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What’s going on with feminism these days?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading all manner of think pieces about a corner of the Internet called #BimboTok, wherein (mostly Gen Z) TikTok content creators are embracing being a bimbo — or, more accurately, a specific, often ironic, performance of hyperfeminine, tee-hee, “math is hard” girlishness, but with a left-leaning, sex-positive bent. As a New York Times piece on the trend put it, “bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not. It’s anti-capitalist, even anti-work.”
The think pieces about #BimboTok remind me a bit of the discourse around the Spice Girls in the late ‘90s. Revisionist anniversary content would have you believe they’ve always been regarded as bold feminist icons but, at the time, they were maligned for being empty-headed marketing dolls who were “setting women back decades” with their bubblegum pop. (I’ve lost track of the total number of decades we’ve been set back by various pop culture movements, just as I’ve lost track of the number of times I, personally, have set John Dafoe spinning in his grave.)
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Still, as I’ve written before, that doesn’t change the fact that the first time I ever heard the word “feminist,” it was out of the mouth of a Spice Girl.
In another corner of the Internet, you have the rise of the #TradWife — which is short for “traditional wife” or a modern woman who has decided to embrace traditional, family-values gender roles and submit to her husband. (Between this and the rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S., there’s a distinct “What year is this?” vibe to everything these days.)
There’s overlap between these seemingly disparate trends: both the Bimbos and the Tradwives are taking two antiquated ideas of femininity and positioning them as new, or in the case of #BimboTok, empowering but, look: being young and hot has literally always been currency; the dual role of wife and mother has always been held up as an ideal. The assertion that either of these movements are inherently anti-capitalist because they focus, in varying degrees, on abandoning work outside the home is also flawed; it’s all still work. It’s work to be conventionally attractive. It’s work to raise children and run a home.
Both trends have also risen out of the ashes of the Girlboss — that striving, hustling Millennial-pink avatar of female ambition that emerged in the 2010s, or the Lean In era of (mostly white) feminism. Girlboss feminism said you could have it all. Girlboss feminism said you could pull yourself up by your rose-gold bootstraps and smash that glass ceiling to become not a CEO, but a SHE-E-O.
But the Bimbos and Tradwives didn’t kill the Girlboss. The pandemic did. These micro-movements do not, to me, read as a backlash to feminism, but a reaction to collective burnout and trauma.
About a year into this Hell Time, I read many pieces written by exhausted, wrung-out women about how the pandemic dulled and shrank their ambition. They were tired of hustling, of leaning in, of giving all of themselves to work, of not having it all, but doing it all.
While I could certainly relate to this flattening of ambition — as well as readily see the appeal of the “just vibes” ethos of bimboism — I bristled. It felt like a slippery slope, like, what: we’re all just back in our kitchens, baking sourdough?
But while I think you can draw a straight line from the flame-out of the Girlboss to the rise of #tradwife and #BimboTok, those are just two reactions to disillusionment with individual choice feminism and its emphasis on careerism. The pandemic, and the increased awareness of burnout and exploitation, has actually radicalized women in many, many ways, especially around issues of reproductive justice, domestic labour, care work, motherhood and class.
In other words, many women were shedding their individual ambition in favour of care, community, collective action. The pandemic taught us, over and over again, that we need to work together, that our response cannot be individual. Feminism, too, cannot be about the individual. It has to be about community. It wasn’t the ambition that made the Girlboss “cringe.” It was the idea that empowerment and liberation were ever about one woman making it to the top.
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