We Need to Talk About Karen
Class, gender, and female aggression, meme-ified
Karen.
Everybody has heard about Karen. Everybody knows a Karen. Everybody has seen a Karen in action.
She is the prize fighter of suburbia; a Chico’s size 12, ready to throw hands on anybody who looks at her Chrysler Pacifica the wrong way.
She is at the grocery store, and the neighborhood dog park, and the local school board meeting. Her house contains no fewer than seventeen signs packed into in 2,300 sq. ft. that all proclaim the importance of living, laughing, and loving, but aside from the living part, Karen is striking out.
She does not laugh and love.
She’s too busy screaming racist insults while her three kids wreck the condiment bar at Lion’s Choice.
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Karen is, at this point, a national icon; a symbol of all of that is wrong with America.
She is a caricature of every busybody hausfrau, every first grade teacher who treats her classroom like a crayon-scented fiefdom, every demanding patron who insists that “the customer is always right”, despite the impossibility of the request.
Karen is mad that she can’t see the arch from her house in Dardenne Prairie. She’s mad that Taco Bell doesn’t have any spaghetti. She’s mad that Costco won’t accept her return, even though she has a receipt showing that she purchased the item from Dillard’s in 1997. And she’s really, really mad that the 16 year old behind the counter doesn’t seem to give a shit about any of those things.
I have known and bemoaned many Karens over the years.
Pretty much everybody has.
One thing about Karen is that she makes herself known; she’s not going to suffer in silence while the guy across the street lets his grass grow ¼ of an inch too long and a vague hint of cigarette smoke wafts in from two miles away. No, she’s going to call the FBI. She’s going to insist on speaking to every single person’s manager until she can work her way up to Joe Biden himself, and she’s going to make him get on Air Force One to tell Bob at the end of the cul de sac to keep his garage door closed. And then, while she has Biden’s ear, she’s going to nag him about the amount of air in a bag of Sun Chips and the skate park three towns over that she thinks looks vaguely unsafe.
It’s just what Karen does.
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The thing is, the older I get, the more conflicted I feel about “Karen”.
Karen looks like me now.
She’s no longer some distant, middle-aged hag. I see her every morning when I brush my teeth in front of the mirror.
I shop at the same stores she does.
I drive the same safe, sensible grocery hauler she does.
I’m as exhausted as she is.
I have a lot of the same pressures on me that she does, and a lot of the same frustrations.
She is both real and a caricature; the monster of the suburbs and a victim of it.
Labeling somebody as a Karen is both a way to put somebody in their place and to keep them in it. It’s both an assertion of a bully’s privilege, and also a punch down. It is a term loaded with class and gender connotations, but often used by people with fewer material advantages.
Quite simply, Karen is complicated.
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First of all, there is the issue of class.
Karen is, hopelessly and undeniably, middle class.
She might be at the top of the upper-middle class, or the bottom of the lower-middle class. Her children, if she has them, might be named Brynxleeye or Caroline. She might drive a Lexus RX, or she might drive a 2008 Caravan. But, at the end of the day, Karen is distinctly separate from both “welfare queens” and #girlbosses. This is the source of her powers, and her kryptonite.
She is good at speaking to managers.
She’s good at getting her problem escalated to the next highest person in charge.
She knows how to wield the language of the petit bourgeois; when to smile and sprinkle sugar on her requests, and when to threaten lawsuits.
She’s assumed to have at least a certain amount of spending power. She’s assumed to have a certain amount of political and social capital.
But…she also doesn’t have millions of dollars to withhold. She doesn’t have a direct line to the president. She doesn’t even have a direct line to the mayor of Ballwin. Her sphere of influence is limited to the $5k she spends at Target each year, and the twenty-three people she can get to “like” her status on Facebook. And…this is very much part of the joke.
Even the cashier making fun of her knows that she ultimately doesn’t have much power. Nobody is that afraid of Karen; it’s generally understood that she’s a pissed off chihuahua, trying to guard the front door. She might have the power to draw blood and get a person written up at IHOP, but she’s not an apex predator. She’s not getting regional assistant managers fired, much less the guys above them. She’s not killing off 35 year careers; she’s complaining about stoned fry cooks who won’t actually get fired, anyway, because they’re fry cooks.
Those dudes get drug tested every month to make sure they’re high enough.
Karen can cause real damage on occasion, but much like a chihuahua, a lot of other things generally have to go right/wrong for that to happen.
Most of the time, she just yaps ineffectually and gets underfoot of anybody trying to get things done. She’s an angry purse dog with opposable thumbs, ready to go hide in her own knockoff Louis Vuitton carrier if things get too scary.
And this leads to another class element: Karen’s world is small.
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Karen is not making life hell for the 70,000 employees who answer to her.
Karen is not throwing a tantrum in Dubai.
Karen is not sitting at a desk on Capitol Hill.
Karen is at a grocery store, two miles from her cookie-cutter house.
She is, at the core of things, provincial.
She’s worried about coupons and grocery prices. She’s worried about her neighbor’s mailbox. She’s worried about the pool party down at the end of the block, and her child’s elementary school, and the local noise ordinances in a suburb of 9,000 people.
Not only is her sphere of influence limited, but so is her sphere of concern: She might have changed her Facebook profile picture to the Ukrainian flag for a week back in 2021, but at the end of the day, her real focus is on the fact that Starbucks was out of white chocolate mocha.
Nobody accuses Nancy Pelosi of being a Karen. Nobody accuses Marjorie Taylor Greene or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of being Karens. Nobody accuses Sheryl Sandberg of being a Karen. Women aren’t generally accused of being Karens when they fly out to DC to protest, regardless of the side they’re on. The Karen accusation comes from talking to the local school board about one’s concerns. It comes from being worried about coupons for $.10 off of Yoplait Yogurt. It comes from calling the police about a suspicious guy roaming the subdivision.
The big thing that makes Karen a Karen is that her grudge matches are local—she might say she’s worried about women’s rights, or the economy, or some other issue of global importance, but at the end of the day, she’s fighting on the homefront.
She’s not working with the NIH or the Department of Justice; she’s arguing with the shift supervisor at Quiznos.
To pretend that there isn’t a class element to this is blind. To pretend that Karen never has a legitimate point—that her concerns about neighborhood zoning and Target return policies and the local elementary school are never valid—is to dismiss the importance of those things entirely, along with the people who have devoted their lives to improving them.
Regardless of which “side” she’s on, Karen is fighting about an HOA bylaw because that bylaw matters to the community.
It might not be of global importance, and it not even matter to everybody in the community, but to both the nine households who bought houses in Hillwood Prairie Estates because they valued the HOA’s dictated aesthetic, and the two households who want to paint their front doors teal because of a project they saw on Pinterest, it really is an important issue. It really is a weighing of personal freedom versus the collective good.
For those people, it’s not a petty issue of taupe versus turquoise paint; it’s a question of how free they are to manage their own largest asset, versus the care that must be shown in preserving the assets of others.
And, at the core of things, Karen recognizes this.
She knows that just because the BBC hasn’t sent an American correspondent over to follow the Hillwood Prairie Estates saga doesn’t mean that the matter is irrelevant. That just because that particular debate, in and of itself, is not a matter of international concern doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter at all; that it doesn’t tie into broader issues.
Karen, like anybody who takes local matters seriously, recognizes that the home is about more than the home. That what happens in Chesterfield or Webster Groves reverberates far beyond the incorporated boundaries.
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This isn’t to give Karen a free pass. This isn’t to excuse her histrionics. This isn’t to say that some of Karen’s fights aren’t truly pointless—Costco’s refusal to accept a Dillard’s coupon that expired in March of 1997 is truly not indicative of any greater societal issue.
Rather, it’s a recognition of the fact that just because a fight is happening on the homefront doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. That just because a concern is provincial doesn’t mean that it’s silly.
In some ways, it’s impossible to indict Karen for fretting so much about the five mile perimeter surrounding her house without indicting all of the people who have devoted their lives to bettering the area.
To completely discount her is to also completely discount the Starbucks manager, and the school superintendent, and every person on the city council, and the woman who owns the flower shop, and the guy who runs the convenience store, and the team of volunteers who work to keep the park well-maintained. They too have all devoted their time and money to that same patch of land. To make fun of Karen for being so preoccupied with it is a dig at everybody who is preoccupied with it.
Secondly, there is no way to fully disentangle Karen from sexism.
Karen is, quite specifically, a woman.
Moreover, Karen isn’t just any woman; she’s a woman who's past her prime.
The drunk Chi Omega yelling “Don’t you know who my dad is?!?!” at a bouncer at 2 a.m. is not a Karen. The high school cheer captain is not a Karen. The youth group zealot who freezes out anybody who didn’t go to the right summer camp is not a Karen. Hot girls wearing tiny rompers are not Karens.
Karen may not be old, but she’s starting to show her age.
She’s wearing sensible shoes. She’s long traded in the Mustang convertible for something that has seven-passenger seating. She has bags under her eyes. She has some variety of Mom Hair. She might be able to clean up and pass for being young and carefree for a couple of hours on a Saturday night, but fundamentally, Karen is a woman who shows the cracks and scars of life.
She’s no longer the girl guys dream of marrying; she’s the mundane reality, scrubbing the floors on a Saturday morning with a cloth diaper on her head to tie her hair back.
Moreover, nobody wants to become a Karen. It’s never seen as an aspirational status. If polled, none of the girls above hope to be seen as Karens when they get older. They might all be in the prime demographic for becoming future Karens, but if stopped and polled on their way home from cheer or field hockey practice, zero percent of teenage girls will answer that “Yes, I would love to start a bench clearer in the frozen vegetable aisle of Walmart one day. That’s really where I’m placing my aspirations for the future”.
No, that’s just something that happens. Usually because a lot of other things went wrong first. Things that may or may not have been Karen’s fault.
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In particular, I find it telling that Karen’s meltdowns don’t usually occur at Neiman Marcus.
They don’t usually occur at the spa.
They generally aren’t even at HomeGoods, or the froyo shop, or Hobby Lobby.
No, they’re at Walmart.
They’re at McDonald’s.
They’re at the pediatrician’s office.
They’re generally occurring in places where people don’t want to be.
If there’s a viral video of a lady yelling at people, nine times out of ten, it’s going to be in a place that has the potential to piss anybody off. And, moreover, the context clues usually point to the fact that Karen drew the short straw—that this was an errand that could have been handled by two or three different people, and Karen was simply the unlucky one who got stuck doing it.
Karen, after all, was probably not buying Centrum for Men, Axe body spray, a 400-pack of Gatorade, and an issue of Seventeen for herself. There were several people in that household who could have opted to spend a gorgeous, 70 degree Saturday filling a grocery cart with frozen pizzas and deodorant. The fact that it was Karen doing so is telling—her husband Ken wasn’t going to be yelling at cashiers because he didn’t have a reason to be mad at any cashiers.
He was relaxing in the backyard hammock, drinking a beer.
Same with their kids, Ken Jr. and Lakelynn.
Ken Jr. was at his friend’s house. Lakelynn was at the mall. They were all happily living their best lives while Karen handled the mundane crap that had to be handled by somebody.
Of course she was going to be the one having a meltdown in the frozen food aisle; she was the one in the frozen food aisle. Ken could be having a very similar meltdown at home, but if he does, it won’t go viral. It can’t. There’s nobody in the kitchen to film him as he yells at the dog, the dishwasher, and a pizza box that keeps the refrigerator door from shutting. There’s nobody to mock him for hurling his pointless insults in private.
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This isn’t unique to women.
Everybody draws the short end of the straw at times. Everybody gets stuck dealing with the crap that nobody else volunteered to help with. What varies are the gendered terms used when someone deals with the crap poorly.
With women, one person’s “Karen” is another’s “doing what needs to be done”.
The line between “helpful neighbor” and busybody can be a blurry one. The line between advocating for one’s loved ones and being a “harpy bitch” can be a blurry one. One person’s “standing up for others” can be another’s “bullying”, and one person’s “demanding customer” is another’s “careful steward of financial resources”.
There are some situations in life with little gray area, but most of a black and white photo is going to be gray.
A decent portion of the time, Karen is being called Karen over the gray area—she and somebody else are fighting over whether to classify a pebble on the ground as black or white. Karen may indeed be wrong, but there’s a chance the other person is, too. The real problem is that they’re both trying to classify a gray stone as being either black or white…and that may or may not be the fault of both of them. It might simply be on whoever came up with that classification system in the first place.
With men, this same phenomenon can be swapped for “toxic masculinity”.
“Toxic masculinity” is, in many ways, the male Karen—the caricatured version once again a past-his-peak suburban prize fighter; this time reminding his kindergartener that “real boys don’t cry”.
Both terms are used to highlight a certain type of gendered aggression. Both are often used to indict a specific type of person—a person who has benefitted from many of the nation’s privileges, but who remains mired in outdated thinking and petty rage. Both are used to de-fang the tyrants of day-to-day life; the micromanaging boss and the HOA president. The demanding customer, and the parent on a power trip. Both terms seek to describe those people, and also to put them back in their place.
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In both cases, the terms can be descriptive, or they can be a cheap way to discount very real grievances.
Male and female aggression do both exist, and generations of gender norms have played a role in the way that men and women tend to express their aggression. But, not all male anger is “toxic masculinity” and not all female anger is “being a Karen”.
In fact, most of it is not. Most anger is just…anger.
Anger can be justified or unjustified. It can be well-placed or misplaced. It can be channeled productively, or expressed in the unhealthiest of ways. But, anger in and of itself is a core emotion. Every person, in every culture throughout the history of mankind, has been really, really pissed off before.
That does not make a man toxic. That does not make a woman a Karen.
It simply makes them all people. Flawed, complicated people.
Which, again, is not to give a free pass to every person throwing a tantrum in the grocery store line.
The universality of anger does not give anybody the right to punch a Little League referee or call a bank teller the n-word. It does not give anybody the right to treat others poorly. It’s fair to call people out for bad behavior. What’s unfair is dragging gender, race, and socioeconomics into the picture for no reason; to focus on somebody’s haircut and the presumed appearance of their genitals rather than the behavior at issue.
The problem, after all, is not that Karen is wearing Sketchers with capris. The problem is that she’s throwing a can of ravioli at somebody. Her Great Clips haircut and jiggling arms are beside the point. Same for her husband, Ken. He’s not toxic because he’s a man. He’s toxic because he threatened to kick a twelve year old’s ass at the company picnic. Dorky footwear and gender are the least of either of their problems.