And the chief way she manifests her class consciousness is not by, say, being a patron of the arts, but by being aggressively rude to the help. But now, she’s against science on principle, which is definitely a new twist to the traditional bourgeois model. What has changed are Karen’s specific offensive traits: Like all bourgeoisie stereotypes before her, she’s snobbish, prudish, and hypocritical. On one level, we’ve seen all of this before: After all, resentment toward the upper middle class - what we might call “ bourgeoisophobia” - has been around since the middle class itself, often coming most strongly from members of that very middle class. It’s a little bit of a commentary on white privilege, perhaps.” “You do see that basic stereotype sometimes, so it’s kind of funny. “She’s the mom in Kroger with her kids asking to speak to the manager,” one Karen, a 29-year-old law student from Oxford, Mississippi, told me in a phone interview. “Our Karen in the wild won’t satisfy all of, but she can still be a true Karen.” “A Karen divorces her husband and takes the kids, is a pseudoscientist/anti-vaxxer/flat-earther, an MLM participant, an avid user of Facebook to post shitty motivational posts/’Live Laugh Love,’ and more,“ karmacop97 explained to me. In particular, the “Karen” has evolved into a figure known for her hypocrisy, rudeness toward working-class staff, and anti-science beliefs.Ĭongratulations, you played yourself /SCRHBNsUO3- Antisocial_butterfly July 24, 2018Įspecially trenchant is the idea - as you can get from this satirical Instagram bio of a spiritual “Karen” - that a stereotypical Karen plays fast and loose with pseudoscience, appropriates identities, may be conservative, and is extremely picky. Since then, the subreddit has grown from 4,000 redditors to more than 435,000 - and the memes posted there call out all kinds of “Karen”-ish behavior. Soon, a few thousand redditors had subscribed to make memes based on the redditor’s enraged posts - but when that aggrieved user eventually deleted his account and vanished shortly after the subreddit’s creation, the forum kept growing. The villainous Karen had taken the kids and then the house, both typical parts of the “Karen” meme. At first, karmacop97 told me, the subreddit was “just to compile the lore behind this guy’s relationship,” which he viewed as likely being a parody. He made the subreddit two years ago as a joke and named it after the now-deleted user account Fuck_You_Karen. Karmacop97 is a 17-year-old from Irvine, California. But one of the most prominent uses developed on Reddit, thanks to a redditor known for posting amusingly bitter invectives about his ex-wife - posts so amusing, they inspired a high school student to make an entire subreddit, r/FuckYouKaren, devoted to turning his saga into a meme. The “Karen” meme has multiple origins, each one using the idea in slightly different ways. Karen has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it: Kate Gosselin - or the Ur-Karen, if you will. The archetypal “Karen” is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer. But the stereotype the name conjures - at least in the US - is limited mainly to white women in their mid-30s or 40s. Where a similar insult like “OK Boomer” stereotypes a specific generation, calling someone a “Karen” draws on associations people have built around extremely common names. And the recently trending Twitter hashtag # AndThenKarenSnapped has further shifted the “Karen” meme from its nebulous origins toward becoming a mainstream trope. Increasingly, “Karen” in particular has emerged as the frontrunner for the average “basic white person name” - a pejorative catchall label for a wide range of behaviors thought to have connections to white privilege. If your name is Karen, Becky, or Chad, you may have noticed a growing trend of people using your name as an insult.
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