By Isra Allana & Anusha Asim
Feminism as a word has a lot of baggage attached to it. In the era of internet activism, individuals feel like they have a platform to voice their two cents and also have access to immense knowledge, considering themselves the front-liners of social justice. If you’ve been on the internet long enough or kept up with popular culture, you must've heard of girl bosses and bimbos. These terms have been rather incorporated into archetypes; essentially a ‘prototype’ and a ‘symbol’ of modern day feminism. Let’s evaluate these terms, their origins, their relationship with feminism and what they mean to women.
The Girl Boss Movement
The term “girlboss” was first coined by Sophia Amoruso when she wrote her 2014 autobiography titled #GirlBoss. Amoruso is an American business woman, and founder of the fast fashion website ‘nasty gal,’ which gained massive and popular recognition, given it’s rag to riches storyline and of course, being a supposed win for women and feminists. That was until the brand went bankrupt for many reasons, among which, “toxic” workplace was a popular one.
Girlboss is now a common everyday word in popular dictionary. It is strongly associated with confident, bold, outspoken women who are usually successful CEO’s, founders, and corporate leaders. Liberal feminism has adopted the archetype and celebrated it ever since it entered pop culture. After all, a woman in a position of power is empowering!
It is no surprise that many young girls aspire to be entrepreneurs and CEO’s, with the way mainstream media portrays such positions as an achievement of feminism. However, we have a lot of reflection and deconstruction to do when it comes to our ideas of empowerment and liberation. How does one woman, usually a rich, fairly privileged and white, being in a position usually taken by a man, empower all women? How does it dismantle the patriarchy when one woman takes the role historically occupied by a man, especially when said role is inherently exploitative?
It is no secret that fast fashion brands and billionaire corporates for that matter are inherently exploitative. They exploit labour from third world countries, provide poor work conditions, irregular work hours and finally, underpay workers. Promoting the idea of being a girlboss implies that a woman at the top exploiting and underpaying workers, who are also women, is empowering, and the ultimate goal of feminism. Essentially, it doesn’t take into account how class, race and in some cases, caste, influence the ways in which women experience the effects of patriarchy and misogyny. Sure, a rich white man is on the top of the hierarchy, above the girlboss, but under her, lie marginalised men, and also women who still do not have access to education, healthcare and housing.
The girlboss archetype does nothing to dismantle capitalist patriarchy. It does not envision the long term goal of dismantling inherently oppressive regimes, the byproducts of which will be the resolution of all the issues that affect women and misogyny affected people. It does not focus on community, or the collective goal of liberation of ALL women. Rather, it celebrates the handful of women on top, because they’re women who exploit and oppress instead of men, and that’s somehow the goal of feminism. Author and activist Bell Hooks very articulately explained how rich white women have not taken into account race and class privilege that impacts the reality of all women, because they ultimately benefit from it. They could “count on,” as she puts it, “there being a lower class of exploited, subordinated women doing the dirty work they were refusing to do.”
With that being said, feminism is not the equality of the sexes. It is not female leaders and CEO’s replacing male dominated designations that continue to exploit working class women, poverty stricken women and women of colour. Feminism is a liberation struggle which aims to dismantle the patriarchy and overthrow a system that allows for oppression of women, especially marginalised women and misogyny affected people. So no, girlbosses are not the face of our liberation. We’re not free until all women are free.
Bimbo Movement
Although the girlboss movement is still relevant in Gen Z feminism, especially in developing countries where more middle to upper class women are starting to enter the workforce, its popularity on the internet has now been replaced by the “Bimbo Movement”. Earlier this year, even Vice covered the “movement” and the ideology of its pioneers.
“Bimbo” is a slang term for a conventionally attractive, sexualized and unintelligent woman. It is a caricature of women whom men resent, yet find themselves attracted to. Both misogynistic men and the self-proclaimed bimbos of today, have labelled women like Marilyn Monroe and the Playboy employees called “bunnies”, as “bimbos”. Playboy logos and iconography are staples of the bimbo aesthetic.
“Immediately Marilyn Monroe was uncomfortable with her sex symbol image. She was trapped in dumb blonde sexy roles and disliked the sexual exploitation she faced day to day.” - The Misunderstanding of Marilyn Monroe .
As for the second example, Hugh Hefner exploited “Playboy Bunnies” for his pornographic magazine. He coerced them for sex and threatened them for revenge porn, commodifying their bodies in every way possible.
It’s tragic enough that these women were seen as solely sexy caricatures by the men of their time. They didn’t freely choose the image that was forced onto them by the male gaze. Yet today’s “bimbo feminists” hold the same view of them. They call these women bimbo icons and celebrate the imagery that was projected onto them, without much of their say in it.
Aside from the celebration of exploitation, the most concerning thing about this movement is the defeating and damaging attitude it promotes to Gen Z girls. It encourages them to embrace sexualization, embrace being seen as unintelligent and make peace with it. It replaces the girl boss era’s can-do attitude with nihilism. It makes girls believe that playing into the ‘unintelligent hyperfeminine’ stereotype latched onto women for years is somehow revolutionary and empowering.
“A bimbo isn’t dumb. Well, she kind of is, but she isn’t that dumb! She’s actually a radical leftist, who’s pro sex work, pro Black Lives Matter, pro LGBTQ+, pro choice.” - Chrissy Chlapecka, originator of the Bimbo Movement.
Quotes like this make it confusing whether the bimbo movement is trying to reclaim “bimbo” or just positively reframe a male fantasy. Reclaiming a word usually means changing the meaning of it towards a more positive definition. If you call yourself “kind of dumb” and celebrate exaggerated stereotypes, how exactly are you challenging the word or giving it a new meaning? Wouldn’t it be more productive to retire such words from the vocabulary of people rather than giving them more weight? The claim of being pro-marginalized groups while uncritically supporting the sex trade which disproportionately exploits them, is also contradictory.
The bastardization of leftist values and language is another flaw of the bimbo movement. They call themselves “radical leftists” and refer to hyperfemininity as “revolutionary”, as if revolution is an aesthetic you can adorn. There is zero critique of how much unnecessary consumerism women are coerced into, for the sake of achieving femininity. Neither is there any awareness about how the majority feminine products, like makeup and clothes, come from the exploited labor of women in the global south. “No thoughts, just vibes.” as they say so themselves, is a fitting summation of this movement. And no, it’s not a good thing.
“All that matters is that you are both physically and mentally hot and sexy, on your own terms.” - Griffin Maxwell Brooks, Bimbo Creator.
Deriving confidence from feeling sexy and hot is a key message in the bimbo ideology. This is a message that has already been deeply drilled into the heads of girls by our patriarchal society, but now certain “feminists” are here to tell them the same. Adding "do it on your own terms" as an afterthought doesn't change much, considering our idea of beauty is already shaped by a patriarchal and racist society. Our brains don’t build definitions of beauty and hotness from scratch, they absorb the already present standards. Telling women and femmes that it's good to be dumb and hot while lining the pockets of capitalists is nothing new, far from being empowering.
This ideology is also anti-intellectual. The alternative to fighting elitist ideas of intelligence should be valuing and promoting unconventional forms of intelligence, not telling women that they should be happy to be "dumb and hot", something the world already expects from us.
Any idea of "reclamation" that promotes consumerism and aesthetics, instead of actually challenging oppressive structures, has zero liberatory potential.
We can see that both these archetypes are dead ends for women. They’re individualistic and self-centric. The ideas they promote might have some value for individual women but they’re detrimental to women as a collective. We can’t blame young girls and women for personally feeling empowered by these hyper-individualistic archetypes, but we can start with acknowledging how damaging they are for our collective community. The liberal ideology of “this empowers me, so this is my feminism” further perpetuates our own oppression. Genuine liberation for all women and misogyny affected people cannot occur until we make the effort to reflect on our own position in an inherently hierarchical society. As mentioned earlier, we’re not free until all women are free.
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