What exactly is a ‘Karen?’

I have always found it fascinating how slang words appear from nowhere and become part of our common language. The term ‘Karen,’ or to put it in the correct context; ‘Oh God, she’s being a Karen!’ is one that seems both funny and offensive at the same time.

After some brief research, it seems ‘Karen’ was created as a way for the American Black community to express their irritation when confronted by a certain type of white middle class women venting toxicity; although let’s face it, sometimes it’s nothing to do with being a ‘Karen,’ but rather just pure and simple racism!

Over time however, it seems the information highway of YouTube has pulled ‘Karen’ away from her American roots and made her a global phenomenon. The United Kingdom of course, is always first in the queue!

As with everything we adopt here from the US (Hip Hop is cool, but you can keep Trump!), barely a day goes by when I don’t see or hear of a woman that’s been accused of being a ‘Karen.’ But perhaps it’s not always justified.

For one thing, Karen is a very popular name here in the UK. I mean, It’s not their fault is it? They were lovingly given this name by their parents and now they’re being tinged by the other type of ‘Karen.’ I’ve actually seen this first hand when a girl at work introduced herself as Karen and everyone made silly groaning noises. Not very kind!

Also, it seems ‘Karen’ is being misused as a way of criticising anything a woman does at all, especially I’m ashamed to say, by men. In fact, the reason I’m writing this now is due to my own offence of accusing a woman of being a Karen just two days ago at a rock concert …

An American woman sat in front of me with her husband and she kept looking annoyed and whispering to him. She also kept looking at the guy seated the other side of her and kept scowling. She then moved to another chair across the isle. I noticed the guy she had moved away from was rather overweight, so I guess she didn’t have a lot of room in her chair.

Then to her disgust, another guy who was also rather on the large side came and sat beside her in the chair she had moved to and she started the scowling process all over again. Then she moved back to her original seat as there was none left 😂

The show hadn’t even started at this point and I turned to my son and declared that she was a complete ‘Karen.’ She overheard me as I was being a rather loud due to having a few of beers and then scowled at me too. Sorry Karen!

The thing is, at this point I had already made my mind up about her. She was wearing what I would call upper middle class clothes and looked completely out of place. I just presumed her husband had dragged her along to watch the concert and she didn’t even want to be there.

But when guitar legends Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, finally came on stage and started shredding, ‘Karen’ suddenly morphed into a different person! She leaped from her chair and began headbanging in her green dress like Tom Araya from thrash metal band Slayer. I was shocked!

Soon realising how wrong I had been, I felt rather ashamed. I mean, she had paid a lot of money for her seat after all, so who can blame her for not wanting to be be squashed into her chair like a sardine.

So I will finish by offering my apologies and sympathy to all the ‘Karen's’ out there that are not proper ‘Karen's’ in the context of; ‘being a Karen.’ For those women that have been born Karen, I think it’s a lovely name and I will try my hardest to spread the word that you should be treated with complete respect at all times. (Unless you are a ‘Karen’ Karen of course, but that’s just too complicated!)

Thanks for reading.

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Originally published at https://medium.com/never-stop-writing/what-exactly-is-a-karen-812ce783bae3