Karen

[kimberlysteele]

I recently went to the shopping mall to get a boba tea. For those of you not in the know, a boba tea is a cold, non-alcoholic drink popular in Taiwan. Boba often features tapioca pearls, which are chewy, sweet orbs of tapioca that sink to the bottom of the drink and that you are given a large straw in order to drink/eat. Boba is in this way a light meal of sorts -- it's more meaty than just a normal iced tea. The best kind of boba is milk tea: it is the creamier version of what I've just described. I am a vegan and boba is very easy to adapt for vegans. The tapioca pearls are vegan to begin with and the rest is just tea and sweetener. Unfortunately for me and anyone else who does not eat dairy, most boba places make milk boba tea with dairy products, usually in the form of creamer. I will explain this later.

So when I went for a celebratory milk tea to a place that had previously told me their milk teas were entirely vegan, I by chance decided to ask whether or not the milk teas were vegan as I am used to the process. The young man at the counter told me that indeed they were not vegan because they use dairy non-dairy creamer. What the hell is "dairy non-dairy" creamer, you ask? You see, because there has to be animal products in absolutely everything, most creamers that are labeled non-dairy have a tiny bit of dairy in them in the form of whey. In short, the previous associate was wrong about the shop's milk tea and the young man was correct. Despite being 100% right, he seemed flummoxed and afraid of me even though I was a good 1.5 feet shorter than him. I tried to reassure him that it was no big deal, thanked him for the information, and left.

I believe the young man feared me for two reasons: one was that vegans in general are often asshats (I too went through the vegan asshat phase) and because middle aged women are often Karens.

According to a user on Urban Dictionary, a Karen is:

Aged 44, has 4 kids (they listen to kidz bop) has a bob cut with blonde hair, annoying, doesn’t want to “calm down” and always wants to speak to your manager.

Karen : I would like to speak to your manager.
Cashier: Ah you must be Karen

by MiniMint November 22, 2019

There are entire social media channels devoted to recording the antics of Karens. Another, smaller army seeks to re-take the name and remove its negative connotations. UrbanDictionary.com was full of definitions of Karen praising the name and trying to redefine it as "a beautiful person" as well a frantic efforts to either portray Karens as vaccinated or unvaccinated in entries made after 2020. A little reading between the lines reveals middle aged women on both ends of the political spectrum who are terrified to be called out as Karens.

Dictionary.com and Wikipedia feature a similar definition of Karen:

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 behaviors.

A Karen of the Middle Ages, Literally

Though we think of Karen as a modern phenomenon, Karens are as old as civilization itself. The Icelandic Eyrbyggja saga is set the year 1000. When a traveling stranger named Thorgunna alights upon a tiny farm in Froda on the Icelandic coast, she brings with her a set of precious linens and quilts. The chieftain/farmer’s wife, Thurgid, becomes insanely jealous of Thorgunna’s luxurious bedding. She makes no secret of coveting the guest’s collection of bed wear and makes an array of obnoxious comments about it. She is nothing short of delighted when Thorgunna becomes sick. Thorgunna, knowing of Thurgid’s lust for her stuff, makes Thurgid’s husband promise to burn every single sheet, pillow, duvet, etc. upon her death. Thorgunna promptly dies and the husband fails to follow her orders. Instead of burning the bedclothes, he lets Thurgid keep them. The story then devolves into a mini-zombie apocalypse as a result of Thurgid's evil Karenning that involves corpses who come back to celebrate their own funeral dinner, a nasty thing that slithers around in the salted cod, and an undead, demonic seal. Fun!

Karen in Non-Zombie Literature

Fast-forward nearly a thousand years and Karen pops up again in the Edith Wharton novel Ethan Frome. Karen is called Zeena in this book and is once again a farmer’s wife. Zeena Frome is described thusly:

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light . . . drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its rings of crimping-pins.

Zeena — a cruel, manipulative, hypochondriac harpy — acts as the rocket fuel that drive her husband Ethan and her cousin/maidservant Mattie to a dramatic act of self-destruction.

Karen is Not Happy

The face that is most associated with Karen in modern times is that of Kate Gosselin, the subject of Jon & Kate Plus 8, a television reality show that documented the family’s life from 2007-2017. Kate, the mother of twins and then fertility drug sextuplets by her then-husband Jon, was the proto-Karen of the modern era. Her stripey blonde bob and control freak antics were all the more annoying by being shoved down our throats for ten years on cable TV. In essence, she was the first mommy influencer, blazing the trail for other abusive grifters to capitalize on the vulnerability and cuteness of her children. To nobody’s surprise, Kate and Jon were divorced by 2009. Their exploited, broken home resulted in obvious damage and unnecessary drama for their children.

Karen and Divorce

One of the ten thousand things that made up my mind that I would never have children in this lifetime was the observations of teachers I had in my long sojourn in public schooling. One of the few sane teachers I had in elementary school was a single woman with no children I will call Ms. Booker in interest of protecting her privacy. Ms. Booker was the only teacher who truly inspired me because she seemed to actually care for the 30 or so children she saw for six hours every day. The other teachers were often decent but mostly uninspiring. One bad apple teacher was so awful, she was forced to apologize to the parents of her students and other staff members for her behavior. I had the misfortune of being taught by Ms. Bad Apple. The pattern I noticed by the tender age of nine was that the teachers who were married with children were mediocre, those who were married without children were far better, and the single, unmarried teacher with no children was the best of all. The teacher who both had children and was divorced was Ms. Bad Apple, an entitled, bitter scold of a woman who frankly sucked at teaching and who should have chosen a career far away from children.

As we ask which came first, the chicken or the egg, we must ask which came first, the Karen or the divorce? Karen is a bitter and ungrateful person who makes everyone around her feel like they cannot do anything right. I would argue that Karen causes the divorce and divorce does not cause Karen; perhaps you feel otherwise. Gratitude is the secret of a long and lasting marriage, in my opinion, and without it, anyone in a long and committed relationship is going to have a bad time. If Karen is mean to perfect strangers in the grocery store and parking lot, just imagine how nasty she gets with her husband and kids when the cameras are off.

Karens in the Wild

As the Dictionary.com entry mentioned, Karen is nothing if not entitled. Medieval Thurgid felt entitled to her guest’s bed linens. Zeena Frome felt entitled to every penny her husband could scratch out of his farm while getting off on his misery. Kate Goselyn felt entitled to “easy” brand deal money at the cost of her children’s wellbeing.

When caught on video, Karens often stalk other people in stores, parking lots, and roadsides, demanding they kowtow to their demands. Karens believe they know the rules and they wield potential lawsuits like a superstitious mace. One video features a Karen hitting another woman and then freaking out and mock-collapsing in a Victoria’s Secret store, ostensibly because the woman got in her way during a free panties giveaway. Several videos show Karens stomping up to parked cars and trucks, demanding they move their vehicles because of some perceived law or rule that has been broken. One shocking video features a male Karen who insists a handicapped man cannot wheel his wheelchair down a forest preserve path because there are no vehicles allowed. A funnier video shows a skinny harridan Karen who berates some kids for ruining the forest preserve by eating too many berries and then breaking into a strange dance to illustrate her point.

Karens Everywhere: How Did We Get So Many?

Excessive Karens are the natural product of a materialistic, ungrateful society. When community is commercialized and relationships within the community become corporate caricatures at best, Karen emerges with her whip in hand, ready to subjugate the meek. Though Karen is associated with women of a certain age, Millennials are happily assuming the mantle; the Victoria’s Secret Panty Karen I mentioned in the previous paragraph is a Millennial. As William Blake said, you become what you behold. Spend enough time immersed in the fishtank echo chambers of greige office fauna on a steady diet of Facebook, online shopping, and Netflix and you too may become a Karen. Offices, schools, and malls are toxic places where the Karening leaks like a radioactive plasma spill. When life is framed as a boring succession of material achievements and mouse-find-cheese Instagram goalposts, the human brain responds by rotting and attempts to take the soul along for the ride.

Karen the Witch

As I mentioned, Karens are nothing new. In the old days, an old woman who made a silent career of throwing around malefic energy because of her general hatred for her community was called a witch. Though third wave feminists would have us all believe that all witches were wise and cunning women persecuted sheerly for being too good with herbs, some witches were actually persecuted because other villagers got tired of them throwing their bad energy around.

When I used to throw vegan gatherings, my get-togethers were frequented by a toxic, older woman who I will call Sylvia. Sylvia was obsessed with getting something for nothing. When I gave away vegetables from my garden, I started ignoring her calls because she pursued me so hard for them. When I hosted a free raffle for some kitchen stuff I was giving away, she entered her name on 20 slips of paper in order to game the system and win everything I put on the table. She did this when she thought nobody was looking. When another guest was backing out of a parking lot close to her old, beaten up car but in no danger of hitting it, she glared and scowled, worried that her ancient, dented car would suffer another dent. At a holiday gathering, she ate a to-go dessert that was promised to another guest right in front of her eyes. The irony of Sylvia was that she and her husband were very comfortable. One of my regular guests knew someone who was his co-worker; his salary was well into the six figure range. Sylvia had every reason to be generous and yet was consumed by worry that someone else had nicer things than she did.

I can easily see Sylvia being done away with if the year was closer to 1524 than 2024. A village only has so many resources. A wealthy resource-sucker like Sylvia who constantly wished harm on other villagers and who carried with her an aura of greed and ruin to every gathering would be all too easy to accuse of cavorting with demons. In its own way, lusting after free crap is a form of demon worship, but only of the most common and blasé kind that hardly deserves being burned at the stake.

Don’t Fight the Karen

Slinging arrows or otherwise avenging yourself on a Karen never works. Karen thrives on opposition and conflict; she is vampiric in that sense. If I ever find myself cornered by Karen in the mall, office, or forest preserve, I know not to react. I will zip my trap and be as mute and still as Tiger Lily on the death raft. I will also do my level best not to be Karen’s judge, because we all have a little Karen in us. The inner Karen we all possess is what makes us hate her so much. Anyone who has never acted in any way resembling a Karen is welcome to throw the first stone.