Fear of being called a Karen is making me less assertive.

[ModiglianisHat]

I'm a FWR regular but have name changed. Didn't know whether to put this here or in Chat, but thought I'd try here first.

I have noticed that in several situations recently I have been less assertive than than I would normally have been to avoid been labelled A Karen.

I'm 54 and a confident assertive women. I'm good at debating and deconstructing arguments, its partly my job, and I'm happy be confrontational when required.

But weirdly for me I have noticed that several times recently I have avoided confrontation to avoid looking like a Karen because I've become conscious this is what I'll be perceived as.

On one occasion I even asked my husband to deal with the issue (with a conveyancer where were not happy with the service) as I would be dismissed as a Karen.

I can't believe this is who I'm becoming. Has anyone else experienced this loss of confidence as a consequence of the Karen phenomenon?

Today I did challenge a solicitor and he took it very badly, and obviously thought I was obnoxious because I challenged the accuracy of what he was saying and picked him up when he misrepresented my position and interrupted me.

Partly I'm beginning to think: maybe I do need to rethink how I come across, but I think a man wouldn't be thinking this or worrying about it.

I think it's really the amount of Karen videos I've seen on social media that have made me think: That could be me. I am a Karen.

Am I alone?

Not if you are actuallly being ignored.

Why is everyone not registering this point.

If you know you are only being half listened to it can get very wearing, because then if it really is important, you do have to get up on your high horse and insist. And then you get ignored as they will take umbrage at your action, rather than register that they were being dismissive.

All the feminists who think misogyny goes away and doesn't impact women if you just chose not to care about it is really weird.

Silly women caring. We should just stop then the problem goes away 🙄

Thank you for understanding the point.

Yes it's a combination of sexism and ageism I think. And when required to be directly confrontational e.g point out something is unacceptable or not as they claim it is, or you provide evidence they do not like, I feel men become more quickly dismissive with a condescending attitude towards me than they would if they were dealing with my husband.

I feel if being assertive in this way I'm perceived as another angry ugly old women who can be despised.

I'm not ugly btw but I am getting old and I'm not particularly 'nice' so I think the ugly/ hag label is becoming the misogyny now getting applied to me.

Absolutely agree with this.

Honestly if anyone called me a Karen, I'd tell them to stop acting like a petulant teen, get off the internet, grow the fuck up and answer the bloody question/sort the problem out instead of being a dick.

Anyone calling someone a Karen or having a tantrum because a woman told them something should be laughed at and firmly put back in their place with a doubling down.

So fucking what if you are an old hag with an opinion?

Genuinely why are you so concerned about that? It doesn't matter if you are!

The whole point is they attack you personally because they don't want to address your argument and the reason they don't want to deal with your argument is pretty much always because you are right and you have shown them up as wrong and they hate it.

A further dose of embarrassment in their direction is the way to go as it shows their crap doesn't work on you.

OP I feel like you might be overthinking this. Wasn't the original meaning about privileged middle aged white women making demands in a bolshy way when they often don't have all the information?

Presumably you were planning on barging in while filming him and asking to speak to the manager... So can you just calmly and clearly say "Please explain this to me again because It appears to me that.....x,y,z".

It's totally fine to challenge people but if they're not actually being a dick it doesn't hurt to be pleasant while doing so.

It depends how you speak to people. If you are aggressive and rude then people will think you are being a dick regardless of your sex. If you are assertive in a charming or polite way, they won't.

If you care too much about what people think of you then it can be a bit limiting but I also don't want to come across as an arse. It is tricky to get the balance right.

This. One of the advantages of maturity/menopause is not giving a fig about what people think. Sticks and stones etc...
If someone's not doing a job or providing a paid service to an acceptable standard, you have every right to call it out, politely and assertively, just as a man would .

The irony of being ignored but everyone carries on ignoring the point because well, they don’t care so clearly it is not an important topic at all.

With stereotypes, especially negative ones rooted in sexism or racism we don’t ignore them and pretend that because we are not bothered by them that prevents them being harmful. We challenge them, as the OP has tried to. Went well 😐 I feel really encouraged that we are going to robustly challenge this damaging and detrimental stereotype going forward.

Yes the irony here seems to be being spectacularly missed!

Who knew overcoming misogyny was so easy? Just don't care!! Simples. Then it goes away.

Someone should tell Victoria Smith to rewrite Hags and add a final chapter explaining that if we just don't care the judgement, poor treatment and discrimination goes away!!

Silly women. It's just in our heads.

I just need to change my silly thoughts and be more badass.

Thanks FWR.

Unfortunately sometimes there isn't an alternative solution to solving a problem other than facing it head on and just getting your head down and dealing with it.

This is one.

I note you are berating others for pointing this out whilst simultaneously failing to come up with a viable alternative strategy.

The only strategy that does work is the double down, precisely because the aim of Karening is to stop women being assertive.

It is also worth pointing out that even old hags deserve respect and are capable of having intelligent arguments worthy of respect. There's a certain irony in saying you don't want to be seen as an older unattractive female when at some point, barring a miracle that's what we will all become and at no point do we ever become less worthy of respect because of our appearance. We either choose to accept this and carry on regardless or we choose to disappear.

We don't have the luxury of alternatives.

All of the people on here saying things like “Karen is a term that is only used for offensive people; don’t be offensive/mean/rude/unkind/ignorable and you won’t get called a Karen” are totally missing the point..

The point is that whatever you say, and however you say it, if you say it while being a woman over the age of 50, the world automatically decides that you have said it in an offensive/mean/rude/unkind/ignorable way, because being a woman over 50 is somehow intrinsically offensive/mean/rude/unkind/ignorable.

This is not a new phenomenon. The world has been dismissing and denigrating older women for aeons. Karen is just the new face.

@ModiglianisHat, I sympathise. You don’t want to be called a Karen (hag, witch) so you try to avoid doing things in a way that might make you be seen as a Karen. But this is in and of itself impossible, because - unfortunately - the thing that makes you be seen as a Karen, is the fact that you have become old while being female. It is infuriating.

You can accept the insult, accept that old women are [insert your demeaning word of choice here], and shrink, and disappear, and let the men around you do all the assertive stuff (which I sense you would not like).

Or, you can accept that you mostly cannot control how other people perceive you, and just get on with being your assertive self.

Yes, it may affect how you get on in the world - nothing doesn’t. But you becoming less yourself to avoid offending people who will be offended no matter what you say, will also affect how you get on in the world.

@RedToothBrush I certainly don’t think the best alternative is just to say ‘oh well it doesn’t bother me.’

I think as far as alternatives go challenging it somewhere like MN is a start. Not ‘oh well it doesn’t bother me.’ I think at the least not dismissing what is a real problem would help.

I guess I was just hoping for more empathetic responses acknowledging this is a real phenomenon I'm experiencing and struggling with, and helping me work through what it is, why I'm experiencing it, whether it's common for women and encouragement to address it internally and in the world.

The 'just don't care' responses may indeed be what it has to ultimately boil down to but it might have been nice to have had the experience more validated and understood by other women as well.

I think I'll go to Reddit next time where I'm sure I'd have got the same "who cares? I don't" level of response!

Thank you.
Yes this is how it feels.

Don't diminish yourself for fear of being judged in a certain way. The type of people who will judge you for being an older confident woman who stands up for yourself are not worthy of your headspace.

The problem is theirs and not yours. The impression from your OP is that their opinion matters. It doesn't. Anyone who dismisses you using lazy stereotypes is someone who doesn't matter to me.

Stand up for yourself when the situation needs this. It is liberating to not care about the judgement. I hope some of the answers on this thread embolden you and make you realise that.

It feels like the “ignore the bullies and they’ll go away” rhetoric.

But, unfortunately you (we, older women) only have two choices, and one of them is “ignore the bullies” - be the Karen. Because once we hit 50 or so, we are all Karen/hag/witch, according to the world around us.

So the instruction to “be more badass” isn’t so much an instruction to “be more badass and the world will stop thinking of you as a Karen” - at least I don’t think it is.

Likewise the “just don’t care” is not coming from a place of lack of sympathy.

I think people are saying - you will be called a Karen/hag/witch/dinosaur/opinionated old bitch, no matter what you do or how you do it, unless you are actively becoming carpet for everyone to walk on. That is now part of your reality. So you can fight it (or shrink from it) and make yourself miserable, or you can just carry on being you, and know that they’re going to hate you anyway, you may as well give them something to hate.

And I think it’s all coming from a place where we have been where you are, and have worked out that nothing we can now do (as individuals - collectively is different) will change the attitude of that man or young woman who just knows before we have opened our mouths that we are going to be a Karen. So we now just get on with it and leave them to their wrongness.

There is a certain freedom in that.

I don’t think people are ignoring the issue. The late night people who use the term differently aren’t discussing the same question.

Those of us saying ’stop caring’, aren’t saying that misogyny goes away or treatment improves. Of course it doesn’t.

But as OP said about Theresa May, you can’t win. Misogynists will view you negatively regardless.

Given that misogyny is rife and we’ll be viewed negatively however we approach it, my personal approach is to roll with it. Fuck ‘em. Be straightforward.

Do we get an extra layer of complexity in life, working extra hard because of misogyny, looking for work arounds to get what we want?
Probably, yes, but there’s no individual way to challenge that effectively except just to power on through regardless.

Medical misogyny, for example. It’s more effective to change GP until you find one that actually listens, than to stand up to individual GPs who are dismissive. That’s a pragmatic choice, rather than avoiding confrontation for fear of being viewed badly.

It’s easier to stay calm and avoid the cliche when you’ve decided you don’t care about being agreeable.

I typed that so slowly, a few posters have said it far better now! Sorry, didn’t mean to be repetitive of you all!

I am very bold.

That is the issue! I'm beginning to question how it's perceived.

And what people don't seem to get is being negatively judged can have real world negative consequences.

It's not just: 'I'm sad because they don't like me'.

It's: I'm becoming less effective and treated differently because of how I'm judged.

Not Caring doesn't help with that.

Honestly telling women not to care about the potential discrimination we experience for being older and assertive is not what I expected here!

I don't know what you expect?!

Simpering posts patting you on the head?

Honestly, all this berating and still not a single post proposing an alternative way to deal with it too.

Women are socialised to be nice and meek and mild. This is part of the problem. There are times that's appropriate, but we almost feel like we have to put ourselves in that box the entire time as appeasers and pleasers.

If someone doesn't like us, it's ok to be disliked.

Men don't feel this need to be constantly liked, approved of and generally conform. Karening is another way of putting up back into this box where we need this constant feeding of being approved of.

Ha

”Honestly telling women not to care about the potential discrimination we experience for being older and assertive is not what I expected here!”

We face discrimination.
We challenge. We campaign. We grumble. We get the occasional legal or company win.
We face discrimination.

It doesn’t stop. The only way to challenge the perception is to ignore it and continue anyway. And get used to knowing they are thinking in a discriminatory way.

The expression of the discrimination is irrelevant. It’s discrimination.

“People don’t like me and try to ignore me because I’m a middle aged woman with opinions.”
Yes they do. And there’s fuck all you can do about them- it’s outside our power as individuals.

All we can change is ourselves, our reactions to stuff. That I think, is the root of saying, fuck ‘em, embrace your inner hag.

It’s acceptance of the right to be a middle aged woman with or without opinions, who will therefore attract disapproval.

I totally get what you mean and it has given me pause a few times /made me feel shame after I have been assertive.

It's a horrible term