"Bimbo" Site Spurs Controversy

A Web site is causing quite a stir in England, upsetting many parents and others.

As CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports, MissBimbo.com is a "game" that deals in fashion and hairstyles, and also offers up items such as breast enlargements and diet pills.

The site enables users to create a character, and play games or use credit cards or mobile phone text messages to buy "bimbo dollars" to feed and clothe their creation.

But there's more than fashion "for sale": cosmetic surgery including breast enlargements, for example.

And -- feed the character the wrong things, and the site warns she could become overweight, and offers diet pills as a remedy. Not real diet pills, but pills in the context of the game.

"I wouldn't want my patients or my children to be looking at material like this," says Dee Dawson, medical director of an anorexia clinic. "There are going to be many children who take this very, very seriously and think that to manipulate somebody's image like this is the norm."

The site originated in France a year ago and, its creator there says, has a million registered users but not a single complaint about content. It's been live, in English, in England for two months and has attracted more than 200,000 registered users there -- the majority over 18, but at least some of them young teens -- and even one who's nine-years-old.

"I think it might influence younger people, people who are perhaps a bit insecure about themselves to start with," Ellie Thomson, 14, told MacVicar, "and it would make them almost see that as a role model or something."

Says Susannah Walker, also 14, "I don't like the way it advertises how to be really thin and everything, because it 'sells' things like diet pills, and I don't agree with that."

Since the story hit the British media, MacVicar observes, the co-founders, working from their kitchen tables, have been inundated, and struggling to justify their choices.

The founder of the British version of MissBimbo.com, Chris Evans, says, "We haven't marketed towards them (young teens and pre-teens). We've marketed to the general, fashion-conscious teenage market. Yeah, it does raise some issues. The fact that we've got players underneath the age 16, and should you have the option to buy a boob job on there, or diet pills?"

"These are clearly things you have never thought about," MacVicar interjected.

"We've discussed it," Evans responded. "We never thought it was necessary. Our players who are under age 16 ... love the game. None of them has complained. None of their parents has complained."

As for site's the name: Blame it on celebrity culture, they say.

"Personally, I think the name 'bimbo' has become an almost endearing term for your, your sort of dizzy, blonde-haired caricature. .. Certainly in the U.K., it's become a sort of endearing term for dizzy, blonde-haired caricature, Britney Spears look-alike, isn't it?"

MacVicar challenged that by saying, "Bimbo is such a derogatory term," to which Evans replied that, in Britain, at least, "bimbo" isn't particularly derogatory and has even become fairly mainstream, used in media there a lot.

Evans told MacVicar that, after all the criticism and concern, they're now thinking about changing the site to restrict some of the content to adults.

Still, MacVicar adds, this is all a reminder to parents that the Web is a regulation-free zone, that there's lots of stuff out there and that, if you think MissBimbo.com is inappropriate material, you had better know where your kids are when they're online.