Good women are young, quiet, have pretty long hair (never dyed a unnatural colour though!) and never speak up about being mistreated, ever. You want to complain about a genuine problem? Sorry, you’re a Karen. Ask people to social distance? Karen. Nicely tell people to please be quiet during a movie? Karen. Ripped off by corporate greed and want a refund? Karen.
Be silent, be feminine and behave, woman.
It sucks because it actually used to describe real harrassment that black service workers experience. Now it’s just “Mouthy mom aged women with short dyed hair”
I’ve even seen a male black service worker be called a “male Karen” I shit you not.
I mean, Woke used to mean “being aware of systemic oppression” and now it’s shorthand for “anything not white, straight and male”
Slang always gets coopted by those in power
To the same end, “Fake News” was a term used heavily by liberals in response to the enshitification of right wing news around 2015. When Trump first started gaining momentum, there were a bunch of news stories that got amplified that were completely made up or used dodgy means to exploit statistics and stuff. The right started shouting it back to everything they didn’t like and now it’s theirs.
Pretty sure the term was popularized by Trump himself, who called a journalist “you are fake news”.
The liberals then used it to basically replace previously common used words like disinformation, propaganda or simply hoax, to describe right wing slop of questionable veracity. While the right wing itself kept using it to claim liberals were the ones lying.
I can believe that. The chain of custody is weird with stuff like that. I was mostly aware of it because we listened to not at work and I used to hear the host pretend to call people out with that term
before that “fake news” was the daily show with jon stewart
It fucking sucks. It’s indoctrinating a whole new generation of sexism
I don’t run into too many kids these day, but when I do, I usually have to play the “That’s a really fucked up thing to say” card
A tale as old as time
People believed that they would just let the new generations grow up without indoctrinating all the isms on them?
Do they think boomers were born racist/sexist?
True, I was naive to think humanity was making progress
Well they do now. The fact that people are ever more aware of facts like this is progress from ten years ago.
That’s a silver lining at least
I think we are still overall, it’s hard to tell when we can’t see outside of the present. One example that gives me some faith is that according to stats I’ve seen the BLM protests had more popular approval in the US than the civil rights marches and MLK at the time.
Wasnt woke first used by black americans to refer to being aware of the race construct? Similar thing happened to Karen, its origin comes from primarily black american women working in customer service jobs and using it to refer to entitled white customers who use the “white woman’s tears/distress/discomfort” as a tool to exort her power?
Yes, it was used in that way as early as the 20s I think, or earlier. On the wiki page about “Karen” they mention that:
In African-American culture, there is a history of calling difficult white women or those who “weaponize” their position by a generic pejorative name.[6] In the antebellum era (1815–1861), “Miss Ann” was used.[7] In the early 1990s, “Becky” was used.[8] As late as 2018, before the use of “Karen” caught on, alliterative names matching particular incidents were used, such as “Barbecue Becky”, “Cornerstore Caroline”, and “Permit Patty”.
Just keep changing words faster and faster
Woke? You mean shalazombabom
It’s become a way to say the c-word or call women female dogs without saying the actual slurs. I’ve never liked it because I noticed right away that’s how it gets used.
similar thing happened to twink btw.
The superstructure of white supremacy leading to the appropriation and complete gutting and twisting of any and all terms originating in New Afrikan lects, in a manner that ends up only serving various systems of oppression, strrrrikes again
Seriously hate how chuds co-opted the term to mean the opposite of what it originally did
Libs did it first. Sometimes they use (white) in front of women to make misogynistic comments but palpable to a progressive audience.
Oh hey something we’re also often guilty of.
Was that libs? I really don’t think it was. I think that talking about white women specifically started as an overly online politics thing - used by right wingers but also by chapoish online Leftists - or at least within the chapo circles there were those who found a home in using it, even if it didn’t represent the majority of users.
I think it wasn’t completely without validity - white men get a fair share of blaming (as they should), but that specificity missed out white women - a group it’s fair to say has been very involved in liberal activist behaviours, ‘girlboss’ hustle culture, and a group that at the top is typified by Pelosi and her fangirls.
Then the rest of the internet took it and ran, and now I would be uncomfortable using it or giving it credit, because it’s just become synonymous with general mysoginy. The dogwhistle is now audible to human ears.
White women when there’s an active shooter at Walmart and the Stanley cups are left unguarded.
it’s the new b word
Likewise, incel communities were originally gender inclusive and focused more on physical and mental issues/disabilities than toxic mindsets. Until the misogynists moved in and pushed everyone else out.
Yeah, from my research on the topic a few years ago, it was a website founded by a woman that turned into something de facto unmoderated once the original founders left, and that made the misogynists go wild - all the way back in like 2003.
what
Same with the anti circumcision movement
How tf do anti-circumcision types also keep their fascist beliefs?
The whole reason circumcision got started in the us was because of conservative prudes who wanted to make sex less pleasure because “sex is eeeeeeeeeevil!”
I’m out of the loop on this, what happened to the anti-circumcision movement?
@DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net I’m lazy to type this comment out twice.
cw: misogyny
MRA shit. It’s feminism and women’s fault. Mum’s are evil and do it to their sons. Most circ doctors are women (totally false BTW). Why won’t feminists protest for me, despite the fact that I’m a raging chud?
Thancc.
…wah? 99% of the time circumcision is either due to patriarchal religious beliefs or dads who want their son to “look like them.” Pure ass nonsense.
I’ve never been on board with the Karen thing. Far too often I’ve seen it applied to any woman standing up for herself.
Wtf?
I never heard of this use, and mostly I and everyone else still uses it as an acronyme for a mix of „Choosing beggar, racist fuck, and generally someone who has a stick up their ass so far they feel the need to enforce every tinyest rule“
That’s fine, but out in the wild, I see a lot of usage that’s synonymous with “bitch”. The definition was never going to remain precise once the Internet got a hold of it.
the first whispers of “karen” back in 2017ish just adhere to the mantra of “never insult honkie males”
honkie females is the furthest they’ll go
“Karen” started out as calling out racism
I feel like I hear this claim pretty often here, but did it really? Pretty much all the early Karen stuff I can find are the she took the kids/can I speak to a manager/vaccines cause autism angles.
I remember it originally meaning any expression of upper class privilege in the feminine. Picking on retail staff, the “don’t you know who I am” kind of attitude.
Various names have been used as ‘white women calling cops on black people nicknames’.
- 2018 BBQ Becky - YouTuber posted a video entitled “White Woman Called Out for Racially Targeting Black Men Having BBQ in Oakland”.
- 2018 Permit Patty - Oakland, California woman called the police on an eight-year-old black girl and her mother for selling water outside her apartment. Her profession as the CEO of a medicinal marijuana company for animals was pointed at as illustrative of the difference between being white and black in America.
- 2018 Pool Patrol Paula - Arrested for accosting a group of black teenagers while trying to forcibly remove them from a public swimming pool in South Carolina.
- 2018 Baggage Claim - A female baggage claim attendant who was filmed refusing a black woman the name and contact of a manager, after the attempted to report a customer service issue at Logan International Airport in Boston.
- 2018 Cornerstore Caroline - A female resident of Brooklyn, New York, who became the subject of a online scutiny, after accusing a nine-year old black child of sexual assault and calling the police on him. The allegations were later refuted by surveillance footage of the incident.
- 2018 Golf Cart Gail - A white woman who was the subject of controversy, after calling the police on a black father watching his son’s soccer game.
6 major incidents in 2018 alone. But a 2020 viral incident that got ‘Karen’ to stick.
- 2020 Central Park Karen - The incident that led to the internet coming to a consensus, much to the chagrin of nice women named Karen everywhere. “Central Park Karen” is the white cop-caller nickname of Amy Cooper, who was recorded calling the police on an African American birder in Central Park in New York City after being asked by him to leash her dog in the park.
- later in 2020 San Francisco Karen - A white man and woman confronted a person of color who was stenciling Black Lives Matter in chalk on their own property. In the video, the woman, Lisa Alexander, assumed James Juanillo was not the property owner and called the police.
A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stencilling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall. “Karen” lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here.
https://twiiit.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240Since then it’s been almost entirely “Karen” and like “woke” and so many other appropriations of Black culture, has been taken from original anti-racist meaning to just be another misogynistic term for “disliked woman” or “man acting like an entitled woman”.
People were absolutely using “Karen” amongst a few other names for the entitled white woman stereotype, but the catalyst for standardising “Karen” was specifically about the racist Central Park Karen video viral. Around that time and George Floyd and BLM summer riots. The peak “Karen” was about BLM against racist white women. And it has since been watered down like a lot of the energy of the summer of 2020.
As this graph shows, “Karen haircut” peaked during the 2020 summer of BLM.
I remember the “good karen” video where a girl just flipped off a bunch of police officers.
It was truly a time where everyone in america was anti-pig. Imagine if the bernards actually did something with it.
I could have sworn it was being thrown around earlier than that. Like, around 2014 or 15
Yeah, it came from a meme about the Nintendo Switch reveal ad which came out in 2016.
You have an impressive knowledge of the history of this topic.
I’m not really disputing any of this except “original anti-racist meaning” because it doesn’t seem like that’s how it started even if that’s what it morphed into around 2020
Original is imprecise.
Certainly for the blips on the graph, “Karen” predates the anti-racist meaning and can be argued to be the “origin”.For most people, including many in the thread, the owl that posts about this occasionally, myself, we hadn’t heard of it until the spike in the graph, so that is the “origin” even if not chronologically first.
The spike is the popular origin people are referring to saying it has lost the “original” meaning since. Saying that the “original” was earlier isn’t so much a ‘dispute’ as a reframing of context. Neither is necessarily more valid until the priority of time vs spread is declared.
The origin is both anti-racist and predates the anti-racist meaning depending on context. Many point to the spike, but pointing to the clock blips is also correct.
Idk I feel like that’s less of an origin than it is a popularization. Like, if someone asked for the origin of pepe I wouldn’t say it started with 4chan edgelords even if that’s how most people were exposed to it. I’d say it started in that webcomic but was popularized and turned into something else.
Ultimately a semantic issue but 乁[ ◕ ᴥ ◕ ]ㄏ
A lot of the early examples I remember involved calling the cops on black people basically for existing.
For example, this article from 2021 which says, “It has gone on to become one of the most widely publicized so-called “Karen” incidents, where a white person, typically a woman, calls police to report a Black or brown person engaged in mundane activities.”
That’s not early, though. It was already pretty popular in like 2018 with the “she took the kids”
Its much earlier than that. The “Karen took the kids” meme was just when it became mainstream.
it absolutely did not
… Wait, what?
‘Karen’ has morphed that much in common, modern usage?
I am not saying you are wrong, I am saying that I have not encountered this… probably worth noting that I entirely do not use corpo social media, I don’t watch livestreams, I basically just use YouTube, which I have done a decent job of curating and manicuring my feed into not serving me up slop or sending me into some unwanted content pipeline… so I acknowledge I may be out of touch here with the modern lingo.
That being said, I still use ‘karen’ to mean basically a vastly over entitled person rudely and aggressively demanding to see the manager, demanding to get special treatment, demeaning anyone else around her as some kind of lesser social category of some kind… basically a delusional petty tyrant, often classist, racist, bigoted, etc.
I don’t even use the term as specific to women, I’ll call anyone of any sex or gender acting like that, though I do realize that most people who use the term use it in reference to women.
… Have the rightoids really bastardized and inverted the term that fucking hard?
Is this a Zoomer or Gen A thing?
I am genuinely asking this, because I go fairly far out of my way to not view or listen to or interact with aggressively ignorant morons.
The Karen meme was actually started by the Myanmar coup government to gain support for its ethnic cleansing campaigns against ethic groups including the Karen. But the westerners riled up by this psyop didn’t know about the demographics of myanmar and created a lore around a certain type of white woman that they would focus the anger the psyop instilled in them on.
I thought it originally came from that early Nintendo Switch advert where a girl brings her switch to a hip rooftop party full of ridiculously attractive people and they all start playing. The “Karen” thing was a joke about her trying to force people to play video games instead of socializing.
That sounds way funnier than what it really is lol
Obviously it morphed quite a bit but I feel like I remember this being the origin of “Karen”: https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/nintendo-switch-karen
There were uses in the same vein before that, from wikipedia:
For the term “Karen”, several possible origins have been proposed.[11] Early uses of Karen as a joke punchline include the airheaded character Karen (played by Amanda Seyfried) from the 2004 film Mean Girls, Dane Cook’s 2005 sketch “The Friend Nobody Likes” on his album Retaliation,[12]
I remember at the time the Dane Cook special that had this joke was super popular, I heard people quote the joke before the term became as widespread.
Dane Cook
You’ve just unlocked bad memories of the aughts.
what
Where
why
when
Tangential, but even though I probably haven’t watched Goodfellas in 20-some-odd years, I still can’t hear the word Karen without thinking of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=voDqfVthTpA
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
