Remember bimbos? Those well-endowed ladies with bra-size IQs who were always hanging in the background of movies and shows, offering low-level titillation and the occasional blonde-moment punch line? Finally, after years and years and years, the bimbo has clacked her heels into passé, become an inexcusable cliché, really—on par with the sassy black friend, both in tiredness and social incorrectness. These days, where there was once a gum-smacking blonde, there’s now a hollow-headed dude. A hollow-headed dude with distinctly un-hollow pecs that look like they get buffed and detailed more regularly than a showroom Lamborghini. The kind of guy who has a misspelled Sanskrit character tattooed across his neck. A guy who immediately conjures the phrase man meat. A himbo, in other words.
[#image: /photos/5582d2691177d66d68d5a90d]||||||
A definition for the OED: A himbo is a man who is more attractive than he is smart. A bimbo with nuts, to put it testicularly. Behold this Y-chromo parade of stupid: There’s Schmidt, the ditzy kimono-wearing roommate on_ New Girl_, who takes off his shirt whenever he’s in the presence of an attractive female. Or Bobby, Courteney Cox’s hunky ex-husband on_ Cougar Town_, who says things like "I don’t get this time-zone crap. How can it be one time here and then another time at home?" Andy "If you rearrange the letters of Peru, you could spell Europe!" Dwyer on Parks and Recreation? Total lumberjack himbo. There’s James Marsden as Liz Lemon’s latest boyfriend on 30 Rock, an aspiring hot-dog-stand owner who spells his name wrong and proudly carries a Sunglass Hut credit card. Actually, Liz Lemon is pretty much a himbo aficionado. Recall the season she spent with the beautiful, pea-brained Jon Hamm, who once screamed, "This racket is a fart!" after losing a tennis game. (But he was still treated like royalty by all of humanity, thanks to the way sunlight reflected off his perfectly contoured cheekbones.) The smartest female character on TV dates like a double-X Hugh Hefner.
In part, the rise of the himbo has to do with the fact that beefcakedom has gone mainstream. This spring, Hollywood tried to sell a movie entirely on Taylor Kitsch in a loincloth, in the hopes that ladies who wanted to bed Tim Riggins would go to a space epic. John Carter is the sort of flick that once would have been marketed only to horny 12-year-old boys, except John Carter would have been wearing pants and the Martian princess would have been the half-naked sex object splashed across every ad. Next up is Magic Mike, a Steven Soderbergh movie about a male stripper, played by former exotic dancer and current big handsome doof Channing Tatum. He’s joined in the art of pelvic gyration by Matthew McConaughey, who must have an insurance policy on his nipples, they’ve been subjected to so much ocean wind. No one ever watched Showgirls for the moving story of one woman’s struggle to rise to the top of her profession. Likewise, the primary attraction of Magic Mike is not its complex story lines or great acting. It is about seeing hot, chiseled bodies fairly naked. Hot, chiseled male bodies. Point being: You can now pen a movie around a guy’s buns.
Once upon a just ten years ago, men were the last frontier against gender-equal shallowness. Sure, there were marginalized instances of himbodom. Like, say, the Chippendales, those waxy chests for hire. And on an early Seinfeld episode, even, Jerry pegs Elaine’s jock boyfriend a "mimbo." (She breaks up with him after his face is wrecked in a rock-climbing accident.) In the late ’90s, there was_ Friends_’ Joey, the heavily hair-gelled counterdolt to hippie ditz Phoebe, who would argue that the hair dig I just made was a "moo point." It’s not like idiots only recently became amusing. But none of them were quite as blatantly objectified as today’s himbos. We’ve been building toward this moment, and now we’ve fully embraced the existence of the insipid-on-the-inside, bronzed-on-the-outside male sex object. Turning on the TV these days is kinda like being at a bachelorette party. Never have the lusting-for and laughing-at impulses blended so seamlessly.
It’s not a coincidence, either, that the Golden Age of Himbodom overlaps with the Year of the Lady. (Which it is, at least entertainmentwise.) Women are doing their own buddy comedies, like Bridesmaids, and there’s been a wave of female-fronted shows. The most lauded formula on TV: pretty ladies + vulgar mouths. Even on the old-fogy networks, you’ll hear a member of the so-called fairer sex spouting lines like "This is giving me lady wood" or "What’d you do, shine a bat symbol on your vagina?" Hollywood has signed on to the idea of ladies as the crass sexual aggressors, and our pretty, vulgar leading ladies need subjects to crassly sexually aggress. Which means there’s no need for the male co-star to be anything more than a handsome, unselfaware dolt. Brains, after all, aren’t what inspires "lady wood."
The himbo feels almost radical in an it’s about time men were relegated to airhead status way. Now dudes are simply the shiny backboards off which female stars can bounce their punch lines. In a Liz Lemon relationship, there’s no question who wears the (albeit marinara-sauce-encrusted) pants. And female shows like_ 2 Broke Girls_, Whitney, and Are You There, Chelsea? might as well be titled Look Who’s Sexist Now! It’s progress! If revenge can be a kind of progress.
But here’s where the revenge fantasy goes astray: There’s something undeniably self-serving about the lot of the himbo. Unlike bimbos, they essentially get to play dumb, or just be dumb, without suffering any real consequences. Actresses who played big-bosomed airheads were tagged as big-bosomed airheads in real life—but no one considers Jon Hamm a dummy, even though he plays one in everything outside of_ Mad Men_. (See: Bridesmaids, 30 Rock, SNL.) Male actors earn a sort of cultural cachet by going himbo. They get the audience’s respect for it—it shows they don’t take themselves too seriously. While also showing off their nicely toned pecs.
It might just be that this whole new class of dirty-talking, male-objectifying, role-reversing ladies aren’t so much evening the score as making it easier for dudes to get laid by doing less. After all, in this scenario, it’s women who are doing all the heavy luring, no effort necessary on the dude’s part. Maybe you can see how this would be appealing. The seldom-clothed men of_ Jersey Shore_—and keep in mind one of them is named after his abdominal musculature—spend their days gym-ing, tanning, and laundry-ing, and at night head to the dance floor, hold up their shirts, and simply wait for hordes of girls to claw their way over.
The bimbo is forever a curse to women, but the himbo ends up being a male fantasy: You can be an idiot, renounce any obligation to string a decent sentence together or even be a decent person, and still have lots and lots and lots of sex. Sex that comes to you as easily as pizza delivery. With women who want to use you as a sex object. If that’s the blue pill, what man wouldn’t take it?
_Lauren Bans is a _GQ associate editor