The Karen Meme and the Death of “Lean In” Feminism
How making a fuss went out of fashion
To get at why it seems so startling to hear progressives mocking women for being too demanding, it’s necessary to remember what mainstream feminism was, until about five minutes ago, and in some circles I suppose still is: a call to women to lean in — that is, to speak up for ourselves and stop being so deferential.
By “Lean In” feminism, I don’t just mean the feminism of the handful of women who personally identified with the struggles of Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg. I mean a phenomenon that predated that book’s 2013 publication (the writer Jonathan Malesic reminded me of the bumper sticker slogan, “Well-behaved women rarely make history”) and persisted (heh) into the years following Trump’s election. I mean nasty women, difficult women, and angry women, but also badass women, bossy women, and girlbosses, women who didn’t care what other people (men especially) thought about them. But also, individual assertiveness — the feminism of being a successful (maybe white, maybe middle-class or wealthy…) woman, within existing structures.
It was a central, nearly unquestioned tenet of this feminism that women should speak up. Speak up about injustice, but also about relatively trivial, personal matters: asking for a raise, not getting ripped off at a car-repair shop.
The impulse not to make a fuss, not to be the squeaky wheel, was in this interpretation internalized misogyny. To focus on people-pleasing, to listen rather than speaking — these were tendencies feminism asked women to overcome. The patriarchy wanted us to be seen, not heard.
The notion that making a fuss was heroic as long as a woman was doing it never quite added up. Sometimes women get political in a bigoted way, not a righteous one. Sometimes the boss is a woman and exploitative. And, on a more mundane level, sometimes women decide during a pandemic to return to the barista to say there was more milk than they’d wanted in a beverage they’d ordered (a thing I’m afraid I actually saw happen). Pushback was necessary. And pushback has, goodness knows, been abundant.
The “Karen” meme has no consistent meaning across all contexts. Sometimes it’s a racist white woman, other times a generically entitled one. Other times, it’s … all over the place. (“Karen,” an explicitly anti-racist white-appearing woman, putting herself in physical danger during the George Floyd protests, or Manhattan women whose misdeed is appearing “bourgeois.” She’s basic, or has the “Karen” haircut. “Karen” can just be a woman someone’s annoyed at.)
But if there’s one essential characteristic of The Karen, it’s that she is a woman who makes too much of a fuss, or makes a fuss for an inappropriate reason. She thinks highly of herself, but isn’t sufficiently concerned with how others see her. She’s out of touch, and stubbornly refuses to take the lead from young people who get it.
She’s difficult, nasty, assertive, and utterly unafraid of calling managers or other authorities to get her way. She has (long since) crossed the line from demure girlhood to DGAF womanhood, and this is not a good thing.
At most, Karen-ness is something that can be channeled into a force for good. A widely-shared tweet advises:
All the middle-aged white women out there that want to help…use that Karen energy and call up your city council members, mayors, sheriffs, etc and DEMAND to speak to their managers. Show up at their doorsteps. Make a scene. Fight as if they wouldn’t take your coupon at Kohl’s
It’s hard to know where to begin with this. The advice itself is sound, but gratuitously insulting of the (ostensible) target audience. There’s the assumption that members of that demographic who are so inclined are not already helping.
Add to this the undeniably sexist and classist reference to retail coupon usage. It’s a patronizing approach (women, always shopping, unless otherwise prompted), but with a jab at women who, heaven forbid, make a fuss over things that aren’t incredibly serious.
As corrections so often do, “Karen” addresses one set of ills while reinforcing another. No, it’s not always a good thing when a woman makes a fuss, but nor should women’s fuss-making be (further) stigmatized. Yes, white women can be racist, rich women classist, and yes, a ‘what if woman ruled the world?’ fantasy about women’s inherent goodness has a way of erasing these and other truths. It doesn’t follow that women’s assertiveness — even with whichever qualifiers (white, posh, etc.) — is inherently worse than men’s.
It seems as though it should be possible to abandon the notion of women-even-privileged-ones as pure victims while also refusing to return to a society where every time a woman raises her voice about something legitimate or innocuous, she needs to first cringe at herself and wonder if she is that.
