The Headless Women Project, started by Marcia Belsky, “seeks 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.”
As the initiative’s website explains, framing women’s bodies like this robs them of their personhood and suggests to the viewer that they’re objects rather than characters: “By decapitating the woman, or fragmenting her body into decontextualized sexual parts, she becomes an unquestionably passive object to the male gaze. The question of her consent is removed completely alongside her head, and her purpose becomes solely that of being looked at by men obediently. Her value is that only of her sexual appeal to men, and not of her personhood.”
While the Tumblr and Instagram have been around for years now, Belsky brought it back into the public conversation with an epic Twitter thread about her “favorite” headless women posters.
For example, here’s a poster for the reality show Beauty & the Geek, which ran from 2005-2008. Belsky called it “truly the most impressive example of @HlywoodHeadless I ever found.”
Then there’s this one for Hall Pass. “In most mainstream comedies, the women are either the Wife or the Butt,” Belsky writes. “Which one do you wanna be?”
Here’s the poster for John Tucker Must Die, which again has a headless woman with her back to the viewer:
Women of color, Belsky notes, are often erased from movie posters entirely. But when they’re included, they’re just as fetishized and dehumanized as white women.
Then there’s this gag-worthy, pseudo-artsy number to promote Youth:
And this gem for Click, starring the pride of Manchester, NH himself:
As Belsky further points out, some posters will even break their own convention in order to show women’s bodies rather than faces, as we see in the posters for Confidence:Â
🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/5R7yMXHGcD
— Marcia Belsky (@MarciaBelsky) March 12, 2018
As Belsky sums it up: “The overwhelming presence of these headless women in the images we see both perpetuate and is symptomatic of the overall idea that women exist primarily for the sexual pleasure and purpose of men.”
What are some of the most egregious headless/faceless posters you’ve seen, TMSers?
(via Refinery 29; images: Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures, The CW, Momentum Pictures, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 20th Century Fox)
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