Headless Women of Hollywood

Submission 8,647

About

Headless Women of Hollywood is a single topic blog that highlights a variety of promotional posters for films and TV shows in which the female character's face is entirely or partially cropped out of the layout. Upon its launch in April 2016, the blog was highlighted by numerous entertainment news sites as a visual examination of a long-running sexist trope in popular culture.

Origin

The Tumblr blog^[1] was launched by New York City comedian Marcia Belsky on April 16th, 2016. According to the site description, the project aims to "bring attention to the still standard practice of fragmenting, fetishizing and dehumanizing the images of women we see in film, TV, book covers, and advertisement."

Spread

While the individual posts on Headless Women of Hollywood have not gained any substantial traction on Tumblr, the blog itself has received media coverage from over a dozen of blogs and news sites for its illustration of objectification of the female body and sexism that span across several decades in Hollywood's film and TV show productions, including The Telegraph^[3], USA Today^[5], Mashable^[4], Huffington Post UK^[9] and Yahoo Movies^[10], among many others.

Criticism

On April 21st, 2016, after the blog underwent a period of mass exposure through several news articles, Belsky posted a statement in response to the "pics of female heads" she has received from the critics of the blog:

The point is (of course) not that every poster we see objectifies and fragments female bodies. The point is that many do and that cutting up female bodies into consumable, sexualized parts is such an accepted and standard marketing practice across the board – people tend not to even notice. […] Even for movies that already objectify women as their main purpose (which maybe one day won’t be an entire genre??) by cutting off the head of the woman on the poster, the dehumanization of her body is taken a step further. And her pleasure and consent are taken completely out of the equation. […] Plz stop sending me heads.