Sympathy for the Devil
Or, Karens are a Problem of Systems
I admit I have a grudge against the whole concept of the Karen. I know that we are supposed to revile Karens, but I feel sympathy for them because of my Minnesota childhood. Minnesota is rivaled only by Canada in its culture of extreme politeness and of never, under any circumstances, speaking up or complaining. Minnesotans will sit at a four-way stop forever, because no one want to be the one to go first. If someone jostles a Minnesotan, it is the Minnesotan who will apologize. I went to the same orthodontist for more than eight years, and the workers never managed to pronounce my name correctly. (It’s kind of amazing actually—you’d think that they would have hit on the right pronunciation at least once, even if only by chance.) I didn’t want to be pushy, so I didn’t correct them, and still less did I complain to the manager or demand that the receptionists note the pronunciation in my chart or something sensible like that. To paraphrase the Ting Tings, “They call me Mary, they call me Maury, they call me Maura, they call me Marie. That’s not my name . . . ”:1
After I married into a family of assertive East Coasters, I FINALLY began to stick up for myself. For example: “Um, I hate to be a bother, but this isn’t actually what I ordered”; “Oh—oops!—I don’t think you realized, but the line starts back there”; and once, on a flight, “Sorry—but I need to climb over you to get to the bathroom” (this to a man in the aisle seat who had spread out two [!] laptops and enough paperwork to litigate Jarndyce and Jarndyce itself). So it is frustrating to me that there now exists an insult specifically targeted at middle-aged women who speak up and complain.
The Motte and Bailey Fallacy
At this point some of you are protesting, “Wait a second! Speaking up and complaining doesn’t make you a Karen! Karens are those awful women who call the cops on innocent people of color!” Aha! You have played right into my hands. We are both right, because Karens are an example of the motte and bailey fallacy. In this fallacy, a group that takes an extreme position on an issue will respond to criticisms of those extremes by saying, “Why are you criticizing us?! We just support this other, totally reasonable thing. Your criticisms have no validity!” And they go on their merry way, confident that they are right and the other side is wrong. This article explains the concept well.
The motte and bailey fallacy is pernicious because it causes us to talk past each other. Even worse, it discourages us from learning from fair criticisms, prevents us from discovering that we in fact agree on more than we might have thought, and makes it harder for us to work together.
To return to Karens.
Here are two types of actions I have seen that get middle-aged women labelled as Karens:
Calling the police on innocent Black people who are peaceably going about their business by, say, having a family reunion in a park, or selling bottled water to raise money for charity, or bird-watching in Central Park, etc.
Getting angry in a shop and demanding to speak to the manager, or complaining about something, or insisting that people follow the rules.
Nearly everyone agrees that the actions in category one are bad (call this group Criminal Karen), and nearly everyone likely feels at least some sympathy with the women in category two (call this group Complaining Karen). Criminal Karen is the motte, and Complaining Karen is the bailey: When people defend the Karen slur, they are defending its being used against Criminal Karens, and when people criticize the Karen slur, they are criticizing its being used against Complaining Karens. In any case, Criminal Karens are not bad because they are older, unattractive women;2 they are bad because they’re committing crimes against innocent people. Their crimes should be addressed not by online shaming, name-calling, doxxing, and other extrajudicial punishments, but rather by enforcing the laws against false reporting, wasting police resources, and, in extreme cases, reckless endangerment. Having consigned Criminal Karen to the criminal justice system where she belongs, I will proceed in the rest of the essay to discuss the more common type of Karen, the grumpy complainers.
What Causes Karens?
Even the most agreeable and submissive among us can turn into a Karen when provoked. To wit, me: One Saturday when I was living in DC, I was waiting for the bus on my way to meet a friend for dinner. Under the best of circumstances the posted bus schedule had only a theoretical relationship to the actual arrival of the busses.
But that day the bus was wildly, apocalyptically late. I stood there, feeling my free time and my lovely evening with my friend dwindling away. Even worse, I was spending that time in a distinctly unenjoyable way, standing around on a smoggy, noisy street corner. I thought we were set when the bus trundled up—and then I had to wait again while the passengers lumbered off. Finally my way was clear, but as I climbed up, there was yet another poky passenger making her laborious way off the bus. I tried to push past her to get on, and she yelled at me. I yelled back: “You don’t have to be so rude!” I scolded her. The bus driver had to intervene—“All right, ladies, wrap it up”—before we stopped bickering.
If I’m lucky, you’re laughing at my petulance right now, but I can tell you that the people on the bus thought I was being a Karen and making a fuss over nothing. But here’s the thing: To me the late bus wasn’t nothing. At that time I was a high school English teacher, and I worked an average of sixty hours per week. And these weren’t relaxed hours of checking email, shooting the breeze with coworkers, and playing computer solitaire either. Every day was a Sisyphean slog up mountains of grading.3 I didn’t have time to go to the bathroom; I bolted my lunches while working at my desk or during conferences with students, parents, or teachers; and every minute of those sixty hours I was reading, writing, speaking, chaperoning, or counseling. I loved my students, but the work was extraordinarily difficult and stressful, and I craved my precious moments of free time, which that late bus had stolen from me. I am now a lady of leisure and, were Switzerland’s trains ever to be late, I could shrug off a delay with no problem, but back then the delay squandered a valuable resource, and I resented it.
Who are Karens? Middle-aged women. They’re caring for elderly parents and teenagers, ferrying van loads of kids around to a relentless onslaught of activities, working for pay and working at home for free, and on top of all that they are running errands. They’re so tightly scheduled that when something goes wrong at any stage in the process, it all starts to fall apart—including them. We would like to believe that stress strengthens us and that we emerge from our struggles stronger at the broken places.
But the sad truth is that stress more often makes us cranky, querulous, impatient, and confrontational—Karens, in other words. Karens are caused by a system that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on ordinary people. Of course some of us fail to mend the breaks with gold. Some of us just break down.
Service Workers and Systems
Now, to redeem myself, I will tell you about four times when I restrained myself and did NOT act like a Karen.
Once when we were out to dinner, my husband discovered that his roll was covered in blue mold. When he showed it to the waitress, she picked it up, said “Huh!” and walked away with it, without bringing us a replacement or even apologizing.
At a CVS in our neighborhood, chit-chatting cashiers regularly ignored customers waiting in line.
At a grocery store, a worker said to a coworker, very audibly to all the customers in line, “Customers suck!”
In a liquor store many years ago, I paid for a $9.90 bottle of wine with a $20, and the cashier gave me a dime back. When I asked for my $10, she loudly and in front of several other customers accused me of stealing.4 She then shut down the line and cashed out her drawer in an effort to prove that I was trying to cheat her. After about 15 minutes, when she discovered that I had indeed paid with a $20, she didn’t apologize (but did at least give me the $10 I was owed).
I suspect that my readers have similar stories of their own. Can we admit that not all service workers are good at their jobs, and that some Karens who ask to speak to the manager might have a point?
And yet shoddy workmanship and irritating service workers are a problem of systems too. For every stressed-out middle-class Karen in a minivan, there are probably a hundred service workers who are paid so little that they can’t support themselves, who are subject to the abuses of just-in-time scheduling so they can’t plan their lives, who are berated and blamed by their bosses (and yes, by customers too) for things that aren’t their fault, who are forced to reimburse the company out of their own paychecks for accidentally broken items or for customer theft,5 and—no matter how well they perform all their tasks under such rotten conditions—who can be fired at will. Too many corporations have calculated that it’s cheaper to have high employee turnover than it is to invest in training and retaining their workers. Some companies don’t pay workers for the time they are changing into their uniforms, waiting in line to clock in and out, or performing other tasks necessary to their jobs. It is a wonder to me that the majority of service workers in the US are so dedicated to doing good work in these circumstances, and that the workers like those I described above are by far the exception.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Karen?
We tend to blame individuals for what are in fact systemic problems. Instead of investing in renewable energy and shifting government subsidies from fossil fuels to wind and solar, we blame Americans for driving too much. Instead of ending subsidies to corporate farmers who plant more corn than we can safely consume, we blame Americans for getting fat. Instead of investigating the criminal malfeasance of the Sackler family and the lax regulatory system that permitted them to prey on us, we once blamed Americans who became addicted to Oxycontin. (Thankfully this last example is from the past. I recommend the book and show Dopesick to readers who are interested in this story.) And instead of considering the economic forces behind the Karen phenomenon, we blame grumpy, griping middle-aged women.
Don’t get me wrong: There are individual solutions to Karens too. It is always psychologically healthy for us when we get irritated or feel as though we’re about to explode to try taking a deep breath and to remember that the service worker is probably stressed out, just like we are. When we see someone acting like a Karen, it’s better—for her and for us—if we try feeling sympathy instead of shaming her. But if we really want to solve a problem like a Karen, we should be voting for people who will improve economic conditions for ordinary Americans so we’re not so gosh-danged harried and exhausted all the time.
A Few Proverbs
The rabbis have a saying: “When a just person is unjust to an unjust person, God weeps for the unjust person.”
Or, as Willa Cather once said, “Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.”
There is a lot of talk in the New Testament about separating the sheep from the goats (meaning the saved from the condemned). But you know what? It’s not always easy to tell the difference between sheep and goats, especially when the sheep have just been sheared.
And why would we want to get rid of the goats anyway? Just like the sheep, they provide wool (well, cashmere), milk, cheese, and meat. Goats and sheep both keep our grass short, and goats even eat up our garbage. And they’re much more fun to watch than sheep—goats are clever and playful, while the sheep just kind of stand there. (Yes, I spend a lot of time on my hikes watching sheep and goats.) When it comes to Karens, are we so sure that they are unjust, wicked goats whom we should cast out? Maybe they are just struggling humans like the rest of us. Maybe they offer us the opportunity to practice patience and understanding. Maybe their complaining is even useful. One thing I do know: We will not make things better, for them or for us, if we call them names. Why not try sympathy instead?
What do you think, readers? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
I like Fatboy Slim’s remix of the classic Stones song, not least because the images in the video remind us that we have bigger problems to worry about than mouthy middle-aged women. Enjoy!
For the life of me I don’t understand why people have so much trouble with my name. It is pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled and has no phonemes that might be difficult for a native speaker of English to pronounce. Say it with me: MAR-ee. See? Easy peasy!
Another gripe: It should go without saying that it’s not just women who sic the police on innocent people of color, but somehow we’ve never come up with a similar slur for men who engage in this odious practice.
Beneath my picture in the yearbook one year was the sobriquet “Grading Machine.”
I didn’t say “Forget it” and walk out, because at the time I was living in the grad-school poverty pit, and I genuinely couldn’t spare that $10. Besides, I was embarrassed by the accusation and wanted to be vindicated in front of all the people watching.
I think this was the issue with the liquor-store cashier. I’ll bet that in the past her boss had forced her to make up losses out of her own money, and she likely couldn’t spare that $10 any more than I could.
1. I’m pleased to have been pronouncing your name correctly in my mind!
2. Interesting post! Yes there’s always context. Even some of the Criminal Karens’ story is more complex, such as the story of Amy Cooper, the Central Park dog walker. She lost her job, her dog, was publicly made out to be a horrible person, was doxxed and had to go into hiding (from which she has not yet emerged I think). Turns out the “innocent black guy” she called 911 on is a guy who’s been in altercations with other dog-walkers, including other men, and the dog-walkers say he is menacing and threatening to people and their dogs. He got into a physical fight with at least one guy. He approached this woman in a deserted part of the park, was aggressive with her, and she perceived him as threatening her dog and she got scared. I’d be scared of any guy who’d done that set of behaviors, and it doesn’t matter if he was black or white. Then he turned on his phone, started recording, acted all meek (instead of just leaving the area) and the rest is history. It would have sounded like a made-up story, this weird Jekyll-Hyde guy threatening people’s dogs, except that he’s done it to a bunch of people and is locally famous for it.
So… sometimes even Criminal Karen has a context. I doubt if there are roving bands of middle-aged racist white women just trying to ruin someone’s day. There is no doubt a Truly Bad psychopathic joy-killing “Karen” somewhere, but her existence hardly deserves smearing a category of women.
I have some Grouchy Internet Feminist feelings about the Karen phenomenon - as you say, we don't have an equivalent term for a snippy, entitled man in a customer service interaction, but those certainly exist. My wife works a customer service job, and it turns out demanding to speak to the manager is gender-neutral.
I appreciate your point about contextualizing the Karen, and looking at what else is going on in her day and her life before judging her. The moment a woman does something we don't like, she somehow ceases to be herself and immediately becomes a meme-ified version of *every* woman who does something we don't like. There's something a bit dehumanizing about it, if that isn't too dramatic a term-- the immediate cultural punishment for a woman who makes a fuss is to be turned into a kind of platonic ideal of petty bitchiness.