On Sunday night, I stumbled upon the kind of tweet that lives in Twitter infamy, right up there with that tweet about not being sad about a two-year-old getting eaten by an alligator because of something something white male entitlement something something. The tweet deduced that the term “himbo” is “ableist” because it fetishizes someone’s lack of intelligence, a move the tweeter called predatory. “I find fetishizing someone’s supposed lack of intelligence to be predatory,” the tweet read. “Why would you desire someone who seemingly has less power than you? Why is that sexy? Why is that different from praying on underage kids? It’s not.”
Well, it is different, which is why the author of the tweet apologized several hours later. But not before the tweet was roundly clowned by himbo defenders everywhere.
For those wondering what a himbo is, it’s an obvious play on the less savory word, “bimbo.” Urban Dictionary defines a himbo as, “Generally, a large (broad, tall, or buff) attractive man, who tends to be not very bright, but usually extremely nice and respectful. Think Kronk from The Emperors New Groove, or maybe a golden retriever.” Though the term is having a renaissance in 2020, it’s not entirely new. In 1995, CNN reporter Sherry Sylvester asked men in Hollywood what they thought of the term himbo, which was more on the nose about its sexual objectification of men than its current iteration. While brawny Sylvester Stallone didn’t care for it, affable Keanu Reeves had a more positive response.
“There’s a great word,” he said. “I love that word. I read that and laughed my head off.”
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