@lionobserving
I'm genuinely confused about the response to that article.
If a word other than Karen was used to describe these sorts of entitled middle aged white women, would that be better?
Do you feel as strongly about articles describing MAGA men? Is it that "Karen" is a woman's name that makes it offensive?
It genuinely confuses me. Surely none of us here relate to the entitled women described in that article so why is it so bothersome? Surely we all know exactly what sort of person is being described. We've all met one..? In the same was as another article will detail MAGA men. Or fake-woke middle class white millennial men. There are specific articles on all sorts of stereotypes; this one is about "Karens". I can't understand the uproar in all honesty.
Entitled middle aged, middle class white women refusing to wear masks, taking it upon themselves to be judge jury and executioner to young black guys.. why wouldn't we call this out. Baffling.
The meme used to be very specific, but in it's actual usage it has now spiraled out into the misogynistic shutting up of women.
You see it a lot online. I saw a woman asking a man not to make suggestive comments about a young woman's breasts in a picture she'd posted in a Facebook group. For that, another woman came along and told her to calm down 'Karen'.
Because American culture is so influential, you have a situation where Karens are being automatically labelled as privileged even in the U.K, where it's been a working class name.
For women not named 'Karen', this has become a stick to beat women down into submission if they display any other characteristic other than being sweet, submissive and compliant. For women actual called 'Karen', it's often a straight jacket where anything they do is used as evidence that they are being typically Karen. Here's a couple of examples -
Karen says she doesn't care very much what what people think of here name. She's pretty chilled generally and things like this usually don't bother her that much
- The response to that would be 'God, how Karen of her to not care what other people think of her. She must be so privileged to have that attitude'
Karen says she feels hurt and stressed that people are making judgements on her based on her name. She finds the online meme distressing and worries that it might affect her in trying to find a job
- The response would be 'Oh what a surprise. Karen tries to play the victim, as usual. Next she'll be calling 999'.
*Karen feels angry that people are aggressive towards her just because of her name. She finds it offensive, and will usually challenge someone who tries to belittle her based on the meme'
- The response would be 'Oh what a typical Karen response! Always getting angry. Always needing to complain'.
You see why it's a straightjacket? It's far more wide reaching than the initial discussion about a certain type of individual.
Furthermore, I've worked in customer service for over a decade in various places, and I can tell you that the nastiest, most aggressive, entitled customers were men. I've had something thrown at me by a man. I've had to call security on men. It's only men who we had to ban from the building because he kept making sexually inappropriate comment based on his fetish to any woman he came across, including staff. It was a man who asked us to hold up an event just for him because he was late.....which would have held up almost 2000 people!!! It was at night too so it would have meant some people might have missed their bus or trains home. From what I can remember our security team had to escort him out of the building because he became aggressive.
It's not that women can't be unpleasant or rude, but I think undue attention is given to difficult women when actually the male ones are worse and there are more of them. Why is that I wonder??