How Karen came under fire in the culture wars

One of the many hypocrisies of the woke movement is its attitude to women, which tends – despite all the virtue signalling – to the blatantly misogynistic. The spectacle of pro-trans warriors hurling sexist abuse at JK Rowling was a chilling example.

Another dimension of the woke brigade’s disgust at women can be seen in the figure of the “Karen”. A Karen, now a global meme, is a grab-bag of any attributes the woke Left doesn’t like. She demands to “speak to the manager” to shame workers, is entitled, “is anti-vaccination, and carries out racist microaggressions, such as asking to touch black people’s hair”.

As well as nastily mocking women and especially women named Karen, an effect of this campaign has been to kill off the name itself. Apparently only 14 babies born last year were named Karen, while the non-name but politically neutral Oakley entered the top 100 for girls. I find this dispiriting. When I grew up there were loads of Karens, some nice, some less nice. I wonder how they feel about the ridicule their names are associated with now.

It’s grotesque but not surprising that in these nasty topsy-turvy times, the face of racism is a generic white woman. Indeed the biggest crime of the imagined “Karens” is that they “weaponise their relative privilege against people of colour” by, for instance, making police complaints against black people for minor or “in numerous cases fictitious infringements”, as the BBC puts it. Hardly a scientific classification, but who cares?

Invoking the “Karen” meme shows your willingness to throw women under the bus for the sake of anti-racist virtue signalling, which makes perfect sense in these mad times. The strangulation of a perfectly nice woman’s name by the woke mob is merely collateral damage.