'Lady Parts' Tumblr Builds Hollywood Dream Girl: Hot, Silent, Servile

Actress Katrina Day came across this casting call a few weeks ago and decided she’d had enough.

“That was the final straw,” she says in an interview at HelloGiggles. “A perfect, five-word representation of everything I’d been struggling against as an early career actress and feminist.” She started a Tumblr called Lady Parts, collecting (and anonymizing) casting calls that are as tiresomely offensive as they are run-of-the-mill. A few examples:

In concert, these “seeking: [female]” notices are particularly striking as a sort of simultaneous cause and effect. Although roles provided for women in Hollywood are (obviously) narrower than roles women have carved for themselves in real life, the controlling attitudes are one and the same. Women—according to these casting calls, and according, doubtlessly, to many people you know—are important first for their looks and second for their sexual availability, and third, in many cases, for the type of abuse she’ll take for aspects of the first two.