Colleen Ballinger: Pulling the Bimbo Card
Content Warning: grooming, sexual innuendo, racism, fatphobia
This was not the plan for this week’s essay, but after Colleen Ballinger’s absolutely bizarre “apology” video (in which there was, unsurprisingly, no apology), I had to.
If you think about it a little, Colleen Ballinger falls (im)perfectly into the whole idea of this substack: she is a woman who believes she was wrongly villainized by the media and the public. While my previous investigations of bimbos have been situated within a pretty clear historical context that we have had time to reflect on, this situation with Colleen Ballinger is happening in the present. More comes out about her every single day – just two days ago, it was confirmed that she sent unsolicited nudes to a minor. That is just to say that this essay, while less fully thought out and considered than the others, is a vital part of the bimbo conversation. Because Colleen Ballinger is pulling what I am calling the “Bimbo Card.”
“What is the Bimbo Card,” you ask? We’ll get there.
But first, a lot of you probably have no idea who Colleen Ballinger is or what I’m even referring to. So here’s some background:
Colleen Ballinger is a YouTuber who went viral in 2008 for her character “Miranda Sings.” She has written and published two books as Miranda Sings, and she wrote, produced, and starred in a Netflix Original Series called Haters Back Off that ran for two seasons. Though Miranda Sings was Colleen’s original claim to fame, she has recently focused most of her energy and social media presence on herself and her family, and has leaned more heavily into the family channel YouTube genre.
That’s the basic overview of who she is – if you want to know more, you can go on Wikipedia or something.
And if you knew me in 2012-2017, you would know that I was a huge fan of Miranda, and subsequently Colleen. I attended five of her live shows over the course of five years. I was even featured in a few of her videos (that’s me in the thumbnail). The point is, over the past month or so I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me what my thoughts are on the controversy currently surrounding her. Not to be like everyone was beggggging me to write this essay, but kind of. (I’m joking!!)
Okay, so I’m not going into a lot of detail about what has come out about her – I can’t tell the stories any better than those who experienced them can. This article from Rolling Stone will give you a pretty good overview of the situation (with the exception of Becky’s story, which I will talk more about later.) Check that out and then come back if you still want to hear my thoughts. And if you really want to get into it, here are links to some of the victims personal accounts of what they experienced:
Adam’s original video, April 2020
Adam’s video, June 2023
Johnny’s video, June 2023
Adam’s twitter – you can find retweets of a number of other victim’s stories here.
This substack article by April Korto Quioh, a PA/Writer’s Assistant/Showrunner’s Assistant on Colleen’s Netflix show, Haters Back Off
Long story short, Colleen has been accused on multiple accounts of grooming minors, fatphobia, racism, sending unsolicited nudes to minors (illegal!) and just being an all-around shitty person. And her response to these very serious, very upsetting allegations was to write a 10-minute-long ukulele song.
Where were you when you found out about “hi. (Colleen’s Version) (From the Vault)”? I was in the car with my friend McKayla, and we watched the whole video in near silence with our jaws on the fucking floor. In this non-apology video, Colleen played the ukulele for ten minutes straight and claimed she was “taking accountability,” while doing anything but that.
The video begins with prolonged, extremely uncomfortable silence. And then, after a full four seconds of her putting on her saddest face, Colleen bends down and picks up her ukulele. What the actual fuck?
At seven seconds, Colleen looks up and makes intense eye contact with the camera for four more seconds. This kind of look is sometimes referred to as the narcissistic stare. Narcissists use sustained and intense eye contact as a form of control – skillfully manipulating their eyes to elicit certain emotions or reactions from their audience. We see this throughout Colleen’s video. There are moments in which she puts on her wide, puppy-dog eyes, to cause viewers to pity her. There are moments in which she stares dead-eyed at the camera, which is intimidating – sending the message that you shouldn’t mess with her (because she will come out with a 10-minute ukulele diss track about you???) The weird eyes will continue throughout the video.
Then, she finally (but not really finally, because she just shouldn’t have done it at all) begins to strum on the ukulele. It’s a pretty chipper, upbeat tune! And also really fucking catchy – I haven’t stopped singing it in the week since it came out. She’s got a number one hit on her hands!
Lyric breakdown time.
Hey, it’s been a while since you’ve seen my face
Yeah, why did she sit on these allegations for so long?
I haven’t been doing so great, so I took a little break
Already pulling the bimbo card! Woe is me! My life is so hard!
A lot of people are saying things about me that aren’t quite true
What exactly wasn’t true? There’s a lot of proof of pretty much every claim made against her.
Doesnʼt matter if itʼs true though
This is exactly what you say when the things said about you are actually true
Just as long as it’s entertaining to you, right? You guys having fun?
Who said anyone is having fun? I think, actually, recounting your trauma online and getting picked apart by faceless people on Twitter sounds, um, not fun.
Immediately, Colleen is choosing to make light of the situation. If the ukulele wasn’t enough to let you know that she wasn’t taking her victims seriously, she accuses them of lying (they’re not), and suggests that they are trying to destroy her reputation “for fun.”
Three years ago, then-seventeen-year-old Adam McIntyre posted his first video about his experience with Colleen. Adam provided Colleen with free labor, creating content and posts for the Miranda Sings account. When Colleen came under fire for one of Miranda’s posts (in which Miranda "came out" as a Meghan Trainor fan), Colleen was quick to blame Adam for what happened. The post was Adam’s idea, but Colleen approved of the content multiple times before it was posted.
Colleen’s treatment of Adam after this incident served as a catalyst for Adam to create a video detailing his experience with Colleen, and sharing some of the manipulative behavior she showed toward him. At that time, Colleen claimed that Adam was lying and twisting facts to his advantage, and pretty much her entire fanbase turned against him. She talked publicly and privately about how he was out to get her, he just wanted to ruin her career for clout, and he was crazy.
Then, about a month ago, KodeeRants (a former fan of Colleen) posted a video discussing the way that Colleen communicated with Kodee at the time of Adam’s original video. In 2020, Colleen sent Kodee DMs talking shit about Adam and planting the idea that Adam was lying about what had happened to him.
And then more evidence against Colleen came out from sources that weren’t Adam – screenshots of DMs she sent to fans individually and in group chats.
So what choice did Adam have but to address the situation again?
In a video from June 4, 2023, Adam explains why he left out some of Colleen’s inappropriate conversations with him. He says he kept some things to himself in order to protect both himself and Colleen.
So I think it’s safe to say Adam is not doing this for entertainment. And he certainly is not having fun. Since posting his second video about Colleen, Adam has received threats so intense that he has had to file a police report.
Here comes the chorus:
ALL ABOARD! the toxic gossip train
Chugging down the tracks of misinformation
The toxic gossip train
You got a one-way ticket to manipulation station
Toxic gossip train
Tie me to the tracks and harass me for my past
‘Cause rumors look like facts if you don’t mind the gaps
I won’t survive the crash but hey, at least you’re having fun.
Now, if I didn’t know what prompted this, I would maybe be like, “hey, this is a pretty good take on cancel-culture!” However, I don’t think this is cancel-culture, as most people define it now. Claiming to be a victim of cancel-culture has become an easy out for people who have caused harm to others and don’t want to truly take accountability.
The line between what is happening here and what I am investigating with bimbos is both very clear and very blurry. If you ask Colleen Ballinger, what is happening to her is exactly like what happened to Paris Hilton or Monica Lewinsky – she made a teeeeeny little mistake in her past, and people made her a villain over it! But the facts are that she made the same mistakes repeatedly. And even more than that, she refuses to own up to her mistakes and stop repeating them.
Did Paris and Monica make mistakes? Absolutely. Did they hurt other people? Yes. But the difference is, Colleen’s mistakes were born out of a malicious need for control (whether she wants to admit that or not), whereas Monica and Paris’s mistakes were born out of a lack of control. Paris was born into public attention, Monica was thrust into it. Paris didn’t choose to be part of a well-known family who believed all they could do to save their daughter and their reputation was send her to troubled-teen school. Monica didn’t choose to expose her relationship with the President to the entire country. Colleen was in control of each and every one of these situations that have come up – Monica and Paris had little control over their bimbo situations.
Colleen goes on to refer to the mistakes she is being called out for as her “past,” and that they happened “many years ago,” and repeatedly calls the allegations “lies.” However, there are screenshots on Twitter that prove that she was still in group chats with fans as recently as June 23, 2023 (a little over ONE WEEK AGO). She claims to have learned that being in group chats with fans is weird, especially if they are minors, yet she didn’t change this behavior until five days before she posted her ukulele video. And still, she claims everyone else is lying.
While Colleen never DMed me inappropriately, I certainly remember times when my internet friends and I would go on TinyChat and receive DMs from Colleen and Company that they were “creeping.” We would send them the link and passcode for our chat rooms and we would learn after the fact that they had been watching us talk. Unlike Zoom or Skype, Tinychat allowed anyone with the link and passcode to log on to the chat without notifying others of their presence. I believe this was around ages 13-15 for me (when I was a die-hard fan). At that moment, we were all so excited – she was noticing us!!!
But looking back, I feel uncomfortable. This experience was obviously not as traumatizing as those shared by her other fans, and I don’t mean to relate or compare them in any way. But I do think it was a weird thing that happened nonetheless. Even now, as a 23-year-old, I would never choose to secretly listen to conversations between young teenagers – that just doesn’t sound fun to me. Even if those kids were talking about me or people in my life. Even if those kids loved me so much and showered me with praise. Even if I knew that they would be so happy I was there. It is just a weird and unnecessary way to connect with fans.
I don’t think many other people could get away with the things Colleen did for as long as she did, and there are two things in particular about her that facilitated her evasion of blame – she is white, and she is a woman.
Colleen has been an outspoken feminist for years, even selling merch that says “women are incredible” on it. But when it comes to women of color, Colleen hasn’t ever really had much to say. She falls into the classic category of the white feminist, who puts herself and other white women as top priority when it comes to feminist issues and turns a blind eye to the nuances of intersectional feminism.
She praises women in her videos constantly – “women are incredible,” “all bodies are beautiful,” and on and on and on. But is that really how she feels? Did she feel that “all bodies are beautiful,” when she held viewing parties to laugh at her friend, Trisha Paytas’s sex work content? Did she feel that way when she screenshotted Trisha’s nudes and forwarded them to underage fans? Did she feel that all women are incredible when she made racist jokes on the internet?
It seems, to me, like she picks and chooses when she wants to be a woman who supports and uplifts other women, and when she just doesn’t feel like it. Because she can. The consequences for that kind of behavior when you are a white woman are pretty nonexistent. You can just pull the bimbo card! Claim you didn’t know what you were doing, express remorse, maybe shed a few tears, and then you can just get back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Or you can do what Colleen did this time, and still claim you didn’t know what you were doing. And because you had no idea what you were doing, you don’t even have to apologize! Because when you don’t have bad intentions, that means that you actually didn’t do anything wrong.
Yeah, sorry I punched you in the face – I didn’t have any bad intentions, so actually you shouldn’t ice the bruise on your cheek. My intentions were good, so your pain isn’t valid.
The song keeps going for sooooo long. Like, so long. And at one point, Colleen sings:
I’m not a groomer, I’m just a loser
Who didn’t understand I shouldn’t respond to fans
And I’m not a predator, even though a lot of you think so
Because five years ago I made a fart joke.
Now THIS is the part that really set me off when I first watched. Because in so many of the articles I’ve read, this victim’s experience gets twisted and brushed over, and so many people are missing the point.
A former fan named Becky told the story of the time she attended a Miranda Sings show and was called up onstage to participate in the “Yoga Challenge” segment of the show. Becky explains that she wore a short, loose romper hoping to be called up onstage for a different segment of the show – the “porn” segment (I’ll explain more about that later). But in this segment, Miranda and the fan who comes onstage do various yoga poses together – this was a trend on YouTube starting in, like, 2016, I think? At one point, Becky was lying on her back with Colleen/Miranda standing over her and spreading her legs out in the air above her. The punchline of this bit was that a loud fart noise played over the speakers and Miranda runs away as if the fan on the floor had farted.
But that’s not the part of the story that’s fucked up, and that’s what I think a lot of news coverage has gotten wrong. Becky says that she was uncomfortable because her romper slid up and the spandex she was wearing under it became exposed to the audience. And to be a teenage girl with your body exposed onstage while hundreds of people laugh at you in the audience – that is traumatic. Becky also shared that when she was leaving the venue she felt like the men in attendance were looking at her in an uncomfortable way that they hadn’t been before she had been called onstage.
I don’t know about you, but if I had made a minor feel inappropriately exposed onstage in front of hundreds of people, I would probably just apologize. Doesn’t matter if I had done the same bit a hundred times before. Doesn’t matter if I didn’t have bad intentions. You don’t have to be an exceptionally good person to recognize that that is the right thing to do – it is just basic human decency.
Now let’s get into the “porn” segment of Miranda shows. This is a classic part of the Miranda show – it’s been there since the very early live shows. Colleen/Miranda calls two fans onstage from the audience – one dressed as Miranda (wearing the classic red sweatpants, striped button down, and thick red lipstick), and one wearing normal (but usually a little skimpy) clothing. Miranda explains that the person dressed like her is a perfect example of how you should dress. And then she points out all the issues that she has with the other person’s outfit. You know who got called onstage to do this bit once? Me!
It was the third Miranda show I had attended, and I was deep in the fandom at this point. So I knew that to get called up onstage, I should wear an outfit that was more revealing than normal. So I put on a matching set from Hollister – a little cropped tank top and a matching pair of flowy short-shorts. At the meet and greet before the show, Colleen told me she liked my outfit and gave me a little wink. Mission accomplished.
When it came time for her to call up volunteers for the porn part, I was picked and I was so excited. She (as Miranda) talked about how inappropriate my outfit was because you could see my whole “chesticle crack,” (Miranda’s term for cleavage – mind you, I was fifteen years old and flat as a board). My shorts were so flowy that with “one gust of wind” you could see “all the creases and crevices.” And after she hung a window shade attached to a ribbon around my neck to cover up the front of my body, she told me to turn around and joked about how you should still see my “badonkadonk” every time I turned around.
Did I think this was funny at the time? Absolutely. Was I honored to be noticed by my favorite celebrity? Absolutely. Do I look at it now and feel uncomfortable? Absolutely!
Although Colleen didn’t directly encourage her fans to wear revealing outfits to her shows, it was well known in the fandom that, that was something you should do to get called onstage. And she knew that! Which is weird! All she had to do was not reward that behavior. And wouldn’t it be even funnier if Miranda had called someone onstage dressed conservatively and still said they were dressed “porn,” just because they weren’t dressed like her? Then the joke isn’t just about slut-shaming!
I should be a comedian.
And again, I don’t feel traumatized by this experience. But I can certainly understand how that would be traumatic for other people. And the fact that in her song, Colleen played into the misconception around Becky’s story, acting like the problem was the fart joke, is yet another example of her deflecting and refusing to take accountability. But five seconds after the “fart joke” line in Colleen’s song, she says “I still felt it was important to come on here and defend myself a little, and take accountability.” Taking accountability would be apologizing for the harm her actions caused, and then changing them. That’s not what’s happening.
After another repetition of the chorus, Colleen reaches to turn off the camera, pauses, says “Actually…” and leans back to continue the song. This is weird tonally – she’s claiming to “feel like shit,” and singing about how her life is ruined, but then does a Disney Channel-esque fake ending. And it just gets worse.
The rest of the song is a repetitive rant that basically just says over and over that just because someone makes a mistake, that doesn't make them a bad person. I can’t say I disagree!
But doesn’t that feel like a weird thing to rant about after you’ve been told by many, many people that you hurt them and caused them harm? Does she not see that the point isn’t whether or not she is a good person? Does she not see that taking these allegations so lightly is maybe part of why people don’t think she is a good person?
Colleen Ballinger is a part of the first generation of YouTube personalities/influencers, and as such they were kind of test subjects for how to appropriately use the internet to interact with fans. So I think that maybe at the beginning of her career, she truly didn’t know what type of interaction was appropriate. But it has been fifteen years since her YouTube career began. And in those fifteen years, a number of others in her field have been called out for interacting with minors inappropriately. Colleen has talked about those people and the allegations against them before! (Shane Dawson, James Charles, Onison, etc.) I think it’s safe to say that she has had plenty of opportunities to learn that what she was doing wasn’t appropriate, and change her behavior. But she chose not to.
There is so much more to this situation – I’ve barely even skimmed the surface. But what I wanted to do here is examine the line between a true bimbo and someone who is just pulling the bimbo card. When we can properly identify someone pulling the bimbo card, we can learn a lot about the way certain people with certain bodies and certain experiences are allowed to move through a space.
Do we think a woman of color could get away with this kind of behavior for as many years as Colleen did? Do we think a man could get away with this kind of behavior? No. Colleen’s whiteness and her identity as a feminist became an easy out every time she has been asked to take accountability. In Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria writes, “this is how white supremacy operates within feminism, with upper-middle-class white women at the top ensuring that the credentials that upper-middle-class white women have remain the most valued criteria within feminism itself.” What is Colleen doing but exactly this?
And those who are historically (in my opinion) considered bimbos often fit the same demographic as Colleen, and are shame-piled upon in a similar way to what Colleen is experiencing. As we’ve discussed before – the shame piling is not a good thing, in general. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson investigates the issue of public shaming conducted by social media, comparing it to historical public shaming – crucifixion, getting beaten in the town square, getting burned at the stake, etc. We like to believe these kinds of punishments have been done away with, but really we have just found new ways of publicly shaming people who we believe deserve it. And social media has been an integral part of that: “The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”
And this is why, I think, Colleen thought her video was a good response to the allegations against her. She is refusing to acknowledge the pain she inflicted upon others, and so she thinks that she is being wrongfully canceled.
She is a feminist! She loves kids! She could never do something to hurt kids! This is just classic cancel-culture. The best thing to do is write a little ukulele song so everyone gets on the same page as me about how not serious this all is.
Colleen Ballinger is not being shamed for something that she could get away with if she was a man. Or being shamed about parts of her identity that make her who she is. Or being shamed for something that we’ll look back on in five years and say “that wasn’t actually a big deal.”
Colleen Ballinger is absolutely pulling the bimbo card – and no one is letting her get away with it this time.
Been thinking a lot about both the self and publicly imposed infantilization of white women during this whole thing. Thank you for sharing your story and pulling it into your dialogue about bimbos!