It's not my preference to talk about high school movies, or high school characters, but it's funny when people act like Karen is the only bimbo character in Mean Girls.
And of course by "funny," I mean absolutely absurd. You think Janis refers to all three of them as the "Plastics" because it sounds cool? It's not particularly subtle. They're pretty popular girls that wear pink and are always made up. "Plastic" undoubtedly refers to plastic surgery or, arguably, Barbie, but both have bimbo connotations either way. Not to mention cultural context. In 2004 (I assume, I wouldn't really know) people like Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, perhaps even Holly Madison would've been on people's mind. The association and intention couldn't be more clear. A few years later Lindsay Lohan would even have a similar reputation of her own, which I honestly can't even begin to parse.
Anyway, back to the Plastics.
Karen is the only one who's salient bimbo trait is stupidity, and despite the incessant ongoing effort to change this, bimbos will always be associated with lack of intelligence, first and foremost, but Regina and Gretchen have salient bimbo traits too. And none of them are particularly bright. Karen is dumber than Regina, but Regina is dumber than Cady. It's all relative. Regina is especially dumb where her salient bimbo trait, vanity, is concerned. She's so desperate to lose weight and be picture perfect thin she blindly trusts Cady about the snack bars and never even considers that possibility someone may have ill-intent towards her. And she thinks she's so infallible that when she actually does gain weight she thinks she'll come out of unscathed, and the her own rules wouldn't also apply to her. Idiocy through hubris.
I think people equate power with intelligence, which goes to show how much about perception this all is, and because Regina is mostly shown either being mean or in control, people fail to clock how she's dumb, or that she could even be dumb.
And speaking of notions of intelligence and power, there's Gretchen, who's salient bimbo trait is eagerness to please. Or desperation. Submissiveness. I just wanted to use "eager to please".
While I can't recall any action or line of dialogue that seemed especially dumb, Gretchen is both the least powerful and most compliant. Weak-willed servile people are very often considered unintelligent, the idea being they can only follow direction and are incapable of thinking for themselves. And Gretchen is always following. Even when she's ousting Regina from the Plastics it's because she's following direction and making an effort to conform. Instead of attempting to seize power for herself in Regina's absence, she follows Cady. When the Plastics break up, she conforms to another group. And I think this sort of empty-headed "follow the leader" act is for some not only the pinnacle of unintelligence, but the pinnacle of "bimbo". That bimbo is submission, and submission is bimbo. I think, for the people more into the BDSM side of this fetish, bimbofication sometimes even intermingles with dollification and dronification. In that sense, Gretchen embodies literal mindlessness. And the idea of bimbos being without personality seems to be a popular sentiment.
