Woman-hating for the Age of Woke
Hadley Freeman tells us about a new Pixar movie:
Obviously, there will be spoilers here, so look away, easily spoiled people. Soul is about a jazz musician, Joe (Jamie Foxx), who has a terrible accident just as he gets his big break. He starts to go up to “the Great Beyond” but, desperate to return to Earth, agrees to mentor a soul about to be born in the hope of sneaking back himself. Joe is assigned the notorious soul 22, whose constant negativity drove previous mentors, including Muhammad Ali and Carl Jung, to despair. Soul 22 is voiced by Tina Fey and, understandably, given she’s yet to be born, Joe asks, “Why do you sound like a middle-aged white woman?”
“I just use this voice because it annoys people,” 22 replies.
“It’s very effective,” says Joe.
Ah, I see. So all white women age, say, 30 to 60, are automatically and inherently annoying.
Record screech! OK, this middle-aged white woman has some questions, starting with what, exactly, the directors (two men) and the writers (three men) of Soul think the little girls watching this film – who may have a middle-aged white woman for a mother, who may themselves one day be middle-aged white women – should make of the implication that this is the most annoying voice in the world?
I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that: nothing. They think nothing on that subject, because they don’t think about it at all, because it doesn’t occur to them, because they don’t give a fuck.
Soul 22 ruins everything with her whining, only finding happiness when she literally steals Joe’s life from him. Then I understood: Fey is playing Pixar’s Karen. Coined in America, “Karen” denotes a white woman who endangers minorities, such as by maliciously calling the cops on them (Amy Cooper, AKA “Central Park Karen”, who last year was charged with filing a false report on birdwatcher Chris Cooper) or erroneously accusing them of theft (Miya Ponsetto, AKA “Soho Karen”, charged last month with attacking a teenage boy in New York).
But this trope gained such momentum in 2020 that it is now commonly used to refer, simply, to middle-aged white women, just as “boomer” has long since lost its “baby boomer” associations and means “anyone older than me”. Over the summer, the alt-right blogger Paul Joseph Watson posted a video in which he called a woman a “Karen” for asking a cyclist to maintain social distancing. British school kids now laugh about whether or not someone’s mum is a Karen, meaning simply that they are boring, annoying, old. Last month, newspapers and dictionaries declared “Karen” to be the word of 2020. Any woman who complains that maybe this term has become a bit sexist is told, with impeccable witch-trial logic, that they are proving their own Karen-ness.
How could anything possibly go wrong? Hmmmm?
And this has been seen as fair enough by people who would usually abhor such stereotypes – because white women have privilege and some abuse it, like Cooper and Ponsetto. But, by and very large, the people who perpetuate racial violence and injustice are white men. Of course it feels safer to make fun of women; but this generalised sneering is just an updated version of the old mother-in-law jokes, with added self-righteousness.
And people who you would really think would know better are all over it like a bad rash.
I dunno. I watched Soul, and I liked it pretty well. That line is irritating, but I don’t agree with the rest of the interpretation. Joe and 22 learn a lot from each other, and end up helping each other. There are some great female secondary characters, including the saxophonist leader of the jazz group, the student trombonist, and Joe’s mother. I didn’t see 22 played as female at all, until I noticed the female pronouns (funny how third-person pronouns don’t come up until there is a third person).
I was surprised at how deep and ambiguous the story line was. It looked like it was headed toward being a promotional message for “find your passion” until it took a sharp turn exactly away from that.
There are many annoying and horrible things about the Karen thing. Like all stereotypes it once held a kernel of truth. You did see the odd obnoxious middle aged white woman causing a public scene for bad reasons. Then again, there was no shortage of equivalent men behaving in the same way and people would just shrug and say arsehole. Now though, the phrase is diluted to just ‘women we don’t like’, which pretty much seems to be all of them. Soho Karen is neither white nor middle aged for example, just poorly behaved. Other women being tagged are just women with attributes or age or looks that someone doesn’t like. I’m just waiting to see the first use of Karen replacing Terf in the wild.
@Sackbut, I agree. Watched this with 12 year old granddaughter and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. To me, the line appeared as a breaking the 4th wall moment poking fun at Tina Fey.
@Rob – I suggest that anytime we encounter a “Karen”, male or female, we refer to that person as a “Yanniv”.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying Sackbut and Roj, but…as a middle aged white woman, I have problems with that meme. Too many people think that way and certain types of jokes are not funny.
I was at my playwriting group recently, and we read a play in which a man opined that men would treat women better if they were all given kittens as a boy. If you can properly take care of a kitten, your relationships with women will be good, because you treat them like you do the kitten. It was condescending, mocking, and in my opinion, downright nasty. It was misogynistic through and through, hitting most stereotypes in the description of ways that treating a kitten translated into treating a woman. It simplified us, reduced us to mere purring furries…and the thing that most people seemed to miss, but knowing the playwright I am sure he did not…he essentially referred to women as “pussies”.
I was horrified by how many of the women in the group thought he hit it on the nose. Seriously? These are feminist women who would probably start swinging at any man who treated them in the way this play described, but they were saying “oh, yes, that’s brilliant!”
I hate to admit, but as a child, I was cruel to kittens and cats. I was always a dog sort of person. But that childish treatment did not affect my later relationships with women who I loved and treated as well as I could.
I am living out my retirement years with a woman I love, one who let me get a dog when she preferred a cat, and one who now has two cats given the run of the house.
But yeah, I am not a woman, but I think I get your point clearly. I tend to correct people who use the Karen slur.
Just pitch Jar Jar Binks’ voice up an octave…complaints vanish.