No thoughts, head empty, just vibes babes—so after a lifetime of unquenchable thirst for knowledge and intellectual expansion, I’ve finally resigned to blissfully cruising along the mindfully-living bimbo pipeline…where thick lips, hot selfies, glossy hair and soft living reside—for life. But who is this mystical bimbo? Where does she come from? How did girlboss hustle culture reshape the bimbo into a billionaire and why has she penetrated the veil of our culture so deeply—again? Marilyn once said ‘I can be smart when it's important, but most men don’t like it.’ Like much of her career under the oppressive shine of the male gaze, she consistently conveyed to us how the possession of both beauty and brains are a man-made double-edged sword that pierce the minds and hearts of women through both ends. However, upon entering the 2020s, we’ve witnessed the resurrection of modern feminism through neo-bimbocore, along with her popularisation of beauty, brains and billion-dollar empires.

In understanding its origins, conception and impact on the culture, let’s contextualise. We can trace back the etymology of ‘bimbo’ as a contraction of the Italian word ‘bambino’ which refers to a male baby or child, the feminine version being ‘bambina’ or ‘bimba’. In 20th century American English, bimbo typically referred to a foolish and unsophisticated man, yet over time the term became more gender neutral, where by the late 20th century it was widely used to describe a certain type of woman—as the name’s roots imply, a woman of childlike disposition, who was treated as such. Through the silver-screen, this character-type was developed in the movies of Hollywood's gilded age, in films of the 1950s and 60s like ‘Born Yesterday’ starring June Holiday or the iconic yet exploitative works of Marilyn Monroe in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘How to Marry a Millionaire.’ Marilyn and the character she embodied in her public persona were truly the first vision of the bimbo and its influence on popular culture. From her perfectly tousled tight bleach curls to her signature breathy speaking voice, often allegorised through wind and smoke, cotton candy, the slow opening and closing of a pink cashmere sweater and champagne lava… although linguists prefer to refer to it as ‘wet’, like the salivating mouth over captivation. This is what she did so beautifully with her personal brand, from her husky elocution to drawing people in closer and creating an aura that was so seductive—like the intimacy she established in her sultry rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President.’

What historically appeared to be simple cinematographic depictions of ‘dumb blondes’ in their daily antics, was something that gradually took advantage of loosening the boundaries of artistic content by reaching for stronger hints of female sexuality. This led to the creation of imagery and archetypes that would be harder for women to live up to. Such representations of the dumb blonde originally depicted through Marilyn, established the bimbo as an obscure blend of being far above other women in her sex appeal, yet far beneath them in her intellect; setting her up to be an object of desire, disrespect and unshakeable disdain.

In the late 90s and early 2000s we began to see a resurgence of bimbo culture, where playboy models turned screen stars Pamela Anderson and the late Anna Nicole Smith were instrumental in moulding the image of the bimbo as a big-breasted, blonde and vacuous sex bomb. These women were supposedly only treasured for their sexualised appearances as the increasingly derogatory bimbo was widely used as a throwaway insult. It is strikingly tragic to observe how in the history of the bimbo, it is often other women who attack her with this label—constructs of an age-old patriarchal blueprint that relentlessly pits women against one another.

A rupture in second-wave feminism that emerged in the 1960s began to address issues beyond the legal rights of equality and led to disagreements as to whether pornography was harmful to women or should be accepted as part of a sex-positive ideology. As unattainable beauty standards continued to sweep across the West, it was easy to dismiss bodies like Anderson and Smith’s as simply pandering to stereotypical male desires rather than belonging to real women—real people. This exploitation of the bimbo stereotype began to bleed into other female archetypes in pop culture through films like ‘Legally Blonde’, ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘House Bunny’. These included the dumb blonde Karen Smith and Shelley Darlingson type—beautiful yet naïve, ditzy yet easily confused. The Regina George, Sharpay Evans and Chanel Oberlin mean-girl type who sits over a vacuum of adoration and fear under the guise of an intimidatingly beautiful exterior. Ultimately we find the girly-girl type in characters like Cher Horowitz and Elle Woods who have a similar emphasis on seemingly superficial and traditional femininity. However, what differentiates the archetypal bimbo from her equally shallow counterparts is the emphasis on her sexuality. While desirability and sexuality play a decisive role in the portrayal of dumb blondes or mean girls, they can still be conveyed without it. A bimbo needs to have perceived sex appeal in order to successfully qualify, as well as to encapsulate a sense of naïvety, promiscuity and slow-wittedness.

Freud once wrote ‘where such men love they have no desire and where they desire, they cannot love.’ The widely misogynistic degradation of the bimbo can be seen in what Freud identifies here as the Madonna-whore complex—a psychoanalytic rubric that emphasises the division between the affectionate and sexual nature of male desire. According to Freud, this is what leads to the dehumanisation of women in their sexuality, all the while vilifying them for being openly sexual and reducing their identity to only that—as the purity of the Madonna-figure and the deviance of the whore cannot co-exist in the black and white narrow-mindedness of the boy-brain. This pejorative attribution to the bimbo turns a woman into a two-dimensional image, like a page ripped from a magazine; an amalgamation of the old school pin-up girl with dumb blonde vacuousness and a more explicit contemporary expression of sexuality. Undoubtedly this cumulative cultural portrayal of the bimbo has made this identity difficult to reclaim… where for decades in a post-Stepford America, there was only one thing that misogynists and feminists could agree on—that bimbos were not real people.

The first waves of bimbo reclamation—both in seriousness and satire—were undoubtedly sparked by Paris Hilton and her sovereignty as an icon over y2k pop culture. The New York Post called it a ‘bimbo summit’, with a sprawled front page of Lindsay, Britney and Paris in the height of their hard-partying paparazzi-drenched fame, squeezed into the front seats of her 2006 Mercedes. Paris was our bimbo warrior who spearheaded the rise of early 2000s Barbie maximalism—think platform flip-flops, Von Dutch trucker hats paired with pink velour Juicy jumpsuits, tiny-ass crop tops, low-waisted hip-hugging jeans and those Dior ski wrap rimless shades, obvi.

Nothing is more representative of this era than the air-sign façade of playing dumb. Like the airheaded nature of a gemini as seen through Marilyn; Paris’ detached aquarian vibes were trademarked by her iconic ‘that’s hot’ slogan, a response to everything that her and Nicole Richie senselessly threw around in their reality TV show The Simple Life. For so much to be conveyed in a simple statement capsulises the way ‘that’s hot’ became the spiritual proverb for y2k bimbos and the generations that ensued. If we look closer, we can see that these bimbo characterisations are imbued with tongue and cheek humour that reveals these women’s true self-awareness in the empowerment of caricatured hotness. In a 2015 interview with Instyle Magazine, Paris says ‘I’m not a dumb blonde, I’m just very good at pretending to be.’ Here she reminds us of how women like her and Marilyn took advantage of the bimbo archetype by incorporating this persona into their real life knowingly, while also being fully in on the joke.

From one air sign to the next, you could say that our blonde aquarian barbie gave rise to our most recent new-age bimbo; a dark-featured libra bambi who’s mesmerising beauty, seduction and entrepreneurialism capsized the steady stacks of the capitalist world—Kim Kardashian. When she stepped out onto the Bondi Beach scene in the early days of Myspace, spray tan, big hoops and LV’s limited-edition Miroir bags, no one would have thought that the slut-shaming that rippled from sex-tape notoriety would transform her into the most affluent businesswomen of the 21st century; leading to an ever-expanding billion-dollar empire built almost entirely on being hot—as it should be. Besides the infamy, what launched her career was partly tactful business plans organised by her ‘momager’ Kris Jenner, as well as the transparency of Keeping up with the Kardashians—her family’s reality TV show that made us privy to their complex blended family dynamics and idyllic Cali living.

What differentiates Kim as a new age bimbo is the way she transmuted revenge porn and sex into a tool for empowerment. The outset of her career was defined by a heavy critical reception, with the likes of Barbara Walters and other journalists branding her as ‘famous for being famous.’ The world was quick to discredit the value of her success in the same way they invalidate the legitimacy of a woman being simultaneously successful, business-oriented and engulfed in her beauty and sexuality—as she should be. Professional chauvinist Piers Morgan is one of many to incessantly shame Kim for the liberation she’s found in nudity, ridiculing her for ‘entirely lacking talent’ and instead capitalising off of being beautiful and naked—as she goddamn should. From her 2008 Playboy shoot where all she wore were drapes of pearls and stilettos to her iconic 2015 coffee table photobook ‘Selfish’ that showcased her never-ending volume of nude selfies, Kim has always shamelessly owned the power of her body and it’s timeless beauty. She epitomises the reclamation of the brainless bimbo stereotype and entirely rebranded its self-obsessed ‘selfish’ identity through the impeccable art of being herself. With the heroin chic cocaine-diet of 90s supermodels to y2k’s pro-ana size-0, Kim’s influence in the early 2010s reshifted the focus from the scarcity and restriction of emaciated bodies to the celebration of fuller curvier silhouettes. While female celebrities are always under scrutiny from the public-eye, Kim’s ability to take advantage of this projected stigma is what makes her so significant.

When observing the rise of the billionaire in the 21st century, we typically envision the endless reiteration of bland Ivy-league tech-geek types like Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates. In a world veiled by the elitist hierarchies of white male supremacy, these men portray their financial success as ‘humbly’ living in a rotation of the same tragic t-shirts and jeans—ew. The bimbo of Marilyn’s time was capricious and too brainless to be self-sufficient, always portrayed as being dependent on a man’s love and wealth. Kim however subverts our expectations of power and wealth through business, all by reclaiming ownership of her bodily autonomy when those rights have always been threatened by the shackles of a patriarchal world. In the years following her success, we see how Kim walked so her little sister Kylie Jenner could run. This new-paved pathway of hyper feminine aesthetics combined with an alluring social media presence allowed Kylie to usher a new wave of bimbos with her Gen Z following, continuing Kim’s work in re-popularising the ‘baddie’ bimbo. In the same way her sister did with her sex-tape, Kylie capitalised off of the controversy surrounding her freshly-filled pillow lips by launching the Kylie lip-kit in 2015 and then transforming it into her self-titled cosmetics brand, making her the youngest self-made billionaire only four years later.

Following Kylie’s success, Kim founded KKW Beauty and her shapewear line SKIMS, borrowing from her sister’s playbook by using a similar direct-to-consumer business model that heavily relies on social media marketing, making them the most lucrative assets to her empire. By 2019, Kim announced the start of her four-year law apprenticeship—a project removed far from the opulence of cosmetics and fashion, yet grounded in the realities of systemic racism through incarceration and the burning need for prison reform. Here we see a reminiscent ‘Legally Blonde’ come to life. Kim is a real-life mirror to Elle Woods, who despite being surrounded by a world of invalidation, rises to the top of her class at Harvard Law and transcends the dumb blonde stereotypes projected onto her; ultimately proving that her seemingly bimbo-esque qualities can be strengths all the while unifying beauty with brains.

Whether it be Marilyn or Paris, or Kim or Kylie, these women enact a broader rejection of the elitism that says we must adopt particular looks or mannerisms to be considered intelligent or valuable to society. The new age bimbo embraces progressive and inclusive ideas whilst still being hyper feminine, espouses her hotness and dismisses the capitalist mindset that she must outwardly display marketable skills to be respectable. The new age bimbo is not necessarily uneducated or airheaded, but her personality is certainly not defined by her degrees and resume. The new age bimbo is equally no longer confined to being a cisgender heterosexual female, with the likes of the ‘bimboy’ who can be smaller and more feminine that the traditional himbo, along with the gender neutral ‘thembo’ and of course our bimbos of colour.

Each of these variations offer a more intersectional concept of the bimbo and move away from satirising traditionally feminine qualities, with the accompanying ideas about who should be respected and why. Ultimately, the dehumanisation and judgement of bimbos is the most superficial part of this discourse and more derogatory than anything they could do or say. Today’s bimbos reach far beyond the stereotype of a vacuous, surgically-enhanced and sexual woman, yet also emphasise that it is entirely okay to be unintellectual, surgically-enhanced and sexual! It is a beautiful thing to witness—the unravelling and reclamation of hyper feminine ideals, the gradual elimination of disparaging themes that have weighed the bimbo and her descendants down for almost a century, to see bimbos transmute our expectations of billion-dollar success through cosmetics, fashion and hot selfies… as Kim tweeted after appearing on the cover of Forbes Magazine… ‘#NotBadForAGirlWithNoTalent’.