Exploring the Postfeminist Frontier
A girl bathed in Barbie-pink light blinks slowly, staring down the selfie cam. She’s massaging her swollen, freshly filled lips with acrylic-tipped fingers, “just like my cosmetologist said to.” Bulbous, rhinestone-encrusted dollar signs dangle from her earlobes, swaying as she speaks. In the next video, a blonde’s platinum locks are pulled taut in pigtails. She sits cross-legged in a fur coat, a notebook in her lap open to a page reading “CAPITALISM IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL <3 <3 <3.” A girl in a baby blue miniskirt glances glibly over her shoulder as she steps onto a stairmaster, overlaid with the caption “me at 24: fully bimbofied only concerned with feeling good and pretty.” Next, a harrowing flashback: an image of her at a computer, typing frantically, worry lines creasing her forehead, the following phrase floating above her: “me at age 15–19 in an unquenchable thirst for truth and knowledge which only led to despair.”
“Good morning fellow thought haters, I hope you took some time to look beautiful today,” a girl greets her followers, in a video promising “bimbo affirmations.” The blonde with the notebook looks up at the camera through thick lashes and speaks out of blood red lips: “Are you a leftist who likes to have her tits out?… Then this is the place for you.”
That place is BimboTok, a virtual sorority house for a new kind of self-proclaimed feminist, one who’s promising her sisters something no previous iteration—not the sixties crusaders, the aughts-era exhausted girlbosses, or the twenty-teens’ depressed e-girls—brought to the table: a good time. She’s taken a long hard look at the patriarchy and found it horrifying and horrifyingly implacable in equal measures. She’s come to the conclusion that screaming at a protest would lead to a sore throat when she’d prefer to preserve her sultry whisper, and scrambling up the corporate ladder sounds draining, not to mention capitalism-promoting. On the other hand, becoming the beautiful airhead the men in charge have simultaneously mocked and worshiped for centuries not only seems doable, but according to self-anointed new age bimbos, might even be fun, and pay better than your day job. Certain that the pursuit of hotness is also the pursuit of a certain type of happiness, one rooted in the conditional affection of men with money or click-happy followers, bimbos embrace a nihilistic vision of a patriarchy too powerful to unseat. So instead of marching, they’re ready to take a seat at the table as someone’s date, because at least then dinner will be paid for.
In a video entitled “First Day of Bimbofication,” a bartender describes the enervation induced by bartending while intelligent—the fake flirting for tips, the objectification from male customers, the rude comments and the ass-grabbing—and then announces, “so I quit! Not bartending, being smart.” Now she’s grinning. Gazing vacantly into the void, a soft smile on her lambent lips. “When you act a little slow, people take it a little easier on you,” another girl explains, to a comment section enthusiastically emoji-ing their agreement. One person posts a proverb for this new (post)-feminism: “don’t ask what you can do for misogyny, but what misogyny can do for you.” Everyone in this hashtag knows that the patriarchy is immoral and unfair, but they also know it’s in charge and not going anywhere. And they know what blondes playing dumb since time immemorial have long known: men with deep pockets and abhorrent values are desperate to fuck, and easy to fleece.
These women speak in baby voices or lobotomy-core monotones, and men are paying to see it. A woman sits in front of an untouched hamburger, smirking as she sips her drink in a video captioned “when they pay for another 1 ml of filler and buy u lunch #bimbofication.” On BimboTok, pleasure becomes a politic, the pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of hotness. Reaping the societal benefits of that hotness is positioned as praxis. Pleasing the very patriarchy that came up with the misogynistic trope of the dumb, superficial, gold-digging blonde is reframed as a feminist shortcut to wealth redistribution.
Fiona Fairbairn, one of this movement’s most-followed figures, posted a Notes app document headlined “Bimbo Manifesto,” which includes the following edicts: “stop fact checking, only focus on u and ur looks, and if you only think about yourself you’ll have no time to think about anything else.” As VICE put it, “a large part of bimboism’s appeal is in its potential to shield oneself from harm—smooth-brain style.” She knows what you’re thinking, but actually, she’d rather not, so she’s playing dumb and watching her follower count rise. A simple strategy: she stopped whining, and started winning.
The new age bimbo embraces a hyper-femininity that feels a lot like a traditional white, heterosexual male fantasy (scantily clad hourglass figures, pink pleather, full lips, breathy voices and baby faces), but pairs the traditionally denigrated bimbo aesthetic with loudly proclaimed leftist bona fides: bimbos are “pro-choice, pro-sex work, pro-BLM” according to one of BimboTok’s figureheads and first denizens, Chrissy Chlapecka. Rolling Stone describes these bimbos as “anticapitalist,” not to mention “staunchly pro-sex work, pro-LGBTQ, pro-BLM, and anti-straight white male.” Media outlets are generally taking bimbos at their word on their progressive feminism, with i-d writing that today’s “subversive bimbo” is giving the term a new, leftist lease on life, “tak[ing] away some of the misogynistic power with which the term was originally wielded by the patriarchy.” PhD researcher Stephanie Deig calls bimbos’ “hyperfemininity” a “form of anti-capitalist critique” in VICE, and The New York Times lauds their fluency in “social justice language.” There is, obviously, a layer of irony in the performances on BimboTok, rife as they are with winks and jokes, but their ironized tone reads more like resignation than liberation. The bimbo knows what looking like a dumb blonde can get you from men who underestimate you, but even if bimbos are conning the capitalist patriarchy’s oppressors out of a few dollars from their fortunes, their strategy is still predicated on playing into sexist stereotypes, in turn entrenching them, while revealing a classically capitalist will to do whatever it takes—abandon your principles, your girls, your mind—in pursuit of accumulating capital. Chalpecka has said that “we all know that capitalism is the root of all evil, but it’s almost impossible to consume ethically in a capitalist society, so let’s stop blaming each other.” This is true, and kind, and no bimbo should be blamed for getting her bag, but I don’t know that we need to call doing so via performing misogynistic stereotypes feminist, or anti-capitalist.
Chlapecka uploaded a video titled “reclaiming this” all the way back in 2020, declaring her new identity by announcing, “people in my comments section keep calling me a bimbo, I’m just going to go with it.” Chlapecka and Fairbairn might seem dumb, they know, but they aren’t—or at least they weren’t, until they devoted themselves to the “freedom” of a “nice, clean, empty mind,” in the words of Fairbairn, the Bimbo Manifesto’s creator. In an interview with Refinery29, Chalpecka claimed that bimboism isn’t actually about rejecting intelligence, it’s about “rejecting what men specifically think intelligence is,” a rejection I wholeheartedly support. But the thing about playing dumb is that if you’re a woman, most people will believe you; that same article went on to report that “the prospect of prioritizing beauty over brains is being explored in earnest” and that “a lot of people are slowly realizing that it feels nice to have your boobs pushed up by a corset top, to put your hair up in the perfect high ponytail, simple and smooth as your brain.”
I can personally attest that corsets hurt, but I can also admit I’ve wished I could think less, because then I might hurt less. The yearning for a smooth—that is, empty—brain began with a meme, which depicted two images, side by side: a human brain, pale pink and wrinkly, the kind you’ve imagined encased in glass in a mad scientist’s laboratory, and a brain that looks like two chicken cutlets set side by side: smooth, inhuman, and ostensibly incapable of thought. Above the chicken cutlet brain are the words “my brain” with a smiling emoji, and below it the following traits: “smooth, no weinkls, cute, cant think=no sad<3.” Above the normal brain are the word “yuor brain” and below it, these attributes: “BUMPY WEIRD, GROSS WRINKLES, UGLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!, AND THINKS!=SAD!!.” The basic sentiment is: society is fucked and therefore, so is my life, and I wish I were too dumb to notice.
The meme went viral in 2020, when “overwhelmed” was an emotion oft-expressed online, and the fixity of an unequal economy, a cruel patriarchy, and violent white supremacy could seem predetermined even in moments of great change. Online, people admitted their fear that even trying to alter or abolish any one of these broken systems was futile, and they made jokes about wanting a brain incapable of recognizing this fact. Happiness seemed at worst impossible, and at best morally reprehensible, in the face of the world’s inequities.
Bimboism applies this epiphany specifically to patriarchy and the continued prevalence of white male domination despite generations of feminists’ efforts. While feminism has obviously made many gains, the evolution of modern misogyny can be demoralizing to say the least—a situation the bimbosphere’s denizens would prefer not to think about, in favor of having fun while scamming some of the misogynists out of some of their money. The thing about this approach, though, is that it involves spending a lot of that money on modifying your body to appeal to those men, an expensive and often physically painful process that is not available to all women, and one that is extremely individualistic, no matter what the BimboTokers say about teaching other women their hot girl tips. This process directs anti-patriarchal, feminist sentiment into the narrow channel of the mirror, rather than outwards, towards communal, longer-term feminist goals. The soft smiles and high-pitched giggles are admittedly alluring after the disappointments of earlier feminist movements, but the ecstasy of idiocy reveals a darker sentiment than even the whiniest, shrillest feminist ever spouted. If the only way to be both a woman and a happy person in this world is through active ignorance, averting our eyes from anything but the selfie cam, our follower count, and our Venmo balance, is this really a world worth winning in? Cracking the glass ceiling, not to mention the bell jar, might require breaking a nail, but bimbofication might break your heart.
Before bimboism was redefined by playfully brain-dead TikTokers, it was actually a niche sexual fetish. Existing under a few different monikers, bimbofication, sissy, or forced feminization porn began with the commandeering of traditional, heterosexual porn by queer users of online platforms like Tumblr. Users took GIFs and stills from straight porn and re-narrativized those scenes, reimagining them not as depictions of buxom women submitting to uber-masculine men, but as stories of men who had been forcibly “sissified,” feminized, transformed into female-looking bimbos—lipsticked against their will, shoved into tight skirts, and forced into multi-layered makeup applications—sexually submitting to masculine men. Describing the subgenre’s history, author Andrea Long Chu explains how these traditional porn visuals are reframed: “the women in these images (some cis, some trans) are then re-presented to spectators as formerly male subjects who have been feminized, or ‘sissified,’ through being forced to put on makeup, wear lingerie, and sexually submit themselves to ‘cock,’ usually (but not always) represented by ‘real men’ to whom sissies are expected to open their holes in worshipful surrender.” Sissification and bimbofication, though, aren’t just about submission and objectification, whether as ironic (BimboTok) or erotic (sissy porn) performance. They are also about aesthetic transformation; the notion of a man undergoing the trials and tribulations of a hot girl getting ready to go out.
The figures being feminized might at first fear the process, but the agony becomes erotic, even liberating—the bimbo, simultaneously abjected and fetishized, is left with no responsibility for anything but her own pleasure, and the aesthetic transformation from masculine to hyper-feminine is understood to occur intellectually as well—that is, brain matter turns to mush. Both BimboTok and the sissy porn genre are home to hypnosis videos that promise to teach viewers “techniques for scooping out intelligence,” as Long Chu puts it. She goes on, writing “sissies have selves, in other words, but these selves are simplified, emptied, dumb. The technical term for this is bimbofication.” Long before the advent of BimboTok, bimbos born on the internet were almost mythological figures, forged out of something like fanfiction. In this folklore, average men undergo gender transitions that are also functionally lobotomies. Also: a crash course in the fascist nature of feminine beauty standards. Sounds like a horror movie, but actually, it’s pretty hot—which is also the case in many horror movies where dumb women with hourglass shapes get hacked up. Bimbofication porn recognizes that achieving idealized physical femininity is violent, and it also admits that we’ve been taught to find that violence sexy, and finally, it asks, now that you know all that, wouldn’t it be nice to forget it, turn off your mind and stare into a screen?
Still, the pornographic iteration of bimbofication has, like BimboTok, been praised by the media as a manifestation of feminist sentiment. Check-Out described “bimbofication—a sexual fetish and viral meme” as “the eroticised transition from smart and reserved to air-headed and overtly sexy. The kink is controversial, but today women are undertaking the bimbofication process on their own terms, whether they’re monetising it through OnlyFans or doing it just for fun.” Where bimboism is credulously hailed by the media as leftist and feminist, Long Chu’s investigation of bimbofication porn points to a less optimistic, and perhaps truer point. What bimbos know is that the system is rigged, fucked, and harming people. In such a system, embracing the celebrated yet stigmatized bimbo identity can be a golden ticket that might be tarnished, but will still get you somewhere. As she puts it, “with knowledge comes the unwanted burden of agency; with agency, the desperation of its inevitable squandering. Knowing sucks. But sucking rules. Becoming a bimbo is your ticket out of ethics, an escape hatch in the hull of a political ship that was probably sinking anyway.” As much as its influencers insist on their progressive credentials, bimbofication seems, to me, more like a process of de-politicization than radicalization. On BimboTok, a girl reminds us, “whenever you’re thinking of the shackles of self-awareness, just think of a blank wall.”
Bimbos aren’t the only girls who are noticing that mainstream feminism’s trajectory is resembling the Titanic’s, and starting to rush the lifeboats. The right also has its female stock characters for the internet age. The most successful—in terms of follower count and media ink spilled—is the tradwife living her best #tradlife. That life consists of cooking, cleaning, raising kids, and staying sexy (working out, putting on a full face of makeup to do chores) while her husband works outside the home and pays for the family’s lifestyle. Importantly, it is the woman’s choice to engage in tradlife, an active decision to sequester herself in domestic spaces, made in the face of a disturbing, disappointing society and economy. In “Day in the Life of a Tradwife” videos, soft, serene music plays as women describe their daily routines in voiceover, and we watch them make bagged lunches for their husband and kids, send them off to work and school, complete a few cleaning tasks, do workout videos, journal, read, cook dinner, and then reunite with their families at the end of the day. Their voices are melodic, monotonous, soothing, so easy to watch on an endless loop that you might start to wonder whether it might be relaxing to live in that loop.
In other videos, tradwives throw out quips about their leisurely lifestyles. The words “So he pays all the bills?” appear on screen as a strawberry blonde woman smirks, winks, and nods. In one video, Estee Williams, one of the most-followed tradwives, frowns into the camera beneath the words “me remembering the time I felt like I had to do it all. Full time student and nanny, burnt out and unhappy.” Suddenly, she’s smiling, bobbed ringlets bouncing as she waves a serving spoon under the words “now im finally liberated from all the pressure society placed on me. #traditionalwife.”
Most tradwives are devoutly and publicly Christian and Republican, and many grew up that way, but a not insignificant proportion of online tradwives are self-proclaimed “ex-feminists” and “former” or “reformed” “extreme leftists.” In one video, a furrowed-brow brunette in a collared shirt—the type one might wear to an office job—stares down the camera as the words “Me 6 years ago a raging feminist miss independent” float above her head. In the next frame, she’s grinning widely and wearing an apron, accompanied by the words “Me now a conservative housewife.” Isa Ryan, who runs a tradwife Substack that publishes articles like “I was raised to be a progressive feminist. Here’s why I now support patriarchy” once asked her Instagram followers “are women really empowered by being expected to work outside the home and outsource their caretaking and homemaking to others?” In another tradwife’s vlog, entitled “How to Marry a High Value Man and Become a Housewife,” women get a philosophical quandary to consider. Is there a difference between submitting to a boss and submitting to a husband, and might one be more pleasant than the other? “If you think about it, you submit to your boss, who makes you clean stupid shelves at your retail job. Wouldn’t it be better if you were cleaning your own shelves? And [at home] your boss wants to sleep with you, but in a good way.”
Uncomfortable as it might be to admit for those of us who do call ourselves feminists, she’s making some points. With workplace harassment extraordinarily common and many of the jobs available to women low-wage and menial, working for a man who loves you and pays you well might start to sound pretty pleasant. But as Zoe Hu writes in Dissent, “the twist that makes tradlife a phenomenon of our times is its earnest criticism of life under capitalism,” but its next twist is foisting the blame for capitalism’s consequences off its power players’ shoulders and onto “the gloomy figure of the working woman” and her politics: feminism. A tradwife tweets “idk who needs to hear this but the feminist movement was a scam made by the government to get the other half of the population working so they double the tax intake.” Meanwhile, someone else tweets succinctly: “the left hates happy people.” Hu argues that tradwives cast feminism as a “defunct and joyless system,” and this is where bimbos and tradwives begin to blur together in the feed, to align, algorithmically and existentially. Joyless is the operative word, one that links bimbos and tradwives in their pursuit of pleasure, no matter how much reality it requires you to ignore, or how much oppression, disrespect, and dehumanization it requires you to endure. Feminism becomes a scapegoat for capitalism’s ills, while marriage starts to look like a safe haven. But that romanticized matrimony is a mirage—financial security is not financial independence, and tradwives certainly don’t have workplace protections—and mirages are much easier to believe in when your brain is atrophying. Long Chu: “pleasure fills the gap knowledge leaves behind.”
In making pleasure their ultimate goal, bimbos and tradwives reveal the individualism obscured by their stances of supposed feminist solidarity (bimbos) and traditional community (tradwives). Becoming a bimbo or becoming a tradwife are both intensely private pursuits, individual journeys that require spending a lot of money and a lot of time alone engaging in aesthetic “self-improvement.” Their definitions of pleasure are predicated on property. The bimbo counts her cash, shows off her surgical enhancements, and the tradwife flaunts her well-appointed home, gleaming appliances and workout equipment. In both cases, hidden beneath their claims to anti-capitalism is an indelible commitment to capital. While the bimbo plays sexy and dumb in a ploy to get horny men to pay for her lifestyle, the trad wife plays subservient domestic angel to get another variation on the same man to pay for her house. In both cases, capital accumulation is the goal, worth abandoning both principles and other women for—these are solitary (anti)heroine’s journeys. Almost all BimboTok and tradwife videos feature only one figure in the camera’s sightline. Pleasure, facilitated by purchases, replaces any fuzzy feelings fostered by a community of fellow women for both bimbos and tradwives, and it’s this will to ownership that unites them. Their retreat into an individualistic, fatalistic mindset might help individuals make it through patriarchy and capitalism, but it does nothing to make life less miserable for women as a class.
While tradwives are alone at home, bimbos are stuck in the equally lonely TikTok frame. Griffin Maxwell Brooks, a self-proclaimed bxmbo, struts around a lake house, as people pretending to be their domestic staff drape them in fur and serve them drinks. In this TikTok, Brooks explains that the bxmbo has “no gender, no race, no class or ability,” but in the next video, they offer a comic warning: “To be a bimbo, one must let go of their former… relationships to adopt a gaudy yet lonely lifestyle.” If you watch these videos long enough, you might start to see something mournful in the vacant stares, hear a plaintive note in the narration of a meal prep video.
Still, ostensibly left-leaning observers of both the bimbo and the tradwife—who are starting to look like long-lost, estranged sisters—are feeling a little jealous, and a little seen. In Cosmopolitan, a self-described feminist, leftist reporter attends a Christian tradlife conference and listens to a sermon about letting go of the desire to control your own and society’s trajectories, and it “rings a bell of defeat I feel in my core. I want to keep fighting the good fight, but systemic ills like sexism and racism feel too big to take on.” The girls at this conference seem happy taking their selfies, leaving their and the world’s futures in the hands of big strong men, god and their husbands. The reporter goes on, admitting the pitch she’s listening to is “regressive” but calling it “uncomfortably comfortable,” and admitting that “many of us seem to be opting in on passive self-preservation.” Passive self-preservation might sound like the opposite of the bimbo’s adamant pursuit of pleasure, but perhaps they’re two ends of a horseshoe, and giving up on change opens a door to a palace of pleasure, one you can only enjoy by emptying your head, avoiding responsibility by claiming not to be intellectually present. If the girlboss wanted it all, the bimbo and the tradwife want nothing to do with any of it. The self-harm and isolation this strategy requires would seem to pose a barrier to the pleasure ostensibly on offer, which is where the faux-idiocy and lobotomy fantasies come in.
This might be an expression of what political science professor Robyn Marasco, via Simone de Beauvoir, calls “womanly nihilism,” an existential stance that recognizes misogynistic oppression, judges it intractable, and adopts one of the following self-destructive forms of self-actualization as a survival tactic: “narcissism, love, [or] mysticism—each a ‘justification’ for women’s situation that reinforces their oppression.” She quotes de Beauvoir explaining that the narcissist, the woman in love, and the mystic all attempt “to convert a prison into a heaven of glory,” a project putting artifice ahead of change. The high of the viral video, the “love” of a domineering, demanding husband or a legion of fans, the in-the-next-life nihilism of mysticism. These all offer succor, pleasure predicated on embodying attributes—superficial, emotional, unrealistic—that earn one woman praise while justifying women’s oppression as a group, so one tradwife’s house, one bimbo’s Venmo account, become down payments on a legion of other women’s continued immiseration.
And no one is safe, even ensconced in the home or the feed. Statistically, your husband might hit you, and your followers might turn on you. We know marriage is one of the most dangerous institutions a woman can enter: in the US, almost three women are killed by an intimate partner every single day. Encouraging women to find financial caretakers is often also a demand that they give up their independence, and in some situations, their safety. When the world outside is designed to diminish you, social media, where you can enlarge and replicate an edited version of your life, might offer a woman who feels undervalued, misunderstood, and controlled by external forces the opportunity to “create a world under her complete control,” as Marasco writes. She was writing about mirrors, not social media, but we can all see the similarities in that reflection. As the scholar Catherine Rottenberg has said, speaking about tradwives, “against a world that feels completely out of control, defining strict gender roles might feel empowering for some women.”
Both of these Gen Z figures appear to offer burnt out millennial girlbosses a life hack: don’t exhaust yourself climbing the corporate ladder, let the guy who was already gliding to the C-suite in a hidden elevator burn his cash getting your attention. As a post titled “how to be a bimbo 101” advises: “blackmail and manipulate old trump sugar daddies.” So the bimbo ethic is leftist in an individualistic, vigilante sense: the patriarchy has been pulling off a long con for centuries, so let’s get some girls, gays, and theys in on the game, and hopefully leave some straight men broke and blue-balled. But while such close-range warfare might be cathartic, it also keeps the corrupt system functioning smoothly, in fact reinforcing tropes used to marginalize women as a group, even if it allows a few individual women to get rich.
The money a rich man chooses to spend on his sugar baby is likely not making a dent in his 401K, and wealth accrued based on one’s physical appearance isn’t necessarily reliable in the long term. It is money that can easily be re-routed to the girl next in line. Meanwhile, the very fact of it changing hands in this exchange entrenches the sexist stereotypes—of women as superficial, unintelligent—historically weaponized to keep women underpaid and underemployed. Similarly, while tradwives might declare a desire to spread their domestic gospel to other women, save their sisters from lives of drudgery by inducting them into fiscally comfortable at-home labor, their performance of happy housewifery actually drapes a glittering filter over an economic system that requires women to do unpaid domestic labor while making it all but impossible for most young couples to live comfortably off of one person’s income. Amid all this, the decision to become a bimbo or a tradwife starts to seem less like an empowered choice and more like a risk avoidance strategy, one worth adopting despite its arduousness, and the fact that it requires subsuming your identity and desires, not to mention abandoning those women who can’t accede to its demands. Yet the bimbo and tradwife’s popularity is being read as proof that these lifestyles are inherently alluring to women, when it could just as easily be understood as evidence of how dangerous today’s economic landscape is for us. The media elevating these lifestyles as feminist is hard to read as anything other than capitalist propaganda with a girly twist, a fresh Instagram filter on the fast-fading American dream.
BimboTok insists that hotness is a mindset rather than a body type. New age bimbos might pair hyper-feminine clothing and makeup with traditionally maligned bimbo characteristics, especially the aforementioned airhead energy, but they consistently insist that unlike the derided bimbos of yore, today’s bimbos don’t conform to the cisgender, white, thin and buxom body standard traditionally associated with the trope, from Marilyn Monroe to Anna Nicole Smith. Bimbofication, with its attachment to gender stereotypes, garners much of its ostensible leftist cred from its promise to expand access to bimbodom to racial and gender identities not previously included in it. Mae Ultra, a queer Asian woman, described her induction into BimboTok in just these terms, telling a journalist “I joined bimbo TikTok on a mission to prove that someone like me—a queer Asian woman—can too become a hot and dumb bitch! I love the smooth-brained bliss and absurdity of it all. I simply woke up one morning with five brain cells left in my brain and an existential crisis and decided that’s what I wanted to become: HOT!”
Bunny the Bimbo, whose TikTok bio includes a rainbow flag emoji and reads “you’ve found fat bimbo tiktok bb” told Check-Out that bimbohood is “about confidence and unapologetically loving yourself and your body,” no matter its size or shape. Across the virtual bimbosphere, you’ll find self-proclaimed bimbos of a variety of races, sizes, and gender identities, (though of course, women who reject femininity still have no place here). But you’ll find a lot of self-identified bimbos who fit that old mold, because that mold is often the one men are most willing to pay the largest amount of money to see, and so many more aspiring bimbos are investing huge amounts of money into surgically altering their bodies to approximate it. Along with their embrace of diversity, new age bimbos are also proudly #plasticpositive, in favor of all bimbos’ right to choose exactly how they want their body to look, which often ends up somewhere between Smith and Pamela Anderson. Scroll through the corners of BimboTok devoted to “bimbofication transformations,” and you’ll see blondes showing off breast implants alongside captions like “Trying to explain to people why I want to look like a blow up doll” and an array of videos tagged #lipfiller.
Alicia Amira has been on a meticulously documented, extremely expensive, and highly marketable bimbofication journey for years now. On Twitter, where she has over 150,000 followers, her bio declares her the “founder of the bimbo movement.” She runs a company that creates bimbo-inspired clothing (featuring tees with slogans like “sexy and dumb makes daddy cum”), as well as a content platform designed for “bimbos & bimbo fans.” She is also in the top half percent of most-followed creators on OnlyFans, where she creates bimbo fetish content. In 2017, she was featured on an episode of the plastic-surgery-gone-wrong reality show Botched. Sitting across from two white, male plastic surgeons for her consultation, Amira wears pale pink separates, hot pink acrylic nails, and a rhinestone encrusted collar as she tells the doctors she’s just begun her bimbofication journey. The doctors repeat the word slowly, sounding it out, incredulous. “When we hear the word bimbo,” one of the doctors says, “we think of someone who is just very stupid.” Alicia—who has already had multiple surgeries, including a breast augmentation that made her a J cup—replies quickly, confident: “I don’t want to be an airhead, but basically what it is is to look like a male fantasy… a blow up doll look.” She proceeds to outline her procedure wish list: Brazilian Butt Lift, rib removal to create an “internal corset,” and a second breast augmentation.
On Reddit, there is a forum called r/bimboficationjourney, where anyone who is “curious about becoming a mindless bimbo fuckdoll,” or anyone who already is one, is encouraged to “show off your bimbofication journey and share it with a community that will appreciate and encourage you.” Surgical journeys like Amira’s are recounted in detail, and many of the posts mention the men in these aspiring bimbos’ lives, and the procedures undergone to please partners. In that Botched episode, Alicia comes to her consultation with her boyfriend. “I started my bimbofication 1 year ago for the sake of my husband. It’s still a long way off, but I’m trying,” writes one woman in an emblematic Reddit post, including before and after pictures. There are also posts written by husbands themselves, with titles like “my wife’s bimbofication pt 2,” a post in which a man describes booking his wife’s lip filler appointment and breast implant consultation, and claims “she loves it when I call her my bimbo slut.” In the comments, men compare stats, the ccs of silicone their wives have implanted in their bodies or milligrams of filler injected into their lips. I believe that many self-proclaimed bimbos do embark on their surgical journeys to fit their own aesthetic standards (“I don’t do this for the misogynistic male gaze, I do this for my gaze”), but I also worry that many more people than the adulatory articles want to admit might be altering their bodies for darker, less feminist reasons than “revers[ing] the fetishisation of femininity,” as Rolling Stone quoted one woman putting it. The fact that so many men appear to be the agentative parties in their wives’ transformations is more reminiscent of what one might expect from tradwifery, where women are instructed to “upkeep your beauty” because “your husband will benefit.” Once again, we end up at two ends of a horseshoe, a blinking blonde balancing on either side.
Around the same time I started seeing articles about BimboTok and tradwives, I saw an article exploring the subreddit r/howtobehot. There, women gather virtually to discuss all things beautifying, from makeup to plastic surgery to diets, with the shared understanding that “beauty is objective.” The ethos is: while “beauty does not define your worth,” why not embark on a journey to become “more conventionally attractive in order to gain benefits from society,” a rhetorical pose struck by both tradwives, with their makeup tutorials, and bimbos, with their exhortations to look hot and manipulate men. There are posts on the Feminine Beauty Ideal, outlining exactly what you’re expecting: thin, blonde, buxom, symmetrical—an ideal that most tradwives fit, as do many bimbos, often after multiple surgeries. In The Cut article that originally led me to the Reddit forum, one Redditor explains that her body is her “avatar in the game of life” so “it’s not that deep if I customize it,” an insistence on superficiality at the expense of analysis that is reminiscent of the bimbo’s politic of ignorant bliss.
It starts to get deep, however, when you delve into this community’s roots, as a spinoff of another reddit forum: r/vindicta, a space for involuntarily celibate women, who decided to use some of the male incel community’s (blatantly racist and misogynistic) terminology for their own ends, most relevantly here the phrase looksmaxxing, which is used in r/vindicta, incel forums, and r/howtobehot. Slang for the endeavor of “maximizing” one’s looks, i.e. bringing those looks into alignment with the prevailing beauty standard, which can involve “modifying your appearance to appear more European.” On looksmaaxxing threads in both r/vindicta and r/howtobehot, “looks theory” and “scientific studies” are cited often, terminology used to attach “objective,” “scientific” cred to the Eurocentric beauty standard. This is not a new trick; eugenics was once an entire scientific field.
Looksmaxxing is divided into hard and soft tactics, with hard meaning surgical. While some r/howtobehot devotees feel like they are reaping the benefits of looksmaxxing, others find their lives derailed by their pursuit of the Hard Glow Up. Filler, included on many users’ looksmaxxing to-do lists and often mentioned on BimboTok, became an incredibly popular cosmetic procedure in the last decade. In 2020, reports emerged of filler migrating around people’s faces a few years after injection, causing aesthetic deformities and pain, and led to the rise of filler dissolving procedures, which have their own side effects. In one Reddit forum devoted to filler-gone-wrong stories, people write about being “not only facially damaged but sick on an autoimmune level” after receiving filler dissolver. People try to help others avoid their fate: “just making a PSA that filler dissolver has ruined my life.”
Even the most devoted members of r/howtobehot admit it: “looksmaxxing is exhausting and demoralizing,” they just think getting to the finish line might be worth it, never mind that the finish line keeps receding into the distance. The process also gets harder and more expensive as one ages, a bimbo’s body is not one that sags, wrinkles, has thin lips or an aching back from breast implants. The process can be physically painful and lead to addiction; there are multiple threads about plastic surgery addiction on these forums. Looksmaxxing also, expectedly, leans into disordered eating, with threads dedicated to “glow foods vs. no foods,” restrictive practices, and extreme diets. The surgeries themselves can also kill; and the people who die on the table are usually the most marginalized, often poor people who are getting cheaper, less safe surgeries. There are alarming racial disparities in plastic surgery death rates. Take the Brazilian Butt Lift, which is the plastic surgery that is both undergone most often by Black women, and the plastic surgery with the highest death rate.
On BimboTok, supporting a woman’s right to make surgical adjustments to her body is a core ethical commitment. “Do you support all women, regardless of their job title, or if they’ve had plastic surgery or body modifications?” asks one self-identified bimbo quoted in VICE, who also told Refinery29 that she plans to become a cosmetic injector. In their reporting, VICE came to the conclusion that “you have to love yourself to be a bimbo, and if you don’t quite love yourself yet, you need to do whatever it takes to reach that point,” begging the question of whether they mean morning affirmations or surgical alterations. BimboTokers are not alone in their embrace of surgery, despite its risks. Self-proclaimed feminist celebrities have made arguments for the empowering effects of surgery in recent years, as have women’s magazines: In Style claimed that “making the conscious choice to have plastic surgery can be a feminist one” and Glamour insisted that “You CAN have plastic surgery and still be a feminist.”
I’m sure that those two things are possible, and you might be a girl who can do both, just as one can easily spend years pinballing between the dictates of feminism and the commandments of femininity. But I worry the desire to call these surgeries feminist is its own form of misogyny, one that reframes self-harm as self-love and maintains the misogynistic, racist beauty standard most of these surgeries are designed to bring bodies closer to. The desperation to cast dangerous, extraordinarily expensive surgical body modification as feminist in fact strikes me as straightforward misogyny, bimbofied. If the media is this eager to cast potentially life-threatening surgeries undergone to approach a misogynistic beauty standard as feminist, what’s stopping them from reframing diets, or even disordered eating, as empowering life hacks? I worry that the line between #plasticpositive and #proana (an abbreviation of pro-anorexia) is blurrier than we’d like to admit. A woman devoted to looksmaxxing reminds her fellow women that they are doing this to get ahead, not because their original bodies aren’t worthy: “you’ve been taught to hate yourself by selfish people who think the world exists to please their eyes. Do you really want to see yourself the same way? As something devoted to pleasing people who don’t care about you?… You deserve to be understood, and you deserve to be loved.” This post is heartbreaking; its writer wants women embarking on looksmaxxing to love themselves through this risky, tiring, endless process, to love the bodies she nevertheless wants them to say goodbye to, and to replace with ones that might be pleasing to the people who taught them to hate themselves. But if more and more women buy in to these practices, from cosmetic surgery to acting stupid, how will that begin to affect the treatment of women who do not, or cannot conform?
This is not to say that bimbofication is not its own struggle; writing about the labor of the “contemporary pin-up” in an essay on Pamela Anderson, Philippa Snow points out that she must be a “gifted illusionist:” less a “dove sequestered in the sleeve of a magician than a swan atop a lake: effortlessly lovely on the surface, furiously treading water underneath.” A pin-up who periodically bucked this illusion is Marilyn Monroe, of whom the scholar Jacqueline Rose has written that “one of her great gifts is to distill suffering into a face and body meant to signify pleasure and nothing else. Just doing that much is already to throw a spanner into the cultural works.” New age bimbos and #tradwives do just the opposite of this, molding their faces and bodies, at great personal risk and high financial cost, into something signifying pleasure and nothing else, in pursuit of pleasure and nothing else. Instead of throwing a wrench into the cultural works, they’re greasing the engine. What they seem to have forgotten is that this American machine was built to crush us.
The writer Jessica DeFino has suggested that the phrase “medical gaze,” originally coined by Michel Foucault, might serve as an uber-contemporary answer to the “male gaze.” The medical gaze accompanies the reframing of plastic surgery, skincare, and diets as “scientific” modes of empowering self-care. It is the gaze of the plastic surgeon or the dermatologist-cum-skincare mogul, the gaze of a scientific professional instead of a random dude, a gaze that lets us pretend we’re doing this for science and ourselves, not men. The term is clarifying, but with random dudes posting “studies” on “scientific” beauty on incel forums, the vast majority of plastic surgeons men, and the vast majority of people spending their money on these surgeries women—92% of American plastic surgery patients are women, at last count—is there a difference, when the male gaze was always racist and misogynistic, and the medical one enacts the same misogyny in morse code, translating its language into formulas, numbers, and profit?
I’m not arguing against anyone’s right to pursue plastic surgery if they want it, but I am asking why we are so eager to call these surgeries—which can go wrong, lead to long-term complications, and even when undergone without complications, still drive people into debt and surgery addiction—feminist? I’m not condemning anyone whose life is made easier by plastic surgery, just as I’m not condemning new age bimbos for dressing for the male gaze, or anyone trying to survive an unsurvivable economy by becoming a different version of herself for a man, but I am asking us to admit that many of these things require us to betray our feminism, not put it into practice. I’m asking whether the pursuit of repeated plastic surgeries might not simply be both a coping mechanism and a mode of self-harm, and whether we can wish for a world where women are not socially and economically punished for not fitting beauty standards, one where such surgeries don’t feel necessary to anyone without shaming women who engage in them in the world we’re living in.
A plastic surgeon famous on TikTok refers to his patients—whose surgeries he often films, posts, and jovially narrates over the whirring of a surgical drill, while they bleed and he rearranges their guts—as “beauty warriors.” Watching the videos, in which he also describes the surgeries he thinks they should get next, the flaws he hasn’t yet sold them on fixing, while they lie unconscious and cut open, I see what he means. They do look like they’ve been in a war, their bodies appear direly injured and in need of frantic life-saving care. Does he mean that they’ve been fighting themselves, or the man paying for this surgery, or the first person who called them fat, or the patient who lay on this table last? If he sounds victorious, it’s because he’s the one winning, and he doesn’t have to bleed for it.
There is one woman both bimbos and tradwives idolize, a beautiful blonde derided as a bimbo throughout her life, despite begging the public to take her intellect seriously, a wife who refused to play the traditionally feminine role in her marriages. She wasn’t interested in reductive titles, yet both groups claim her as one of their own, creating TikTok videos set to the soundtrack of her sultry voice, or featuring slideshows of her pinup pictures, their own outfits and hairdos inspired by her iconic looks. There are videos within both the #bimbo and #tradwife tags set to the same audio, a line from one of this woman’s most famous films: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Marilyn Monroe’s voice lilts out of my iPhone speaker, tinny but tender, buoyant with suppressed laughter. “If a girl is spending all her time worrying about the money she doesn’t have, how’s she supposed to have any time for being in love?” In the context of the film, Marilyn’s character is explaining why it’s smart to date rich men to a friend who claims not to care about a romantic interest’s financial status. According to Marilyn’s character, if a girl is too busy agonizing over her own finances, she can’t throw herself, body and soul, into love. This is true, and as good an argument for socialism as it is for gold digging. But on BimboTok, the sound is utilized sarcastically, and to ostensibly feminist effect: get a man to pay your bills, and you can actually skip falling in love with him, and fall in love with yourself instead. Used by tradwives, it’s meant to reinforce conservative gender roles: the man should be breadwinning, and the woman should be setting the supportive, emotional tenor of the relationship.
Marilyn herself would probably have hated both takes; she was a staunch proponent of women’s financial independence, which she achieved herself while also campaigning for better pay for those working alongside her, and leaving unhappy marriages even when they might have been financially beneficial. Her insistence on financial independence was decidedly feminist—she knew that the financial support of a male partner is as fickle as his desire, and she believed that a woman could only pursue her own happiness if her identity was not constrained by her husband’s control, or his conceptions of her femininity. Critic Diana Trilling called her economic independence one of her core “expressions of strength.” Her politics, which the CIA agents who spied on her called “very positively and concisely leftist,” would not have aligned with those of either today’s bimbos or today’s tradwives; she considered intelligence, of the very bookish, “academic” kind today’s bimbos deem a holdover of patriarchy, one of her greatest accomplishments. She was known to show up to interviews lugging heavy tomes of Freudian theory, was famously photographed reading Joyce and McCullers, her long legs kicked up and her gaze far from blank, laser-focused on someone else’s words instead of her reflection. Aware of the way she was depicted by the press as a blonde bimbo, she begged one of her final interviewers, “please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.”
Trilling, writing about that heart-wrenching and, in the end, rejected, request, mourns the fact that “the public that loved her” still couldn’t see “a sex idol who read books” as anything but a joke. This is our failure, one I fear we’re recreating every time we retweet a girl wishing for her brain to be cut out of her head so she can reap the rewards of her hot body guilt-free. The new age bimbos might be having a great time, but if Marilyn’s legacy tells us anything, that kind of high doesn’t last, and all that laughter might be drowning out someone else’s screams. If some of us choose to be dehumanized by men, how do we ensure that they don’t then feel more empowered than they already do to dehumanize all women? The roles Marilyn wanted weren’t ones like she played in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; her dream was to play Grushenka, the famously fiery, independent female character at the center of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. She wanted to learn, and educate others, to inform the “tricked and manipulated masses, as she saw them,” according to one for her former husbands, about the cruel, capitalist systems controlling their world. Rose writes about Marilyn in her book Women in Dark Times, and Marilyn certainly was, and we certainly are, in dark times these days. But I wonder if today’s e-feminists are bringing a flashlight into the tunnel or simply blinding themselves, staring into the light of the selfie cam.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the desire to avert our eyes from this society and numb out in the infinite scroll instead, but even the most-followed bimbos and tradwives eventually have to leave their glam rooms and renovated kitchens. In the end, these are lifestyle accounts, not career paths or political identities, and the media’s inclination to elevate them as the future of feminism is a simple case of pinkwashing, a hot pink coat of nail polish hardened over an otherwise grayscale bootstraps myth. Putting bimbos and tradwives on a pedestal isn’t just philosophically depressing, it’s also materially worrying for women—both roles pit women against each other in a contest to win financial support from a narrow subset of men—channeling our material dissatisfaction with the current system towards internecine competition, rather than towards organizing for a system where we could all find stability without relying on our looks or ability to embody a domesticated stereotype.
For too long, our location in the heterosexual romantic matrix has felt like it determined our life circumstances. But it doesn’t have to, and if we turn our gazes towards each other instead of our selfie cams, I think we might find alternative ways to survive, and even thrive, together. Less a genuinely capitalistic ethic, and more a survival tactic under shitty circumstances, bimbodom and tradwifehood might be coping mechanisms, but their portrayal in much of the media puts a rosy filter on a cruel capitalist system all the same. Even the most successful are embracing a strategy that is also a ticking time bomb: both bimbos and tradwives are trapped in a patriarchal economic system, and both groups seem to believe that looking like a snack is the easiest route to ending up in a well-appointed kitchen. The thing about these metaphors, though, is that the same old white men are the ones eating, and they’ve always wanted more than just a bite.
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