Alyssa on Sex
The Rise of the Bimbo Fetish
Hyperfemininity is the new black!
You’ve checked it out, don’t lie. It’s intriguing by nature, visually distinctive, and incredibly controversial, all the necessary ingredients for Internet notoriety. Perhaps more than any other fetish or kink, bimbofication lives online.
But in the moments when the wider Internet gets a glimpse of bimbo fetishism, it generates a storm of controversy; you might remember that time when Buzzfeed found a debimbofication cartoon to get mad about or the other time when Rolling Stone decided to do a piece on BimboTok. We do love a good moral panic, and the bimbo fetish has been the subject of several.
And why wouldn’t it make people mad? We live in a world where feminism, at least of the watered-down lean-in variety, is considered mainstream and politically correct. The bimbo, the fake, objectified plastic doll, flies in the face of that idea. A woman who pursues bimbofication seems to reject that modern consensus, transporting herself back to an earlier time when men made the decisions and women looked pretty. This is not PC, not socially acceptable, and certainly not safe for work.
But, predictably, that controversy only adds to the fetish’s popularity. “BimboTok” videos on TikTok have garnered millions of views. /r/bimbofetish, the largest subreddit devoted to the bimbo community, though by no means the only one, has over 360,000 subscribers. And individual fetish models who self-identify as bimbos or fit the aesthetic, like Alicia Amira and Nicolette Shea, rack up hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, and, presumably, huge amounts of cash on Onlyfans.
This all begs the question: why is the bimbo fetish so popular? Who gets their jollies looking at pictures of women who take makeup advice from Bratz dolls? Why would someone willingly subject themselves to “bimbofication”? The way our culture thinks about sex is so fraught that any deviation from the norm is instantly the subject of censure and condemnation — but what’s the bimbo fetish really about?
It’s about the community.
Fetishes tend to be popular in part because they are unusual. Human cow (“hucow”) erotica is extremely popular on Amazon, where I publish stories, rivaling even the much-better-known “billionaire” niche, and that’s in part because it’s so bizarre that anyone not “in the know” would be disgusted by it. Groups of people all over the Internet, from guitar collectors to PC builders to, yes, fetish enthusiasts, all thrive on the knowledge that they are “in” and that other people are “out.”
But it’s not just about that. While the bimbofication community is splintered between the actual bimbos themselves, people who consider themselves “bimbo trainers,” or are in relationships with bimbos in real life, and just plain fans of big, silicon-enhanced boobs, all of these people find solace in visiting bimbofication forums. While you certainly see plenty of good old-fashioned thirst on these websites, you also see people commiserating about having such an unusual kink, sharing their personal stories, and forming genuine connections with people who they would never speak to otherwise. Kink communities are communities too.
It’s about gender roles.
This one might not seem so obvious. To illuminate what I mean, I have to make a confession: I have, shall we say, personal experience with the bimbo fetish. I’m a trans woman, and before I cracked my egg and came out to myself, I often consumed bimbo fetish porn because, I told myself, the women were hot. Of course, that’s a position I stand by today — I’m proudly bi — but I realize now that I also admired the model of hyperfemininity they provided.
At that point, because I didn’t recognize the truth about myself, I had unconsciously given up hope of ever living my life in a way that felt authentic. So the vision of female sexuality that I saw when I looked at a picture of, say, Amy Anderssen provided me with what I now realize was a beacon of hope, an ultra-pure distillation of the femininity that I wanted so desperately but felt that I couldn’t have.
In fact, while I have no numbers to back up this claim, it seems that the bimbo fetish is very popular with members of the trans community. It makes sense; no other fetish plays so openly with the idea of what gender roles should be. Society doesn’t expect women to dress, look, and act like bimbos, so it punishes those who do — and this mirrors, in miniature, the experience of trans people.
There is certainly transphobia within the community, people who insist that only cis (and, for that matter, straight and white) women can be bimbos, but by and large it is more accepting than society as a whole, and it can serve as a refuge for people who don’t feel that their gender expression is accepted by the wider world.
It’s about feminism.
I’ll admit that I might get hit with some flak for this one, but I genuinely believe that the bimbo fetish is one of the purest expressions of feminism on the Internet today. That’s because bimbos resist the mainstream idea of what it means to be feminine. While the community is often treated by media outlets as a haven for antique gender roles, the idea that the bimbo fetish somehow harkens back to some archaic view of the world is ridiculous to me.
How come? Well, if a modern bimbo — a woman with surgically-augmented breasts and lips, a long, platinum-blonde mane, and a heavily-pink wardrobe — were to visit a bar in 1955, she would probably not attract much positive male attention, and not only because that physical appearance was so far out of fashion at the time. No, a modern bimbo would also be unappealing to the dinosaur-like conservatives of yesteryear because she is, fundamentally, a woman who controls her own destiny.
What do I mean by that? I should start by directing you to Alicia Amira’s brilliant blog post here, where she describes how, for her, becoming a bimbo was about dressing the way she wanted and expressing herself in a way that felt authentic. It was never about men and their desires for her, just about silicon, makeup, and tight clothing.
Really, society is hypocritical when it comes to feminism. Despite all the talk of “leaning in” and “breaking the glass ceiling,” women are judged harshly for deviating from what is perceived to be the “norm.” Feminism isn’t just fighting for the right to wear business suits and to better fit into a soulless capitalist hamster wheel, a hamster wheel where no human of any gender would spend time if they had the choice. It’s about women being able to express their true selves, and if that self likes tight dresses and platform heels, well, so be it!
It’s about changing the world.
There you have it. Bimbofication appears to be regressive and reactionary, but in fact it’s a very progressive movement. By taking society’s expectations for modern femininity and subverting them, bimbos are able to live the lives they want, other people be damned. Really, it’s beautiful.
So, the next time you see a panicky article about bimbofication popping up in your news feed, don’t worry. In the immortal words of The Who, “the kids are alright –” and, if you don’t watch out, we might turn society’s conceptions of gender completely upside down. Maybe, just maybe, the future is pink.
Alyssa Wills is an erotica author and general Internet skank. You can find her on Twitter here.
