Revenge of the bimbo |Illustrated

Revenge of the bimbo

Too free, too flashy, too everything ... The figure of the bimbo has long suffered from a painful stigma, punishing her to assume her body and her sexuality.Under the leadership of young contemporary feminists, she returns to assert her hyper-firmity, playing stereotypes.Decryption.

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Her name is Chrissy Chlapecka, lives in Chicago and has just celebrated her 20th anniversary.She also has a collection of ultra-adjusted tops decorated with hearts, lace, glitter, which lets her chest twirl.Its makeup is outraged, its poses voluntarily handled.In one of her latest videos, named "La Bimbo at the beach", she is in mini-bikini and minauade: "Hi, it's Chrissy.You might think I'm just exciting and you're right.But the bimbo knows many other things, as capitalism is the root of evil. "

A break, before chaining, maliciously showing your curves: "Being as canon is not that difficult.All you have to do is trample on homophobic and republicans!Join me in the Bimbo adventure.And stop worrying about what ugly people think. ”Chrissy has 230,000 subscribers on her Instagram account and 480,000 on Tiktok, where she has become the leader of a new current which carries the nude the aesthetic codes of the bimbo, this figure formerly ashamed for its hunting outfits.

In the range of definitions that are rampant here and there, the bimbo always designates a "luscious and sexy young woman, often superficial", "with provocative femininity", "generally characterized by juvenile, narcissistic behavior", a "sexy gourd».In short, everything in the body and nothing in the head, according to the misogynistic ideal ...

But in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Chrissy and his faithful just entered adulthood decided to rehabilitate the bimbo, to demonstrate its highly subversive function.And on the bimbeotok, the new bimbo sphere of the Tiktok social network, inclusion is the only watchword since everyone can become a bimbo, like Griffin Maxwell Brooks, 19 -year -old aerospace engineering atThe Princeton University, which poses as a wardrobe and compensated throbes, and recently affirmed in an American media: “The modern aesthetic of the bimbo is a state of mind.I want to dress as I want, and look sexy, and not meet your expectations. "

Stephanie Deig, doctoral student in feminist philosophy and gender studies at the University of Lucerne, studies the radical discourse of the community. "For these bimbos, hyper-firmity is a performance game that makes it possible to reverse gender expectations," she summarizes. The bimbo has a long history that some bring back to Hollywood, with the emergence of Starlettes like Marilyn Monroe. But the stereotype of the stupid blonde has really become a current at the dawn of the 2000s, in many media, both in a critical and non -critical way. You had personalities like Anna Nicole Smith who embodied this bimbo aesthetic, to the point of making it a performance. Recently, the current took a more critical and political feminist turning point, particularly on Tiktok, where the bimbo becomes a way to question many things: the male look, the way in which the bimbo movement was very white so far, Before people of color take it, like Cardi B ... The bimbo becomes a global and inclusive figure which poses many interesting challenges. ”

The bimbo returns triumphantly at the time of a large mea culpa vis-à-vis those that have long been punished to express their sexual desire or simply wear ostentatious clothes in a society where the female body remains subject to controlSocial… Originally, the term emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, to designate men or women with low intellectual capacities.But in the late 1990s, he became a word to (say) qualify only women, especially those who have a career in entertainment, by focusing on their sexuality.

In Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times documentary dissecting the predatory mechanics that destroyed the singer, the archives of the time are freezing."Are you a virgin?"Asks her a journalist when she is 17 years old (but dares to wave in miniskirt and a curved shirt in her clips)."Everyone talks about your breasts," says another.It was also the time when the prolific actress Lindsay Lohan finds herself on the cover of Rolling Stone, the day of her 18th birthday, in 2004, with the title: "Hot, Ready and Legal!"("Warm, ready and legal!").

Six years earlier, Monica Lewinsky, 22, was dragged into the mud for responding to the advances of a 52 -year -old president.The Wall Street Journal describes it as "little pie", Maureen Dowd, editorialist of the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize for his cover of the case, speaks of a "predatory and silly intern", while Fox News launches a survey forKnow how many viewers consider it "a young trail in search of thrills".

Journalist Paul Sanfourche himself has just devoted a feminist essay to the former reality TV star, Story sexism, Loana Petrucciani (ed. Seuil), in which he demonstrates how the blonde, whose notoriety starts with the flight onInternet of images of an embrace with a participant, at 24, was thrown into pasture as the perfect prototype of the bimbo without conscience.

>> Lire aussi:Loana, si dure est la chute

“These images on the Internet are the reason why Loft Story has become viral and have founded the celebrity of Loana; I wanted to investigate a sexist media construction, including understanding how we have been able to leak such images, he confides. Because they had consequences. At that time, Loana becomes a kind of national joke that replaces the word "blonde" in jokes on blondes. Everyone takes hold of her, laughs at her, while Jean-Edouard, her partner, is seen as someone cool ... We are today a few years after #MeToo, but no one has redesigned to Loana and everything she could live. While her story is much more complex than the boxes in which he was locked up: easy girl, bimbo, fallen star ... Her career is actually at the crossroads of female violence themes that we are talking about, since she has lived the intra -family, conjugal violence, incest, harassment. The endless criticisms against his physique (too thin, fat, blonde, redone ...) also reveal the whole weight of the injunctions on the body of women. "

Proud of her retouched body, which she uses as an instrument of power, the ex-stripper who has become icon of the Cardi B rap is one of those which reclaim hyper-feminity playing voluntarily on the pleasure of excess, for Make radical feminism questioning past stereotypes. "There is currently a whole work that aims to return the stigma of formerly disqualified practices, because it is associated with types of femininity classified as low in the hierarchy compared to a white -valued bourgeois white femininity," confirms Lucile Quéré, doctoral student in studies Genre at the University of Lausanne and specialist in links between bodies and feminism. And young feminist activists seek to make this hierarchy disappear, to get out of the contradictory injunctions made to women, especially on their bodies. This implies taking up their account of bodily practices often considered as contrary to the emancipation of women and to associate a subversive meaning from it. "

On Bimbotok, the bimbo aesthetics are even used for a radical criticism of capitalism, notes Stephanie Deig: “We live in a society where we are all shaped and constituted by expectations and where to be in a certain way give access to certain spaces ofpower.Now neo-bimbo is aware of the way capitalism makes it consumer, but also the object of consumption, and it plays on this dynamic.His message is that everyone can be bimbo, to create their own space of freedom. ”

Marilyn Monroe, proto-bimbo who inspired the aesthetics of many descendants, before committing suicide at 36, desperate to have been confined to the roles of stupid blonde by a violently misogynistic industry when she dreamed of playing the great Russian authors, said: "A sex-symbol becomes one thing.I hate being one thing. "

But contemporary bimbos now write their history, ardently defending their choice. Aya Nakamura, Nabilla, Zahia Dehar, Kim Kardashian ... So many women to whom some still criticize their aesthetics, and who don't care. "The difference between Loana and Nabilla is that today bimbos have total control of their image, without going through producers and agents who often used them. And it is a dynamic of individualization and "eagerness", analyzes Paul Sanfourche. We can completely challenge Kim Kardashian's lifestyle, and what it reveals from our societies, but there is a major development to see a woman becoming a billionaire by herself, with a total mastery of her communication. The subject of bimbos is never trivial because, from the moment they become media representations that will all mark us, we are at the heart of power and symbolic power. " And always subversive.

The resurrection of the bimbo aesthetics

In the 2000s, these signs were subject to sexist taunting.In the #MeToo era, they come back in force, and no one is mixing.

The bimbo, eternal figure in the cinema

Obviously blonde, necessarily a jug, she had a plethora of roles in the cinema.Written by men ... At least, the actresses who embody them gave them all their benevolence.

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