You might have spotted this in the news this morning. An online role-playing game ‘Miss Bimbo‘ (incidentally the site has been unaccessible all day, hopefully the volume of hits has brought the site to a halt) has raised concern with parents’ groups. In case you weren’t up with the latest online games popular with 9-16 year old girls, the sites front page explains the purpose of the game:
Become the hottest, coolest most famous bimbo ever !
Welcome to Miss Bimbo. Enter the exciting world of the first ever, virtual fashion game !
Become the most famous, beautiful, sought after bimbo across the globe!
- Find your own cool place to live.
- Find a fun job to pay for your needs and all the clothes a Bimbo could possibly want.
- Shop for the latest fashions and become the trendsetting bimbo in town !
- Become a socialite and skyrocket to the top of fame and popularity.
- Date that famous hottie you’ve had your eye on and show the Bimbo world the social starlet you are !
- Even resort to meds or plastic surgery. Stop at nothing to become the reigning bimbo !
- Tackle your 104 tasks as quick as possible to become the rising star bimbo !!
Are you ready to become the hottest of hot Bimbos !?!
Apart from the crimes against exclamation use, what could be so bad about that? Well let’s lift a quote from the Guardian website:
“The aim of the Miss Bimbo beauty contest game, which was launched in Britain last month, is to become the “hottest, coolest, most famous bimbo in the whole world”, and contestants who compete against each other are told to “stop at nothing”, even “meds or plastic surgery”, to ensure their dolls win.
Children are given a naked virtual character to look after. They compete against other players to earn “bimbo” dollars so they can dress her in sexy outfits and take her clubbing. They are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game’s clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills.
Although it is free to play, when the contestants run out of virtual cash they have to send text messages costing £1.50 each or use PayPal to top up their accounts.”
From CNN, apparently the site advises that:
“Bimbo dollars is ‘the cabbage,’ ‘bread,’ the ‘mula’ you’ll need to buy nice things and to get by in bimbo world. To earn some bimbo cash you will have to (gasp) work or find a boyfriend to be your sugar daddy and hook you up with a phat expense account”
So. 9-16 year old girls, the site’s largest demographic, are playing a game to hook up with ’sugar daddies’ to finance their lifestyle, dye their hair, indulge in eating -disorder-like behaviour (diet pills do not a happy relationship with food, and your body, make) and have invasive and dangerous breast augmentation surgery to ‘become the hottest of hot bimbos!!!(!)’
I could be enraged by this. OK, I am. But what saddens me most is how I am not surprised. Young girls grow up with an onslaught of images of women who are airbrushed, painted and dieted to unattainable forms of ‘beauty’ (beauty defined by a cosmetics, fashion and diet industry who profit from us all hating ourselves because, in our desperation, we buy their snake oil hoping it will be the magic elixir that makes us look how these industries are telling us to look) and watching ‘role models’ like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie live off men’s money (whether it’s their father’s or partner’s money it’s immaterial, they are not earning the money themselves nor do they see a need to be independent financially), diet themselves into skeletons and live entirely vacuous lives. Where are the intelligent, independent female role models? And when they do dare to pop up, where is the press championing them rather than discussing their clothes/cleavage/gender?
What do we expect? We exist in a culture that is so noxious to growing minds (any minds really, but growing minds especially) that it’s a wonder any girls grow up vaguely mentally stable at all. The cult of celebrity, especially the cult of skinny, dim workshy female celebrities, only reinforces that being a ‘bimbo’ is the way to go is you want success. And by success we mean having the BMI of a starving African, enough cash to wear a different shade of UGG boot everyday and appearing on TV as a ‘reality tv star’ earning enough kudos to open the odd supermarket and eventually die young of a cocaine overdose.
Incidentally, the site’s owner said:
“It is not a bad influence for young children. They learn to take care of their bimbos. The missions and goals are morally sound and teach children about the real world.” He added: “The breast operations are just one part of the game and we are not encouraging young girls to have them, just reflecting real life.”
‘Morally sound’? Teaching young girls that the only reason they exist is to fit a ridiculous stereotype, avoid work, rely on men financially (essentially prostituting themselves), and the the route to success is through extreme dieting, dangerous surgery and being a ‘bimbo’?
Not morally sound, but it certainly prepares girls for the real world. 9-16 year olds will not see this game as a warning, a joke, a tongue-in-cheek look at society, they’ll see it as normal. It’s part of the many many messages sent to girls each day that dumb is good and skinny and dumb is even better.
And just because it reflects the ‘real world’, that doesn’t make it OK to perpetuate these stereotypes. How convenient that the creator is male, and sees no harm in this pink (of course! pink!) site reinforcing gender stereotypes and using a derogatory term ‘bimbo’ to sell his misogynist wares to unsuspecting 10 year olds.
Fucker.
