A scary story for Halloween
A scary story for Halloween
"Karen," racism, misogyny, casual mockery, and the image of God
Fellow pilgrims,
I’m just going to put this out there: the Karen thing? It’s misogyny.
“No,” says my son, “there’s a boy version. It’s Brad or Chad or something.”
Or something.
But the boy version isn’t batted around a tiny fraction as much as are the snipes at Karen.
Who is Karen? She’s a middle aged white lady with a at least a little bit of money. Enough money to fight against her age with some hair dye and maybe some botox. And Karen wants things.1
Why is Karen so easy to mock?
If we’re going to say it isn’t simply being a middle aged white lady, then it must be the wanting things.
Who is allowed to want things without being ridiculed?
Brad/Chad.
Who is deluded into thinking she shares Brad/Chad’s prerogative because she shares his race and social class?
Karen.
Why doesn’t she share Brad/Chad’s prerogative? Because she’s a woman.
At least three women have apologized to me in the last year, when introducing themselves as “Karen.” I met one woman who has taken to using her middle name instead. Look at those lovely Karens, shamed right out of wanting anything, even the ability to use their names.
If we’re going to admit that mocking Karen is misogyny, we’ll need to sort out the important truth about race that is also worked through the trope.
Entitled white ladies are entitled, at least in part, because of race based privilege. And, in an especially evil part of the story that sustains that privilege, entitled white ladies sometimes believe they are entitled to be far away from black men.
The white woman who calls the police about a black man watching birds in the park certainly deserves calls for confession and repentance.
But the story that taught her to make that call is a story wielded by patriarchy, and when we reduce “Karen” to a laughable meme, we elide the way patriarchy is using power here, as though the problem were this individual woman’s individual racist entitlement. That makes it easier for us to look away from the history and structures of racist entitlement, structures that go far beyond “Karen.”
When a white woman fears a black man in a space she presumes belongs to her, that fear is located within a racist, patriarchal, misogynist story. In that demonic story, white women are the property of white men, whose violence is legitimized in the name of protecting that property from supposed threats posed black men. This is the false story that sanctioned the murder of Emmett Till and so many others, buttressing the violent power of white patriarchs.
Mostly, when we make fun of Karen, we who are white people don’t think about race at all. Mostly, we’re repeating the unspoken belief that femaleness + a bit of age is despicable. Femaleness + age + wanting things goes against all the rules of a patriarchal world.
has taught us that misogyny is not a feeling but a social system, a system which punishes women for breaking the rules. The rules go like this:Women are supposed to give goods to men. (Goods like sex, respect, or a delicious dinner.)
Women who don’t give face the consequences.
Says Manne,
“a woman is regarded as owing her human capacities to particular people, often men or his children within heterosexual relationships that also uphold white supremacy, and who are in turn deemed entitled to her services.”
Women, “Karen” among them, are those whose
“personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty.”
How dare Karen want things for herself, when she is supposed to give things to men?
(Manne’s book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, took me a year to read because it was so painful. I highly recommend it.)
I ask the ChatGPT AI image generator to give me a “realistic portrait of a woman who fits the ‘Karen’ meme.”
She could be me. Or my mom. Your friend. Your sister in Christ. She doesn’t look happy, but she’s a human being. She’s a beloved and broken and beautiful being. (What? She wants to be beautiful? Old women don’t get to want that, says patriarchy!??!)
In 1965, Karen was the 3rd most popular name given to baby girls in the United States.2 It’s an astonishing thing to take the personal name of countless women and turn it into an easy, flip joke.
Karen wants things. The patriarchy destroys her for it.
I’m not defending entitlement. Sweet humility is a beautiful thing, and none of us deserves to be first in line or have the best piece of pie or whatever it is we’re making fun of Karen for wanting.
But we all should be allowed to desire.
We’re all made in the image of God. The white woman is an image bearer. The black man is an image bearer. They should both be free to want things and to walk in the park and to see each other as persons and not as labels attached to stories, which would depersonalize them and wrench away their identity as children of God.
Making fun of Karen is a distraction, a misogynist distraction, from working toward a world where we’re free from racist and misogynist structures.
All humans, women and people of color included, should be able to want things. Patriarchy (and white supremacy as an arm of patriarchy) wants to hoard those things to itself.
ABC News called “Karen,” “the scariest Halloween costume of 2020.”
That’s a claim that demeans women and serves as a powerful mask for far scarier things—racism and misogyny—to hide behind.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Karen tropes paint her as an annoying, middle-aged, suburban, white lady. https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/karen/
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/top5names.html
Hi, Beth. I'm glad to see someone standing up for Karen's. (My daughter is one, btw)
These poor women i see on YouTube lying down in parking lots to save their busy husband a space, trying to explain their needs through someone's closed window, yelling helplessly at whoever is not listening are the pitiful end product of the patriarchy gaslighting campaign. They been told so often by people who should love them that they are stupid, or useless, or just plain wrong that they have at last been driven mad. And then we laugh at them and their antics because, of course, that proves our evaluation right there.
Have you ever heard on a BBC program some man say in disgust, " You stuuuupid woman!" The Brits do that so well.