Himbo Culture in the Movie Parasite

The movie Parasite is about two families. One Rich and Powerful, the other not. The rich characters are attractive, relaxed, lovable, sort of innocent. The protagonists, the not rich family, is grasping, desperate, conniving. They look visibly older and less refined. They are plotting, and they have been plotting for very long time.

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The term himbo comes from gay porn, as far as I know. It got sort of sucked into lesbian culture, noted by Harron Walker on Twitter a couple of months ago.  I could not tell you why the word himbo jumped from gay porn to lesbians beyond the statistic that queer women are four to five times more likely to experience anxiety than the rest of the population.

Eventually, like all things on the Internet, it was absorbed into the dominant culture. Boys in the DSA started using the word enough that Jaboukie Young-White tweeted “leftist boys say theyre a himbo all the while knowing what a dialectic is.”

Technically, himbo is a compound word — him and bimbo.

Bimbo started as a word used to describe women sort of colloquially, an antiquated way of saying a ditz or any other phrases used to write women off. It is not related to Bimbo Bakeries, as far as I can tell. But of course, this is the Internet. So it’s also a type of porn, focused on becoming dumber, the process of becoming dumber.  This porn exists on pretty much every site, both created for porn and not explicitly created for porn, like Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube. Because again, this is the Internet. Some of the YouTube comments on videos like these, especially post pandemic, will say things like, thanks for this! I was going to jerk off but I actually relaxed instead. it’s the best sleep I’ve gotten in six months.

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The Fool card in Tarot, equates being dumb, a himbo, with being naïve. Being innocent, oblivious, relaxed.

To become dumber is to become more powerful, to become comfortable with unknowing, still feeling relaxed. 

It is to know your ignorance will not lead to your demise.

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At the end of Parasite, the son of the wealthy family is injured, and the wealthy father demands the other father rush with him to the hospital.

As this happens, the other father’s daughter bleeds out from a fatal stab wound.

The wealthy father is so convinced of what is right when he demands the other father follow him to the hospital as his daughter dies, so careless, he doesn’t think twice about what he’s asking.

So when the father of the other family, instead of following, stabs him in the heart, he never sees it coming.

He drops to the ground confused as he dies, looking like a real dummy. A total himbo.

Note: guys! After I finished this I read this article with Daniel Lavery, an interview by Calvin Kalsulke. I cannot I imagine that I am not drawing on his idea of “forced masculinization” here, so, you should read that interview, and pretend that this article wasn’t so rushed, and included an explanation of how I am engaging with Daniel’s ideas, and the Twitter trans-mind, here.