How the Karen Meme Benefits the Right - by Nina Burleigh. She traces the origin of the meme to a Reddit Thread (which I hadn't known) and says:
How better to get some of those middle-aged, suburban white women back in the fold — or at the very least, to sit out the election — than to stoke progressive misogyny with a social media assault that heaps contempt on white suburban women? Divide and conquer is a tactic that never fails to stump the diverse left.
In
"The Sly Sexism of the OK Karen Meme," Sarah Ditum says, "It’s a finger trap insult, where struggling against it only makes it grip tighter." That is, when a woman points it out, she's called a Karen. Ditum quotes a more recent source:
In a 1991 essay, the feminist scholar Catharine Mackinnon noted that the phrase “straight white economically-privileged women” had become a kind of “dismissive sneer”, used to imply that the women it referred to were too pampered, too cossetted, too privileged to ever experience subjugation on the basis of sex. What is the “white woman”, asked Mackinnon? “This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really)… She flings her hair, feels beautiful all the time, complains about the colored help, tips badly, can’t do anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t know anything…” What a Karen.
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Other essays I'd recommend if anyone's interested:
The Karen Meme is Everywhere and It Has Become Mired in Sexism - Hadley Freeman traces "Karen" to a 2005 Dane Cook monologue when he said, “Every (friendship) group has a Karen, and she’s always a bag of douche.” She asks:
Do I really need to spell out the sexism of a meme about a woman’s name that took off from a man griping about his ex-wife and has become a way of telling women to shut up?
Feel Free to Use Karen Memes, Just Stop Pretending It's Politically Justified - Meghan Murphy
People (let’s call them women) are trying to have a conversation, and discussing the implications of “Karen” — that is to say, how it is used, and the purpose of that use. In fact, the response to those arguing “Karen” is a means to insult, dismiss, and mock women demonstrates the purpose of “Karen” rather precisely: you are a stupid woman and your concerns don’t matter — you don’t deserve to be taken seriously as a human being, you are silly, unimportant, and to be mocked.
I hadn't read these before - I was just writing from my own thoughts. But these writers are much more eloquent than I am, and maybe something they have written will resonate more than my words did.
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