Our columnist Dawn Neesom has her say

I’ve always been fiercely proud to be a woman, to work for a magazine dedicated to us and been incredibly proud of the achievements femalekind has made over the decades. It hasn’t always been easy but I genuinely thought we were getting there.

And then Karen popped up. Not the name itself – which is actually rather pretty and derives from the Danish for pure – but the insult. Suddenly any middle-aged woman who dares have an opinion, who won’t be told how to think/live/ behave, and isn’t afraid to speak her mind, is told to ‘sit down and shut up, Karen’.

The insult depicts Karen as a stroppy, privileged, mouthy b***h with a choppy highlighted blonde bob (a style sneeringly deemed way too young for her) who constantly demands to ‘see the manager’. And people think this is funny.

I did at first, but now it’s getting slightly sinister. It implies that while you – quite rightly – can’t be racist or homophobic, it’s still OK to be sexist.

Surely the underlying sentiment here is: how dare you, as a woman, feel you have the right to speak out and have your own opinion. Especially if you’re a woman of a certain age who doesn’t have youth and beauty to distract Karen cat-callers.

A man who demonstrates the characteristics of Karen-ness is called an alpha male, a strong leader who knows his own mind. So why are females castigated as bossy, neurotic and cantankerous? And why are we writing this off as harmless? The origin of Karen as an insult is American and commonly used as a pejorative term for a woman perceived to be ‘entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is considered appropriate or necessary’.

Check out that last sentence – what is considered appropriate or necessary. What does that mean if it doesn’t mean women should know their places? This is never going to be applied to a man is it?

Add to this the JK Rowling row where she was deluged with hate for daring to imply there was nothing wrong with using the word ‘woman’. This evidently made her a transphobic bigot. Again no one has yet implied using the term ‘man’ is a hate crime.

The fight for emancipation is generally recognised to have started in 1848 in America, at a meeting held by Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But, blimey, don’t you wish one of them had been a Karen!