But which people, which Americans, whose bodies?
Janice Turner cops to having grown up thinking the feminist women who preceded her generation were dreary old has-beens.
Other political movements respect their elders even when their views no longer align with modern mores. Black Lives Matter would never forsake Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X; the LGBT movement deifies those who in 1969 bravely defied homophobic police at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Feminism alone lays waste to each preceding generation of leaders, campaigners and thinkers as impure, backward, irrelevant, wrong.
It’s true. That “second wave”? We weren’t really second at all, we just thought we were. I wonder often why feminism is that way, and if it’s rooted in the perceived need to Reject Mommy in order to be an adult, and if that perceived need is really a general need or just a cultural habit.
The Pankhursts: rich bitches. Marie Stopes: eugenicist. Andrea Dworkin: man-hater, fun-sucker and (most unforgivably) ugly. Germaine Greer: transphobe, no matter The Female Eunuch rocked the world. Hillary Clinton: privileged, white, pantsuit girlboss. Besides they’re all old, like your mother, the very worst thing a woman can be. So let’s wipe feminism clean and start again.
Oopsy, we wiped it too clean and lost it altogether! Trans women shoving us aside on the one hand and abortion rights disappearing on the other. Looks like carelessness.
But why would young liberal women think feminism has damaged their lives? Complacency, of course, about existing rights. But also the desire to please, to abnegate, to “be kind”, which is so strongly indoctrinated into girls that to demand a movement of your own in which you place your rights uncompromisingly front and centre is pushy, selfish, unkind. Moreover the term “Karen” has lately expanded from its original meaning of aggressive female racist to encompass any uppity woman who won’t shut up.
And any uppity woman who won’t shut up = basically all women.
In the US, feminism is increasingly a mean-girl game, a purity test in which those guilty of transgression are “called out”, their careers and reputations ruined. Looking from Britain at America’s broken, sclerotic politics, it is understandable that you’d go for the quick serotonin hit of getting someone’s book deal cancelled rather than address seemingly impossible goals, such as paid maternity leave or solid abortion laws, to replace the legal lean-to of Roe v Wade.
Understandable but a short walk off a very high cliff. Life is grim down here at the bottom.
I wonder too what making the very word “woman” so toxic that it is unsayable has done for feminism’s standing. Better stay away in case you misspeak on a placard. Or why bother with feminism at all when with just a change of pronouns you can identify out of womanhood. Notably when expressing outrage about Roe falling, US politicians including even Obama, plus civil rights bodies like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, all avoided describing abortion as a woman’s right. “People will suffer”; “Americans will die”; “We demand bodily autonomy.” But which people, which Americans, whose bodies?
The ones who must not be named. We can talk about men all day long, and far into the night, but the word “women” is an unexploded bomb…unless it refers to men.
One note of correction to the article:
“Karen” didn’t originally mean “aggressive female racist”. It originally (as used by the male black comedian who coined the term) was mostly about class-privilege (in, of course, a gendered way), about upper-middle-class women who made life tough for front-line service industry workers by complaining incessantly and immediately demanding to ‘speak to the manager’. So not about feminists specifically, and mostly focused on class, but with that sexist tag-along.
It didn’t really have anything to do with race until the New York Central Park incident, where the white woman calling the cops on a black man as a threat was considered the ultimate form of ‘speaking to the manager’. So then it became about racism, too.
And then, it took about 60 seconds to transform into ‘any woman, anywhere, who does something I want to criticize, and imply that the behavior is because she’s a woman, specifically’. (The term “Mary Sue” did a similar transformation–it started out as a critique of a specific form of self-insert fanfiction character, then got applied to female characters who were protected by plot armor–with the occasional slightly more aware critic pointing out that this also applies to Batman, etc–and then finally, “any fictional female character who does something I don’t like”. It’s almost like these gendered epithets are meant to be ultimately expanded to apply to all women, or something.)
And, of course, the original coinage of the term is, in addition to being misogynistic in design, also dead wrong. The reason a lot of service people encounter a specific behavior coming from white, middle class women is simple–women still do most of the shopping, and upper-middle-class women (who are disproportionately white, since this country is racist as fuck), specifically, are the bulk of people who round out their shopping by going to a cafe or whatever. I work retail–but since it’s home improvement, we have a much more gender-balanced customer base. And the behavior originally attributed to “Karens”? Yeah, it’s pretty much universal, as a small percentage of any human sampling will include people who are overly entitled, and seeking an edge in some way or another at the expense of the hourly wageslave who is just trying to make it through the end of their shift. Most of the folks demanding to speak to my manger, frankly, are named either Sergei or Patel (the home improvement contractors in my store’s area are mostly either Indian or Eastern European men).
I point this out to people, and I usually get some form of “Well, men can be Karens, too.” My rejoinder is usually, “Well, then, why don’t we use the word ‘asshole’, instead? That’s nicely non-gendered and really would apply to everyone.”
Hmm. It seems to me PZ and guys like him were using “Karen” to mean white bitch before the Central Park incident…but I’m not sure. I wonder if I can confirm or deny via searching posts…
Deny. You must be right. There’s an explosion in the number of times I talked about Karens after the Central Park incident and little or nothing before that.
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