I’m not sure where she was first tipped off to the concept of “a Karen” (YouTube surely), but my daughter has been obsessed with the caricature for a few months now.
When she feels like joking around, she’ll stomp around the house shouting things like, “I want to speak to your manager!” in a shrill voice. Usually in response I scrunch up my face for a few seconds before saying, “I just spoke with her and she says everything is fine and that your mom is doing a fantastic job, and she has no notes.”
She obviously thinks her part is funnier, but I hold fast to my faith that the day will come when a 20-something-year-old Lisa will tell her friends, “Y’all, my mom is so funny!” It’s coming. I know it!
Anyway.
Let me start this by saying that I think the name “a Karen” is 100% unfair. I have known several Karens and they are lovely. Sarah could have very well been the name chosen, or Lisa, or Sharon, or Becky… the idea is a female Gen X name, someone who fits the bill as an entitled and ridiculous middle-aged white lady.
“Karen” is basically a meme that started in the late 20-teens to describe the kinds of women who would occasionally pop up on viral cell phone videos being assholes to people less powerful than them. They’d do things like call the police because a couple of Black kids were walking through her neighborhood that she thought looked suspicious, or berate low-paid service employees for stupid reasons.
Notably, there is no male equivalent to “a Karen.” I’ve heard “a Ken” or “a Chad,” as intended counterparts, but neither have stuck in the cultural zeitgeist the same way. If Karens are superglue, Kens and Chads are those Dollar Store magnets that are too weak to fix even a single sheet of paper to the fridge.
My working theory is that those kinds of humiliating stereotyped labels don’t stick to men because they’re not pre-prepped for ridicule in this culture in the same way that women are; they’re allowed and expected to be bitchy because they’re asserting the anger and power that everyone already believes they are in their full right to display.
I mean, if Donald Trump isn’t the whiniest, most entitled little bitch I’ve ever seen, I don’t know who is. But it’s the likes of Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris who’ve been pegged as hysterical a thousand times more.
For every assertive man, a crazy, contemptuous female counterpart.
Those of you who know me personally know that I am, truly, very sweet in my interactions with people, as well as quick to crack a joke. Those of you who know me very, very well know that I also share some similarities with four-year-olds in that I really like rules, and get upset when other people don’t follow them (especially when I really believe in the logic behind the rules, such as general public safety: I take reckless driving as a personal affront, and it takes me a while to cool down after witnessing particularly grievous examples).
I also cry a lot, often for stupid reasons.
The “I want everyone else to act right” part is what sometimes makes me unlikeable. As I’ve aged — and I think the fact that “Karens” are always middle-aged women is telling — even I have become, as I’ve been told to expect, less shy about letting people know when I think they’re being dumbasses.
Which brings us to my own “Karen” moment almost exactly a week ago, which I did not include in my MND article this week:
Last Saturday while in the Valley, my sister, a friend and I decided to have a late lunch at IHOP (very traditional border food, I know). Most of the people working that day were quite young, most around the age of 20, including our waitress.
As a policy, I am very nice to waiters, and gracious when they get things wrong. It’s a hard job, and a lot of people are just shitty to them.
Anyway, I don’t know if it was because of inexperience or what, but our waitress was just not with it at all. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to bring us coffee or when, the food and drinks took forever to come out, and she repeatedly brought my sister sweet tea instead of unsweet, even after my sister told her that it was important because she was diabetic (she’s not, but thought that might help it stick). Those are forgivable things and not all necessarily her fault, though especially the tea was a kind of weird oversight.
But then she tried several times to bring me a waffle that I hadn’t ordered. When I said, “No, I ordered the french toast,” she’d mutter something about checking with the manager and then disappear for a while. She’d then return with the same waffle and say, “My manager says we can’t change it.”
Sigh.
“It’s their generation. They’re all probably back there watching TikTok, it fries their brains and they can’t concentrate,” my friend said. I agreed, my annoyance growing.
By now my hurt feelings were also growing. My friend, out of nowhere, had declared, just before the final time the waitress trotted the waffle out, that she liked my sister better than me.
This is understandable, as my sister is super cool. I totally understand if people like her better than me. But really, what’s the point of saying this to someone other than to hurt their feelings?
So when the waitress came back with that goddamned waffle she wanted to force me to take — I’d have to pay extra for my french toast since tHe WaFfLe WaS mY fOoD — I let her have it, when what I should have done was just asked to speak to the manager. “Do you speak Spanish?” I asked. She had an accent, so I thought that maybe — maybe? — this was a language problem?
“I did not order a waffle at any point. I ordered the french toast, and everyone at this table heard me order it. I don’t understand why you’re trying to force me to take this waffle that I did not order, behaving as if I’d changed my mind between ordering and it coming out of the kitchen, which I did not. Why do you keep trying to give this to me when it’s not what I ordered?”
I thought I sounded okay, if a little curt, but my sister and friend agreed that my tone of voice was very, very scary. Apparently it was, because the waitress did not show her face for the rest of the meal. Neither did any other waiters, at least not voluntarily, and we had to flag someone down for every other thing we needed.
My french toast finally arrived, and despite surely having some unidentified bodily fluids in it, it tasted okay. I sure couldn’t enjoy it by then, though.
Afterwards, I cried for a bit and took a nap, and then felt okay. The weekend continued.
But the peace was not to last: the next day, I decided it would be a great idea to berate my friend for not having got her dog fixed and letting it wander the neighborhood getting other dogs pregnant (the rules of responsible dog ownership!). I feel the need to point out that we’d been on the subject anyway, lest you think I just decided to randomly lecture her out of nowhere.
Shockingly, my lecture was ineffective, and seemed to hit a nerve. She said it was the last in a series of issues she had with me that had been “building up” (which apparently included my interaction with the waitress the day before) and left the house. Soon after, by message, she asked us to leave.
We drove the three and a half hours back to Victoria, and I cried most of the way.
Since then, of course, I’ve done quite a bit of soul searching. Was it me? Am I actually a horrible person who only thinks she’s a good person?
My friend was a little nutty, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a terrible judge of character. Also, she was not the first friend to brusquely cut me off.
Interestingly though, the only people to have done this to me have been Americans, which I think is a little counter-intuitive; Mexicans are the ones with the reputation for being dramatic and hot-headed. Is the fact that it’s not happened with them just coincidence? I’ve certainly (blessedly) not had enough experiences for them to be considered an appropriate scientific sample size.
In the end, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve discussed this with the manager in my head at length. She says I’m great, and that I handled it like a champ. No notes.
This was so excellent, on so many levels -- thank you!!
"Kens and Chads are those Dollar Store magnets that are too weak to fix even a single sheet of paper to the fridge"
😂 Just started reading this essay and I'm already dying