Be more Karen

In case you were under the apprehension that ‘Karen’ is simply an attractive name popularly given to girl babies in the early 1960s (my best friend as a child was called Karen, and there were three more in our year at my sink-school comprehensive) I’ve got news for you. To quote dictionary.com:

Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviours. As featured in memes, Karen is generally stereotyped as having a blonde bob haircut, asking to speak to retail and restaurant managers to voice complaints or make demands.

In other words, it’s a witless way to objectify and demonise non-posh women – you can’t pick on mothers-in-laws any more, but here’s a handy female stand-in punch bag.

I love my adopted hometown of Brighton, but it houses the biggest selection of over-privileged idiots you ever did see outside of ‘Glasto’. They’re the students, both actual and perennial, who voted in the Green council, the same one that has spent the past four years decimating our city. The pubs, once agreeable neighbourhood havens, have now been colonised by shrieking gaggles of the over-privileged with more of daddy’s money than sense. So naturally it would be Brighton that went after this modern hate icon, opening a restaurant called Karen’s Diner in which the staff are rude to customers.

Now one Karen, living in Worthing, has complained about this to the Brighton Argus: ‘It’s damaging for businesswomen called Karen and they are attacking a certain demographic. They are attacking women – have you ever come across a male Karen?’ A spokesman for the restaurant snootily responded:

Karen’s Diner combines a restaurant along with an immersive theatre experience. Certainly a sense of humour is needed to understand all comedy productions and Karen’s is no exception. The company identified that Brightonians, generally speaking, are more broad minded than most and eager to contribute to the status of being one of the most diverse cities in Britain.

Imagine if a name favoured by any other ethnic group was used as a synonym for being unpleasant. This is yet another pathetic attack on women and the working class, handily combined in one stereotype. Those who use the term try to weasel out of what in others they would call out as punching down by attributing privilege to their Karen. But if you are an educated person seeking to draw contempt towards a less educated person, how come that doesn’t count?

The only women called Karen I’ve ever known came from council houses. Why not call this privileged, arrogant white woman by a more accurate name, such as India, Emily or Charlotte? Because that would be implicating their own social group.

In 2020, academic Charlotte Riley and influencer Amelia Dimoldenberg recorded a podcast for BBC Sounds advising women how not to become Karens: ‘Educate yourself…’ giggled Amelia. ‘Read some books’. Charlotte added that white women should ‘think critically about your identity and your privilege… get out of the way’. ‘Yeah, basically leave’, agreed Amelia. What a smorgasbord of unreconstructed snobbery; middle-class women telling working-class women to shut up. As Brendan O’Neill put it

Many people will be asking why on earth they should be forced by law to fund a broadcaster that views them as Karens and gammons who must be saved from themselves by a new, supposedly enlightened elite. The public broadcaster should treat the public with respect, not insult them with classist diatribes disguised as academic analysis. Wokeness is the mask elitism wears, and the BBC needs to recognise that.

Karen isn’t the only villain to be found in the Names For Baby Girls book. There’s Natasha – ‘a prostitute, especially of Eastern European origin’ who was probably trafficked but, hey, probably no better than she should be. There’s Stacey – ‘an attractive but shallow woman’ often blamed by unattractive men for the fact that no one wants to have sex with them. Becky is ‘a white woman who is ignorant of both her privilege and her prejudice.’

It’s interesting that male names never become terms of abuse in this way; in 1965, the year Karen reached its peak popularity as the third-most popular girls name in the USA, the male counterpart was David. Do we ever hear said of a man ‘He’s a right David’? Tim-Nice-But-Dim was at least nice – Karens are irredeemably nasty.

We see this attempted policing of working-class white women in the reaction even to something as obviously positive as the rise of the Lionesses, who were criticised for being too white. Writing in Spiked, Inaya Folarin Iman summed up this weird behaviour well:

It is remarkable how ‘white’ has become a casual insult. To even remark that a team is ‘all white’ is to imply there is a problem that needs to be solved. This is incredibly demeaning to the England women, who have trained hard for years to earn their place on the team. Many would have made immense sacrifices to reach such an elite level – only to then be judged negatively for the colour of their skin.

With their lovely eyebrows and high ponytails, they wore the badges of their class and generation proudly, these gorgeous girls with names generally only heard on Love Island – Millie, Ella, Lauren. But who’s to say that these names won’t be the Karens of the future, so acceptable is it to pick on working-class women in this creepy, cowardly way, just for daring to stand up for themselves? In a world where women are increasingly encouraged to be #BeKind doormats, be more Karen.