Why Doesn’t She Have a Head
Chio, a snack brand, once decided the most important thing it could do with its chips was assign a gender to each flavor. Men’s chips. Women’s chips. This landed in 2013 as part of a longer parade of needlessly binary products—gender-targeted Kinder Surprise eggs, cuts of meat separated by sex, as if the animal on the hook had somehow been feminized before butchering. The absurdity seemed like it would eventually embarrass someone. It didn’t.
That summer, Dr. Stevie Schmiedel and the organization Pinkstinks had been collecting the evidence. Not just chips—the Axe campaigns where astronauts "direct traffic," the seafood brand whose entire pitch was "sexy fish," the H&M lingerie billboards at every corner. She brought twenty-four organizations together, including Terre des Femmes and the German federation of women’s crisis centers, and filed a petition with the German Advertising Council demanding that sexist advertising be taken seriously. Then she organized a demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin under the slogan "Vielfalt ist Schönheit"—diversity is beauty. Tocotronic, the Hamburg post-punk band, and Berlin rapper Sookee added their names to it.
The Advertising Council had a standard response to complaints: irony. The campaign is ironic. It’s self-aware. Schmiedel’s counter was blunt: children don’t know irony. One in five children in Germany was already showing symptoms of an eating disorder. Outdoor advertising—wallpaper-scale, unavoidable—was teaching gender stereotypes as if they were laws of physics. And when a child asks why the nearly naked woman on the billboard doesn’t have a head, the honest answer is: because she doesn’t need one. Only the body counts.
The comparison Schmiedel drew between David Beckham in underwear and the standard female lingerie model is one of those observations that seems obvious once stated. Beckham looks at you with something like challenge: maybe, if you’re lucky, you have a chance. The women on the same size billboard look back with an expression that says: yes, this is already yours. One is a subject with conditions; the other has been arranged as an object without any. It’s not about nudity. It’s about who holds the gaze and who is held by it.
Sookee, who had spent years parsing sexism and homophobia in German hip-hop, came at advertising from a more gut-level place. She wasn’t opposed to being sold things. She liked clever language and wordplay and creative ideas. But she wanted the stretch marks and wrinkles left in, the photoshopped illusions taken down. Making someone feel insufficient and ugly in order to sell them something was, in her word, indecent.
On hip-hop: she saw the previous decade in Germany as a fairly unbroken run of gangsta and battle rap that had carried homophobia and misogyny along with it and sold both as authenticity. Things were slowly differentiating. Gay-friendly and openly queer artists were appearing in club playlists, mostly arriving from the US. In the UK, a generation of female MCs was building something that might eventually reach the mainstream. Visibility was doing slow, incremental work.
The harder question was why so many women resist feminism, position themselves against it, defend arrangements that cost them. She answered it without comfort. Some of it is economic: if your financial and social stability depends on male approval, profeminist positions carry real personal cost. Some of it is capitalism’s logic internalized as gender: to call another woman a slut in a rape culture is to mark yourself as honorable and therefore protected. To dismiss a feminist as unreasonable and pushy is to signal that you won’t be making demands on anyone’s resources or space. Both moves are forms of survival that work by sacrificing other women.
What stays with me is the child’s question. She hadn’t yet learned not to notice. The headless woman on the billboard is not an oversight—it’s the logical conclusion of a visual language in which the female body is environment, decoration, atmosphere. The child saw it immediately. The adults walking past her had already adapted.