printed photo of Goodall as a teenager. She grins at the camera awkwardly with glasses, acne, and braces.Page 6: Text: We grow up in a world which surrounds us with intense beauty standards. We may not totally understand all of it, but it starts to sink in early. We’re completely mired in it from a young age and it only increases in pressure as time goes on. Picture: The cover photo once more. A self portrait of the author Jenn Woodall grimacing, stylized to be intentionally asymmetrical. This time, the picture extends to show Woodall’s torso and her posture is awkward and stiff. The background is a photo collage of real world magazine covers, all of glamorous women wearing heavy makeup with shiny hair blowing all ways. They all smile and make eye contact with the camera, looking anywhere from bored to seductive.Page 7: Text: So, getting called ugly when people see this sticker, it’s about more than an insult. It’s a reminder that you are failing at the most fundamental aspect of womanhood and you are jealous and bitter about it. Picture: Woodall’s face, cropped between the eyebrows and the nose. Her eyes are closed, twin tears falling down her face and her brow is creased with sorrow.Page 8: Text: Isn’t it funny (and sad) that the reaction to women’s anger on this specific topic comes back to appearance? Following text is set against a red box that slashes across the page, full of spikes: Anger from women seems to really make people uncomfortable, so it needs to be categorized and pathologized. Angry, ugly, and bitter all seem to go hand in hand. Text resumes as normal, black against a pink page: But let’s say I am ugly. Does being ugly automatically make my thoughts and criticism worthless? Can’t I be ugly and offended on behalf of the women who are victims of sexual harassment?Page 9: Text: Can only a “beautiful” woman comment on cat-calling and harassment? Picture: A stereotypically feminine white woman, delicately raising painted nails under her chin while serenely smiling and saying in a text bubble: I just LOVE being objectified!Page 10: Text: My sister is very beautiful. She’s tall and blonde. She studied art history in university, before switching into psychology. Some people are surprised by her intelligence, by her anger and her passion for progressive issues. But I guess people see the blonde hair, a pretty face and they make assumptions. Her 20s-30s were filled with awful stories about cat-calling, sexual harassment, and poor treatment at the hands of men. Picture: A girl who looks similar to Woodall faces the camera, staring angrily at the ground. She has long wavy hair and wears a tight-fitting tank top. Behind her are silhouettes of people looming over her, making her seem small and defeated.Page 11: Text: My sister connected the dots between her appearance and the way people treated her. In college, she dyed her hair dark red. She got facial piercings. She took on a more alt appearance. I didn’t really read into it. It wasn’t until years later she told me “Part of the reason I changed my appearance was so people wouldn’t treat me as some innocent, dumb, blonde girl.” I had no idea that was the reason. Picture: Woodall and her sister sit at a restaurant table, her sister angrily ranting while holding a glass up. Woodall stares at the table, surprised.Page 12: Text: I went to Montreal a few years ago, and I was lucky enough to see an exhibition on the works of Marisol. Image: A scanned photo of a museum exhibition. A series of oddly dressed figures all stand in line. One has a leopard print mask and hat perched atop, another has a boxy garment on, a third has an umbrella shielding its head.Page 13: Text: But one thing really stuck out to me in the exhibit. There were many photos of her across the gallery, with clippings of her gallery showings. A lot of the comments were focused on her appearance. “The first girl artist with glamor.” -Andy Warhol. “The Latin Garbo.” -Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Picture: A greyscale illustration of Marisol in a new style- much more realistic, with careful shading. She looks down and to the side, as if disappointed or quietly frustrated.Page 14: Text: Here I was, in a space filled with art by a woman with a practice that encompassed many mediums. A person who used her artistry to challenge norms around femininity and women’s roles. Even here, her appearance was something special that it needed to be given space in an exhibit about her work. It seems that if you’re lucky enough to be beautiful, it comes with its own share of drawbacks. Picture: Woodall staring angrily at a museum placard with a thought bubble that reads: “WTF?!”Page 15: Text: So back to the topic at hand: This sticker. Why did I make it? Well, I think it’s interesting. The emotional reactions we have to things without a lot of forethought can express things that people carry around them. It can show us the type of common sexism that is being carried around by people. Picture: Woodall rolling her eyes and sighing as a huge hand points forcefully to her with the speech bubble “Well, you’re ugly!!”Page 16: Text: Whether you’re ugly or beautiful, it seems our appearance is low-hanging fruit used to insult us, dismiss us, or harass us. Image: A woman with locs and hoop earrings stands underneath an apple tree, glaring to the side and saying “ow.” as an apple falls and bounces off her head.Page 17: Text: Some of my visibly queer friends have told me about their individual experiences with street harassment- having insults thrown at them about their identity, appearance, or weight. It makes me wish I had a rocket launcher to blow those pieces of shit to the fucking moon. Picture: Woodall jumping very high up and aiming rockets, which explore on the ground in a huge blast and scatter bigoted body parts in the air.Page 18: Text: It’s fucking enraging. Mortifying! A reminder that when you’re out in the world, you’re seen as a piece of meat to be yelled at by some assholes. I think that’s part of why people like the sticker so much. I made it to encapsulate the rage we feel in those moments, and the catharsis that can come with expressing it. Picture: A woman walking past a car as the male driver calls out “Hey baby.” She has a thought bubble of a single, bloody knife.Page 19: Text: I get tagged in posts online when people find it in their city. I’ve also spotted it wheat-pasted up in my own city, and it wasn’t done by me! Picture: A photo of the “Catcall Kill Kill” sticker on a lamppost, scrubbed and weathered from how long it’s been there.Page 20: Text: However, typically within a day or two, it’s been scraped off whatever surface it was on. I once had a friend send me hundreds of this sticker several years ago. I gave them out as freebies. When I was moving out of an old apartment, I put a box of them out on the curb for people to take, along with lots of other stuff. Picture: Woodall outside an apartment building, setting down a box of stickers next to to other moving boxes.Page 21: Text: When I came back out later to bring out more stuff, someone had methodically ripped up every single catcall sticker in the box and I left it on my porch. They also wrote… “BITCH.” It made me happy I was moving in a few days. Picture: A cardboard box with scraps of ripped stickers falling out of it. “Bitch” is written in dark, heavy letters alongside one of the flaps.Page 22: Text: It made me think of how pointless my worrying was. If I got harassed, I couldn’t be rude back unless I was ready to risk them getting violent. I couldn’t express my anger through my art, it’d be destroyed. Would anything be any different if I looked like someone else? Picture: Woodall bent over the cardboard box, staring into it blankly.Page 23: Text: It makes me feel so stupid to think about how much time I used to stare in the mirror, hating myself because of what someone said or what an ad told me. I used to agonize over my appearance. Once I fix my skin, I’ll be pretty. Once I fix my teeth, I’ll be pretty. Once I fix my eyebrows, I’ll be pretty. Picture: A self portrait of Woodall, facing the reader looking forlorn and tired. Overlaid atop the drawing are scans of pictures- a hyperrealistic eye, hyperrealistic hair, hyperrealistic teeth bared in a vapid smile. The result is an unsettling face that doesn’t make sense.Page 24: Text: Getting older is nice, you give less of a shit about things that used to take up a lot of real estate in your mind. Now my only response to assumptions about my appearance is… Picture: Woodall smiling at her phone as she reads something.Page 25: Text: My hair is pink, actually. Picture: A self portrait of the author Jenn Woodall grimacing, stylized to be intentionally asymmetrical. It is identical to the first page, with the word “pink” being underlined for emphasis.
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