The Miss Bimbo Controversy

I had been on the website for several months before it caught a wave of media attention. It's viewed as an anti-feminist portrayal of women, encouraging plastic surgery, gold digging, and eating disorders. This is not the case.

I'm only giving the website a half-assed defense, because I'm not happy with them at the moment. I used to advocate it, but they're making that impossible for me now.

First of all, the game is designed to be satire. It's amusing for housewives to log online while the young ones are napping and live like an internet fashionista. It's a little get away. The game was never aimed at children, until seemingly recently.

A web update went live today. The layout has become very kid friendly, and the "Bimbo" doll has been changed to look very much like a twelve year old hooker. It's hard to defend their previous intentions now that they are seemingly moving in the direction the media had made them out to be.

What used to be an elegant, edgy twenty something, now looks like a sixth grade girl who plays with her mother's makeup, gets a boob job and a face lift, and dates older men for money. Now that's where it's sick. Before she at least looked legal. Now, if she walked up to the Clinique counter at the mall, the saleswoman would say "Where are your parents, sweetie? Are you lost?"

The ideology behind the game was something I used to appreciate. I have been banned from the forums several times because the administration doesn't appreciate anything I have to say, and you aren't allowed to talk about opinions/thoughts/feelings over there because that's considered controversy.. but now there's a whole new level of controversy.

Before, I would call anyone offended by the game a homely militant feminist. Now I could look at them and say "You're damn right".

It used to be the type of environment that I felt was easily dismissable as heavy sarcasm, but now the long overdue updates are making it look like a child prostitution ring. The intentions may have been to make the doll a little less Nicole Kidman and a little more Angelina Jolie.. but I'm pretty sure Dakota Fanning isn't the middle point.

The site is laden with disclaimers like "Boob jobs are serious!" and "Don't kiss too many boys!", and before I thought they were redundant and unnecessary to anyone with common sense, but now with the target audience changing.. I think the disclaimers should be spelled out with little refrigerator magnets or hand drawn with fingerpaint. Only on Miss Bimbo can you play a game where the object is to make out with men who are TRYING TO GET AWAY FROM YOU.

I'm hoping they will drop the lolita-esque update, which has been live for only several hours and already has an unsettlingly displeased response, and go back to normal. I realize it took a lot of time to come together, but if they had spend half that time putting thought into what they were doing, it could be something much less the antithesis of what they claim to be aiming for. I've been signed up for a year. If I wanted to play a twelve year old whore game, I'd wear pigtails and stand on the corner in a plaid skirt and a button-down.