Confessions of a Karen (Are You One Too?)
PLUS Our Hot Summer Reading List by Favorite Femsplainers
Summer 2022
But first, how do you know whether you are a Karen? AA offers a list of personal questions to determine if you’re an alcoholic. Here are a few that might reveal whether you’re a Karen.
A server brings you a meal you did not order. Or if you ordered it, the server ignored your request to replace the fries with salad. Or perhaps the kitchen did not cook the dish to your liking. Do you a) Say nothing and eat around the error; b) Politely point out the error and ask if it can be fixed? c) Say to yourself: HEADS ARE GOING TO FUCKING ROLL PEOPLE.
A cashier is frustratingly slow and incompetent. A line of customers is forming. You are at the end of the line, needing to go to the bathroom and also to get somewhere else fast. Do you: a) Ask the person behind you to hold your place in line, go to the bathroom, effuse gratitude to the place holder when you return, and note cheerfully that the line is shorter than when you left it; b) push your way to the front, yelling, “I gotta pee! I gotta pee!” while making loud, sarcastic observations about the cashier’s sub-par abilities; c) Storm off to find the manager while shouting, HEADS ARE GOING TO FUCKING ROLL PEOPLE.
Your Uber driver clearly arrived yesterday from some non-English-speaking country. He seems baffled, lost, and relies on WAZE to take you to your destination. The result is you end up being driven through a frustrating network of side streets that are in no way faster than if he’d just taken the direct route you suggested. Do you: a) Remain silent but tell yourself maybe just this once you’ll give the driver a 4-star rating instead of 5, and a 15% tip instead of your usual 20% or 25%; b) Speak up in a friendly manner to re-direct the driver to your preferred route; c) Huff and sigh theatrically, point out to your companion all the stupid choices the driver is making and WTF who uses WAZE anymore, seriously. At the end of the ride, you tell the driver you are giving him one star, no tip, and HIS HEAD IS GOING TO FUCKING ROLL PEOPLE.
Why hello to all of you who answered C.
I used to be proud of this “take no shit” aspect of myself. Maybe it was more fetching when I was younger. It’s certainly confusing when a woman’s take-no-shit attitude is applauded by some people in some situations for being “bad ass.” I’ve been stewing over what is the difference between being “bad ass” and a “Karen.” I think it’s this: A woman is bad ass when she does anything that will earn her a “You go, girl” from the sisterhood. So a woman who snaps back at a man who whistles at her is bad ass. She’s a Karen if she’s white, middle-aged, and complains her Wendy’s hamburger is undercooked.
I’ve often felt (as a white, middle-aged woman) that the term “Karen” is blown about with whiffs of misogyny and other unpleasant prejudices - and maybe “gusts” not “whiffs.” Yeah, we get it. Having reached the Age of Invisibility, as Germaine Greer called it, the world is done with us. All we do is remind you of your scolding mother.
But sometimes you do need to ask for the manager! Or service is so terrible it’s imperative for you to speak up! Yet, as some feminists have argued, “Any white woman who needs to complain, see the manager, needs to stick up for herself, runs the risk of being called a ‘Karen’.”
It’s true. I would now no more dare to ask for the manager than run naked through Target.
SO HOW DID my self-realization as a Karen happen, you might wonder?
It began late one evening in Los Angeles, when I was returning to my hotel in an Uber. I was a little tipsy, and the driver and I hit it off. He was the kind of driver you only encounter in LA: flamboyantly extroverted, likely going to dance auditions between shifts. After we zinged jokes back and forth for a bit, he was moved to say, “My DEAR, you’re so much nicer than I expected!”
Startled, I asked why he might think otherwise. The driver then guided me to the section of the App where it shows youe passenger rating by previous drivers. I hadn’t known it existed. My rating was 4.3 stars, a human box-office flop by Uber standards. The driver warned me that with such a low number, many drivers wouldn’t even pick me up. In fact, he hesitated himself.
That was more than four years ago. After my initial disbelief, followed by Karen-like outrage at the App, I embarked on a mission to improve my rating. The mission expanded into other situations without a specific number attached. (It didn’t help that when I told my children about Uber’s ridiculous slur against my character, they nodded knowingly. “You know how you sometimes get, Mom…”).
The great 20th-century rabbi and philosopher, Abraham Heschel, once counseled that it wasn’t necessary to believe in God to attend synagogue. What was important was “to point your toes in the right direction.” By regularly going through the motion of praying, Heschel felt, true belief would eventually take hold.
And so I’ve found with overcoming Karen-ism. Pointing my sneakered toes away from conflict and towards conflict resolution brings rewards I didn’t expect (aside from a higher Uber-rating). A friend of mine, who got Botox for the first time between her eyebrows, discovered that her sudden inability to frown actually made her feel generally happier. By reeling in my Karen, I became calmer, genuinely more patient, and certainly more empathetic. We all screw up! Maybe the driver’s mother is sick! Maybe the driver is struggling with something I know nothing about!
I’ve learned that if I have a complaint to make, I better first banish all the impatient and annoyed words that are clamoring to get out of my mouth. I summon, best I can, a facade of patience and empathy. I ask politely if there is a way we might resolve the situation (while inner-Karen me is already gnawing at her arm with frustration). Then, and only then, I ask if perhaps “someone else” might help us?
Here is the Christmas miracle: More often than not, this approach works a thousand times better than launching the Karen cruise missiles right away. The term may be misogynistic, but “internalizing” it has helped me become a better human being.
My new Zen-like demeanor even helps when someone is startlingly rude or aggressive towards me. I no longer feel the need to respond with some trolling one-liner or push back harder. Nothing disarms a bully faster than a complete lack of response, let alone an understanding one: “I guess someone’s having a bad day.”
It’s corny but true, you attract more flies with honey than vinegar. The trouble is, I don’t want to attract flies.
Pulitzer-Prize winning author Anne Applebaum, Wall Street Journal book critic Meghan Cox Gurdon, and author and Unspeakable podcast host Meghan Daum share what books they’ll be cracking open, alongside a chilled bottle of rosé.
Anne is usually immersed up to her eyeballs in serious histories (or writing them herself), but she has a passion for the works of contemporary novelist Emily St. John Mandel — who most notably and presciently wrote about a mass pandemic, Station Eleven. (The novel was adapted to an HBO Series of the same name, released last year).
Anne told us, “Am halfway through Sea of Tranquility, Emily St John Mandel's latest...really great. Was going to write to you all and tell you to rush out and get it. but you should read The Glass Hotel, and of course Station 11, first...”
C’mon Anne, you must have some heavy lifting for us as well? Of course: “After that am going to read Antony Beevor's new book on the Russian Civil War (Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921)” Serious beach readers will be disappointed to learn that the Beevor book won’t be published until after Labor Day. But you can find all of Emily St. John Mandel’s aforementioned books here.
As well as reviewing books, Meghan has also written one — about the joys of reading: The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. I’ve found myself recommending this book over and over again, especially to new parents and those with small children. Meghan delves into the fascinating science that lays behind what most would consider a cuddly past-time, only to discover that reading aloud is perhaps one of the most important ways a parent can aid a child’s brain development. It also has beneficial powers for the old, as well.
Unsurprisingly, Meghan has a comprehensive summer reading plan, with choices that should appeal to every one. She writes us:
I will be filling in some gaps — authors I haven’t read, books I’m overdue for re-reading — so my summer shelf is a mixed one. I just finished a tag-sale paperback of Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, about whom (and about which book) I knew nothing and which delighted me with its quirkiness, breadth, and humanity. Now reading How It All Began, a novel of fate and happenstance by Penelope Lively (another new writer for me), and am underwhelmed but will persevere.
On my bedside table, waiting their chance, are: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which I read in my early 20s and thought brilliant, which I expect to dislike on re-reading; Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara because it comes from the old Everyman Library, without any external clues about its contents. I discovered Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier the same way. A complicated novel of love and adultery, it blew me away with its genius. Everyman has never let me down; and Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, which I read as a girl and which scarred me most delightfully.
Oh, and I am planning to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, because I adore his work and have read all his other books. I was put off by reviews that called it ‘lyrical,’ because ugh, but it’s a gap I have to fill.
Meghan has written six books (!) but I first connected with her shortly after she published The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars in 2019. I loved her insights into modern feminism, among many other things, and right away booked her on The Femsplainers podcast. She has since launched a successful podcast of her own, The Unspeakable — and is also building a community of “Unspeakable Women” called The Unspeakeasy. She describes it as “an intellectual community for freethinking women.” Definitely adding that to my list of fun virtual watering holes.
So what is Meghan delving into this summer? She writes,
This may be the first time I’ve uttered this sentence but I’m really excited about an academic book. Sheena Mason’s Theory of Racelessness promises a new framework for talking about racial identity, fostering anti-racism, and asking what “race” even means. Dr. Mason's Theory of Racelessness already exists as a teaching and diversity training platform that turns the standard definition of critical race theory on its ear. But now there’s a book, too, and it may be a game changer.
My husband David often makes fun of my obsession with everything Royal. Despite my supremely patient indulgence of so many of his intellectual hobby horses (South American politics, random presidential historical facts, Canadian natural gas supplies, the stupidity of cryptocurrency, etc.) I only have to start up about some piece of Royal gossip — a tidbit, say, from that morning’s Daily Mail — and his eyes quickly start fading. Before I’m even onto the second half of the headline, a distinctive type of male restlessness overtakes his body. It’s as if he suddenly has to go to the bathroom. He glances from side-to-side, as he might do at a restaurant table, discreetly checking for the most direct route to the Men’s.
“Are you okay? I was just saying that Harry and Meghan, if you can believe it …”
He is already standing by this point.
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, I thought you were finished.”
But I know some other Femsplainers are obsessed as I am, so in honor of the Queen’s Jubilee year, I’ve picked three juicy Royal reads.
1: Anne Glenconner’s memoir, Lady In Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, was released in paperback in March. At the risk of seeming lazy, I’m going to reprint here the Amazon bio of the author because, well, you’ll understand:
Lady Glenconner is now 89. She was born Lady Anne Coke in 1932, the eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, and growing up in their ancestral estate at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. A Maid of Honour at the Queen's Coronation, she married Lord Glenconner in 1956. They had 5 children together of whom 3 survive. In 1958 she and her husband began to transform the island of Mustique into a paradise for the rich and famous. They granted a plot of land to Princess Margaret who built her favorite home there. She was appointed Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret in 1971 and kept this role - accompanying her on many state occasions and foreign tours - until her death in 2002. Lord Glenconner died in 2010, leaving everything in his will to his former employee. She now lives in a farmhouse near Kings Lynn in Norfolk.
Classic British understatement! Glenconner grew up playing with the future monarch and her younger sister. Among her many interesting insights into the 20th-century aristocratic world was, for me, its sexual decadence. You may not realize how truly bourgeois you are until you read that on Lady Glenconner’s wedding night in Paris, her new Lord husband took her to a seedy brothel to watch another couple have sex. And also this world’s genteel poverty: Despite coming from a top aristocratic family, Glenconner’s Earl father could no longer meet the payments for their noble family estate. So a teenage Anne was sent to America to hawk a line of Norfolk pottery her mother created to make ends meet. Anne crossed the states by rail with other traveling salesmen, sleeping in nasty, cheap hotel rooms unless she was in a city where her family had social connections. Then it was fine linen sheets, elegant company, excellent food and wine … before Anne was sent packing again.
Anne tells many stories of sudden adversity she met with the sang froid and lack of complaint that only centuries of thoroughbred breeding can produce. If you’ve ever wondered what this world is really like, there is no better Margaret Mead than Lady Anne Glenconner.
2. Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil was our May book of the month. You can read my comments there — but in sum, if you wished you had a smart, gossipy, and extremely informed guide to the private history and characters behind the Queen’s reign, she is it. I found myself laughing and reading out loud segments of it to my husband, even after he’d left the room.
3. Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor by bestselling biographer Andrew Lownie will be published July 5. order). If this excerpt in the Daily Mail is any indication, my bourgeois sensibilities are about to be challenged again. If the headline alone doesn’t grab you — “How Edward gave up the throne for a woman who didn't love him, cheated on him, and grew to despise him: ANDREW LOWNIE casts a dramatic new light on the Wallis Simpson story... including exile, secret agents, and her lover accused of castrating a partner” — well, why don’t you go join my husband in the next room and discuss intermodal transportation.
What Do You Miss?!: Early in 2020, after the start of the pandemic, novelist Emily St. John Mandel, Anne Applebaum, Meghan Cox Gurdon, and me discussed coping with the ongoing pandemic, Mandel's latest novel, and more.
Woke Me When It’s Over: Meghan Daum joined Christina Hoff Sommers and me in 2019 to discuss her book The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars. PLUS Why drinking is good for your brain, 'Ok Boomer' warfare, and, er, um, vaginas.
Poor Grievances & A Funeral: It's Our Royal Special!!! British author, journalist, and insider Rachel Johnson (yes, sister to Boris) joined me for a right royal gossip in the wake of Prince Philip's 2021 funeral: The prodigal grandson returns, can the monarchy survive Wokeness, Meghan & Harry's squandered opportunities, and wait...did you just say the Queen told Meghan to keep acting?!
Kennie wrote:
Danielle, I have been an avid listener and reader of yours for years and find this take off the mark. I am a 66-year-old woman who has had a tortured relationship with weight my entire life. My mother, whom I loved very much, was weight obsessed and because she loved me felt she should lead me in this matter. For my 13th birthday I received my own scales for my bathroom. Daily weighing was what we did etc. At 13, I was 5'2' and 110 pounds. I could go on. You might have read the sermon the Baptist minister gave on women's weight and your man. He gave this sermon with quite the paunch. I heard this throughout my life. ENOUGH! I am a nurse and totally agree with all the problems excess weight causes. There is a culture of disordered eating passed down from mother to daughter in this country. I am a new grandmother to a beautiful baby girl and was quite pleased to hear my daughter say no weight talk! She wants to concentrate on healthy eating and being active with her. She also does not want to talk about good or bad foods. I say that is the way to go. Encourage women to live their lives and not tell themselves when I lose weight then I will.....go to the beach, go to the gym, put myself out there.
From Mindy:
Excellent piece. What saddens me the most about this obesity epidemic and attempt to make it normal is obese kids. Most of the time when I see an overweight kid, the parent is too. It's true that there are medical/ medicine reasons for being overweight, but the majority problem imo is the availability of cheap processed foods and junk food. And it's getting worse. Food manufacturers seem to be promoting this fattening of kids through their products lately: oatmeal with candied cereal, "Fruity Pebbles" syrup and pancake mix, etc. It's almost as if they want us fatter by promoting foods like this.
And I say this as someone who grew up relatively poor, raised only by my dad, and spent a good chunk of my childhood dining out at fast food restaurants because my dad didn't want a fight about what to have for supper. It took a lot of dedication and making good food choices to lose weight and keep it off.
And a reply to above from Holly:
There's no such thing as good or bad food. Food does not have any morality :)
Food manufacturers aren't trying to make people fat; they always and only want money. There's high-fructose corn syrup in many foods because corn has been heavily subsidized for decades. It's a lot easier to blame individuals for food choices than it is to hold corporations and politicians accountable and demand change.
This essay should be titled "The danger of confusing correlation and causation." I'm sorry that the author has so much internalized fatphobia, but that's no excuse for misinformation. Here's an excellent article about how being fat does NOT cause health risks: TLDR "Until we can account for the possible impacts of the research issues and confounding variables, the correlation between weight and health has to be held in serious question."
Thank you to everyone who weighed in (sorry, I couldn’t resist).
To Kennie’s first point, about mothers passing along unhealthy obsessions with weight, I couldn’t agree more. It’s one thing to discuss nutrition and healthy eating habits, quite another to give your children complexes about their bodies, etc. I never suggested or implied doing that: every parent knows the futility of trying to give teenagers and young adults “helpful advice.” And Kennie, what your mother did almost amounts to a form of child abuse. However I’m surprised that as a nurse who “totally agrees with all the problems excess weight causes” you would object to any discussion with your granddaughter about what are healthy food choices and what aren’t. How are children to learn that grilled chicken is better for them than a box of McNuggets, even if they are indulged occasionally in the latter? Or that their candy intake should be limited, if all foods are to be regarded the same (neither “good” nor “bad”). This is educating them — not “shaming” or passing along eating disorders.
Mindy makes this last point eloquently, as someone who had to learn on her own how to eat healthily, despite an upbringing on fast food. I would stress the word “how” as much as “what” to eat. As I wrote in the essay, I’ve always been fairly observant about avoiding junk food and sodas — but even eating healthily can cause weight gain if you’re not thinking about portion size and balancing your diet with fruits and vegetables, etc. And as Mindy says, don’t even get me started on all the dangerous additives that are packed into seemingly “healthy” foods. The level of vigilance a consumer needs just to buy something as simple as oatmeal is crazy.
Last, Holly correctly fingers the villains in the additives category: Government corn subsidies plus restrictions on imported cane sugar encourage manufacturers to sweeten foods with sinister and unhealthful high-fructose corn syrup. It doesn’t help that the largest producer of this nasty product is Iowa, the all-important first state in the presidential nomination process. Are you going to be the candidate who tells the farmers this racket is ending under your administration? No, I thought not.
But Holly, seriously, how can you suggest being overweight doesn’t carry health consequences?! My essay linked to legitimate studies and information from the CDC. The article you linked to is an opinion piece by a non-medical-professional and fat acceptance activist. This illustrates exactly the point I was making: If we won’t acknowledge the serious effects of America’s consumption of cheap, fast food — if we’re not even allowed to discuss it without being accused of “fat phobia” — those who will suffer most will, of course, be the obese. In no way do I encourage shaming individuals. But I do think we should shame corporations and politicians who contribute to the problem. Joe Biden just announced measures to limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to help decrease their addictiveness. Why can’t similar policies be enacted against the junk food industry? The FDA was able to limit transfats. Why not other additives? And why not tax junk food more heavily like we do cigarettes? I’m not an economist or policy wonk, but I do believe the public can bring pressure to bear on these issues — if we’re allowed to honestly confront obesity as a national health crisis. ~DC
Everyone, have a wonderful summer! We will return with our next newsletter in September.
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If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundread days of sorrow. - Chinese proverb
It's useful to have a simple term to capture a type of behavior but I dunno. I know some very nice women named "Karen" and they are justifiably unhappy about how their name has been hijacked.