WATCH: Woman screams at Hispanic family for playing 'Mexican' music in the park

[Celerity]

45. Karen: The anti-vaxxer soccer mom with speak-to-the-manager hair, explained

How the name “Karen” became an insult — and a meme.

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager



If your name is Karen, Becky, or Chad, you may have noticed a growing trend of people using your name as an insult. Increasingly, “Karen” in particular has emerged as the frontrunner for the average “basic white person name” — a pejorative catchall label for a wide range of behaviors thought to have connections to white privilege. And the recently trending Twitter hashtag #AndThenKarenSnapped has further shifted the “Karen” meme from its nebulous origins toward becoming a mainstream trope. Where a similar insult like “OK Boomer” stereotypes a specific generation, calling someone a “Karen” draws on associations people have built around extremely common names. But the stereotype the name conjures — at least in the US — is limited mainly to white women in their mid-30s or 40s. The archetypal “Karen” is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer. Karen has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it:

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

How exactly did “Karen” become the manager-summoning meme of choice? And is any of this justified? To find out, we talked to a lot of interested parties, including some Karens, the creator of a Karen meme forum, and some naming experts. Here’s everything we learned about what’s in a name.

The “Karen” meme has multiple origins, each one using the idea in slightly different ways. But one of the most prominent uses developed on Reddit, thanks to a redditor known for posting amusingly bitter invectives about his ex-wife — posts so amusing, they inspired a high school student to make an entire subreddit, r/FuckYouKaren, devoted to turning his saga into a meme. Karmacop97 is a 17-year-old from Irvine, California. He made the subreddit two years ago as a joke and named it after the now-deleted user account Fuck_You_Karen. At first, karmacop97 told me, the subreddit was “just to compile the lore behind this guy’s relationship,” which he viewed as likely being a parody. The villainous Karen had taken the kids and then the house, both typical parts of the “Karen” meme. Soon, a few thousand redditors had subscribed to make memes based on the redditor’s enraged posts — but when that aggrieved user eventually deleted his account and vanished shortly after the subreddit’s creation, the forum kept growing. Since then, the subreddit has grown from 4,000 redditors to more than 435,000 — and the memes posted there call out all kinds of “Karen”-ish behavior. In particular, the “Karen” has evolved into a figure known for her hypocrisy, rudeness toward working-class staff, and anti-science beliefs.

Link to tweet

Especially trenchant is the idea — as you can get from this satirical Instagram bio of a spiritual “Karen” — that a stereotypical Karen plays fast and loose with pseudoscience, appropriates identities, may be conservative, and is extremely picky.



snip




Karen (slang)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

Origins and history

The origins of Karen as an Internet meme date back to an anonymous Reddit user, Fuck_You_Karen, who posted rants denigrating his ex-wife Karen, whom he alleged had "taken" both his children and, later, his house during divorce proceedings. The unintentional entertainment value provided by the posts led to the creation of a subreddit in 2017, r/FuckYouKaren, to both compile a narrative and share memes about the posts. Since Fuck_You_Karen deleted his account, the subreddit has since refocused to memes about the stereotype in general rather than one specific woman. The name Karen has several negative connotations that predate the Internet meme. The most notable uses of Karen as a name for such unpopular characters in popular culture include Lorraine Bracco's depiction of Karen Friedman Hill in the 1990 film Goodfellas and Amanda Seyfried's ditzy schoolgirl character in the 2004 film Mean Girls. Other uses of Karen as the punchline of a joke include Dane Cook's 2005 sketch about "the friend nobody likes", and a 2016 Internet meme regarding an officially unnamed woman in an advert for the Nintendo Switch console who exhibits antisocial behavior.

Usage and examples

The Karen archetype carries several stereotypes that are common to "basic white women"; the most notable is the stereotype that a Karen will demand to "speak with the manager" of a hypothetical service provider. Further common stereotypes associated with the Karen pejorative include anti-vaccination beliefs, racism against black people, use of Facebook and a bob haircut with blonde highlights—pictures of Kate Gosselin during the airing of Kate Plus 8 were used in earlier memes about a "can-I-speak-to-your-manager haircut", and continue to be used in Karen memes—engagement in multi-level marketing schemes, and Facebook posts sharing trite motivational messages. The stereotype saw greater prominence in mid-2019, when the formation of Tropical Storm Karen in the Atlantic hurricane basin led to memes likening the storm to the stereotype; several users made jokes about the storm wanting to "speak with the manager", with images photoshopped to include the "Karen haircut" on either the hurricane or its forecasted path. At the same time, the term gained prominence in Hispanic and African-American communities as a way to describe suburban white women who would supposedly call the police on people of color for minor trespasses, similar to the prior use of "Becky" in the same communities to describe the same archetype.

The term also saw heightened scrutiny in April 2020, with considerable debate over whether the term constitutes a slur: a Twitter account named "Friends of Journalism" (suspected to be to be a false flag operation by white supremacists) asserted the term to be "an equivalent of the n-word for white women" and polled Twitter users on whether they would like to see it banned; 96% of respondents answered in the negative. At the same time, journalist and radical feminist Julie Bindel asked on her Twitter feed, "Does anyone else think the 'Karen' slur is woman-hating and based on class prejudice?" Bindel's comments provoked a wide-ranging debate; a columnist for The Guardian, Hadley Freeman, replied to Bindel saying that it was "sexist, ageist, and classist, in that order". Freeman's own comments received criticism from people of color – who believed Bindel and Freeman were denigrating their use of the term to discuss racism – and several misogynistic trolling comments. Other critics of Bindel's statements asserted that "claiming Karen is a slur is a very Karen thing to do" and likened it to Bindel's opposition to the term TERF.

The meme was also used during the COVID-19 pandemic to describe such women who would passively-aggressively enforce quarantine, as well as those abusing Asian-American health workers due to the virus's origins in China. The meme also manifested in different ways during different stages in the pandemic: prior to the announcement of local epidemics, Karen was used to also describe those hoarding essential supplies such as toilet paper; as quarantine restrictions continued throughout April and May 2020, the term saw use to describe those same people who protested the continuance of the restrictions because they prevented them visiting hair salons. Another belief of a "Karen" includes the myth that 5g caused the virus, which led to some people burning 5g towers down in the UK. Notable posts on Reddit mocking or criticising the stereotype included a meme in which a Karen pitted "stuff I read on Facebook" with a doctor's scientific expertise, a protestor in Nashville with a placard reading "Sacrifice the Weak, Reopen TN", and, in one case, mocking a woman called Karen who doubted the pandemic's danger and later died. The term grew in popularity when a video was released online depicting a woman walking her dog in a birding section of Central Park without a leash, which is against regulations. She threatened to call the police on the person who filmed the video, a black man. When he continued to record, she threatened to tell police he was threatening her life, and she dragged her dog by the collar. The video received widespread condemnation and led to the woman, identified as Amy Cooper, to be nicknamed the "Central Park Karen".