On Tiktok, Marije Bruinsma started singing her life as a young woman four years ago from her student room in Utrecht. In the ‘uterine song’, for example, she closes over all those times that she was not allowed to talk about the economy in the pub. “What a breakdown/ what a bad luck/ womb is always in the way.”
Hundreds of girls and women then posted videos of themselves in which they sing along this catchy song. Her song ‘Age and broke’ is also popular: it has been viewed one and a half million times. Bruinsma describes her work as ‘Bimbocorefeminism’ where iconic women such as Brigitte Kaandorp and Beyoncé come together in singing, dance and conference.
On International Women’s Day, the ‘cabaretite’, as Bruinsma calls itself, releases her first album ‘Je (Baar) Mother’ in the Midwest community center in Amsterdam. “I want to bring fun back in activism. It is not possible to just fight, “she says.
She always knew that it had to be something with theater and singing, Bruinsma says in a fluffy pink top at a Utrecht café table. During dinner it was better for the whole Bruinsma family if Marije could perform in the kitchen instead of sitting on a chair.
When she was sent from the ROC of Almelo from the ROC because she would have a ‘voice’ voice, it was a bit of a swallow. “I was seventeen and really got the advice ‘go do something else’. I didn’t dare go back home, so then I started working in the door-to-door sale in Twente. Only roosters worked through me all the time and thought I was too noisy.
A reproach that as a young girl she always got. “I wanted to do something with that. When I started with theater, I only understood why I had been thrown off that music training. I couldn’t express myself with music alone, I didn’t fit within a genre. “
Unsolicited advice
She studied Theater at the Utrecht School of the Arts and is currently completing the Cabaret and Kleinkunst course at the Koningstheater Academy in Den Bosch. Her feminist activism is the core of her work. “I write about friction. And coincidentally I always have that with men who think I should be something. Male colleagues often give me the unsolicited advice to dress less over the top because people don’t listen to me like that. You have to be desirable but certainly not challenging, then people don’t take you seriously. That is to go crazy. ”
Clothing is an essential part of her ‘Bimbocorefeminism’. Bimbo stands for the conventionally attractive, sexualized and especially naive woman. Bimbocorefeminism is a satirical aesthetics in which women dress hyper -feminine and girlish as an act of resistance, she explains.
“I consciously play with that assumption of ‘a sexy woman will be stupid’. Sex is a perfect tool for this. Many men only see women when they think ‘I want to have sex with you’. I see that as an invitation to do something totally disruptive. As a girl I completely dress in pink and meanwhile I explicitly sing about the boring, gorge of sex and being a woman. I don’t know what it is, but something about that combination makes a lot of men furious online. ”
The release of her new song ‘Burgerlijk things’ she celebrated in the restaurant of the Ikea, she says. “We ate vega balls and watched the video clip, that was the most civil I could imagine.” On the song, Bruinsma got many online hate reactions, when she sings: “I want to shave your butt hair/ stay with your grandmother/ I want to use one toothbrush together/ let my farts smell under the comforter.” “Someone responded:” You are the reason for femicide. ” I am really surprised about that, it’s just a love song, but without the glamor.
“Too naked”
On TIKTOK she is also increasingly confronted with Shadow Banning, A means with which platforms on social media limit the reach of messages and accounts, without informing the user of the account. “I noticed that some videos were not watched at all. Then someone would have reported that I would be ‘too naked’ or that I performed sexual acts in that video. As a woman you may not have the zipper of your sweater too far behind the piano on Tiktok, while Fitboys set up shirt -less to everything. ”
Bruinsma feels limited by the uneven frameworks of the platform. She adjusts her content and clothing. “In that sense, social media are a sad reflection of society. I use it as an online billboard, something that I get people in the real world to my show. ”
In the theater, Bruinsma wonders if you as a feminist can be a straight woman. “I’m not going to lie for you, it’s hard. It is possible. ” Many of her conferences are about embracing those conflicting desires. Because how do you explain that you have sex dreams about Thierry Baudet while he says on television that women have less excel and have less ambition?
“I also often use sexism in my favor. For a while I performed with a painfully long sketch where I pretended to finger someone on stage. People, especially male colleagues, found that so innovative. Such a sketch has already been done by a hundred men, but only because I am a woman is it suddenly new? Then I think: “Fine, I’ll take it”.
Via Tiktok she received a message from a man who will first run the women’s march on 8 March in Amsterdam and then comes to her show. “That is exactly what I was hoping for; Just do some work and then dance together and laughs at the absurdity of that inequality. “