![]() #The office questions meme freeBut women should also be free to point out when a trope has become mired in sexism without being accused of being humourless old shrews, ie Karens. People of colour should describe their experiences of racism in whatever language works for them. Tick, tick, tick.Ĭontrary to what some silly articles have claimed, no serious person is equating Karen with the N-word. It is no coincidence that a tweet calling Jess Phillips a Karen was so popular, given Phillips grew up working-class, is a mother and – not wanting to shock anyone here – a woman. Try substituting Karen for Emily, Freya, Alice or Isabel and the meme doesn’t work. Whatever upper-middle connotations Karen might have in the US, in the UK the name is not posh. So we’re probably talking middle age here. One with multiple children, as Vox put it. ![]() Next, ageism: “Karen”, as we have established, is a mother. Mmm, let’s see how long denigrating your own sex works for you, ladies. When I see young (and not so young) white women defending the Karen meme, I’m reminded of the Cool Girl passage in Gone Girl: yeah, I’m not a basic pushy-mum-type woman – I’m a cool girl. Truly, few things warm the heart like the palpable excitement of men when they find a new misogynistic term they can lob at women with impunity.ĭo I really need to spell out the sexism of a meme about a woman’s name that took off from a man griping about his ex-wife and has become a way of telling women to shut up? Yes, there are memes about Chad and Zach, but these have never gained the popularity of ones about Becky, Susan or Tammy, let alone Karen. But they were at least equalled by men gleefully calling me a Karen (“OK, Karen”) and telling me to make them a sandwich. Some were from people of colour, frustrated that the term’s original meaning had been lost and that two white women were denigrating a term they use to describe racism, and fair enough. The Karen chat stepped up a notch last week when the feminist writer Julie Bindel tweeted: “Does anyone else think the ‘Karen’ slur is woman-hating and based on class prejudice?” Cue a social media firestorm, one I blithely wandered into: “Yes – it’s sexist, ageist and classist, in that order.” Soon, I had thousands of responses. Pushy mothers: aren’t they THE WORST? Lolz. Moore adds that Karen is her “favourite internet villain”. They share corny inspirational quotes on Facebook, buy merchandise inscribed with ‘Love Life Laugh’ and love to ruin teenage fun,” Elaine Moore wrote in the FT. I’m gonna guess it’s a feminine, curvaceous zero. This weekend, the Sunday Times defined Karen as “an annoying person in the office”, and you have to admire the use of the genderless word “person” there because I’d love to know how many men out there have been called “a Karen”. One of the most popular ever tweets using the Karen meme was posted a month ago, just before the lockdown: “I’m scared for people who actually need to go to the store & feed their fams but Susan and Karen stocked up for 30 years.” This was liked 1.2m times, because only women shop, apparently (and shop selfishly). As Vox wrote in its extremely extensive history of the trope, the comedian Dane Cook was using it in his act in 2005: “Every group has a Karen, and she’s always a bag of douche.” The term went more mainstream a few years ago when someone on Reddit wrote so much bile about his ex-wife that his posts got their own subreddit called “r/FuckYouKaren”. But the term was never just about racial oppression. ![]() “Karen” is commonly used in the US to refer to a strident middle-class white woman who talks down to people of colour, usually in serving-staff positions. ![]()
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