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At the Glamour Women of the Year awards Monday night, Lady Gaga bit the hand that, well, made her its most recent cover girl.

“The picture, which I’m very grateful for and very happy to be on this cover, I felt it was too beautiful,” she said of the cover shot. “I felt my skin looked too perfect, and my hair looked too soft. This is not usually how I dress or how I carry myself.”

Instead, she proposed another candidate: Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani education activist and also one of Glamour‘s honorees. “You’re so inspiring, so young and so brilliant,” Mother Monster told Yousafzai. “If I could forfeit my Glamour cover, I would give it to Malala.”

Gaga explained her rejection of the cover by saying that the image fails to empower women.

“I believe my true mission is to inspire young people to fight back against forces that make them feel like they’re not beautiful or important,” she said. “I do not look like this when I wake up in the morning.”