Opinion | Meet the Self-Described ‘Bimbos’ of TikTok (Published 2022) (2024)

“Are you a leftist who likes to have their tit* out? Do you like to flick off pro-lifers?” Chrissy Chlapecka asks the camera in a 51-second TikTok captioned “BIMBOS, RISE 💖‼️” In the video, Ms. Chlapecka, a 22-year-old comedian who lives in Chicago and has about 4.6 million TikTok followers, is wearing a tight pink minidress, a pink coat trimmed with faux fur and tall white leather boots; her bleach-blond hair is in pigtails. “Are you good at math?” she asks, scribbling “2+2=<3” into a notebook. She holds a pose while reading a book upside down. “Are you good at reading? Well, if you are, how?” At the end of the video, she yells out the window: “I’m a bimbo and I’m proud!”

Ms. Chlapecka’s celebration of the much-maligned category of the “bimbo” is provocative, even shocking. In a recent phone interview, Ms. Chlapecka told me she identifies as feminist but that a lot of feminism needs to be “reworked.” Like critiques of many women of her generation, hers include the historical whiteness of many strains of feminism, its heteronormativity and the persistence of anti-trans voices within the movement today.

In a messy period when many are trying to redefine feminism, a wide variety of intriguing, occasionally fraught new iterations have come about. One of these is evident on #BimboTok, a corner of the internet that Ms. Chlapecka helped create. It’s a space where comedians and creators mix makeup tips with articulations of left-leaning politics. In her videos, Ms. Chlapecka’s tone is dripping with sarcasm and irony. It’s OK to wear a faux-fur hot pink bralette, she assures us, and it’s also OK if we don’t know long division or who Elon Musk is.

One might ask: How could it possibly be feminist to talk about how hot and dumb you are all the time? Women bragging that they can’t do long division has an obviously retrograde quality to it; it can play into juvenile stereotypes even as it attempts to manipulate them. Watching some of these videos can feel like peering into a series of conservative fantasies that have been ever so slightly warped: Is it really leftist for a woman to want to just go shopping and never get a job? But to dismiss this corner of the internet as totally backward would be to miss the point.

The #BimboTok sphere is a diffuse collective of creators with different ideas and personas, but generally, it’s sex-positive and sex-work-positive. It often borrows the language of social justice movements. It encourages asking the dumb questions that get to the heart of things. “I don’t know what the economy is, I don’t know what supply and demand is,” Ms. Chlapecka says in one video. “All I know is that our problems would be solved if we’d just print more money.” There’s a way in which her monologues can come to feel almost incisive — why can’t we print more money? The answer is complicated, obviously, and on some level Ms. Chlapecka knows that. “I’m asking a lot of questions that, yes, I have the answer to, but are also valid,” she said. “The whole world we made is literally made up, so we can make up solutions to the issues we have.”

Ms. Chlapecka’s videos would have been unimaginable in 2016, when liberals were mourning Hillary Clinton’s loss and joining Facebook groups with names like “Pantsuit Nation.” Bimboism is the antithesis of the mode of feminism that was dominant in the 2010s, a kind of hyperambitious you-can-have-it-all feminism that can be summed up by the label “girlboss.” The girlboss was striving and succeeding in a male workplace; she was a female founder who also went to 6 a.m. yoga classes. She wore a chic dress and looked coiffed on Instagram. She was liberal and outspoken about her gender.