Welcome to Jezebel’s Himbos Week

Celebrating the beautifully scrutable world of the fairly appreciated himbo

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | July 7, 2021 | 3:30pm

In Depth In Depth

The term “himbo,” coined in 1988 by Washington Post critic Rita Kempley, is meant to be a male equivalent to the sexist term “bimbo,” but by its very nature, it is also a retort: a kind of cheeky leveling for men who are muscular in stature and less muscular in intellect, and fully OK with that. But over the last year or so, the himbo has materialized in the popular imagination as not just an archetypal category of hunky actor, as Kempley defined it, but as a kind of good-hearted hero, a response to the toxic brand of dastardly character that emerged in the Trump years meant to reassure women that Not All Men. It’s almost War-era in concept—Superman was, of course, the ultimate himbo—yet as MEL’s Miles Klee wrote last summer in his exegesis declaring the “Golden Era of the Himbo,” “these gentle oafs are a special breed, too innocent to hurt out of malice or insecurity, too serene in their size and strength to even start a war of words.”

In practice, the himbo is not even necessarily unintelligent; a himbo just does not feel the desire to flex his intellect over his desire to, say, fix a car. And for a lifetime of women and femmes who have grown used to, and weary of, men talking over us as a baseline, the himbo is a welcome distinction and perfect foil for a generation of intellectual women who are just utterly over it. So for Jezebel’s Summer Crush series—celebrating the horny, hot days of 2021—we present a week of himbo celebration, devoted to exploring and interrogating this vast and generally beautiful genre of dudes, and maybe finding some universal truths among them.