Have you heard about MissBimbo.com, the online game in which young, impressionable girls with vulnerable self-esteem adopt a virtual bimbo and try to her make her hot, thin, pretty and rich with diet pills and plastic surgery and sugar daddies? We know: gag us with a Barbie Doll. Feministing and Erica C. Barnett understandably took the site to task this week--with the latter interestingly pointing out a Tacoma story in which moms can't find any clothes for their adolescent girls that don't make them look like strippers.

But with reports of breast implants among British teens at an all-time high, is it really any surprise something like this would surface? The site is run by two London dudes who somehow manage to talk about "taking care of your Bimbo, sending her to university" as redeeming aspects of the game without cracking up. They claim their site just reflects real life. As despicable as these two are as human beings, they might have a small point here. Is this stuff really that far off from the pressures placed, however unintentionally, by some women's magazines and celebrity tabloids on young girls--because young girls, in an effort to grow up as fast as possible, eat that stuff up. Just a thought...

We went to Miss Bimbo the other day to see how bad it actually is. We weren't even sure it was a real legitimate Internet community, because the dorky founders operating out of their tiny flat just seemed like a total joke (and because we tend to be scam paranoids). And once there, our suspicions weren't totally allayed, because nothing worked. Could it really have 100s of 1,000s of visitors as the news report claimed? Not only does it look like the site couldn't technically handle that kind of traffic, but are there really that many kids falling for such trash? Or is this just the kind of nothing that the media and bloggers (like us) eat up with a spoon? We couldn't stomach spending another minute on the site, but our intern Ariel took one for the team and dug deeper:

I registered an account on Miss Bimbo and was able to use the site just long enough to become a popular blonde with pigtails (that was one of my goals, the other two were to move out of my parents' house and rent and apartment, and to start a training course so I could get a job). I discovered that to get more Bimbobucks I had to shell out real money via Paypal (which I did NOT do), and then the site stopped working. I'm wondering if it's because of all of their recent press, and the site getting overwhelmed by new members.

Either way, everything I clicked on I got strange messages, and then I started to get worried that maybe I shouldn't have given out my real information to this seemingly shady website run by two young douchebags. So I decided that I really didn't need to know about more about Miss Bimbo and that I would cancel my account (it's not like I could do anything with it anyway, the site wasn't working). Of course, the ability to permanently delete my account was also unavailable due to whatever problems the site was having (something that, since I was suddenly skeptical, made me wonder whether it was a new error or if there really was no way to permanently delete your account), so I resorted to changing my personal information to not-personal information (which I was surprisingly able to do).

I have since forgotten the fake email address I gave them (you don't need a real, validated one unless you want to send personal messages or comment in the forums, apparently) and haven't been able to log in again. I'm not too disappointed.

As the website's homepage now states, all the press attention has spiked traffic to unmanageable heights: their shit is broke. Plus, they've decided to get rid of the diet pills. (Thank heaven for small mercies.) And they've wisely added a front-page reminder that they are not responsible for "boob jobs incurred in real life as a result of playing the Miss Bimbo game."