“It is a truly amazing time to be a headless female body part in Hollywood. Here's to all the people who help make it happen,” reads the bio of The Headless Women of Hollywood, a Tumblr page. Launched in 2016 by New York-based standup comedian Marcia Belsky, the page 'seeks to bring attention to the still standard practice of fragmenting, fetishising and dehumanising the images of women we see in film, TV, book covers and advertisement'.
On the page, Belsky features posters with body parts of women as the main highlight. A quick look through the page might make you giggle, but the rampant sexism hits you hard the very next second. And that's the reason this two-year-old page is trending again, rightfully in the age of #MeToo and #Time'sUp.
While we have always been aware of sexism and objectification of women in film and television, Belsky gives us ample visual proof—in the form of female legs, backs, butts, lips. No faces.
In the thread that is now going viral, Belsky reposted some of her picks on her official Twitter profile, on March 12. “Happy anniversary to truly the most impressive example of @HlywoodHeadless I ever found,” she tweeted with a poster of Ashton Kutcher's Beauty and the Geek.
"To constantly take women’s heads out of sexualised images of our bodies does so many things. It signifies to us that not only are our desires not important, they don’t even exist. It teaches us to strive for an ideal body whose reward, if achieved, is becoming interchangeable," she writes in one of her tweets.
In other tweets, she posts posters of films like Youth, Dirty Grandpa, Misconduct, A League of Their Own, The Graduate and many more. What makes it ironic is even women-centric films like Wonder Woman and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants feature on Belsky's list.
“Please send me the headless women you see,” she writes in another tweet.
Happy anniversary to truly the most impressive example of @HlywoodHeadless I ever found pic.twitter.com/qGDsIR0c8K
— Marcia Belsky (@MarciaBelsky) March 12, 2018