Don Paterson : 18 Poems

 

The Wreck

 
But what lovers we were, what lovers,
even when it was all over—
 
the bull-black, deadweight wines that we swung
towards each other rang and rang
 
like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port
 
and watched our sober unreal life
unmoor, a continent of grief;
 
the candlelight strange on our faces
like the tiny silent blazes
 
and coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs
 
into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,
 
gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down
 
to mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back
 
to back, and made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.
 
 

 

The Thread

 
Jamie made his landing in the world
so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth.
They caught him by the head of his one breath
and pulled him up.  They don’t know how it held.
And so today thank what higher will
brought us to here, to you and me and Russ,
the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us
roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill
 
and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving
every engine in the universe.
All that trouble just to turn up the dead
was all I thought that long week.  Now the thread
is holding all of us: look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.

 

The Dead

 
Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom;
though they speak with more than just the season's tongue—
the colours that they blaze from the dark loam
all have something of the jealous tang
 
of the dead about them. What do we know of their part
in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,
invigorators of the soil—oiling the dirt
so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?
 
But here's the question. Are the flower and fruit
held out to us in love, or merely thrust
up at us, their masters, like a fist?
 
Or are they the lords, asleep amongst the roots,
granting to us in their great largesse
this hybrid thing—part brute force, part mute kiss?

Stream

 
God is the place that always heals over,
how ever often we tear it. We are all so
jagged, forever having to know;
but too great to show his favour or disfavour
 
He accepts even  the purest of our gifts
with the same indifference and stony calm,
standing motionless to face the rift
our each inquiry opens in his realm
 
Listen: that low hissing is the stream
where the dead kneel down  to drink
at his mute signal.
 
We pray to keep it near us, as the lamb
might  beg the shepherd  for its bell,
from  its quietest  instinct.

 

Rain

 
I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;
 
one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame
 
to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,
 
and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,
 
so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,
 
I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:
 
forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
 
and none of this, none of this matters.
 

Don Paterson reads ’Rain’

Being
 
Silent comrade of the distances,
Know that space dilates with your own breath;
ring out, as a bell into the Earth
from the dark rafters of its own high place –
 
then watch what feeds on you grow strong again.
Learn the transformations through and through:
what in your life has most tormented you?
If the water’s sour, turn it into wine.
 
Our senses cannot fathom this night, so
be the meaning of their strange encounter;
at their crossing, be the radiant centre.
 
And should the world itself forget your name
say this to the still earth: I flow.
Say this to the quick stream: I am.
 
After Rilke

My Love
 
It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon—
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share; but we’re always wrong.
 
When our lover mercifully departs
 
and lets us get back to the business of love again,
either we’ll slip it inside us like the host
or we’ll beat its gibbous drum that the whole world
might know who has it. Which was always more my style:
 
O the moon’s a bodhran, a skin gong
torn from the hide of Capricorn,
and many’s the time I’d lift it from its high peg,
grip it to my side, tight as a gun,
and whip the life out of it, just for the joy
 
of that huge heart under my ribs again.
A thousand blows I showered like meteors
down on that sweet-spot over Mare Imbrium
where I could make it sing its name, over and over.
While I have the moon, I cried, no ship will sink,
or woman bleed, or man lose his mind—
but truth told, I was terrible:
the idiot at the session spoiling it,
as they say, for everyone.
O kings petitioned me to pack it in.
The last time, I peeled off my shirt
and found a coffee bruise that ran from hip to wrist.
Two years passed before a soul could touch me.
 
Even in its lowest coin, it kills us to keep love,
kills us to give it away. All of which
brings us to Camille Flammarion,
signing the flyleaf of his Terres du Ciel
for a girl down from the sanatorium,
and his remark—the one he couldn’t help but make—
on the gorgeous candid pallor of her shoulders;
then two years later, unwrapping the same book
reinscribed in her clear hand, with my love,
and bound in her own lunar vellum.

The Circle
 
     For Jamie
 
My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run
 
in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up.
 
The shake’s as old as he is, all
(thank god) his body can recall
of that hour when, one inch from home,
we couldn’t get the air to him;
 
and though today he’s all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole troposphere can’t cure
the flutter in his signature.
 
But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark
 
and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim –
our will and nature’s are the same;
 
we are its living word, and not
a book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song
inscribed in both our right and wrong –
 
so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on your spoiled work and useless kit,
you just can’t help but broadcast it:
 
look at the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
filling with the perfect ring
singing under everything.

Correctives
 
 
The shudder in my son’s left hand
he cures with one touch from his right,
two fingertips laid feather light
to still his pen. He understands
 
the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone;
though some of us have never known
the one hand’s kindness to another.

 

Why do you stay up so late?
 
For Russ
 
I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:
remember that day you lost two years ago
at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler
with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?
Most of them went dark and nothing more,
but sometimes one would blink the secret color
it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.
This is how you knew the ones to keep.
 
So I collect the dull things of the day
in which I see some possibility
but which are dead and which have the surprise
I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell—
so I look at them and look at them until
one thing makes a mirror in my eyes
then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.
This is why I sit up through the night.

 

Don Paterson reads  ‘Why do you stay up so late?’

Two Trees

One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Don Miguel's patio.
 
The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.

Don Paterson reads 'Two Trees'

The Lie
 
As was my custom, I'd risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.
 
I was by then so practiced in this chore
I'd counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I'd felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.
 
I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.
 
Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child's voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.
 
He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more
 
and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

Wave

 
For months I’d moved across the open water
like a wheel under its skin, a frictionless
and by then almost wholly abstract matter
with nothing in my head beyond the bliss
of my own breaking, how the long foreshore
would hear my full confession, and I’d drain
into the shale till I was filtered pure.
There was no way to tell on that bare plain
but I felt my power run down with the miles
and by the time I saw the scattered sails,
the painted front and children on the pier
I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown
and knew I was already in the clear.
I hit the beach and swept away the town.

Souls

 
The body is at home in time and space
and loves things, how they come and go,
and such distances as it might cross or place
between the things it loves and its own touch.
But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error
like some weird pearl, everything is wrong.
Space is stone, and time a breakneck terror
where you hold to nothing but your own small song.
No wonder you would rather stay asleep
than wake again to your live burial.
But sometimes, shrinking in your tiny keep
you make out through the thousand-mile-thick wall
the faint tapped code of one as trapped as you:
saying: those high white mansions –I dream them too –

Mercies
 
 
She might have had months left of her dog-years,
but to be who? She’d grown light as a nest
and spent the whole day under her long ears
listening to the bad radio in her breast.
On the steel bench, knowing what was taking shape
she tried and tried to stand, as if to sign
that she was still of use, and should escape
our selection. So I turned her face to mine,
and seeing only love there – which, for all
the wolf in her, she knew as well as we did –
she lay back down and let the needle enter.
And love was surely what her eyes conceded
as her stare grew hard, and one bright aerial
quit making its report back to the centre.

 

Sentinel

 
for Nora

 
Those times when you advance on me like a statue
holding the plain truth in a bowl of fire,
I will think of you, aged six and running
from that two-room ark, your brother’s lonely rage
to where your father would not be again, brushing
the pot seeds from your coat, your moon-white hair,
figuring someone round here needs to pay some fucking attention
as you tack across a Broadway gridlock, in the dark and rain –
then the day I lost you in Kings Cross at rush hour
and saw I was the lost one, lost in the roiling,
polyhedral sea of their desire –
then found you on the edge, with all in view,
all in hand, tall as a mast of white pine
to which I had to lash myself or drown.

The Song of the Human
 
 
There are days like this when I remember I am living in a glass box
         marked Earth creature in his own habitat
except the visitors have long gotten bored at the sight of the bald ape
         who sits all day
scratching at a piece of paper, eating sullenly from a cereal bowl, or
         playing his funny little twang-box
and have wandered off in search of more interesting exhibits. Last
         week I tried the door
and found it unlocked. I guess with everything falling apart, security is
         their least concern
and I can now go out if I wish, explore the burning planet, try to
        converse or breed with the weeping natives,
but to be honest I think I have become institutionalized and I am
        disinclined to wander far.
 

The Arrow and the Song

 
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
 
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
 
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the song there, still unbroke;
And the arrow, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend

About the poet and  his poetry :

Don Paterson. Poetry Foundation

 

Don Paterson. Scottish Poetry Library

Poetry in the Age of Superior Television Drama: A Review of Don Paterson’s Zonal. By Brian Brodeur.  Literary Matters,  Winter 2021.

On Poetry and Writing : an Interview with Don Paterson.  By Stephen Carruthers. Dundee University Review of the Arts, February 3, 2017. 

Face to Face: Don Paterson - "Every compliment is like a stab to the chest" By Phil Miller. The Glasgow Times, February 16, 2016.

40 Sonnets review – the perfect vehicle for Don Paterson’s craft and lyricism. By Sarah Crown. The Guardian, September 26, 2015. 

A Word in your Ear : An Interview with Don Paterson. By Memphis Barker, Nanette O’Brien.  Isis Magazine, March 16, 2015. 

An Interview with Don Paterson. By J P O'Malley. The Bottle Imp, November 2012.

Erica Rutherford : That Which Is

 

Frames within frames. A bed and an orange chair. The black-dressed figure kneels against the bed. Her clothes capture light in folds. Her terribly pink face is faceless—a flat surface missing its features. Her hands are fingerless. She is plains of paint, just as she is flattened by kneeling. Grief, anguish, or pleasurable submission, her facelessness refuses to show the emotional demand I place on her. Just as the canvas frames what it frames, the chair frames the body, frames the shape a body takes held in its rigidity. These frames—like the white framing of the figure itself, that pleated light—become indistinguishable from the flattened edges of the figure. Her body is a frame; she is flattened and does not so much struggle to emerge from the frame but, curiously, becomes the frame.
 
The more I look, there is nothing to see but framing. The painting proposes “her” as a frame, reflexively gesturing to the function of gender as frame. Framing as a technology of representation. Also, framing as a setup: gender is a setup, even those we choose or refuse (no-gender is also a gender setup). All these framings discipline, something that this figure yields to. But in doing so, I wonder if this figure also enacts a refusal to be known through the frame by being known as a frame. That is to say, in fore-placing the work of framing, the painting also gestures to what a frame never captures, never knows, never can show.
 
About her own painting, Erica Rutherford (1923–2008) writes: “Featureless faces opened their mouths in silent screams, as if horror at their deformity. Bodies were shockingly naked, with nothing to conceal their hermaphroditic lack of differentiation. If they had arms, they flung these out in despair into the surrounding darkness.”
 
Rutherford finds her figures trapped between the absolutism of visibility (the role vision has in classification) and embodiments that have no representation. A paradox: overly visible and unseen. Existence that is nonexistence—that does not exist as existence itself. This is not utopic or liberatory; it is catastrophic. Her painted bodies witness the violence that the viewer (me, for instance) inflicts upon them in wanting to know—simultaneously naked (transsexual women are always already naked, contrived to be our sex first) and forced to scream out of mouths that are not theirs, not ours. What better description is there for the representation of transsexual women? “Her”—the race and sex that make this pronoun mean—is a problem that is central to Rutherford’s self-portraits in the 1970s.
 
1.

Bodies remain trouble. Irrefutable, unknowable, and seductive, bodies are what thought wants to escape but never can. All thought emanates from bone, muscle, skin, and nerve, and yet to think is as far as we can feel our own disembodiment. Audre Lorde and Judith Butler puzzled over the contradictions of embodiment, recognizing how systems of power and domination—particularly white supremacy and patriarchy—shape and reshape bodies as well as the feeling of bodily life. Even as they both suggested bodies are potentials—erotic and performative, respectively—everywhere violence defines the concatenation of bodies. They recognized that the unbearableness of bodily being thwarts every effort to represent—to think—bodily potential or plentitude. It is no wonder that thought—for this thinker—longs for a reprieve from—to literally, get out from—the impossible demands of bodily existence. And yet, Lorde and Butler both understood that disembodiment or transcendentalism were the very drive of white supremacist patriarchy.
 
In trans studies, body trouble is paramount. Through ever-changing names—transsexual, transgender, trans, trans*, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming—trans studies has no more central a problematic than embodiment. Trans studies has followed the feminist principle that gender ought to be capacious, disrupting the presumptions that biological assignment of sex (male/female/intersex) scripts gender. Following this feminist tenet, trans studies has shown: 1) gender is relational, shaped as much by sociohistorical forces as by subjective processes; 2) nonbiological agencies override anatomy and the material body, contesting ontological orders; 3) gender is a condition of the autopoietic subject that can be invented and destroyed even as the social order (patriarchy and white supremacy) hyper-invests in ever-narrowing sex conscriptions.
 
Gender promised a reprieve from the difficulty of bodies—from sexed and sexual bodies—that thought wanted, especially in trans thinking. The capaciousness of gender—indeed, its ability to suggest ideation, agency, and sociality—emboldened proposals for trans heuristics. Trans is no longer obliged to be about gender or bodies, subjects or identities. Trans now finds attachment to any number of objects, disciplines, media, histories, and much more.
 
Many of these are arguably advancements in theory, but there remain reasons to question how an ever-expanding trans—built upon a logic of dematerializing gender—has made questions about bodies and sexes difficult to ask, even politically precarious to pose. Are there differences between bodies framed by the general term “trans”? For instance, are there material divergences between estrogenic and androgenic hormonal changes to bodies, or for those trans subjects that maintain their endogenous states? If not essential differences, might there be consequential and material differences between, say, white transsexual women (with a pronoun “she”) and brown gender nonconforming femmes (with a pronoun “they”)? Do these differences shape livability, survivability, not only in terms of racial embodiments but sexual ones as well? And most troubling for the maxims of trans studies, does embodiment differently materialize the experience of trans masculinity from femininity? How might the generalizability of trans have enabled transsexual men to mis-conceptualize the lived experiences of transsexual women? What attention is needed to think well about differences that a trans theory simply distorts, often with transsexual women remaining unthought or worse?
 
This essay is an effort to think sexual differences—specifically, those of transsexual women who became through estrogen and surgery, which is also to say some women. Possibly, it means women who took canary-yellow Premarin® tablets as an act of wanting one’s self so exquisitely that only the language of necessity could approximate this desire. Needs are often primal wants that are too unbearable to describe as lust. These estrogens might have been prescribed with anti-androgen and progesterone pills. Likely, it means women who have been oversubscribed, undersubscribed, or mis-subscribed to the point of panic attacks, blood clots, strokes, unending nausea, and heart attacks. But also, women who have experienced nongenital orgasms that feel like bones cracking into lush velvet; a woman whose nipples achingly leak milk when she is afraid. All these—and numerous other contradictory effects of medicalized anti-trans violence, structural racism, and economic inequality—define them.
 
Premarin® meant, as it did for me, a woman who is sensorially redone—not male to female, but a sexed subject differently done in the effort to feel her body. Hormones, in this way, are not the same as medicalized embodiment, but instead are a supplemental register of sensation that is limited by sensory anatomy even as senses are excited over the edge of themselves. Simply, hormonal change remakes sensoria, and this begins to modify corporeality that subtends the senses. Touch, smell, and sight are disarranged, but not in the manner of some reductive “I see now as other women see”—that narrative is a hope for becoming a woman through her re-essentialization. Instead, bodily sensoria are percussed beyond our sense of sensed self. Sense vibrates, deranging the “feel of this” or the “look of that.” These transsexual women do not become “more woman” with hormonal change. No. But they do—I do—become another sex, not female and not male, but no less materialized sexually. This sexuality is not biologism, not essentialism, not absolutism. Which is not to say this sexuality is not consequential, differential, and substantial.
 
The bodies of these estrogenic women, these differently sexed women, are altered by social forces responding to them just as they are anatomically reacting to biochemical changes. Patriarchy and white supremacy—both are what make gender/sex, they are also the materials that make her—are cataclysms that all bodies are processed through no matter their resistances or privileges. Every effort to resist sex is also a confirmation of the racism and sexism of cultural and historical orders that translate such efforts.
 
Transsexual women are no different; we too become through these same catastrophes, we self-fashion with, from, and through the carnage of this violence. Even though my transsexuality makes me other to female or male, other to essentialism but no less material, my survivability (how I will die) is shaped by a very narrow social translation of my otherwise-ness. And yet, this is not to say that the desire to refuse social order is only purposeless, uninventive, or simply regressive. This is one of the paradoxes of wanting to change sexual difference into sexual differences.
 
Sexuality and sensation are these transsexual women. Not just in euphoric or positivist senses. Some wants are conscious and intentional fantasies that shape decisions. While others—often held hidden within those choices—are unrepresentable and intolerable, a negativity that magnetizes beyond what we know but is no less than what we want. Sensation sounds luxurious, but it is also the noise of “you fucking faggot” that vibrates into her body. A white man’s fists punching as he rapes is also assembling, as did his earlier oeillades. The systemic neglect of a neighborhood, planning decisions made to immiserate and segregate, environmental degradation and other structural forces are also the sensuousness that makes these women’s pharaonic bodies even as the curvature of her eye is altered by estrogen, seeing differently her place in this same neighborhood.

 
Both want and sensation necessitate bodies, and even the wish to be bodiless is a bodily fantasy. There is nothing new about this statement, but the discourse of trans (from its study to its activism) is framed not by differences or specificities but by generalities, sharedness, and cohesions. Dean Spade recently posted on Twitter: “Black feminist thought and Black lesbian analysis and organizing are and have been essential to trans liberation. We can’t build a trans politics that actually improves trans lives (instead of just using trans lives to justify and decorate the status quo) without it.” Rightly invoking the centrality of black feminist and lesbian thought for thinking about the racial logic of sex/gender systems, Spade’s “trans” and “we” eschew a similar commitment to difference and specificity. Could it be that an unspoken white trans masculinity is this “we”? Is this “trans liberation”? The very distortions that Lorde diagnosed—a repudiation of difference—are evoked here in a call for justice. This is not specific to Spade—he is but an example—but a more extensive problem within trans discourse—so many different subjectivities talking as one.
 
The generalizability of trans—not unlike the whiteness of liberalism—Spade’s point—obliterates the different (and often contradictory) organizing and building required to improve transsexual women’s lives, to improve black and brown transwomen’s lives. I agree with Spade: black, brown, and white transsexual women must grapple with the problem that femininity is capacitated through the fungibility of black femaleness. Femininity is a racial logic, and the desire for femininity is made possible through the sexuating capacity of antiblackness. This complexification of transsexual women’s lust for femininity deserves attention; we deserve the work of nuanced and difficult thinking. We can grapple with the racist logic of our own figuration—something that a generalized “trans theory” or “trans liberation” or “we” cannot provide. It is time to deconstruct “trans.”
 
 
 
2.

Frames in frames. A frame splits the figural body and the rectilinear shapes, canvases, pictures of the space the figure occupies, her space. “Her” is framed through style, but it is no less a frame, no less a structure of perception. What frames her space are fragmented language and blocks of color. The frame of language is foregrounded through its fragmentation; since I do not know the meaning of “new” or “ter pape,” I am confronted by the representational force of language, its hold for meaning. Her pinkness, her color is repeated in surrounding squares—surfaces that come to mean skin, epidermalization. Her and her pinky-whiteness are framed as frames. The frame we call gender is here a surface, an epidermalization. “Her” is produced out of surface, produced out of the racialization of her surface. Everywhere the painting points to the technologies of seeing, to the frame’s administration. And again, this faceless figure is a refusal of the frames that make her up, but only through the contradiction of becoming frame herself.
 
3.

How to think about a transsexual woman’s differences? By “a,” I mean a specific account among many. It could be called my transsexual method—I turn to art. For me, there is artfulness in transsexuality, and it is not her physician’s. Trans studies and activism advocate for the conservative position of transsexual women as needy literalists. Given that anti-trans violence imbues the sociopolitical climate, this position is understandable, but it conceals lustier questions with ontological certitudes—it is anti-sexual. The very act of her need for Premarin® or breast implants, or facial feminization and orchidectomies, are wants in the form, style, and feel of one’s sensuous self.
 
The misogyny and racism of surgeons and endocrinologists are obstacles for her want. Medicalization does not define a transsexual woman—just ask her. Medicalization is what repudiates her want even as it makes her otherwise to herself and others. She is not plasticized through medicalization. On the contrary, she is confronted with the limits of a cultural order (what structures her consciousness and preconsciousness, and the authority of the super ego) that materially translates her bodily sexuality, her art. Transsexual women’s bodies are accretions of intimate and subjective want made legible and experiential through the aesthetics of the cultural. What is art but a constant fight with—if also a reliance on—the protocols of aesthetics? Susan Stryker writes, “Nothing other than my desire brings Him [surgeon; but also, Medicine] here.” She continues: “Materiality always resists the symbolic frame. I beg it, then, to throw all language off and become ungendered flesh, but language clenches this meat between its teeth in a death-grip.” Invoking Lacanian terms, Stryker describes a paradox of transsexual women’s “desire”—what we desire happens within materiality’s resistance to representation, to representation’s commitment to the cultural. But, transsexuality is not the return of a real materiality stripped of the symbolic—of the really real—but about how sexuality intensifies and invents matter, even as it is conscribed by the cutting relationship between symbolic and real registers. In begging materiality, Stryker wants to reverse the cutting relationship that the symbolic performs. But perhaps her desire reveals that some women want what is also foreclosed—they want their want. If transsexuality is sensuous intensity, it is so because of sexuality; what I would call her artistry.
 
Art and aesthetics produce a fractious join. Transsexuality is sexuality’s inventiveness with an impoverished reality, nothing more than the alibi for a brutalizing symbolic. It may be too contentious to say that transsexuality is artistry with modifications of sex as indexical signs of wantonness, but I offer this as an-other imaginary, an-other ego ideal for transsexuality. An artfulness at lusty odds with (and within) the cultural. This conversation risks but must avoid collapsing artistry into self-fashioning. Might her transsexual art-making aim toward a reprieve from the technology of selfhood? If art is the work of passion, her art also wants more than the cultural prescribes, more than the frameworks provided her. The art of transsexuality must not be confused with technologies of the self—seeing transsexuality as art places it as intervention in the material, rather than as confirmation of the reality’s authenticating and totalizing function. By “art,” here, I mean transsexuality’s sexualization of the sexed body, and the fashioning of sex as an act of artistry.

 
4.
In Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford, Rutherford documents her varied life as an actor, filmmaker, theater designer, printmaker, painter, activist, and professor in England, the United States, Spain, South Africa, and Canada. A member of the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts, she painted for over forty years and was shown in major galleries in North American and Europe. Rutherford’s style ranged from abstract expressionism—murky fields of color that give way to swaths of luminosity that defined her work in the 1960s—to an oneiric modernism akin to Ken Kiff. Rutherford’s work in the dreamlike paintings of the 1990s step past the divides between abstraction and figuration by suggesting that fantasy is not opposite material reality but a contingent force in making the world.
 
During the late seventies, while undergoing sexual transition, Rutherford experimented with self-portraiture. Starting with a posed photograph of herself, she would paint from this photograph not to achieve realism, but to look at the function of photography, particularly its frame. Her flattened figures seem to merge with the apparatus of framing, both the photograph and the canvas. She pushes against portraiture’s cromulent function, and with it a modern conception of photography as capture. This period of work, I argue, refused photography’s privileged relationship to rendering transsexuality visible: from linear progressions of before and after to seeing transition as sexual binarism from zero to oneness, male to female, and also the collapse of the referent to the image-matter. Photographs accompanying transsexual memoires confirmed this narrow understanding. For the reader, the photograph demonstrated a seeing it—the indeterminate pronoun “it” working to materialize the transsexual transition. In contrast, Rutherford’s painted-self challenges photography’s conceit that it captures what really is.
 
In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, an inaugural text for trans studies, Jay Prosser writes about the connection between Rutherford’s paintings and her transition:
 
‘’A painter, Erica Rutherford paints self-portraits based on photographs she first takes of herself dressed as a woman—also concretizations of an imperceptible self … These portraits begin by envisioning the woman Rutherford wishes to become and are gradually transformed as she transitions into a record of that becoming.’’
 
For Prosser, Rutherford’s paintings are the sexual abstraction of her photographic becoming—to be, to be a woman, is photographic. Through photography, a transsexual emerges as a subject materialized into a real self. Here, Prosser pivots around the photographic referent to cohere the transsexual real with bodily matter.
 
 
In discussing the above photograph in Rutherford’s autobiography, Prosser goes on to say:
 
“A painted self-portrait is situated behind the photographic Rutherford. In the painting, the seated figure is feminized through body contour, posture, and clothing, but the face is featureless—a blank space as undetailed by the feminine as the still-masculine face of the photographic Rutherford seated before her.”
 
Prosser continues: “The self-portrait is a blueprint for the transsexual subject in transition: like the photographs in the autobiographies for readers, visual means of making the transsexual’s gender real.” The real of her photograph, for Prosser, is her feminine failure—a failure the painting does not record. But, what if Rutherford’s painted portrait reflexively argues against the framework that her transsexuality is forced to represent here? Might the photographs she takes of herself be what Rutherford paints against, knowing that the photograph aims to render her transsexuality in terms of male to female, a sexual transition predicated on authentication and autopoiesis? Rather than collapsing her material body with the photographic referent, or confusing the real with matter, Rutherford’s paintings provocatively attend to the imperceptibility of perceptual frames.
 
Prosser understands how the apparatus of representation—for Second Skins, it is the narrative form of biography, which values a linear timeline and conflict resolution—attempts to capture the subject represented. Narrative progression has few better tools than transsexual transition to organize time and the arc of a story. However, Prosser concludes his book with the realness of sex as photographic, showing how the indexicality of photography’s referent substantiates the logic of sexual becoming. His study of “second skins” (his theory of transsexuality) ends with photography to lend it its own narrative resolution. Instead of recognizing the linear role photography plays in biographical accounts of transsexuality, Prosser turns to the photographic image as his theory of transsexual realness and bodily being. For Prosser, transsexuality is photographic: to be (seen/skinned) is sex itself: “For transsexuals surgery is a fantasy of restoring the body to the self enacted on the surface of the body.” Taking literally Roland Barthes’s assertation that photography is an indexical (literally “light … is a carnal medium, a skin”) record of “that which has been,” Prosser’s account of transsexuality is about that which is, about the realness of transsexuality as image, as photographic. Prosser is certainly not alone in building an account of transsexuality on a modern presumption of photography, but more consequentially, it seems to me that much of trans studies—what we might call its canon, its political orientations, its central commitments—has relied on an investment in the being of trans that it draws from photography as its defense and—perhaps even more impoverishing—as its logic. Trans studies has a photography problem.
 
Prosser’s meditation on Rutherford initiates his argument about trans becoming that he theorizes through a particular photographic reading of Freud’s enigmatic statement about the ego as “not merely a surface entity, but … the projection of a surface,” that ultimately collapses the image-matter of skin and transexual being. In Prosser’s careful critique of Judith Butler, he demonstrates how she misreads the distinction Freud makes between body and ego. For Butler, the body becomes “itself the psychic projection of a surface.” For Freud, Prosser notes, the ego is a “product of the body, not the body as a product of the ego.” Butler conflates materiality with the mental projection of the surface of the body—collapsing the differences between Lacan’s mirror stage and Freud’s conception of the ego. Prosser makes the case that transsexual phenomena “illustrate the materiality of the bodily ego rather than the phantasmatic status of the sexed body: the material reality of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of material reality.”

 
In structuring this critique, Prosser turns to the cinematic imagery of Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) to show how Butler’s account of transsexuality is metaphorized away from the sexed and raced materiality of the body. In Butler’s own discussion of this film, she defines the camera as a metaphor of transsexualization: Livingston’s camera performs phallic maneuvering through transsexual women who want sex change (specifically, genital surgery), turning black and Latina transsexuals into confusions of phallus and penis. Prosser explains this confusion as a repetition of Butler’s misreading of Freud, again de-literalizing transsexuality. But what is interesting here is how similar Prosser’s turn to photography as metonymic of transsexualization is to Butler’s cinematic approach.
 
If, as Prosser suggests, the transsexual’s body image “is radically split off from the material body,” then the description of feeling “trapped in the wrong body” becomes uncannily similar to the capture of the referent in the emulsion of the photograph. An interior negative of the body image is printed—with surgery and hormones as processing fluids—onto and as the material body. “The skin is the locale for the physical experience of body image and the surface upon which is projected the psychic representation of the body.” Prosser recognizes the problem of Lacan’s occularcentrism of subjectivity, noting that that Freud emphasizes bodily sensations as forming the ego. However, he pursues the substantiation of the transsexual feeling of wrong-bodiliness such that
 
‘’surgery deploys the skin and tissues to materialize the transsexual body image with fleshy prostheses in the shape of the sentient ghost-body. The surgical grafting of materials endows the transsexual with the corporeal referents for these imaginary and phantomized signifieds, restoring their substance.’
 
Photography, it would seem, is the form of transsexuality, creating a photo-ontic. Haunted by referents—appeals to the real—transsexuality happens between referentiality and representation. The problem with transsexualization as photograph is revealed in Prosser’s wish that the referentiality of transsexuality is captured (trapped) in photography.
 
The consequences of the photo-ontic of Prosser’s reading become clearer in his later book Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, where he critiques his own autobiographical impulse in using a photograph of himself to end Second Skins. Guided again by his reading of Barthes, Prosser recognizes that his literal (what Barthes described as studium) reading of transsexual photographs missed what photography cannot show (the photograph’s punctum) in its capture: affect. In returning affect (punctum) to transsexual photographs, Prosser writes, “This failure to be real is the transsexual real.” For Prosser, transsexuals never achieve their referents, never achieve the longing for their sexed referent. It is the un-becoming of sex bound with an overdetermined sexual visibility that defines his transsexuality. Yet, transsexual being remains, problematically, photographic.
 
Yes, Prosser’s punctum allows for the affective, but it continues to rely on a photo-ontic. By “photo-ontic,” I mean how the seduction of the photographic referent produces a collapse between image-matter and being in theorizing transsexuality. Even the trauma inflicted by the surgeon who cuts her up through an acting-out of racialized sexism—any transwoman who has modified her body knows exactly what I mean, either as fear or actuality—remains within this photo-ontic framework for understanding transsexual beingness. Prosser writes “The photograph incarnates because it takes the body of the referent ... I may never recover my first skin. But the realization of that loss is my second skin.” His photo-ontic: not being is transsexual being as enacted through the logic of photography. Image-matter, even in its most evanescent and affective form, defines transsexual being. The implications of transsexual-as-photograph are that the transphobic logic of spectacular spectacle defines transsexuality, obscuring other “bodily sensations” that mark the work of sexuality.
 
5.
Rutherford writes:
 
‘’Then, at the moment when they seemed most to threaten me, they staggered, dropped to the floor and in helpless crouched postures withdrew themselves. In this position, though smaller, they still thrived, fattening themselves, assuming sensuous curves of a sexuality they could never know, growing breasts that obtruded indecently from their infantile bodies until they appeared malformed infants, aberrations of nature. Capriciously, they now assumed joyful colors, reds and yellows, as if to ensure that no one could ignore their presence.’’
 
Instead—and what I can read from Rutherford’s refusal—let us take seriously the sexuality of sex change: the want that cannot be fully metabolized by the social (ego ideals that refuse ideal egos) while modifying the real’s own becoming, its ongoing materializations, sexualizations, and concatenations. Perhaps instead of Rutherford’s paintings as naive accounts of her becoming a woman, her painting proposes that photography is the naive technology for representing transsexuality (let alone for modeling transsexuality on). Rutherford does not show who she is becoming but shows what forces—and cultural aesthetics—are at work in delimiting that emergence, that potential. Working against photography as record, against becoming real through photographic logics, Rutherford’s paintings draw attention to those technical modes of perception that limit what the body is or might be. And more specific to Rutherford: What if a realist theory of photography has produced reproducible narratives about transsexual women’s lives—even to ourselves—that refuse bodily difference and those experiences that exceed the sex/gender schema?
 
But Freud continues to define “projection of a surface” as a sensuousness that is derived from the body, but not as a literalization of the surface of that body. Embodiment—the sense of feeling bodily—is a sensuous rapport between affective states we might call inside and outside. At every point in this relay, fantasy makes sense of sensations refracted through an inaccessible, but no less significant, materiality. In other words, bodily sense is produced through sensuous excess, not through a precise organ of sensation. Might, then, transsexuality not be simply about skin—one organ dedicated to touch and vision—but an excess that has no representative? Despite Prosser’s critique of Butler’s imagistic (and as such, performative) reading of the body ego, he also organ-izes the body ego through a phenomenology of photography (a studium-only account of the body—what literally is present-ed—as described by Barthes in Camera Lucida), with transsexuality as idealized example. The referential surface—what I read Rutherford’s art working against—is the frame that delimits transsexuality into a visibility, into a logic of the photo-self as sex. For Rutherford, transsexuality is not ontologically a skin to be imagistically realized. Instead, transsexuality is what infuses the body (even as limit) with sexuality as a register of fantasy always aiming toward what is yet unknown, the otherwise that designates transsexuality.
 
What would it mean for Rutherford’s paintings if we returned sexuality (not identity, but libido) to transsexuality? To “assume sensuous curves of a sexuality [we] could never know”?
 
Painted Camera, “”Her”. By Eva Hayward.  e-flux. April 2021.
 

The Bimbo Is Back

 

“You’re breaking up with me because I’m too . . . blonde?” Elle Woods drives up to the Harvard campus in her Porsche convertible wearing a hot pink leather suit and a Bottega Veneta bag. Chihuahua in tow, she looks like the fever dream of all the blondes who came before her—effervescent, glitzy, charming. She is a spectacle against the muted tones of the Ivy League, and her arrival sparks mockery. Someone yells from a dorm room above, “Check out Malibu Barbie. . . . Where’s the beach honey?” Driving up to campus, she tells her dog, “Oh Bruiser it’s so exciting! Look, Harvard!” Oblivious to the bemused students who begin to gather, her perky verve is infectious as she proclaims, “This is our new house for the next three years!” Her language is dotted with exclamation points, and her resumé is perfumed.

 
In a 2001 review of Legally Blonde for the Guardian, Joe Queenan describes Elle Woods as a “nattering imbecile,” “cunningly masquerading as a person who has at least half a brain,” and “an über-bimbo who lives only for fashion, perfume, fitness . . . beautiful, wealthy and mesmerizingly stupid.” Today we read these lines with smug disgust. From our vantage point, we have moved beyond this dull misogyny—but is that true?
 
There is a lingering nastiness reserved for young women whose casual videos are taken out of context and spread across social media, especially the kind that show a day in their lives or reveal them asking wide-eyed questions about the universe. We take these young women as symbols of the worst parts of culture—empty-headed, vapid, and frivolous. Because their perceived frivolity is entwined with what they buy, we feel justified, if not gleeful, in laughing at them. The sight of young women taking photos of themselves often provokes spontaneous annoyance. This is nothing new, and an echo of what Kate Zambreno describes as “the Victorian suffragette dismissing the shopgirls as victims of consumerism for spending their paychecks on dangling earrings and silk pantyhose and jewelled cigarette cases, as if their sartorial excesses somehow set back the movement.” In contrast, a bright, scintillating era is on the rise.
 
Materialist Girl
 
The bimbo and its many iterations (himbo, thembo) are having a renaissance in the current vernacular, and specifically on TikTok, where a conversation about “Bimboism” has emerged. i-D christened 2021 the “Year of the Bimbo,” perhaps unaware that the previous “Year of the Bimbo” was 1987—the women who defined that year like Fawn Hall, Donna Rice, and Jessica Hahn, were embroiled in highly publicized scandals. These “bimbos” were attractive women caught in the crosshairs of powerful institutions and publicized in the media to their detriment. The Wall Street Journal ran a society column soon after Black Monday proclaiming that yes, the year will be remembered for the stock market crash, but “crash or no crash, it is certain that 1987 is the year of the Bimbo,” “everybody’s favorite epithet.”
 
 

This is the bimbo as she has been portrayed in film and popular culture: the image of a buxom “dumb” blonde, “an attractive but unintelligent or frivolous young woman,” as Elizabeth Knowles wrote in The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. In contrast, this year has brought a reclamation of the term. Twitter is rife with people self-defining as bimbos, himbos, and the like. What makes the title so alluring in this present moment? There is the aesthetic glitz—jaunty shades of pink and blown-out hair; the idea of being “done up” feels fortifying after a year stuck indoors—but there must be something else.
 
Historically speaking, the archetypal bimbo is enthusiastic and good-natured. Bimboism does not necessarily require passivity; it is just not in the bimbo to be cruel. She only punches up. She pursues hyper-femininity to the extreme—at times to the point of drag. She’s glossy, voluminous, and kind. The bimbo counters the assumption that we would opt out of femininity if we could; in fact, she embraces it. Ultimately the desire to absorb the identity of the bimbo comes from the fact the bimbo is unburdened—whether or not this is a performance. Her respite is covetable, especially when the internet often feels like it lives in the grips of irascible snark. Perhaps after a year of being too online, Bimboism is the antidote.
 
While scrolling through videos under bimbo-related hashtags, young people attempt to describe or critique the codes and aesthetics of the self-proclaimed movement. Griffin Maxwell Brooks and Chrissy Chlapecka are the viral sensations to have come out of #bimbotok. In one of Brooks’s videos they reveal they’re studying mechanical engineering at Princeton, while yes, identifying as a bimbo. Wearing a midriff-bearing top and low-slung jeans, they simply say, “People can be two things!” Brooks told Rolling Stone, “The modern bimbo aesthetic is more about a state of mind and embracing, ‘I want to dress however I want and look hot and not cater to your expectations.’ . . . You’re aware of all the shit that’s going on around you, but you’re letting go of it because you want to live the life of being pretty and walking around.” The philosophy is the embodiment of the internet catchphrase “no thoughts head empty.”
 

In the Wink of a Lie
 
While the bimbo takes on the task of freeing hyper-femininity from its conventional shackles, the himbo is her amusing counterpart. The qualities they share are in their good natures. Primarily buff in physique, the himbo is a man who does not have any anxiety about seeming intelligent. Seeming is key here—a himbo may be smart, but the wound-up insecurities of “appearing to be” are what’s different. The himbo accepts that there are some things he does not have the answers for. To him this feels more honest than the masculine farce of pretending to know it all. The himbo is unafraid to ask questions, non-judgmental, and non-threatening. Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby and Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire play experts in their respective fields, but in matters of love they are completely naïve. Playing against Barbara Stanwyck’s street-smart nightclub singer, Cooper becomes a man who “gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk.” While the bimbo is the product of profound rituals that create hyper-femininity, the himbo is an unmade man—innocent and uncontaminated by prevailing forms of masculinity.
 
About Robert Luketic, the director of Legally Blonde, Joe Queenan complains, “[Luketic] seems to think he is breaking new ground by suggesting that if you’re a beautiful and ambitious moron, you can still find your place in the world. But we already know that if you’re an ambitious, beautiful moron you can still find your place in the world. The place is called Hollywood.”
 
But the essence of the bimbo in cinema has always been subversive. If you weren’t in on the joke, you were the butt of it. The bimbo’s humor was for a feminine audience. She often made fun of men, but they rarely noticed, distracted by the aesthetic attack of the bimbo’s physicality. As Gina Barreca writes, “you can use irony undetected by its subject but apparent to the correct audience. Girls are taught to do this very early on, blinking darkly fringed round eyes at the most boring man in the room and telling him that he is fascinating, . . . while her girlfriend stands behind the guy laughing silently.”
 
When Marilyn Monroe winks, the pretext is a sexual invitation while the subtext is look how silly he is. She weaponizes this expert humor best in the 1953 Howard Hawks film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Monroe plays gold digger, dumb blonde, and blueprint bimbo Lorelei Lee. The joke of the film is not that Lorelei is naïve, but that she must perform naïveté in order to achieve success. The joke’s target is never the woman, but the men watching her. In the film, Monroe’s performance of Lorelei physically enacts this duality of being both sly and innocent: “This is not a question of Lorelei/Monroe being one thing one moment and another the next, but of her being simultaneously polar opposites,” writes Richard Dyer in Stars. Monroe’s delivery makes Lorelei’s lines sound like questions, when in reality she is making demands. Visually, Monroe’s facial movements transform from authoritative to doe-eyed, often in a single moment. Critics found this dualism in the film to be incoherent; “simplicity and calculation is a clearly paradoxical phenomenon,” according to Eduard Andreas Lerperger. The humor, then relies on Lorelei being a character who is seemingly passive but “acts in response to her own desires rather than in response to the desires of men.” Barreca writes, “Learning to sound like a Good Girl, while half-concealing the text of the Bad Girl, has been the subject of a great deal of women’s humor.”
 
The most commonly cited predecessor to Monroe is Jean Harlow, whose roles in films like Dinner at Eight and Red-Headed Woman were never obviously unintelligent; rather, her characters were unlikely heroines due to their class status. Harlow’s version of bimbo was crass and unrefined but insistent on rising through the ranks to secure a better future for herself. In cinema, the gold digger, dumb blonde, and the bimbo all walk the same line, concerning themselves with sexuality, beauty, and commerce—wielding all to their advantage.
 
Excess Baggage
 

In criticism of this new era of Bimboism, Laura Mulvey’s theory of The Male Gaze is alluded to like scripture. The gist of it goes something like, “How can being a bimbo be liberating or radical if the bimbo’s hyper-feminine aesthetic caters to the Male Gaze?” This way of thinking has come around before on Twitter and Tumblr. As Kate Zambreno writes, “Feminist critics have swallowed some sort of narrative punishing women who are too feminine that reflects the revulsion towards the excessive that comes right out of patriarchy.” This narrative demands “that women must write, must be, empowered heroines, and if they are not, they are frivolous and should be dismissed.” To define the aesthetic choices of femininity as a trap set by men feels deceivingly easy. The Male Gaze concept interrogates how male artists present women in their work. It’s troubling that this theory is then misapplied to real world interactions that have nothing to do with representation in art. Laura Mulvey’s manifesto has been recast as an inescapable fact of life, conflating men’s artistic gaze with men’s literal gaze—the latter being painted as inherently oppressive. How long will we measure women’s every action against the Male Gaze? What is the political function of this omnipresent Gaze besides something to keep in mind when we consume media? What is its destination?
 
When we measure art by these standards it often feels too prescriptive. It becomes a formula that we must adhere to in order to seem politically good. By the time these formulas reach the mainstream, they offer nothing but a pat on the back for those who take comfort in minute progress. Hollywood adopts these formulas to do the bare minimum, in the hopes that this will silence their critics—it’s similar to the way they trot out condescending material to satisfy diversity quotas and finance stories of racial injustice specifically for the consumption of white audiences. The products are hollow and overwrought. These easy solutions prevent us from telling authentic, nuanced stories of how people live.
 
Just like Hollywood, men want women who fit into their lives neatly, without too much adjustment on their part. The bimbo, in all her glory, is a walking reminder that femininity is a process of making oneself. High maintenance and high effort. The more time a bimbo puts into her looks, the less time she spends on anyone but herself.

 
In a curated film series at Indiana University, the nineties film Party Girl, starring Parker Posey, is described as a bildungsroman that is “not about the accumulation of emotional or social intelligence, but instead the sublimation of a feminine intelligence to a patriarchal order.” Posey, who by way of mastering the Dewey Decimal system while working at a library, casts off her socialite life and designer closet to enter graduate school. Similarly to Elle Woods, her intelligence is not taken seriously until it is bolstered by an institution. Why do we require an official seal of approval to legitimize and substantiate the existence of these hyper-feminine characters? Must we use academic theory to explain away the existence of Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and the like? Elle Woods, poolside in her sequined bikini, didn’t need to go to Harvard—but perhaps we needed her to.
 
The Bimbo’s Laugh. By Marlowe Granados. The Baffler, July 2021.

Cast your mind back to the year 2007. Motorola Razrs, Juicy Couture tracksuits and slogan tees were the height of aestheticism. Nuts was still on sale. Everyone still posted on Facebook. It was the year when reality TV found its footing as a cultural juggernaut, spearheaded by the supposedly ditsy Valley Girls of Laguna Beach and the dubious moralism of the Anna Nicole Smith Show. It was also the year, according to a 13-year-old New York Post headline, of the bimbo.
 
In a listicle that revels in its cruelty, the tabloid catalogued 2007’s most notorious bimbos, including Amy Winehouse (a 24-year-old “alterna-bimbo” who “they couldn’t make go to rehab”), Jamie-Lynn Spears (a “bimbo-in-training” because she became pregnant at 18 and subsequently monetised her pregnancy photos), Britney, Paris Hilton, Mischa Barton and the bimbo-prototype herself, Anna Nicole Smith. Looking back on the year, the New York Post wrote: “Whether dead, jailed, bald, knocked up, unemployable […] the year gone by was young, ditzy and out of control.”
 
This, for a long time, was how the world understood what the word bimbo meant. It was a term used to strip young women of their humanness and agency. It inferred sexual promiscuity as a sign of depravity, and a lack of intelligence. It even worked as a tactless stand-in for mental health problems (Britney Spears and Mischa Barton both experienced well-documented psychotic breaks in the mid-noughties, while Amy Winehouse and Lindsay Lohan publicly struggled with substance abuse). It was a concept used to disparage some of the most culturally powerful young women of the time. It conjured up images of big silicon boobs, big bleach blonde hair, tight clothes and heavy makeup, while communicating that all of those things were somehow inherently immoral. The term’s negative connotations are official, even (the dictionary definition of bimbo is: “a derogatory term for an attractive but frivolous woman”).
 
The mainstream backlash against bimbos in the Y2K-era and even the preceding 90s -- when it entered the political realm for the first time thanks to Monica Lewinsky -- was intense. Since then, massive cultural shifts, whether that’s the commodification of GirlBoss culture, or the #MeToo movement, have brought feminism further into mainstream discourse than ever before. Politics has shifted too; with the centrism of the late 90s and mid-00s giving way to a more fractious, violent political landscape which has birthed a generation of young people who are more politically engaged, and, generally speaking, more politically progressive, than any of their predecessors.
 
It’s perhaps inevitable then, that the past few years the lure of the bimbo, as a transgressive, feminist, radically left wing figure, has begun to creep back into our collective imagination. And, because it’s 2021, it’s obviously happening mostly on TikTok. Bimboification videos, which first began showing up on the app last year, have exploded in popularity during the pandemic, and bimboism, in the process, is being reclaimed not as a misogynistic stereotype, but instead as a mentality, an aesthetic, and a way of life.
 
  
“I have always been a self-identified bimbo, however I didn’t fully embrace it until the recent wave of new age bimbos debuted on TikTok,” says Hannah Foran, a self-confessed 23-year-old Bimbo from Bristol, Tennessee. BimboToks like “how to be a bimbo 101” (which lists tips like “worship the girls, the gays and theys” and “blackmail and manipulate old trumpee sugar daddies'' inspired Hannah to adopt the FYP niche into her everyday lifestyle. She now boasts over 56,000 followers of her own on TikTok, where she posts -- as user @parishiltonsleftitty, natch -- about everything from bimbo fashion to living as a bimbo with borderline personality disorder.

 
“Gen Z have redefined the meaning of bimbo,” Hannah explains. “It’s no longer a dirty word with negative connotations; it’s been restructured from its original meaning. A new age bimbo is thought of as someone who is politically active and values far left views, so in that respect the popularity of the new bimbo is definitely informed by the state of the world today. Everything happening in our world gave Gen Z the momentum to corrupt a derogatory term and resurface it with a polished new identity.” And she’s right: while bimboism is historically deeply entwined with white womanhood, in 2021’s era of bimboification, the parameters are wider.
 
Coming off the heels of the popularity of the himbo -- a sweet, uncomplicated heartthrob that emerged in 2020 as a balm to sadboi and incel modern masculinity -- 2021’s bimbo doesn’t have to be cis, white, blonde or even a woman to qualify as a member of the inclusive club. In fact, the 2021 bimbo (also known as the thembo or nimbo for non-binary bimbos) renders 2020’s himbo obsolete. 2021’s subversive bimbo defines themselves as a bimbo without adopting the original context, and as a result, they take away some of the misogynistic power with which the term was originally wielded by the patriarchy.
 
“The definition of a bimbo has expanded from the stereotypical Valley Girl blonde,” says 24-year-old New Yorker Meredith Suzuki (AKA @maeultra), another self-confessed TikTok bimbo. “Anyone of any race, gender, sexual orientation, body type or style aesthetic can become a bimbo. As a QPOC myself, rather than feeling excluded from the conversation, I wanted to set an example.” Meredith explains that bimbos of today are much more concerned with the ideology of being hot, confident and at one with yourself, rather than actually looking a certain way. “It feels powerful and liberating to know that I’m constantly challenging gender and societal norms with hotness,” she adds. “Nothing makes misogynists angrier than women choosing to be hot, appearing dumb and yet being incredibly self-aware. Bimbo is no longer a derogatory term now we’re reclaiming it for ourselves.”
 
While the bimboification community has exploded on TikTok, the renaissance of the bimbo has been simmering away in the background for the past few years. The podcast You’re Wrong About — which first launched in 2018 but exploded in popularity during lockdown — has spent hours righting the wrongs of history and reclaiming some of its most famous and maligned bimbos, from Nicole Brown and Anna Nicole Smith to Jessica Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.
 
Pre-2021, the idea of the bimbo was living in corners of the right wing internet too, where offensive memes (which have since been reclaimed by the modern TikTok bimbo) are dissected by incels. One particular viral image, of a woman turning from a mousy bookworm to a dumb, beautiful bimbo, was recently defended by its creator who claimed it was not intended as sexist propaganda, but as bimbo fetish fanart. The figure of the bimbo body in fetish and porn has also become more visible in mainstream adult media in the past few years. The Cock Destroyers’ aesthetic is heavily influenced by bimboism, and on sites like PornHub and XHamster, the bimbo hashtag rakes in hundreds of thousands of views accumulatively. A 2018 article from MEL proclaimed “the bimbo fetish is alive and well” after speaking to a number of self-confessed feminist bimbos. “The term has generally been a pejorative,” the article writes. “But in recent years some women have turned it into a fringe identity.”
 

 
Since the piece was published however, the bimboification of our world has spread further, and to think of it just as a fringe identity or view it through a purely sexual, fetishistic lens is to ignore the power of the modern day bimbo. In fact, although the bimbo is a reaction to the current unprecedented times we are living through, it’s not, as you might first expect, a smooth brained empty-headed rejection of those times, but instead a way of metabolising the daily horrors of the news and a way of radicalising our reactions to current events. In short, contrary to popular belief, modern bimbos are the absolute opposite of their smooth brain no thinky stereotype.
 
“A bimbo is a person using the radical power that comes with playing the performance of hyperfemininity as a form of anti-capitalist critique,” says Stephanie Deig, a PhD researcher specialising in feminist philosophy and gender studies at the University of Lucerne. “Bimbos are subverting the neoliberal expectation that hyperfeminine traits cannot be intellectually substantive. They embody hyperfemininity through gender performance to subvert the things which have been used historically to objectify and oppress women. A bimbo is someone who embodies the notion of hyperfemininity in a radical way. By subverting expectations they are reclaiming the power of that femininity.”
 
Stephanie’s research is particularly focused on TikTok as an intersectional leftist sphere for the Gen Z bimbos of today to radicalise each other while looking pink and fabulous. “There are so many radical political ideas circulating around in bimboification circles online,” she says, ascribing the collectivism and intersectionality of Gen Z bimboism as a reaction to the previous generation of millennial ‘girlboss’ feminism, which understands female power through a male, capitalist lens. “TikTok bimbos are anti-capitalist while at the same time recognising through this luxurious aesthetic that you can’t fully escape the bounds of capitalism as both a source of pleasure and oppression,” Stephanie explains. “They’re radical, they’re intersectional. They’ve made feminism so much more inclusive than before.”
 
Today’s radical, politically engaged bimbo makes sense when you realise that, even in the 90s and 00s, the figure of the bimbo was a transgressive one. We can look back in horror at the sexism of “The Year of the Bimbo'' article, while at the same time still see the women it talked about as the transgressive figures Gen Z are celebrating today. “In the 2000s the bimbo was a way women could reject a narrow, limiting view of what a woman should be, and to claim power from the objectification of women’s bodies,” says Stephanie. “That same logic applies now, except it’s become even more inclusive, radical and transgressive when it comes to gender performance. A lot of young queer people, for example, are using the figure of the bimbo to turn sexualisation on its head and use it as a source of power.”
 
It was easy to dismiss figures like Paris Hilton, Monica Lewinsky, and Britney Spears as vapid bimbos because to do so was to disregard the power they had to carve out reality TV empires, sell millions of records, or cause presidential crises. And while none of those spheres of influence can enact power to change the structural societal, capitalistic means of oppressing women, it doesn’t diminish the fact that they are still routes to power, however flawed. Even fictional bimbos of the past point us to TikTok’s current iteration of the radical leftist bimbo; the ultimate bimbo, Elle Woods, might have been hyperfeminine, but she was nonetheless a deeply feminist character (albeit one who upheld the problematic prison industrial complex through her work as a lawyer). And a quick look over the FYP, or your Depop, shows that it’s not just the politics of 00s bimbos that appeals to Gen Z, but the aesthetic too, whether that’s pink Juicy Couture tracksuits, slogan tees or bedazzled flip phones.
 

  
It’s this particular set of circumstances -- the resurgence of Y2K aesthetics, a video-led platform for bimbos in training to converse and grow, the information overload of a pandemic and election year, and the radicalisation of disenfranchised youth by late capitalism, like duh -- that makes 2021 the perfect time to usher in The Year of the Bimbo, 2.0. “During these times when we’re spending more time alone, we’re thinking more about our relationships with ourselves and our bodies,” Stephanie says of the perfect timing that’s led to the rise of the bimbos. “We’re thinking about how our bodies serve us. Gen Z are using TikTok to have frank conversations about how we can use our bodies, and its transmitting theory in a frank, concise way in such an open space. That feels revolutionary.”
 
Another of the TikTok bimbos puts it slightly differently. “Anyone can be a bimbo,” they say. “It’s about applying a mindset to your way of life. Women and queer people have been oppressed by the patriarchy, and being a bimbo is a rejection of all that. It’s a way of finding empowerment where you’ve been taught to feel ashamed.” And to quote one bimbo god, that’s hot.
 
 
2021 is the year of the bimbo. By Roisin Lanigan. i-D,  January 19 , 2021

The bimbo is back and Gen Z is reclaiming it with a leftist flair.
 
The modern bimbo is hyperfeminine, embraces their hotness, and rejects the capitalist mentality that they must showcase marketable skills.
 
Bimbofication isn't exclusively for cis women — everyone who aligns themselves with femininity and finds joy in being ditzy can identify as a bimbo. Above all, the modern bimbo isn't necessarily uneducated or unintelligent, but their personality doesn't revolve around their degrees and resúmé. The modern bimbo takes the male gaze that's been unavoidable since birth and creates a caricature of it by performing vanity and cluelessness.
 
Despite the derogatory origins of the word "bimbo," used to dismiss beautiful women as unintelligent, Gen Z is leading the effort to reclaim the word. Syrena, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed "intelligent bimbo" who goes by the handle fauxrich, offered a diagnosis in a recent viral TikTok.
 
"Do you not care about society's elitist view on academic intelligence? Do you support all women regardless of their job title and if they have plastic surgery or body modifications?" Syrena asks her followers in a singsong lilt, before asking if they also dream of owning dozens of shoes and idolize the late model Anna Nicole Smith. "I'm no doctor, but I think you may be a New Age bimbo!"
 
The prognosis: pink glitter and Juicy Couture velour sweatsuits.
 
The bimbo's resurgence is especially popular on TikTok, where, as Rolling Stone put it, bimbos are something of an "aspirational figure." The tag #bimbo has just over 81 million views. The tags #bimbotiktok and #bimbofication have 8.9 million views and 5.8 million views, respectively.
 
The phrase "bimbofication" gained notoriety in 2017, when an illustration of a buxom woman in a minidress picking up a book and transforming into someone more conservatively dressed went viral. Though the artist insisted that it was fetish art, not an anti-feminist condemnation of sexually confident women, the internet was outraged over the implication that women could be either hot or intelligent. In a Deviantart blog post, the artist apologized for offending people, and wrote that the image was meant to satisfy a client's kink, not make a statement.

The image took on a life of its own, and inspired memes, spin-offs, and even fanfiction that imagined the various versions of the woman as a queer book club. The meme format made a comeback in late November following Harry Styles' Vogue cover, which features the musician in a Gucci ball gown.

 
Personally, I began jokingly calling myself a bimbo earlier this year when the term "himbo" started trending. Himbos are known for being traditionally masculine men — the himbo is hot and dumb, but above all, he respects women. When viral discourse over the term brought the word back to TikTok, young women asked why the word "bimbo" wasn't met with the same affection. Spoiler alert: It's the same reason femininity has been belittled and dismissed for centuries.
 
The short answer: Sexism!
 
Syrena, the 21-year-old diagnosing her followers as New Age bimbos, is a college student studying health science. As a woman in a rigorous educational program, Syrena rejects the expectation that to be taken seriously in professional or academic settings she has to distance herself from hyperfemininity.
 
"I think we don't have to 'be' anything to be taken seriously, as women should be taken seriously in all spaces regardless of how they look," Syrena said over Instagram DM. "I think all-inclusive feminism includes boss babes, sluts, bimbos, PhD holders, single moms, and just ALL women in general ... The people who believe it's anti-feminist are those who believe bimbos are who they are for the male gaze, which is completely untrue."
 
Syrena added that she herself had to unlearn her own "inner male gaze" in the process of identifying as a bimbo. Diving headfirst into the hyperfeminine should not be equated to giving in to the male gaze. The TikTok creators who identify as bimbos have made it clear they're putting on the costume not to appeal to men, but to make fun of them. Kate Muir, who posts on TikTok as bimbokate, told Rolling Stone that she uses her online persona to make men uncomfortable by pairing stereotypically feminine visuals with jarring messaging.
 
"Being a self-aware bimbo is amazing," she captioned one TikTok of herself dancing in front of a mirror. "You become everything men want visually whilst also being everything they hate (self-aware, sexually empowered, politically conscious.) Reverse the fetishisation of femininity."
 
The real appeal of the term, aside from consciously choosing to lean into your inherent hotness, is rejecting the societal expectation that women must have it all. (Anyone, Syrena explained in another video, can be hot with confidence.)
 
To have some sort of value in American society, the modern woman is expected to be compassionate and maternal, but also ambitious and goal-oriented. On top of that, women are pressured to meet a constantly changing beauty standard. Juggling all of these expectations is so exhausting and instilled in women from such an early age, it's taking a psychological toll on teenage girls. In his book The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today's Pressures, University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor Stephen Hinshaw described the juggling act as excelling at "girl skills," achieving "boy goals," and being "models of female perfection." Between conflicting messaging about being both family- and career-oriented, plus immense pressure to be sexually appealing from a young age, the teenagers Hinshaw profiled in his case studies were "set up for crisis" and at higher risk for anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders.
 
Which is why the bimbo resurgence is transgressive — by leaning into the caricature of femininity, Gen Z's New Age bimbos are turning the male gaze back on itself.
Jaime Hough teaches introductory gender studies courses at Washington State University and wrote her PhD dissertation on women's expression of sexuality. Dealing with that triple bind, as Hinshaw describes it, is an exhausting, lifelong juggle. Hough is especially enamored by the resurgence of the bimbo because it's such a middle finger to that triple bind.
 
"I think part of bimbofication is saying I'm not going to do it all," Hough said in a phone interview. "Today I'm just going to focus on being pretty, because I want to. I'm going to let go of being assertive, going to let go of caring for everyone else. I'm just going to care for myself, feel good, and look pretty. Fuck the rest of you."
 
The modern bimbo is inherently anti-capitalist too, because no matter how intelligent, accomplished, and ambitious they may be, contributing to the market is not a priority. Everyone has likely performed some form of unpaid emotional labor at some point in their lives, but women take on more of it than cis men. From waking up earlier than cis male coworkers to get ready in the mornings, to doing the bulk of household duties because men simply "aren't as good at it," to regulating their emotions to appear more approachable.
 
"In our culture, we rely on women to do almost all the emotional labor we don't teach men how to do," Hough said. "And so, women are always carrying this huge mental emotional burden of thinking not just about what I want to do, but whose feelings are going to get hurt and how can I do it in a way that their feelings don't get hurt? How can I achieve my goals without making anyone feel threatened?"
 
In addition to the triple bind young women face, all young people are expected to meet some level of productivity. If something isn't directly related to self-improvement, it's not seen as valuable in American culture. The labor and expense women put into maintaining their appearance, Hough added, isn't directly profitable, but that doesn't mean it isn't work. Being a bimbo also involves rejecting the pressure to be constantly productive.
 
"I believe that productivity is constantly fed to society as being a slave to capitalism by working or thinking about work," Syrena said. "I think productivity can be learning something random that you like."
 
Identifying as a bimbo is so enjoyable because, whether it's feminist or not, you're allowing yourself to be selfish for once. If you have to spend hours futzing with your appearance to have any value in this capitalist hellscape, why not make it your entire personality?
 
Don't confuse the New Age bimbo with girlboss second-wave feminism. The New Age bimbo is intersectional, and transcends gender or heterosexuality. Though the classic bimbo is a skinny, blonde, heterosexual white woman, TikTok's modern bimbos are queer, trans, people of all races and of any and all body types. Chrissy Chlapecka, a 20-year-old TikTok creator who wrote the "Bimbo Bibble," styles her videos as open letters to "the girls, the gays, the theys," and "anyone who, unfortunately, likes men."
 
Anyone who embraces femininity can be a bimbo; TikTok has also come up with the gender neutral term "thembo" to describe someone who's hot, dumb, and respects women. TikTok creator little_sun_boy coined the phrase "bimboy" as a spin-off of himbos. Instead of someone who's large, masculine, and ditzy, the 24-year-old creator explains that the bimboy is small, feminine, and ditzy. In an Instagram DM, little_sun_boy clarified that while the bimboy is feminine and ditzy, he isn't ditzy because he's feminine.
 

Ultimately, the bimbo's newfound popularity points to a shift away from the belittling of femininity. Hough noted that stereotypical hyperfeminine women in children's media, like Sharpay in High School Musical and Yzma in Emperor's New Groove were written as the movies' villains and, though it's subtle, that messaging only adds to the triple bind young women grapple with in their childhoods.
 
Nothing is black and white, though, and categorizing traits, goals, and interests into "for boys" and "for girls" is harmful for all impressionable kids. I myself was reluctant to admit my own queerness because I was so insistent that being hyperfeminine could only mean that I was heterosexual, and when I did come to terms with it, I overcompensated by getting rid of my frilly wardrobe and extensive makeup collection. But surprise! You can be two things at once! I, for one, have now leaned even further into hyperfemininity with an even more extensive makeup collection and a newfound zest for wearing over-the-top looks that I put on for my own artistic enjoyment, not for a man's.
 
Distancing from the color pink is a common experience in feminist circles. Hough and many of her peers in academia were reluctant to embrace the color that had been forced upon them since birth. A 2011 study led by Stefan Puntoni, an associate professor of marketing at the Rotterdam School of Management, concluded that the relentlessly pink, gendered marketing used in breast cancer awareness ads actually may repel the women the ads are targeting. Female participants were less likely to think they were at risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer when they were shown pink advertisements than when they were shown colorless or neutral-toned ones. Participants were also less likely to donate to the causes when shown pink marketing materials. Puntoni hypothesized that the color pink triggered a "defense mechanism" that made some female participants unconsciously ignore or downplay the advertisement's message.
 
American culture has a habit of forcing femininity and masculinity on children from birth, so rejecting the color pink is a natural reaction to foisting bubblegum bows and flamingo-toned tutus on infant girls. But distancing yourself from femininity for the sake of distancing yourself from women is just internalized misogyny. The sexist and backhanded compliment "not like other girls" has been reborn and recirculated in different forms over the last two decades, from bimbofication fetish art to the "Bruh girl" versus "Hi girlie" tropes popularized on TikTok this year. Regardless of whether they identify as women, New Age bimbos subvert such patriarchal categorizations by reclaiming femininity without pitting women against each other, whatever their gender may be.
 
"One of the things I love about this new wave of bimbofication is that it's very anti-hierarchical, and no one's degree makes them better or smarter, that's not a thing we value," Hough said. "This new wave of bimbofication is this idea that this is about self-love and self-pleasure. Anything that gets in the way of that, like traditional educational values or capitalist values, isn't worth it."
 
But then again, expecting that anything women do must be in the name of subversion goes against the modern bimbo's hedonist principles. All you need to do to be a new bimbo is be feminine, feel pretty, and not particularly care about what men want from you.
 
Cyndi Lauper put it best in her 1983 bimbo anthem: Girls (and gays and theys) just wanna have fun.
 
Bimbos are good, actually. By Morgan Sung. Mashable , December 5,  2020.

Chrissy Chlapecka twirls in front of her mirror in a Paas-colored minidress and matching faux-fur trimmed coat, her long platinum hair pulled back into two pigtails. “Hi. Welcome to Bimbo TikTok,” she says breathily, mouth half open, a vacant stare in her impeccably made up eyes. “You’re probably wondering how you got here. Are you a leftist who likes to have your tits out? Do you like to flick off pro lifers? Then this is the place for you. Are you good at math? Are you good at reading? Well, then if you are, how?”
 
Chlapecka is one of the de facto leaders of BimboTok, a glittery island in the middle of the wasteland of TikTok’s infinite scroll, where “girls, gays, and theys,” per Chlapecka’s verbiage, engage in a collective performance of hyperfemininity. The bimbo has radically transformed since its years as a tabloid mainstay, when it was used pejoratively to describe everyone from President Bill Clinton’s paramours to Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White, as misogynistic shorthand for a vapid, attractive young woman. “It’s such an old school term and all of a sudden it’s become kind of a trend in a way,” says Chlapecka, a 20-year-old Chicago-based barista with more than 475,000 followers, who is leading the charge to transform the bimbo into an all-inclusive, gender-neutral leftist icon.
 
In some respects, the bimbo hasn’t changed much since the naissance of the term in the early 20th century, when it was used to describe both men and women with diminished intellectual capacities. (The male equivalents, “himbo” and “mimbo,” wouldn’t come to being in the lexicon until the late 1980s.) The bimbo speaks in a flutey, birdlike tone (think a drag queen doing an Ariana Grande impersonation) and has a predilection for push-up bras, ponytails, and copious amounts of winged eyeliner. They wear short dresses and long coats and gold hoops paired with Juicy Couture sweatsuits (which have made a comeback along with early-2000s fashion and are in high demand on the clothing reselling platform Depop) and Viktor and Rolf’s Flowerbomb (or, if you’re on a budget, Victoria’s Secret body spray). Role models include Cardi B, Anna Faris’ character in The House Bunny, porn stars-turned-viral sensations the Cock Destroyers, and the OG smart dumb blonde: Paris Hilton.
 
In recent years, the bimbo has made something of a resurgence in meme form thanks in part to the popularization of “bimbofication,” a niche erotica fetish that involves the transformation of an understated, normal-looking woman (or man) into a surgically enhanced, spray-tanned camp icon. Influencers like the Danish model and sex worker Alicia Amira, who markets herself on Instagram as the “founder of the bimbo movement,” have built sizable followings leaning into the aesthetic. Among the Gen Z creators on TikTok, however, the bimbo has evolved into an aspirational figure, acquiring something of a political iconography in itself. As defined by Chlapecka and her fellow BimboTokers, the bimbo is staunchly pro-sex work, pro-LGBTQ,  pro-BLM, and anti-straight white male; in one of her videos, among the 10 “cummandments” listed in Chlapecka’s “Bimbo Bibble” are “birth control,” “bark at straight people,” and “men stop.”
 
Perhaps most surprisingly, the Gen Z bimbo is anti-capitalist (indeed, Chlapecka hashtags many of her TikToks #ihatecapitalism). Of course, there’s more than a whiff of irony here, as the bimbo aesthetic is in many ways predicated on consumerist values: as Syrena, who goes by @fauxrich on TikTok, puts it, “it costs a lot of money to be hyperfeminine. Makeup costs a lot of money: primer, eyeliner, lashes. Then there’s the hair, the nails, the clothes. Fillers, Botox, surgeries, that costs thousands of dollars.”
 
But most bimbos will tell you that bimbofication is less about the ability to afford $40 primer at Sephora and more about a state of mind. “Even though the aesthetic is rooted in consumerism and being all about money and things, we’re trying to push it the opposite way,” says Griffin Maxwell Brooks, a 19-year-old mechanical and engineering aerospace student at Princeton University. “The modern bimbo aesthetic is more about a state of mind and embracing, ‘I want to dress however I want and look hot and not cater to your expectations.'” On TikTok, Brooks favors glittery mesh tops, jangly earrings, jewel-toned hair dye and bedazzled combat boots; with Chlapecka, they are one of the unofficial leaders of the bimbo movement on TikTok, going viral in October with a video of him summarizing the bimbo aesthetic. “The bimbo is not only blissfully and ignorant and spacey but exists at the aesthetic intersection of tackiness and luxury,” they say in the video. “To be a bimbo, one must let go of their former earthly possessions and relationships to adopt a gaudy yet lonely lifestyle.”

 
Initially, Brooks received some flak for their use of the term in the video; some assumed that they were using the trope as a way to poke fun at female stereotypes and deride women. Brooks, who identifies as non-binary, denies that was their intention. For them, bimbofication is a way to subvert traditional expectations associated with gender and sexuality. “There’s a lot of internalized homophobia in the gay community,” they say. “In adopting this very feminine aesthetic at times, one of the things I had to do was be OK with no longer fitting this mold so some gay men will not be attracted to me.” For them, bimbofication “isn’t about acting in a way that caters to what men are attracted to. it’s about looking how we want to look, and if that was initially about catering to the male gaze, we’re taking that back.”
 
“I see it as a way of tackling gender oppression and stereotyping and gender norms,” says Kate Muir, a London-based TikTok creator who goes by @bimbokate. One of her most popular videos features her preening in front of a mirror with the caption, “Being a self-aware bimbo is amazing: you become everything men want visually whilst also being everything they hate (self-aware, sexually empowered, politically conscious, etc.) Reverse the fetishisation of femininity.” Part of the goal of such content, she says, is to present a stereotypically feminine message accompanied by a caption that undercuts the visual message, thus creating a jarring cognitive dissonance and discomfort for the (straight, male) viewer. (This is, apparently, quite an effective tactic: Muir says the vast majority of her hate comments are from straight men, an experience shared by the other female-identified BimBoTok creators interviewed for this piece.) For her, BimboTok is “definitely a feminist movement.”

 
All of this might have the ring of familiarity. In many respects, the valorization of the bimbo mirrors what writer Ariel Levy wrote about in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs, women who had internalized the patriarchal values of Playboy and Girls Gone Wild to such an extreme degree that they willingly participated in their own objectification. And indeed, there are many — particularly feminists over the age of 30, who have lived through multiple cycles of various forms of subjugation being marketed as empowering — who balk at the term. “Officially viewing the word ‘bimbo’ as a fucked up thing to say,” viral tweet read. “I’m okay with women who have obviously been called it many times reclaiming it — but if you don’t look like a hyper sexual person and you use that word I feel like you hate women.”
 
In the midst of the endless vagaries of 2020, however, with much of Gen Z saddled with student debt and skyrocketing unemployment, leaning into bimbofication may be one of the more healthier forms of stress relief out there. “It’s not about being ignorant. You’re letting go of your consciousness in order to achieve this higher level of enlightenment,” says Brooks. “You’re aware of all the shit that’s going on around you, but you’re letting go of it because you want to live the life of being pretty and walking around.” Don’t hate them because they’re beautiful — ask yourself why you’re not.
 
 
The Bimbo is Back. Like, for Real ! By EJ Dickson. Rolling Stone, November 23, 2021.