For those
who don’t know here’s an article by The Daily News:
First, there was the ‘can I speak to the manager’ Karen.
Then came the blonde bob Karen.
Followed by racist Karen, soccer mum Karen, toilet paper
hoarding Karen, and anti-vax Karen.
Now, there is the Central Park Karen.
New York woman Amy Cooper lost her job after getting into an
argument with African-American man Christian Cooper, no relation, in Central
Park after he asked her to leash her dog – in a leash area.
“I’m taking a picture and calling the cops,” Amy Cooper is heard
saying in the video. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man
threatening my life.”
Amy has apologized but the damage is done. She has become a
Karen.
The video went viral, launching a new wave of memes and heated
debate over if the Karen meme is ‘problematic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfVU87y1B60
Karen is everywhere.
But who actually is she?
Karen is a concept.
Like most things that start on the world wide web, the exact
origin is hard to pin down, but it’s believed it first appeared in 2014.
It has been linked to the film Mean Girls where one of the main
characters says to another: “Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask someone why
they’re white.”
Then, in 2017, an anonymous Reddit user with the screen name
f***_you_Karen went viral on the platform after posting rants about ex-wife
Karen, who he said had taken his children and their house during the divorce
proceedings.
It spawned the subreddit r/f***youkaren in 2017 where people
could share stories and memes about run-ins with entitled middle-aged white
women.
The Urban
Dictionary definition of Karen appeared in March 2018
and the meme was inducted into the slang hall of fame.
Since then, Karen has saturated the internet.
“Karen is a caricature of the problematic aspects of whiteness
and privilege,” the University of Melbourne’s Dr Lauren Rosewarne, who
specialises in gender, sexuality and pop culture said.
“It’s manifested in middle age white women. We would have used
to use the word ‘basic’ to describe her aesthetically,” Dr Rosewarne said.
“But the key parts are, she’s white, she’s middle-aged, and
generally she’s blonde, not always, but in memes she is.
“She’s seen as someone who is oblivious to how they treat
others.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBspygDA8Vo&feature=emb_title
Proponents of the Karen meme argue that it’s a way to use humour
to subvert the entitlement of middle-class women who treat people of colour and
people in service roles like they own them.
“It’s a class thing, but it’s an obliviousness thing. Or another
way to look at it is, there’s an entitlement there,” she said.
“If you think about the memes, you think about Karen wanting to
see the manager or wanting to call the police on black people driving or
jogging. There’s a set of things this woman feels entitled to.”
Karen is straight, drives an SUV in the city, refuses to
vaccinate her children, lives in the suburbs, drinks too much wine, posts trite
motivational messages on Facebook and calls the police on black people who are
just going about their lives.
Karen can be contradictory. She passively-aggressively enforces
COVID-19 guarantee restrictions and at the same time protested strict lockdown
measures because she couldn’t get to the hairdressers.
Mostly, she’s as entitled as she is ignorant and lives her life
without consequences.
Karen doesn’t die.
The joke manifests in different ways, and the memes often respond
to global and viral events, so it has had a long internet shelf life.
“Every time we think it’s done they’ll be scandal like the one
in New York and it gets new life because she’s the new iteration of Karen,” Dr
Rosewarne said.
“It has millage and high-level saturation.”
But is Karen sexist?
As the meme took off and become more prominent online the
message behind it got confused and, what was once a way of laughing at the
racial controversies white women caused, became a controversy in its own right.
The criticism is that Karen is sexist. That we make fun of only
women for being demanding, that there is no male equivalent.
‘Why is it OK to make fun of entitled white women when they ‘ask
to speak to the manager’ but never a man?’ is the general line of questioning.
Real-life Karen’s have arched up. With one recently writing to
the editor of the Los
Angeles Times to say she was ‘grief-stricken’ that the paper
had run an opinion piece condoning the use of Karen, or as she put it,
approving ‘of dragging my name through the mud’.
But the debate fired up in April after radical British feminist
Julie Bindel tweeted that “the ‘Karen’ slur is woman-hating and based on class
prejudice”, arguing that it was a working-class name.
Enter the furore of the internet.
Almost no one in Australia has heard of Ms Bindel, but the tweet
made Karen very busy, as she bounced around opinion articles, twitter threads,
and Facebook arguments.
On one side we had a thousand Karens scorned, and their allies
who wanted us to see the meme as sexist.
On the other, we had many people of colour and less-radical
feminists who were frustrated that the term’s original use, to direct racism in
a humorous way, was being thrown out the window by ‘whiney white women’.
Oh, Karen, what have you done?
Like most things, Karen is complex, said Dr Rosewarne.
“It’s tricky. The meme is not an indictment of women primarily,
it’s an indictment of whiteness, but in doing that there is a gendered message.
“There was a chat on social media yesterday about what the male
equivalent is.
“People were proposing things like Chad, but Chad isn’t the
equivalent.
“Much like sl-t and stud, we don’t have a male equivalent, and
that means there is something gendered about it, even though the memes are
primarily about whiteness.
“Lots of things that are meant to be one thing, have other
underlying aspects.”
