I've never been on board with the Karen thing. Far too often I've seen it applied to any woman standing up for herself.
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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... Wait, what?
'Karen' has morphed that much in common, modern usage?
I am not saying you are wrong, I am saying that I have not encountered this... probably worth noting that I entirely do not use corpo social media, I don't watch livestreams, I basically just use YouTube, which I have done a decent job of curating and manicuring my feed into not serving me up slop or sending me into some unwanted content pipeline... so I acknowledge I may be out of touch here with the modern lingo.
That being said, I still use 'karen' to mean basically a vastly over entitled person rudely and aggressively demanding to see the manager, demanding to get special treatment, demeaning anyone else around her as some kind of lesser social category of some kind... basically a delusional petty tyrant, often classist, racist, bigoted, etc.
I don't even use the term as specific to women, I'll call anyone of any sex or gender acting like that, though I do realize that most people who use the term use it in reference to women.
... Have the rightoids really bastardized and inverted the term that fucking hard?
Is this a Zoomer or Gen A thing?
I am genuinely asking this, because I go fairly far out of my way to not view or listen to or interact with aggressively ignorant morons.
I thought it originally came from that early Nintendo Switch advert where a girl brings her switch to a hip rooftop party full of ridiculously attractive people and they all start playing. The "Karen" thing was a joke about her trying to force people to play video games instead of socializing.
That sounds way funnier than what it really is lol
Obviously it morphed quite a bit but I feel like I remember this being the origin of “Karen”: https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/nintendo-switch-karen
There were uses in the same vein before that, from wikipedia:
For the term "Karen", several possible origins have been proposed.[11] Early uses of Karen as a joke punchline include the airheaded character Karen (played by Amanda Seyfried) from the 2004 film Mean Girls, Dane Cook's 2005 sketch "The Friend Nobody Likes" on his album Retaliation,[12]
I remember at the time the Dane Cook special that had this joke was super popular, I heard people quote the joke before the term became as widespread.
Dane Cook
You've just unlocked bad memories of the aughts.
Wtf?
I never heard of this use, and mostly I and everyone else still uses it as an acronyme for a mix of „Choosing beggar, racist fuck, and generally someone who has a stick up their ass so far they feel the need to enforce every tinyest rule“
the first whispers of "karen" back in 2017ish just adhere to the mantra of "never insult honkie males"
honkie females is the furthest they'll go
That's fine, but out in the wild, I see a lot of usage that's synonymous with "bitch". The definition was never going to remain precise once the Internet got a hold of it.
Tangential, but even though I probably haven't watched Goodfellas in 20-some-odd years, I still can't hear the word Karen without thinking of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=voDqfVthTpA
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The Karen meme was actually started by the Myanmar coup government to gain support for its ethnic cleansing campaigns against ethic groups including the Karen. But the westerners riled up by this psyop didn't know about the demographics of myanmar and created a lore around a certain type of white woman that they would focus the anger the psyop instilled in them on.
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