Guest post: The origin of “Karen”

Jun 28th, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Freemage on But which people, which Americans, whose bodies?

“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.”

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