Don't blame Miss Bimbo

Helen A.S. Popkin

Things don't bode well for Sweet Potato. Ever since all this “Save the children!” hysteria started over Miss Bimbo, the online game site where she resides, the poor virtual paper doll hasn’t had a thing to eat. Not that she eats much anyway.

Most days, it’s just a glass of milk. Occasionally, her corporeal creator allows Sweet Potato a pear to take the edge off. But her 30-something real-world keeper hasn’t visited the animated trollop in days. And as Sweet Potato is already “waif thin,” in keeping with the game, she doesn’t have a lot of extra calories to burn.

It’s not that Sweet Potato’s adult keeper is bored with Miss Bimbo, which is allegedly geared towards the ‘tween set. On the contrary, like a lot of other adults, she enjoys her daily 20-minute foray into the amateurishly-designed Web world where plastic surgery, body image, boyfriends and trampy clothes earn her Attitude points like Dungeon & Dragons for Paris Hilton-esque celebutards.

Unfortunately, since big media started heralding Miss Bimbo as the catalyst of destruction for the young female psyche, Web traffic continues to crash both the recently released English version of the site, and the French originator, Ma Bimbo. Now nobody can access Miss Bimbo. And if Sweet Potato doesn’t get a “dose” of milk, her creator will have to shell out valuable “Bimbo dollars” to bring her trampy avatar back from the dead. (Remember Tomgotchis?)

“This sucks!” Sweet Potato’s keeper recently told Netiquette. Wishing to remain anonymous to other Miss Bimbo gamers, Sweet Potato’s keeper isn’t alone in her annoyance. Grown-up players unable to access either Ma Bimbo or Miss Bimbo’s online forums are forced to complain elsewhere. From political bulletin boards to beauty product chat rooms, adult Miss Bimbo fans rage on about news reports and parent groups they say have it totally wrong. 

MissBimbo.com Sweet Potato (left) is clobbered in a Miss Bimbo Challenge by a more powerful hussy who's wearing the same outfit but garishly teamed with unsightly, yet pricey and effective accessories.

“Miss Bimbo Web site promotes extreme diets and surgery to 9-year-olds” screams the headline in the British Times. The report, quickly picked up by U.S. news agencies, is chock full of quotes from the experts.

“This is as lethal as pro-anorexia Web sites,” Dee Dawson, told the Times. She’s a medical director of Rhodes Farm Clinic in England, which treats 8- to 18-year girls with eating disorders. “A lot of children will get caught up with the extremely damaging and appalling messages,” she says.

“What parent in his or her right mind would let a 7 or 9-year-old on a site with “bimbo” in the name?” says Sweet Potato’s keeper.  “Parents can’t be all, ‘Oh, my stars! I thought that nice Bimbo Web site was a safe place I could trust to shape my daughter’s worldview on womanhood.’  It’s such a manufactured controversy.”

The irate woman echoes other adult Miss Bimbo players in her criticism of the brouhaha. And well, she has a point. Either parents know their daughter joined ‘The Miss Bimbo site’ or they have no clue what their wee one is doing online.  In the case of the latter, they ought to thank the heavens their little girl only stumbled onto Miss Bimbo and not “2Girls1Cup” (a particularly scatological video popular with the kids).

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