Three women girlsplain the resurgence of the bimbo

The "bimbo" archetype has been showing up a lot lately, whether it's on TikTok or in movies like Barbie and Mean Girls: The Musical — but for reasons you might not expect.

Host Elamin Abdelmahmoud chats with culture writers Rayne Fisher-Quann, Rebecca Jennings and Andrea Werhun about why people are self-identifying as bimbos, and whether you can really reclaim an identity intended to disempower you.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Rebecca, can you talk about the satire in this and why are people are putting "girl" in front of anything? This is not a girl-question; this is just a regular question.

Rebecca: Oh, OK. This is my girl-answer. For the past few years, people online have coined all these terms like "girl dinner," "girl math," [and] "hot girl walks." There are certain aesthetics like "clean girl," "VSCO girl," "strawberry girl," whatever. These things are both jokes where this is an expression of what one girl does, and … it's this way to connect with other women over the internet. But it's also a joke because these are obviously not real things — and they're not exclusive to girls or women or whatever. There's another irony in that most of the people that are coining these terms are probably in their 20s and 30s. They're not girls; they're women. But there's a reason why we don't say "woman dinner" or "woman math," because when you think about woman dinner, you think of this tired mom who's eating the scraps off her kids plates and being annoyed that her husband isn't doing the dishes. That's what we're told that womanhood is, and that's not really appealing to a lot of us.

Margot Robbie and Taylor Swift, the girls of our era — they're both 30-something-year-old women. But there's a reason why we claim the girl name, because in our culture this idea of girlhood is so fetishized, because girls have this whole world available to them. Women have closed off those doors. Those doors are now their kids and husbands or their career. And also, society despises women. We still root for girls. There's an idea where you look at a "girl" and you're like, "She could be anything!" Whereas a woman is just a woman. And there's this chance that you're still figuring yourself out as a girl. I think a lot of women who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, who don't have these classical markers of womanhood — a husband, a kid, a really important job or a house — they still identify more with stories that are told about girls, because girls have options and they have uncertain futures, whereas a woman's future is kind of laid out for her. I think that's why we really desire stories about girls, but what we're really looking for are stories about women who have the opportunities presented by girlhood.

Elamin: Andrea, as someone who is not particularly engaged in Girl TikTok or bimbofication TikTok, you've been self-identifying as a bimbo for a long time before it was a trend. What is missing from this mainstream conversation about bimboism?

Andrea: I think what's missing is an understanding that there is an erogenous zone between objectification and subjectification — that there can be something erotic in making oneself an object and being perceived as hot and sexy, while at the same time craving to be a subject who is understood and treated like a human being who is worthy of respect, dignity and love. I think typical depictions of the bimbo, say from the '90s and the 2000s, often feature these beautiful, buxom, sexy women who inevitably are punished for their sexuality. I think the bimbo as a beautiful person who isn't punished — we haven't seen that.

I think about Stormy Daniels, for instance. I see her as a bimbo hero because she's sexy. She's a sex worker. She's out there. She does not have sexual shame. And so someone like Donald Trump can be the king of misogynists and hurl every single insult he can at her, but it's like she's Teflon because she's a bimbo without sexual shame. That is hero stuff. I would aspire to be that kind of a person, that kind of a bimbo who can be impervious to punishment because she has no sexual shame.

Elamin: Rayne, last word to you on all of this. We've talked about the way that bimbo feminists on TikTok are reclaiming the word as a rejection of girlboss feminism and appealing to the patriarchy. It's worth asking, is that rejection working?

Rayne: I have very complicated feelings about this. I think, as Rebecca said, the fundamental thing that some people don't understand about GirlTok and bimboism and girl math and girl dinner is that these things are jokes. A lot of the time I think it's women joking about the way that men view us. It's us kind of playing with these characters that are assigned to us without our consent…. These are jokes that I've always made with my friends. But sometimes, especially recently, I kind of think to myself: whose joke is this? I struggle with the feeling that these jokes that women are idiots and we don't know how to make dinner for ourselves and we don't know how to do math — we're laughing at it because these jokes exist, but those aren't really our jokes. Those are men's jokes, and those are jokes that they make at our expense. And I think on the internet there is a context collapse. There are jokes that when I make them in a room with all of my friends, we all know that we're smart and intelligent women, and we all know that we're self-sufficient, and we know that we're feminists. We are aware of all of the context of how these jokes are playing with these roles and these experiences. On the internet, it's not so. On the internet, it's to such a wide audience where that context doesn't exist, and it's where men can see it, and where young girls can see it — young girls who haven't reckoned with these things. I think that makes it really, really complicated.

Something that I think about a lot is that I have never dressed more femininely, in more of a bimbo archetype way than when I was studying math and physics at university. I think a fundamental part of the bimbo movement is that there's something fundamentally debasing about begging for respect. And when you are a woman who tries to capitulate to this male standard of respectability, when you're trying to prove that you are smart in the way that men are smart, it feels embarrassing. It feels like you're begging on your knees for men to see you like a person. And I think there's something about dressing really femininely, where it's kind of like, screw you. I don't care about your respect. The last thing I would say is that I dress very feminine, in a way where I wanted to kind of spite these men for looking down on me. But then I also grappled with these questions where, if the form of liberation I'm being given is profit for a makeup company that makes its business off of women's insecurities, can't there be a better form of liberation than that? Is that all the liberation I'm offered?

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Nikky Manfredi.