Wow!

Sorry about the long lapse, there.  Seriously, such a lot has happened the last couple of months.  I've been insanely busy.  Whilst I have, I promise you, kept up on reading around my interests, actively engaging in them and working on those pictures I promised, I've had very little time or energy to post.

Anyway, trying to get back on track.  I had an interesting little experience the other day that highlighted for me the difference between fat girls like myself and my smaller-framed friends.

Myself and a few of the ladies were together for an evening of home-cooked food, wine, good music and giggles.  Part way through the evening one of my friends, a gorgeous, tall and slinky redhead with serious self-image issues, begins to make once again comments about her appearance.  Let's call her E

Now, don't get me wrong, we all have body issues these days, with the media and society pushing these extremely fake ideals of beauty on us, and I certainly can't blame any woman for feeling bad about her appearance.  However, E is tall, a size 10-12 ordinarily, with DD-E cup breasts which have magically retained their full pert youthfulness, a smattering of lovely freckles, deep red hair, legs that practically reach her armpits and a really cute face.  Her complaint was that she is "getting fat", having gained enough weight to go up to a 12-14 in clothing.  This, when she has just reached her-mid twenties, the time of the great sag and expansion of all humans, male and female.

Of course, being the body-positive bunch that we are, we weren't going to let her dwell on that, so decided to bump her out of her funk by lifting our tops to display much larger and wobblier bellies, and to profess our love for our imperfect bodies.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was derailed by E discovering to her shock and confusion that my friend J and I have stretchmarks.  She thought that they were something you got from being pregnant, that it was caused by saggy wrinkling of loose skin that had been stretched out.  We had to explain to her that stretch marks are, in fact, scar tissue, and that they occur when the body grows faster than the skin can stretch.  Mine developed when I went through puberty, and the ones on my stomach grow an extra few millimetres every year, assuring that they are always pink and fresh-looking, thanks to the amount that my belly moves when I am active, pulling further on already-weakened skin.  I then pressed the flat of my palm against my breasts, upper arms and thighs and showed her that I actually have them all over, but most are faded except when I tug on the skin more.  She didn't know you could get  stretch marks there, either.  She's never had them.  I advised her that people that weight train can get them as well, when the muscle mass increases too rapidly, and that a friend of mine in college ended up with his entire upper back a mass of pink stripes, and that my OH had a fair-sized mass of them on his upper arms and thighs.

Now, J and I were more than a little surprised to hear this, having considered stretch marks a fact of life since we were 10.  The fact that E didn't even really know what they were came as something of a shock, as well.

The thing is, E is lovely, but she has never really had to confront the particular privelege she has in being tall, slim and curvaceous, nor think outside of her own bodily experiences, so I don't think she ever really saw her own image issues as being different to those of her fat friends, nor realised just how different our relative experiences are.

Another example is bra shopping.  E is ample in the bust, like me, but there is a whole world of difference between DD and FF, and most of the places she shops for underwear don't offer anyting for women like myself. 

Thinking about this made me consider my own privelege.  I am a 16-18, usually 18, and as such straddle the plus-size line in most shops.  I can often choose clothing both from the higher sizes in a shop's "normal" range and the lowest sizes in it's "plus" range.  I can pick and choose where I shop, and can reliably purchase fashionable clothing so long as I am mindful of my shape.  Many fat women don't have this privelege, being relegated to shopping online, or just always going to Evans and Bon Marche, and to whatever range of clothes those shops choose to offer.  I also am still small enough that people will reliably say "you're not really all that fat" or something similar.

My stretch marks and body wobbliness makes high-impact exercise uncomfortable, even painful, but what of women who are larger still?  What of the restrictions their own bodies put on the range of exercise they can enjoy?

And what of my much thinner friends, who get cold during weather that I consider pleasantly warm, and need a cushion to sit on even soft seats?

There is a whole world of difference of experience between each of us, and unrealistic beauty ideals and social stigma against being "too thin" or "too fat" affect and harm us all.

Watch those videos I linked to.  And watch all the ones that link from them.  The level to which an image can be altered and look either realistic, or at least no different to those in most magazines, is frightening.

Those magazines like Heat and OK will have a mixture of images of celebrities.  Some will look preened, poised and beautiful and will be praised for their efforts.  Others will have spotlights shone on their "flaws".  But pick up a similar magazine of different name, and those praised people will also seem to have numerous "problems", whilst the imperfect people suddenly glow.  The difference?  Whether the photos were shopped or not, and to what degree.  Nothing more.  What separates you from the celebrities isn't just personal trainers, cosmetic surgery, hours of make-up and having their clothing specially selected.  It's image fakery and enhancement.  Stop worrying about it, and just take care of yourself for you.

Get exercise that you enjoy, because you enjoy it, and do it with friends.  Eat food that you like, and expand your range of foods, eat what you want when you want, and you may find that your cravings ebb and die, as "naughty pleasures" lose the appeal of the forbidden.  Feel great, love yourself, and STOP STRESSING!

Wow,

Sorry for the long gap without posts.  I've been very busy lately, working on those long-ago promised comic book characters with switched gender stereotypes.  So far, my biggest problem is that I simply cannot draw supersized male genitals, albeit contained in clothing, as an equivalent of the outsized and out-of-proportion breasts of most female comic book characters.  The bodies themselves are working fine, and I'm getting pretty good at testicleavage, but I feel ridiculous when I add on a massive crotch bulge.

I'd post some examples, except that my scanner has somewhat died recently, but I promise I'll have it up and running, soon!

In the meantime, to keep things active, why not post your own characters with switched gender stereotypes, and send me a link?  I'd love to see what other people have been up to.

This post moved me really quite dramatically.

Reading this, I did want to cry with sympathy for this woman's experiences.  At the same time, I felt so much admiration for her; for her candour and openness in deciding to share her experiences, and her courage at opening up about something so frightening.

Too few of us keep quiet when we are assaulted, and reading this post makes me wish I could have had more courage to speak up when things happened to me.  But I counted myself lucky, because I was never "actually raped".  I was never penetrated against my will, that I could remember, though I had come close on several occassions.  I found myself thinking that this made the things that were done to me "unimportant",  because "nothing really happened".

Well, now I know better.  Here is my list.  TRIGGER WARNING, UNPLEASANT STUFF

1.  I was around eight or nine years old.  It was a special occassion; one of those events where the entire family and lots of the family friends would all gather together at my grandparents for feasting, games and general merriment.  I was still the only child on our rambling branch of the family tree; my second and third cousins hadn't been able to make it this time, so I was also the only child in the house.  When the family decided they wanted to go to the pub, I asked to stay home as I didn't like the smokiness.  A family friend, a man whose house I had stayed over regularly, sometimes for a week or two in the holidays, offered to sit me whilst everybody else went drinking.  When we were alone, at some point I decided to go and give him a little family kiss.  Instead, when I went to give him a peck he grabbed me and pulled me into a straddling position on his lap, started kissng me and grabbing me, pushing his hands under my clothes.  I remember him pushing me back and down so that he was on top of me and starting to undo my jeans, then we heard the key turn in the front door.  He let me go, and I sat in a corner of the room.  I don't remember why, but at the time I felt guilty about the matter, so I asked him not to tell.  Maybe because I kissed him first, so I thought I had "started it".  Looking back, I can remember that when I used to visit him prior to this, sometimes he would get me to cuddle up in bed with him in the mornings, and we'd play tickling games and other things.  It had never seemed odd to me, before.

2.  When I was around twelve years old, during the Summer holidays, I was walking to a friend's house.  I had just reached the top of my road, and there was a man standing there.  He looked lost, or like he was waiting for someone.  I smiled at him as I walked past.  He started talking to me.  Said he was going to a party, and would I like to come with him?  I said no, and went to walk on, but he had backed me into a corner.  He started touching me, talking all the time about this party, and how I would really enjoy it.  It happened on a busy street, in the middle of a sunny day, with people I knew from school, the shops and other areas walking past, and no one said a thing, or tried to stop him from kissing and grabbing me.  In the end, I agreed to go to the party, but I had to go and finish my errands first.  He let me go, and said he would be waiting for me.  When I eventually had to walk home from my friends' house, I took the route through the back streets.

3.  I was around fourteen years old, maybe a little older, and was shopping at the local supermarket.  A couple of times, my trolley bumped into an older man's one.  I vaguely recognised him as someone who lived in the village, one of those people that you casually say "good morning" to when passing in the street, so I did again, and thought nothing more of it.  As I was leaving, with my trolley full of groceries, he approached and asked if I would like a lift home.  I said no, thank you, I'm fine to walk.  As soon as he offered me the lift, I knew sometin was up.  My school seemed to be targetted regularly by predators, so most months there would be a letter circulated to parents, warnin of a person or persons of particular description driving a particular vehicle who might "ask your child to ride home with them".  He badgered me fora few moments more, and then splurted "I will pay you £50!".  I said no once more, and by this time a few of the other shoppers had noticed what was going on and were watching him.  This man never touched me, not once, but I walked home shaking the whole way, afraid his car would pull up next to me in a less crowded area.

4.  My uncle decided to have his wedding at a luxurious holiday resort, and the whole family came along.  I was now sixteen, and past the age of consent in England.  While on the holiday, a number of the waiters flirted with me, mostly harmlessly, and doing so only when my parens were around, mostly I think to see if they could get me to blush, which I did with worrying ease.  So I thought nothing of it when, at the little nigthclub, one of the waiters asked if they could dance with me at the end of their shift.  Oddly, it was just as the club had closed and I was leaving that I was offered a dance.  He grabbed me with a number of his coworkers surrounding us, watching, and pushed me up against a wall to kiss me.  His friends were egging him on as he started stripping off my clothes.  I managed to talk him out of it, saying that my parents, whom he had met, would be coming to collect me shortly and they would worry if I wasn't outside.  He kept asking me to come away with him somewhere more private, and I just pretended I didn't understand what he was trying to ask me, that the language barrier was greater than it really was.

5.  At a party around a friend's house, when I was around seventeen or eighteen.  Most of us would be leaving for university soon, so we were having a last get together.  A friend of a friend, a gloriously witty and charming young lad from America, who had been staying in England the last few weeks and had gotten to know us all well, was at this party.  It got late, so with the host's parents away for the weekend there was no problem with us all sleeping over and making our way home the next day; safer, we thought, than walking home drunk after dark.  I took one of the sofas in the front room.  When I woke up, the young lad I mentioned was on the sofa with me.  Lying behind me, with his arms around me, and one hand down my trousers.  With his other hand he was trying to get me to touch him.  I struggled, kept on trying tomove my hands away and to wriggle away from him, but I didn't say anything.  I was scared, and embarrassed that I would wake up my friends upstairs and they would think I was just being daft.  At one point his grip slipped, and I fell off the sofa on to the floor.  I went immediately upstairs, and went to sleep on the floor in a room my best friend was in, with her boyfriend and a couple of other people.  Nothing more happened, and I told no one about it the next day.

6.  At university, it was the birthday of one of the guys I'd met during fresher week.  We didn't share any classes, having taken completely different subjects, but we'd gone out with our social group together many times.  I got too drunk at the pub, although I don't know how as I was drinking something I regularly enjoyed, knew my limits for, and hadn't had many.  I don't remember getting back, or leaving the pub, but I woke up on the floor of my friend's bedroom.  He told me I'd passed out and, as he couldn't find my dorm, he'd helped me back to his and let me have the floor.  In any case, I still felt woozy and figured I was still drunk from the night before; I wasn't quite all there at the time.  It was't until I was back to my own dorm and went to change out of my dress that I realised my underpants were missing.  I don't know what happened.  At the time I rationalised that, if anything did happen, I might have consented.  I might even have just taken them off in a drunken stupor.  Since I couldn't remember, I thought it would be unfair to accuse him of anything, and let the incident go, and bought a morning after pill.  I still don't know if anything actually happened.

So that is my list.  Even as I write it, I can't help but remind myself that "nothing really happened" during any of these incidents, that many women have experienced far worse than I have, but I try to ignore myself thinking like that.  That sort of thinking is exactly the reason I kept quiet all those times, and I know that, had I not struggled, had I not said no, had my nan not come home early, much worse things would have happened.

There are other incidents.  The usual, brief and "minor" encounters that most women have had; an unwelcome grope in a pub, on a bus or train, in the street.  A man trying to walk me into a corner, or lead me towards a secluded area, but never actually getting the chance to touch me.  A drunken friend kissing me in the pub and not getting off of me until a friend saw me gesturing and helped pull me away.  A "compliment" given in the wrong tone of voice, with the wrong body language.  Just stuff, and not worth the detail I've given to the above accounts.  Most women reading this will know exactly the sort of incidents I am talking about, anyway.

From now on, I will speak up when someone touches me.  I will fight back, and I will refuse to feel embarrassed or ashamed for myself.

It would seem that the Miss Bimbo game developers really are taking heed of the things being said about them.  This is new:

Is that a disclaimer I see?

So, to sum up the changes I've seen since I started playing.

1. Diet pills were taken off of the site and replaced with "medicine pills" which, presumably, will help a sick Bimbo but will not cause weight loss.
2. A greater range of clothing has been introduced, including trousers, more sensible tops and a choice betwene revealing or modest clothing.
3. The game developers are pointing out that real-life surgery is different.

The changes are good.  Whilst I may have my own personal gripes about the game, I recognise that these are personal preferences.  For example, I do not liek the fact that these dolls are called Bimbos.  Nor do I like that the starting IQ is so very far below average.  From a HAES point of view, the weight loss and gain issues are problematic, but since the rest of society as a whole does't embrace HAES as yet, I'm not going to hold that against the game.  Besides which, there is a goal later in the game to become a plus-size model, with positive descriptors used. 

When I first started looking into this game, there were a large number of clearly quite problematic issues.  The game developers were targetting the game at children, and paying minimal lip-service to parental consent.  However, they weren't taking note of the fact that children, whilst certainly far more intelligent than most people give them credit for, are not adults and the younger players will not necessarily be able to discern intuitively which parts of the game are unrealistic and potentially harmful.

Now, however, a number of small, yet significant, changes have been made.  This still isn't a game I would encourage children to play, just as I would not encourage them to play with Bratz dolls or any other toys that focus on promoting a heavily gendered and stereotyped image of What Girls Are.  But this isn't a game I would feel overly concerned about letting children play with any more, either.

The only issue right now that I am really concerned with is the skin colour issue.  This is certainly no small issue, but I don't yet have enough information to draw any conclusions, and at the moment every time I try to enter the tanning/scouring room the game logs me out, so I can't test this.  However, I hope that if I am right the game developers will continue to listen as they have thus far, and alter this so that the Bimbos don't all start out whiter than a teenage goth in bad theatrical make-up.

More on this if I do manage to test this.

The selection of clothing available for one's Bimbo has been expanding, recently.  Some new clothing items appear when progressing through different levels, but additionally some new items have been added to the first level.

When I first joined, the clothing selection was limited, and definitely favoured visible flesh.  And, if you take a look at the olive-covered crop top above, you will note that the grey preview doll has, suddenly, flesh-coloured side-boob.  Some clothing items, such as this top, will have a fleshed out section in the cleavage to ensure that, even if you do put underwear on your Bimbo, it will look like she isn't wearing a bra.  I can see how this would matter with clashing underwear.  However, since the only underwear choices for purchase up as far as level 2 are a sexy pink corset with suspenders, or lacy, impractical bra-and-pantie sets, with no buyable plain underwear, there really is no choice but to wear a clashing bra.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with nudity, with revealing clothes, or sexuality.  What I do have a problem with is when dressing in a revealing manner, or dressing in a modest manner, is the only choice.  At first, the choice of trousers was plain jeans or mid-calf leggings.  There were, however, well over a dozen skirts to choose from, all but two of which barely skimmed the top of the thigh.  All of the tops available shower stomach, or cleavage, or both.  There were only 3-4 flat shoes or traines, with the rest being high heeled shoes and boots, and the "coats" were all smaller than the tops, therefore only being wearable alone.

There are still plenty of revealing items, but the key point is that a girl dressing up her bimbo can nowchoose whether to dress her in revealing clothes or comfortable clothes.  The range of clothing has expanded to include comfortable, practical clothes and cute, but not sexy clothes as well.

Since the clothes can be layered, a Bimbo can wear leggings with a skirt over the top, a short dress over trouser tunic-style, or can just walk around n underwear and high heels.  Accessories exist, and there is now a wider range of flat shoes available.   To indicate this, and how the items come together, I have arranged a selection of outfits for my Bimbo.

The two dressier outfits are complete sets.  There are cheap, 1dollar items called "Kawinou's necklace" or "Kawinou's garter" and "Bettyboune's skirt".  The complete set of each results in some gothic, but slightly over-revealing, outfits.  They also look more than a little uncomfortable and chilly to wear, but that might just be me.

Overall, then, the clothing is improving, albeit the range of revealing items is still larger.  It is still easier and, in some cases, cheaper to dress a Bimbo up like she's about to star in a porn film than like she's on her way to the gym, with some items costing 4-500 dollars, or even 1000 dollars or more, an impossible sum for a beginner unless she wants to go to the bank and exchange real cash for virtual money.

***

I am curious, having read Jgoreham's reviews to date, about the skin colour-changing thing.  As stated in an earlier post, I was given no choice of skin colour for my Bimbo, although I have seen darker skinned ones on the website.  With the use of a "scouring" bed and a "tanning" bed, and based on Jgoreham's mention of the need to "get paler skin", is that all the skin variation comes down to?  If so, that is more than a little troubling.  If anyone has more experience in this, please let me know.  Otherwise, I'll save up my Bimbo dollars and see what half a dozen consecutive tanning sessions will do.  The idea that skin colour and, consequently, ethnicity, is reduced in game to a cosmetic choice, well... I honestly am not sure how to even start responding to that.

I just killed my Bimbo- couldn't get enough food in her in time to crawl back from the starvation point, and didn't have enough cash toressurect her, so she has now been reset to her starting stats.

Therefore, I can now conclude that the percentage rating for starving a Bimbo is, in fact, how close she is to death, and that there are clear consequencec for starving your way towards weight loss.

Dieting and Health; Part 1

A bimbo can choose to eat chocolate and steak, with soft drinks to wash it down, or can eat vegetables and drink soy milk and water.  Diet pills have been removed, but there are "medicine pills".  I've yet to see how these will be implemented.

Each day, a Bimbo will become hungry or thirsty by a certain percentage, and a Bimbo that has just been fed and watered will have both stats at 0%.  Since Bimbos have a goal weight, and with weight loss pills removed, it will be interesting to see how far girls will go to keep their Bimbo at that perfect 127lb.

My Bimbo is currently six days old.  I fed her, once, on the first day to see how it works, and since then she has been given only water, or soy milk when out of stock.  At the time I started this, her hunger was at 0% and her weight was127.204lb.  Yes, that's right, the game measures weight to one thousandth of an lb.  As of today, my Bimbo's hunger is at 66% and her weight is... 127.204lb.  She has not lost one lb of weight after six days without food.  This could mean one of two things.  Perhaps weight loss cannot be acheived in game via starvation, in order to discourage girls from learning that disordered eating is an acceptable technique for weight loss.  Alternatively, it could simply be that with diet pills removed, the game creators haven't yet worked out a solution for a suitable replacement and are suspending wieght changes.  Perhaps, in my wildest dreams, I could imagine that the game creaors have taken note from FA and HAES, and have created Bimbos that, being created close to their own body's preferred size, cannot easily lose or gain weight.  Perhaps the game is trying to teach girls that they should be able to go this long without food.  That, really, is the problem.  The hunger percentages are arbitray; I have no idea what they mean.  Does my Bimbo die when hunger reaches 100%, or is a Bimbop that is less than 100% hungry just, well, not really hungry?  There are no in-game prompts warnign me, for example, that my Bimbo has gone without food too long.  Perhaps it would be better for hunger to be shown in gradients of "peckish, a little hungry, hungry, very hungry..." and so on?  Or, perhaps, the percentage numbers could change colour from green to red as hunger increases.

Gyms exist in-game, and a Bimbo can, upon purchasing a gym membership, take regular exercise this way.  Gym memberships are, sadly, expensive and this early in-game I cannot afford one.  Pets also exist, and it is possible that taking the pet for a walk, exercising it and playing with it could count towards exercise.  I hope so, since this would lend the message that keeping healthy by getting exercise is fun as well as effective.  More on that once I can afford either a gym card or a cat.

I have heard that Bimbos can die if starved too long, so I presume they can become ill as well.  I intend to feed my Bimbo shortly, as I have no desire to cut the game short by killing off my Bimbo.  Instead, I will now start massively overfeeding her to see whether the affects of this are any different.

More coming soon.

For any of you that may wonder why I blog about size acceptance, why I don't just go on a diet and lose weight, (my issues with the concept of weight loss being so easy aside), why I'm bothered by it all?

Here is why.

And if you think for even one moment that this "doesn't sound that bad" or that it's "for the best", then I would kindly ask you to go EXPLETIVE DELETED.

A Rambling Introduction.

When  first heard of Miss Bimbo, most of the information to hand came from second- or third-hand sources, people who had not necessarily played the game themselves but had instead heard about it from another, or read about it in the newspaper, or knew some one whose child said they had played it.  Understandably, then, most of the information I received came in wake of the media interest in the game, and I was worried that news sources, ever mindful of the next big thing to hype up and drag through the dirt for as long as possible, might not be offering a fair judgement of the game.

Additionally, as a feminist, I was concerned at the message that this game would send to young children.  Oh, don't get me wrong.  I am well aware that children are not he naive, bouncy little balls of innocence and sweetness that Anne Geddes would have one believe.  At least, not once they start school and have contact with people outside of their immediate family.  Nor do I believe that this is the only, or even the most, concerning thing that children may be exposed to.

However, we live in a society where, despite lipservice being paid to notions of equality, there is still a massive division between the sexes.  This division is worsened continuously by the continuous messages we receive, telling us that we must behave in a certain manner in order to be acceptable.  Women's magazines will dedicate pages to lavishly and relentlessly picking out every physical flaw in the bodies of the celebrities we see, and yet by only using heavily airbrushed images except where their "spot the wrinkle" specials are printed.  Men's magazines degrade women with sexist jokes and the insistence on tit and arse specials and offensive humour.  Both teach people that voyeurism, and judging a person's worth based on how artificially perfect they are, is a legitimate act and even that it is within a person's right to do so.  We feel entitled to treat with contempt people that are not conventionally attractive, do not slavishly obey the requiements of being a perfect man or perfect woman, or who are simply different.  Adverts for alcohol, lingerie, sportwear, fragrances and an increasing number of products use not just sex, but hints of violent sex, to sell products.

Children's entertainment often plays into this on a simpler level, and yet this is more troubling since children absorb what they learn at a very young age and, if certain notions are not addressed and debated, sexist ideals can become ingrained.  The Miss Bimbo game, at first glance, certainly plays into this.  Apearance can be deceiving however, so it seemed prudent to take a look for myself and draw my own conclusions.

A Surface Glance

My review of this game will be necessarily affected by one glaring fact.  The website runs like utter, heaving shite.  It looks Java-based, based on the loading graphics that frequently pop up before the inevitable time-out errors.  Pages regularly fail to load and at present I am unable even to access the front page of the website.  I apologise, therefore, that thus far I have not had the opportunity to take an in-depth look at the game features.  For this reason, further chapters in this review will be released later, as I am able to spend more time playing.

The premise for Miss Bimbo seems somewhat similar toother online childrens' games, such as Neopets, in that you create your own virtual pet, care for them, level them up and explore the world they live in, playing games to earn spending points and, occassionally, spending actual money as well.  This game differs in that, instead of a cute fantasy creature, your "pet" appears to be a teenage girl with the proportions of a doll. 

Registering for the game is worryingly easy.  The game website pays lipservice to parental guidance.  You are required to enter an email for yourself, and one for your parents.  However, any fool knows how easy it would be to simply use two personal email addresses.  Additionally, whilst the game states that notification will be sent to the parental email address, children can play instantly, being limited only to not using the chat and forum areas.  Additionally, the verification code arrived at the email address I gave as my personal one, not the parental one.  Regsitration is also very short and simple.  Please see the screencap below.  That short form is all that I needed to fill in before playing.

Please note that I did not choose that name, for my final username.  I have more taste than that!

The doll herself was plain and naked when I received her.  Admittedly, however, the game was not running especially well and I note that she initially had no hair either, although this appeared later, so it is reasonable to expect that some plain clothing or underwear would have been present had the game server not been acting up.  The legs, like those of Barbie and many comic book heroines, are unnaturaly long.  The torso is extremely small in relation to the rest of the body, and very slim as well.  Arms are pencil-thin and hands and feet are small and pointed.  The natural pose for the doll is extremely girly and passive, but with a "sassy" modern twist.  The hips and head are cocked, the doll is standing with her body not facing you directly, but turned very slightly to the side.  One arm hangs limly down, whilst another hangs lightly on a hip.  I was offered no options to change the skin colour, body size or pose of my bimbo, and thus I am unable at the first stage to inject any personality of my own into her.  Customisation is possible, however, through the use of clothing, hair and makeup, and I have seen other skin colours on the dolls.

Bimbos come with certain stats and features, including an IQ, a saving of spendable points and attitude points.  My starter IQ is 70, which is in fact considered sub-normal.  The average human IQ is approximately 100, with 135, I think, being the starting point for a certified genius.  Bimbos also have a starting weight, which is also their target weight.  Bimbos are expected to try to remain at approximately 135 lb.  There is also an "ideal height", although how a bimbo is expected to keep to this I do not know. The ideal weight and neight for my Bimbo puts her slap bang in the middle fo the "normal" BMI range.  My own personal issues with that measuring scale aside, I admit I had expected the creators to set the standard at borderline underweight.  My only issue is that the body shown in these images does not, in any way, correlate with a height of 5 foor 6 and a weight of 135lb, making this just another image adding to the many that resultin people these days having skewed ideas of what "underweight" and "overweight" means.  Then again, the image is completely unrealistic in any case, so I'm not sure whether this could be considered relevant.  I leave you to make your own decision on that one.

A Bimbo also has certain goals to meet, which allow it to move up the ranks.  These include increasing the IQ, getting a new hairstyle, getting a job, losing and gaining weight.  One goal involes gaining weight to become a curvy, plus-size fashion model.  The target weight, however, is onyl 154lb, putting my Bimbo still within the "normal" category, albeit a mere 1lb away from "overweight".  Not plus size at all.  As a result, I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or not.  In the first instance, the language used to describe being a plus size model in this goal is very positive, and sends the message that larger women are still beautiful,  However, by setting the goal so low, the game also states that "normal" girls are, in fact, plus sized.

The ability to gain IQ points is a positive plus, and in fact obtaining a high IQ is one of the goals of the game.  This can be done by sending your Bimbo to the library, or by playing sudoku and puzzle games.  Sadly, IQ point rewards are tiny; as little as half a point and for some games the maximum is only 1 or 2 points.  Contrast this to the scratchcard game, which gives away 30 or 40 spendable points a day, and activities like going to the hairdresser that typically give away 30 points, and this sends the message that learning is hard.  It's much easier to get ahead by being pretty than by being smart, and rewards for vanity arrive much more quickly than those for intellectualism.

Keeping the body at the goal weight involves monitoring of food and exercise.  A Bimbo can gain weight by eating lots of steak and chocolate, or lose it by eating vegetables and drinking soya milk and water.  A Bimbo can also lose weight, however, by starving herself, and at the moment I do not know what negative effects this has.  Diet pills were an additonal weight loss option, but these have been removed now.  I don't yet know how easy weight loss for the Bimbo is using only healthy eating and exercise, so I can't say how tempting it would be to simply starve my Bimbo should Ineed to reduce her weight.  More on that, later.

Overall, so far the game still seems troubling to me.  There are positive aspects, but these are added in such a way as to seem more about paying lipservice to expected criticism rather than a real effort towards such things.

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I'm afraid that is all for today, since I cannot access most of the webste on some nights, and none o the website on others.  More to come!

Well, that was quick.

I logged into my new little MissBimbo account today to start my review, and there is a response up on the frontpage regarding media criticism and their action in response.  Please go check it out here.  Also, you'll be pleased to hear that diet pills have been removed from the game.  Their response seems measured and fair to me.  I am holding out on judging whether or not the plastic surgery is an issue, for the time being.  For all I know, the game may include negative connotations of such surgery, just as it includes negative connotations for overeating.

I still intend to complete my review, of course.  And I will certainly take into account this quick response from the creators when drawing my conclusions.