Of Miss Bimbo, breast enlargement and little girls

BANGALORE, INDIA: It was no ordinary child’s game that nine-year-old Katie of Shrewsbery, Shropshire, used to play. Instead, she was busy into a game that promotes plastic surgery and extreme diets in search of a perfect figure.

At home, Katie was not alone. Her dad Nick Williams found his elder daughter Sarah, aged 14, also playing the virtual bust enhancement game.

The website, Miss Bimbo, provided this game aimed at girls aged nine to 16. It gives the users ‘bimbo dillars’ to buy lingerie, diet pills and nightclub outfits.

This game could be termed as an irresponsible act by its creators. But it attracted 200,000 members in the UK.

Parents groups, healthcare professionals and an organization representing people suffering from anorexia and bulimia took up cudgels against the website that encouraged prepubescent girls “to buy” their virtual characters’ breast enlargement surgery and to make them showoff an hourglass figure.

The website was inaccessible from Bangalore this morning.

Twenty-three-year-old Nicholas Jacquart, a French entrepreneur, along with a 30-year-old businessman named Chris Evans, set up Ouza Ltd to promote the website in the UK, reports said.

A report added that the website was introduced at a time when research showed that even six-year-olds were developing acute eating disorders.

An increasing number of British teenagers were undergoing breast enlargement surgery.

The Miss Bimbo site, which asked girls to keep their bimbo waif thin, offered the registration free of cost, but charged £1.50 per text message to buy dollars to spend on the characters.

This has surprised many unsuspecting parents to find their phone bills going up. Girls as young as nine, are increasingly getting concerned over their looks. Parents fear that little girls were likely to see Bimbo as a role model.

(cmn@cybermedia.co.in)