Tomb Raiders
The divisions in the culture war, at least as it stands in 2023, are formed not so much out of competing ideologies as by competing imperatives. Different, too, is the manner in which these “sides” fight, which is not against each other, but against the same abstract enemy in an awkwardly coordinated sequence, like ballroom dancers in blindfolds.
One side is the iconoclastic imperative, by which objects of a vaguely sacral nature in American public life (and in the countries that imitate this practice) are torn down, literally and figuratively, ideally taking their mythic statuses and broad consensuses down with them. Though the more popular versions of this imperative are seen as coming from the left, there is just as much of it to be discovered on the right, which often has the same targets in mind but for different reasons.
The other imperative, that of grave-robbing, seeks to replace the ruined totems not with new ones but with forgotten objects, often long predating the times of their robbers, which were buried by their forebears for the concise purpose of never being unearthed under any circumstances, whether out of presumed obsolescence or out of some more occult portent. This practice is just as ideologically omnivorous but somehow far messier than cultural demolition. The exhumation of Osama Bin Laden by way of his “Letter to America” by college students on TikTok this past week is just one controversial instance. Some, like James Baldwin and Andrea Dworkin, are respectable enough; but robbers tend to go further out of bounds to the likes of Ted Kaczynski, Valerie Solanas, and Carl Schmitt. It is mainly in hopes of delivering a tolerance-testing shock, but it also signals a much more urgent need to find new answers to persistent questions.
Something like a shock was probably felt last year when Sophie Haigney took to the New York Times to disinter an evil that took untold effort to entomb. And like all grave-robbers, Haigney acted under the blindness of having a noble purpose, even if it was the innocent act of trying to read the culture’s weather. “In a messy period when many are trying to redefine feminism,” she begins, “a wide variety of intriguing, occasionally fraught new iterations have come about.”
That “intriguing iteration” was the bimbo. As with most things that get this kind of attention, it was TikTok-originated and dispersed. It is not absent of context, being one reaction to recent disillusionments with more strait-laced forms of womanhood. Haigney highlights the posts of Chrissy Chlapecka, a 22-year-old Chicago comedian who has made the type her stock-in-trade. She dresses mostly in pink, wears her dyed hair in pigtails, she professes to be illiterate and to not know basic math. It is the style of a ‘90s club kid combined with severe learning disabilities. (Last I checked, I could not actually find those posts on her page; she seems mostly to post about sex and dating, like everyone else.) Nevertheless, “Ms. Chlapecka’s tone is dripping with sarcasm and irony.”
“Bimboism is the antithesis of the mode of feminism that was dominant in the 2010s,” Haigney contextualizes, “a kind of hyperambitious you-can-have-it-all feminism that can be summed up by the label ‘girlboss.’ The girlboss was striving and succeeding in a male workplace; she was a female founder who also went to 6 a.m. yoga classes. She wore a chic dress and looked coiffed on Instagram. She was liberal and outspoken about her gender.”
Thinking Gives You Wrinkles
“BimboTok,” arose as a counter to the “girlboss” and the pantsuit nation following a drift among younger internet users further to the left, rejecting the capitalist imperatives of “careerism and individualism” and the exclusivity and suffocating whiteness these imperatives engendered. They also adopted a more ironic tone of voice, condemning as “cringe” the girlboss’s chipper positivity masking her ruthless will to succeed. “No more Instagrams about rising and grinding. No more The Wing. No more straining to be smarter than the boys.” The bimbo of the 2020s is valued for what she isn’t: not capable, not reliable, not driven, which is to say, not easily inhaled by corporate hegemony and will not willingly give her whole self to work 12-hour days.
It’s curious, at best, to forge a contrarian movement on a word that probably wasn’t spoken by women very often. And if the concept wasn’t theirs either, it served a specific, complicated purpose in the general culture. In the 1990s bimbos were things that “erupted” in dark money-funded press conferences and shady nude magazine deals across the nation to undermine the gains respectable women made in living life outside the confines of domesticity. They were endlessly preyed upon in Revenge of the Nerds or Friday the 13th sequels or in the pages of Bret Easton Ellis. In time it was beyond dispute that bimbo was a pejorative curse imposed from without, to a type of woman to whom adverse things were constantly happening by dint of their apparent lack of brainpower relative to their excess of confidence. Tradition tells us that it was not good to be called this and if you didn’t want to be called this you had to work at being something else even if it wasn’t suited to you.
That much had been imparted by one of our most powerful arbiters of contemporary morals: The Simpsons. In the 1994 episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” the show’s Barbie counterpart releases a new doll that speaks asinine catchphrases such as “I wish they taught shopping in school” and “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl.” Offended, Lisa seeks the creator of the doll to make one with a more empowering message. Dubbed Lisa Lionheart, the doll proves to have real market potential, which Malibu Stacy’s male executives thwart by amending their doll with a new hat. Even so, Lisa Simpson takes a moral victory that seeps out into other pop culture shibboleths. Overachievement and competence were net positives, even if they were still subject to some comic relief, whether from Jessie Spano in Saved by the Bell, Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Tracy Flick in Election. Even with their faults these were real, admirable characters; if the “bimbo” existed at all it was as a boy-retaining foil. If Brenda Walsh was not strictly a bimbo on 90210, she might as well have been.
This dynamic is not exclusive to women; it asserts itself into any collective identity that ascends up from subjection and finds that some of its members are not ascending as quickly as those who mind the standards of that collective would like them to. In this standard, economic prosperity dovetailed conveniently with personal liberty. Feminism could not resist the lure of the suburbs: professional in conduct, utilitarian in morals, arid in culture, and intolerant in politics.1 And in the history of resistance against it, bimboism is only one facet.
The Queen of the Neighborhood
Riot grrl does not require an extensive explanation, as will be evident in a moment; but it can be summarized as the collective call for punk to allow a more central role for the women in its scenes, and more broadly for a womanhood that rejected the suburbanized mainstream. “BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival,” the Riot Grrl manifesto declared in 1991, “and are patently aware that the punk rock ‘you can do anything’ idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.” It succeeded in both aims, using the tools of DIY culture and in fusing feminist critique with strident punk rhetoric. Like straight-edge before it, riot grrl was a voice of dissent calling for liberation by moral redress, a punk movement within the punk movement.
Punk feminism itself emanated quite naturally into mainstream consciousness through its own creators. Kim Gordon published her memoir and Jessica Hopper published her collected writings. (Kathleen Hanna’s memoir is expected next year.) This was carried along by a pre-existing, and apparently unkillable, longing for the 1990s. But the shift in the political climate at the end of the last decade gave the movement a more immediate necessity. Jennifer Mathieu’s 2017 novel Moxie centers on a teenage girl who battles the institutional corruption and sexism of her high school by starting a zine. It makes explicit references to riot grrl, inspired by the protagonist’s Gen X mother. The 2021 film, in which director Amy Poehler assumes the motherly role, maintains the iconic Xerox cut-and-paste purity of its ‘90s peak. Not only is it pure, but it is effective, fomenting a mass movement among the student body and bringing about long-delayed justice.
The premise did not ring convincing for some. A review of the book remarked that Moxie “works on a pure, wish-fulfillment level.” The wish, I’m guessing, of Gen X parents for their now-teenaged children to validate the integrity of their youthful ideals; to be eternal while managing their 401k. But riot grrl was a movement of its moment. Other attempts to replicate its rhetoric and visual style, such as in Rookie magazine and The Linda Lindas, mostly won the admiration of their elders; but without building upon its spirit and ethos with their own ideas, as the founders of riot grrl had done, its reach would be limited.
That the movement has become just as suburbanized as the culture it originally resisted is one thing. It is quite another to create something so couched in a particular media voice that it is destined for the zine archives. It is not so much grave-robbing as breaking open the tomb only to take residence with the corpse.
Pretend That We’re Dead
If the outward style of bimboism is regressive, its own spirit comes closer to the more complex character of the age: a perfect product of the internet tendency to put classic cultural archetypes through an ironic filter. Grave-robbing gives way to a kind of elevated appropriation. “For Ms. Chlapecka,” Haigney writes, “her bimbo persona is a bit, but it’s also a bit serious: She really does want us to look at her boobs.” But, she concludes, “have you considered that you, too, could be a bimbo, and that it might be fun?”
“Fun” is a relative thing. It might be liberating for you to get out from under the constrictions of Leslie Knope-emulation, and from the fear of having to articulate the meaning behind “the future is female” that you still haven’t figured out for yourself. But spend enough time with bimboism, and with the many adjacent post-Obama internet subcultures, you might be bound to find it no less constricting.
Irony is like the guacamole of internet rhetoric: lots of people seem to love it and will pay a little extra for it. But few know how to store it or forget that it’s there and it becomes a grey-brown abomination in short order. Particularly if the irony’s target is shallow or absent altogether. Contrast the online irony of bimboism against the woman-created satires Three Busy Debras and Greener Grass, both of which are rooted in the corroding effects of the suburban ideal, where superiority and status pressures collide to comic, and sometimes menacing, effect against inadequacy, passivity, and the perpetual dread of being seen and judged.
The irony advanced by bimboism is that of reaction rather than of critique. It leaves more or less untouched the status quo it resists, wherein intelligence is reduced from a flexible way of seeing and acting in the world to a product with luxe pricing and a rigid set of instructions. That leaves an outcome almost as popular across online communities: exit. It is a polite sort of self-abnegation. “If we cannot break the glass ceiling, we will descend into the glass basement and corpse-pose on the glass shag carpet, cascaded upon by glass Funyuns.” It is a pose colored by the vibe shift: that powerful, almost deterministic force that sways the direction of Peak Online culture. In Haigney’s conception, women have a very limited capacity within the vibe shift’s iron law, which dictates, evidently, that they cannot be more than one thing at a time. It’s almost Hegelian: that which is excellent must become bogus; she who was a boss bitch must then act the bimbo. Without an in-between there is no possibility of exit, revolution, or reform; just tombs sealing up and breaking open to serve the anxieties of the living in their unending war with everything and nothing.
The censure goes both ways. Consider the common talking point about how science fiction was “invented by a teenage girl.” The point is less about literary history—which gives Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, published 150 years before Frankenstein, a stronger claim—than it is about marketing appeal. The precocious daughter of feminism’s founder is more aspirational than the volatile, poorly disciplined genius of the eccentric wife of a royalist aristocrat, who remains as Virginia Woolf assessed her, with “the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of a non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm.”