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MissBimbo -- When satire turns serious
With a name like MissBimbo.com, you probably won't expect to find a reasoned, measured website where girls are taught the finer points of economic theory. Its founders, however, have definitely learned that lesson. Since launching in France two years ago as Ma-Bimbo.com, girls have created over 1.3 million "bimbos" which they teach to become fashion superstars. Like superstar celebrities Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, success for a girl is defined by these sites not by what they do, but by how they look. We live in a Barbie world, with Bratz dolls all around, constantly discussing fashionable celebrities' every moves. Aren't girls continually soaked in an increasingly confined prison of society's expectations? Parents turn a blind eye while their daughters eagerly learn the answer to the only question the world wants to ask them -- Hot or Not?Where parents were content to let the television raise their children, now they have the Internet to do their babysitting for them. Soupy Sales asked children to reach into their sleeping parents' wallets and send him those "funny green pieces of paper" (in return they'd receive a lovely postcard from Puerto Rico!). Parents were outraged! Now the Internet asks the children to text MissBimbo for $1.99 per text, and the parents gladly pay. Perhaps it isn't only the children that are learning a lesson. Kids should not be set free, unsupervised, on the Internet. Villainous marketers are waiting for them there. If it takes an over-the-top satirical (yet profitable) website like MissBimbo to make parents understand what's happened, then it has provided a real service. We come here not to bury MissBimbo, but to praise it.
