What do you think of when you hear the word "bimbo?" A few decades ago, it probably wasn't anything good. But like many sexist pejoratives, the term is going through a reclamation amongst the women it previously put down. Emily Abbott and Fiona Shea are both aware that people might look at them and think "bimbo." They like to dress up. They have platinum blonde hair. They even listen to Taylor Swift. And yet, none of this precludes intelligence. The "bimbo" issue is at the heart of their new show Genius Bimbos, a Daylight Media podcast built on the duality neither woman wants to resolve.
Ask writer Fiona Shea what she looks for in fellow "genius bimbo" and she doesn’t describe a type. She describes a lifestyle. “We can go out, have dirty martinis, get wasted, have the most fun night ever on the town,” she told me early on a weekday morning, a few days before the launch of their show, “and then the next day we’ll go to a writer’s workshop at my house and do tarot readings and have these deep esoteric talks about existentialism.” Their refusal to pick a lane is the whole premise of the show. And why should they?!
Genius Bimbos, which launches on November 11th, will appeal to women who feel caught between two archetypes: smart or fun. The name itself traces back to the night the hosts met. “After the first conversation with Emily, hearing her backstory about her career and all the cool projects she’d worked on, but also just having a fun drink in hand, mingling around the bar,” Shea said, “I could just tell she held that same duality I try to — being fun and not taking myself too seriously, while also taking my career seriously.”
Abbott puts it more bluntly: “Everyone is a genius bimbo in their own way.” There’s the external presentation, embracing the things men dismiss as dumb or basic, and then there’s the moment “a man looks at you and says, you’re actually really smart — like that’s supposed to be a compliment, that he thought you were stupid.”
Genius Bimbos, as both see it, is a way of being “okay with being underestimated,” no longer needing anyone’s validation to know you’re smart.
Genius Bimbos Emily Abbott and Fiona Shea
Shea traces that impulse to control. "Our society has always taught us women can’t have it all.” The women they admire break that binary in public. They read Joan Didion one day, then get “bimbified and go out on the town” the next.
Abbott wrote and produced for Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy during its Golden Globe-nominated, GLAAD Award-winning run. She was also Alix Earle’s lead producer and writer on Hot Mess, and started out as a staff writer on Netflix’s Cobra Kai. Shea cut her teeth on HBO’s social marketing team before hosting more than 200 episodes of SiriusXM’s The Daily Dirty for Unwell Network, where she first met Abbott.
Days before launch of Genius Bimbos, the hosts feel “nervous energy” more than dread — “I’m such a perfectionist that I’ve been nervous the past couple weeks, watching all the little things come together,” Abbott admitted, “I don’t really put myself out there very much, so it’s different being forward-facing.”
The show format alternates between research-driven deep dives and an advice segment, “What Would Bimbo Do?” every week. Abbott traces the whole concept back to a TikTok video about the Barkley Marathons, the notoriously brutal ultramarathon in Tennessee. “I don’t even care about running, I don’t care about marathons,” she said, “but for some reason it was just so interesting to me, and I went down the rabbit hole.”
Abbott and Shea are determined to make Genius Bimbos a video sensation, as well as an audio success. “We weren’t gonna do this if it was not something that we could sit there and be in person together and have something really visual,” Abbott said. Working with Daylight’s team, they cycled through ideas (a makeshift hair salon was floated and abandoned) before landing on something more inviting: a fireplace, a big comfy couch, blankets. “It just feels like the coziest, girliest HQ ever for all the genius bimbos to meet at,” Abbott said. Shea put it more simply: “It’s like a clubhouse more so than something that feels formal.”
For anyone reading who doesn’t think of themselves as a podcast person, Abbott still thinks you should tune in. “I think we are in a brain rot crisis,” she said. “We are scrolling, we are not reading books, and I don’t think we like that our brains feel like this.” Genius Bimbos, in her telling, is “a very light way out” — still entertainment, but the kind that leaves you with “some things to contribute to that next dinner.” Their upcoming topics include "The Psychology of Physical Attraction," Henrietta Lacks, and "being the last single one in the friend group."
New episodes of Genius Bimbos land every Wednesday, starting November 11th. If you would like to submit a question for their "What Would Bimbo Do?" segment, send them a message on LinkTree.
