She later said that she was not aware of the origins of the meme, and had reached her view after seeing “white misogynistic men use it towards older women”. Last month, the British feminist commentator Julie Bindel tweeted that “the ‘Karen’ slur is woman hating and based on class prejudice”, arguing that it was a working-class name.
Philadelphia community organiser Gwen Snyder recently tweeted that it had been co-opted by “white boys stole it and turned it into code for ‘bitch’”. “Karen might be Kyle’s mom,” suggests Caldwell, “and they don’t have a very good relationship.”īut “Karen” is far more popular than “Kyle” – and the fact that an older woman’s name has been made an internet-wide figure of fun has led to criticisms of the meme as misogynistic. The male equivalent might be the “ Kyle” meme: an angry, aggressive white teenage boy, characterised by his penchant for Monster energy drinks, Axe body spray and punching drywall. The meme has new resonance in the time of coronavirus, increasingly being applied to those who are protesting against social distancing measures or treating the pandemic as permission to unfairly police others. To try to hijack the meaning of the meme is “a pretty Karen thing to do”.
“It was an unspoken thing, but Karen was a white, older lady’s name.” “Growing up as a kid in the 1990s, I remember people – particularly other black kids – being like, ‘You don’t look like a Karen,’” recalls Karen Attiah, an editor at the Washington Post. The choice of moniker has been linked to the 2004 film Mean Girls, where a character says, outraged: “Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask someone why they’re white” – a meme in and of itself.īut more likely, the name was chosen for its association with whiteness.
“Whenever you want to signal that that character’s a Karen, you’ll just toss that haircut on,” says the editor-in-chief, Don Caldwell. Know Your Meme, a Wiki-style site that defines internet culture, added “Karen” last year as an extension of the “‘Can I speak to the manager’ haircut” meme, born of Black Twitter back in 2014. It’s supposed to be about people who want to speak to the manager.” “Anything you say, people can be like, ‘OK, well, whatever, KAREN’ – but that’s not even how the meme is supposed to be used. “I spend a lot of time on Twitter, so I find it rather annoying,” says Karen Geier, a writer and podcaster from Toronto. But as the meme has become more prominent in online discourse, its meaning has become confused, and criticism has been voiced that it is sexist – with real-life Karens caught in the crosshairs.