kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with karen

Men and women on the political right delight in taking stabs at the low-hanging fruit of the childless cat lady stereotype. According to the narrative, cats are put in place as pathetic substitutes for human children. The ownership of cats is a reverse status symbol: it is a signifier of a woman as bitter and envious of "real" parents of human children. It is always pointed out, often multiple times, that the cat lady will die alone and that her ignomious demise will be proof that she wasted her life on things that did not matter.

I find the cat lady stereotype to be a transparently hysterical projection of the fears of parents. Like many hysterical fears, it hides the terrifying truth under a caul of mockery. First of all, not every cat person fits the single, childless stereotype. Plenty of women who have become mothers are also cat ladies. Cat Dads are also very much a thing: cat expert Jackson Galaxy (not his real name) is one of the primary influences who educated me on cat behavior. I have not met the guy -- he managed to do this solely via TV and internet.

Second of all, when we shoot straight to the heart of the cat lady stereotype, having biological children offers zero guarantees you won't die as alone as the craziest of cat ladies. Most of the old people languishing in nursing homes right now -- literally begging to go to a home that no longer exists -- have at least one child. More often than not, it is the child that put them in the nursing home to begin with. Dying alone these days is more of a function of class than parental status. Basically if your adult children dwell within the PMC or Professional Managerial Class (or if they want to be there) it is highly likely you will die alone. Their PMC aspirations will be nearly directly proportional to how much physical and emotional distance they put between themselves and you. Consider Asian immigrants who confine their experience with their elderly parents in India, the Philippines, etc. to whatever return visits the work visa and budget will barely allow. They don't come to the US to live like white trash.

The Age of Isolated Hyperdependence

There has never been a better or a worse time to raise a child than the current era. On the upside, childbirth is somewhat easier than it used to be because of sanitation, surgery, and drugs. Very few in the industrialized world are starving in any way except etheric starvation. On the downside, we live in a culture of isolated hyperdependence where the child is the most isolated and hyperdependent of all. In ancient Greece, when a couple had a child they could not afford or did not want, they left the baby in the public square. If the baby was not adopted, he or she was left to die. Cultures around the globe did the same thing: abortion and infanticide is nothing new. In almost every ancient culture, boys were apprenticed and trained as warriors shortly after puberty. Girls were married off around the same age. In the supposedly-enlightened Victorian era, children were routinely exploited as laborers, hence the various portraits of child labor in Charles Dickens novels. The molly-coddled TV/iPad/console childhood is a blip on the radar of world history. It will be shortlived.

Preventing a child of today from being at least partially raised by screens is virtually impossible. Adults who were raised on screens now raise children on screens who will raise their children with copious screens.

The Eternal Child

Humans remain in an infantile state far longer than other mammals because of our large brains. In almost every species of the mammalian kingdom outside our own, adulthood happens within a single year of being born. Adding fuel to the fire, modernity has enabled us to extend infancy from cradle to grave. Being able to extend the life of someone born with compromised lungs, compromised guts, or a compromised brain is a double-edged sword. If the disabled, autistic, and mentally retarded can live into their 70s, which nowadays they can, the logical result is a large population of adult orphans who have no way of making a living or working together outside of gaming chats. I may be lampooned for my cats but at least I will not leave an adult human child behind to deal with the collapse of the only world she has ever known.

The burden of responsibility that goes with being a human mother can and does drive women crazy. Nobody is more psychotic than the regretful mother, and all mothers have regrets at some point. As selfless as the mother's journey often turns out, the choice to have a child is just that: a choice. It is a choice that usually began with the statement "I wanted..." Yet maybe she didn't get what she thought she wanted.

I did not have the biological urge to become a mother. To my mind, it really needs to be there for a woman to become a good mother, regardless of whether she conceives or adopts. Without the overwhelming urge to become a mom, the species would quickly end. All a man has to do is shoot his rocks off; women have to be there no matter what, and if they aren't, all hell breaks loose. The fatherly version of toxic is either to be a controlling dictator or to up and leave. The motherly version of toxic is much more insidious and complicated.

Types of Devouring Mother

Carl Jung meaningfully plumbed the devouring mother archetype, expounding the concept beyond Freud's Oedipal fixations. The devouring mother is a narcissist who uses her child as a second self or mini-me. As I briefly explained in this essay, I believe that mother and child share the etheric body until the child is approximately seven years old and the processes of puberty begin to differentiate and develop their default etherically-male bodies. Girls separate from their mothers as they go through puberty because they begin to polarize with boys and are drawn away from the maternal force by the magnetic etheric presence of young men. Boys separate because their etheric bodies invert polarity as they become physically male and etherically female. Nevertheless, until young childhood wanes, it is this shared male etheric body that gives the mother the ability to devour the child, as to some degree it is an act of metaphorical cannibalism because they co-habitate a slowly-separating subtle body.

MINOS: Married in Name Only

The MINO is a common type of devouring mother. She hates men and she hates her man. Though she may have occasional outbursts of affection, she's mostly in it out of the grudging acknowledgement her kids are better off with their dad in the picture and/or for the money. Like many women, she tends to externalize blame, using men and masculinity as her scapegoat. A MINO will often openly lust after men in the community or celebrities. No attractive male piece of eye candy is off-limits to the MINO: she will go after a neighbor, the mailman, or her teenage daughter's boyfriend. She spends her time re-living her halycon days and has no sane way of accepting the ageing process. She is also known as a cougar or MILF and usually ends up divorced.

Boss Mom

Boss mom's kids are mere accessories to her busy life. They are exploited, not heard. She will endanger their health and well-being without a second thought if it improves her public image or bottom line. Famous examples of Boss Moms include Kris Jenner, Yolanda Hadid, and Gywneth Paltrow. The children of a boss mom are unfortunate mini-mes who end up pitted against each other. Boss mom's children are only there to extend her own beloved image. Boss Mom is the most hands-off and absentee of mothers. She relegates childrearing duties to other women whenever possible. Her career is always far more important than her child's needs.

Karen

The Karen is a control freak, Type A, borderline personality who seeks to control others via shame. Her shame, of course, is a projection of her own shadow. Karens are frightened of people who see beneath their facade of having it all handled and together. The Karen exists in a dual reality of wanting to be pitied and wanting to wield infinite power. At the root of the Karen, there is a festering ball of shame and regret for the avalanche of bad decisions and behavior that started as a single snowball. She knows at any opportunity that she could have stopped herself from acting like a Karen but pretends that circumstances put a gun to her head. She knows this to be a lie. Karens usually have children because they want the clout and virtue signaling that goes along with being a mother in our civilization.

Smother Mother

Smother Mothering is a disorder on the same spectrum as Munchausen's by proxy, which is when a parent, usually the mother, deliberately poisons and sickens her child in order to run him or her around to various doctors for treatments. The mother actually has no concern for the child (otherwise she would not deliberately sicken him) and uses the child's body in order to get attention. The masquerade is that she loves the child to pieces, and in her demented way, she does love the child. She also hates the child.

The Smother Mother spoils and molly-coddles her children until they have no will of their own with which to provide for themselves or anyone else. The child becomes a perpetual baby ensnared by the mother's pathological need to be worshipped. Discipline is something that is supposed to magically appear and happen on its own. She is always bargaining and pleading with the child to enforce limits on himself or herself. This bargaining usually happens in public for the "benefit" of onlookers. The child becomes used to throwing tantrums, hitting, and screaming in order to obtain a toy or a trinket. She uses the extreme displays of her child's manufactured problems in order to feed her martyrdom complex and sense of helplessness. She frequently abdicates matters of discipline because a calm and ordered existence does not generate the dramatic energy she subsists upon like a vampire. The child is an extension of herself and she hates herself. She handicaps the child while putting him or her on a pedestal for attention and clout.

In all of these cases, we see women with boundary issues. They don't know where the child ends and self begins. They lack the willpower to understand what they are projecting or how to stop it. I was lucky; I grew up with a good mother. I know how rare a good mother happens to be. I was not willing to be a bad mother and that is why I decided to skip it this time around. This does not mean I would be a bad mother -- we will never know -- and it certainly does not preclude me from expressing my maternal instincts. I don't confine my maternal expressions to cats by the way, and neither do my fellow childless cat ladies. There are a million ways to be maternal without being the literal mother of a human being or even a woman. The Great Mother is accessible to all of us and lives within all of us. That is why she is called "great".

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.