That’s a homonym, not the name. And yes, I would be annoyed if my name was used as an insult in my region.
And I do strongly agree that “Karen” is a gendered insult there is no current male equivalent of. People have mentioned several variations (none of which I’ve ever seen in the wild, even on the internet), but there isn’t one that has anything approaching the wideness of usage (I’d say all put together don’t) nor any agreement on said name.
OMG! It’s female Elon! The Karenest Karen ever to grace curse the Earth!
Gaaah! Run away! Run away!!
When you Google “what is the male version…” it autocompletes to “of a Karen,” and the 67 million results suggests it’s not as gendered as you think. Ken, Kevin, and Greg seem to be the front-runners in links going back to 2020.
And where were you when Mark, Dick, Peter, and John needed a champion? The truth is no male equivalent would generate the defensiveness and social outrage of Karen because who cares about vaguely insulting men?
Nonsense. I use the term “Kevin” as the male version of “Karen” all the time. My daughters (progressive, enlightened feminists) and their friends (spanning a large spectrum of the 20-something LGBTQIA+ community) likewise use the term.
“Kevin” as a meme also appears on social media—you know, that thing on your smartphone that virtually everyone on the planet watches every day?
To say “Kevin” (or “Ken”) isn’t a meme and associated with “Karen” is simply wrong.
Is Kevin as common as Karen meme-wise? No. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s simply because entitled White women ranting have been videoed and posted on SM more than entitled White men ranting.
Are “Karen” and “Kevin” slurs? Yes, of course, they are. Are they slurs against people named Karen and Kevin? No, of course, they’re not. Are they slurs against women? No, not unless you think Kevin is a woman’s name. Are they slurs against White people? Sort of, but not really. They are slurs against a particular sub-set of White people—those who act entitled and superior and rant about petty issues to people they feel superior to. Should you feel bad for slurring these types of people? I don’t. Do you?
Do you even have to be White to be a Karen or Kevin? No, people of all colors often rant about petty issues and act superior to others. But, in Western society, it’s typically White people who hold the majority (hence the power) and typically behave entitled and privileged (it’s the self-entitlement and privilege that make Karen and Kevin the memes that they are). It’s a different situation in the East. Non-White names are probably used in those cases.
Should your nose be put out of joint if your name happens to be Karen or Kevin? No, they are simply common names for White people. Any common White name could have become the meme, with no loss of meaning.
If your name is Karen or Kevin and you are offended, I suggest you have First World problems and you should study cases of real bigotry, because there’s plenty of that in the world.
To be honest I’ve gotten tired of this thread. If you all want to insist Karen isn’t a gendered insult I can’t stop you. It’s a nice day after some brutal heat so I’m going to enjoy it rather than argue on the internet.
I have to agree that asshole isn’t a sufficient synonym for Karen.
It doesn’t carry the relevant information that a Karen is a dangerous meddler who weaponizes white supremacy to achieve trivial victories.
Or as Twitter users frequently calls Elon, Space Karen
IMO the Karen insult is weak sauce, to me it barely conveys the vitriol one may really feel about uppity white people. It’s a reflection of the speakers reluctance to say something really hurtful, but that might make them look vulgar. Why do folks want to shy away from well established curse words?
ISTM that the whole point of the original race-specific origin of “Karen” as an insult is that it’s not about white racist “uppityness” in general. It’s about a specific type of controlling and entitled behavior from people exploiting societal white privilege.
And sadly, AFAICT, most Black Americans are sufficiently habituated to the impacts of white racism that white people “Karening” at them generally doesn’t provoke the level of “vitriol” in response that you (not unreasonably) imagine it to inspire.
Yes, I’m sure you as a straight white man would be absolutely sizzling with outrage if somebody assumed they could treat you with the same disrespectful arrogance that many Black Americans endure from some of their white compatriots. For many Black Americans themselves, however, that’s just another day ending in “y”.
Edit:
It’s also a well-known fact that our historically and persistently racist society judges Black people more harshly than others for the expression of anger or hostility, however justified. If a white woman says to a Black woman walking down the sidewalk “What are you doing here? Your people don’t belong in this neighborhood” and the Black woman replies “Fuck you, you nosy asshole, I happen to own this house”, many people will immediately read that exchange as a stereotypical “angry black woman” “overreacting” and “making a scene”.
So yeah, again, you as a straight white man can often get away with throwing around “well established curse words” more freely than many other types of people can. Being verbally “hurtful” and looking “vulgar” is often not as severely judged in someone like you.
There’s an entry for “male Karen” in the urban dictionary and tons of other cites; when there are Karens of other genders, it’s not a gendered insult. But enjoying the day is always a good plan.
To be fair, the term “gendered insult” carries a lot of shades of meaning, and a particular epithet may or may not be considered a gendered insult depending on how the criteria are interpreted. Some possible criteria for the term are:
Is the insult used only, or primarily, about members of a particular gender?
Is the insult based on an intrinsically gender- or sex-specific characteristic?
Is its use influenced by gender stereotypes that are in theory separate from whatever specific action or attitude the insult is calling out?
And so on. The way “Karen” is used would qualify as a gendered insult according to some of those criteria but not others.
I know two checkers. Who tell stories like: “Wellll, we had a male Karen in the 12 Items Lane first thing this morning…”
It’s a meme, folks.
It will go away. They always do.
Then there will be a new one to be all outraged by.
While ‘Karen’ is certainly gendered in the sense that it is literally a woman’s name, and represents a female archetype, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s sexist. Which is to say, gendered insults aren’t necessarily sexist (although sexist people might use them more often).
My rationale goes thusly:
An insult (or any kind of comment) is sexist if it implicitly or otherwise demeans or disparages an entire sex, or a significant proportion of its constituents. ‘Bastard’, for example, is pretty much exclusively used with men, for instance - so it’s gendered, but calling me a ‘bastard’ only really affects me, not all members of the brotherhood equally, so it’s not a sexist term per se.
‘Karen’ is much more of a specific term, in that it summons up quite detailed stereotypes (middle-aged, entitled white woman, etc…) - but the observation that ‘there is a certain archetype of person, which seems to share some common traits and behaviours, which we find to be offensively antisocial and obnoxious, and women of these generation seem to disproportionately be named ‘Karen’’ isn’t disparaging or offensive to all women everywhere.
One counter-argument I read somewhere is that it is sexist, because this sort of obnoxious behaviour is tolerated or even admired in men, but scolded in women (because patriarchy). I respectfully disagree. The sort of behaviour I’ve seen in ‘Karen’ videos would be equally condemned and ridiculed if it had been men doing it
As it should be.
But what would you call those men? How would they be condemned and ridiculed? By calling a raging hormonal white man a Karen”? a meme meaning middle aged uppity white woman?
Or has Karen become universal for adult tantrums of any ethnicity.
“Karen” refers to a person who is exercising their perceived abitrary cultural privilege. To apply it to someone who would otherwise not be perceived to have that privilege seems doubly insulting, or something. Kind of like how, in the US, calling a white person “uppity” would be strangely discordant.
Also, I am not sure that “Karen” is middle-aged. I can imagine a Karen in their 30s, which is most decidely not middle-aged in modern parlance.
Uppity is not race specific. Is Karen gender and race specific?
In the US, it really is.