Barbie and the Karens

A new girlband?

I finally saw Barbie. I am sorry to admit that I am one of the few members of the intended audience to dislike it. It felt like a grotesque celebration of plastic and consumerism and a triple axel marketing feat: take a retro doll and admit it is retro, upgrade it to feminist with some standard issue women’s studies basics, add a hip indy female director, and voila, a whole new generation of doll-buyers and feminist grannies to buy them for the kids. I know women who left the theater in tears they were so moved by the message, and I do appreciate the truisms in that America Ferrara monologue, but I guess I am missing an emotion chip. I squirmed through what felt like a long commercial.

One thing I did appreciate about the movie is that Barbie, played by white Margot Robbie, never got called a Karen. I’m willing to bet that in her doll phase, “stereotypical Barbie” stumbling around LA inadvertently pulled some off-camera Karen-y moves.

Last week, New York Times opinion writer Pamela Paul wrote about the continuing phenomenon of the Karenings - white women, of a certain age, viralized via iPhone video acting racist or homophobic or just like jerks.

Paul quoted from an essay I wrote on the Karen phenomenon as we were just seeing dramatic rise in the use of the term online. I wrote about how hurling misogynistic slurs at women in general, by taking a common woman’s name and applying it to specific incidents of asshole-ism, was not a politically wise move from the left in 2020, with Republicans desperate for that white suburban female cohort. What would happen if you started using “Muhammad” for shorthand to describe Muslim men behaving badly, or pick a common Black or Jewish name and apply it to Black or Jewish man behaving badly? You wouldn’t last a minute online or in real company.

My Karens essay was paywalled because GEN, the late Medium platform that published it, was at the time paying for these pieces. GEN is gone and I am posting the full original for my subscribers.

How the Karen Meme Benefits the Right

Uncool, middle-aged white women are Democrats’ best hope for unseating Trump. Why does the online left hate them so much?

I am late to the Karens, which probably makes me Karen-ish — that is, white, middle class, middle-aged, female, college-educated, from Midwestern suburbia, and too distracted to track what’s trending on Twitter. So, when a video was retweeted into my feed last week calling an obnoxious, mask-defying white woman a “Karen,” I asked whether there might not be some actual Karens who did not act like that. I was stupefied at the hostile replies, including one that simply stated, “Because you’re fucking white.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. White middle-class women of a certain age are among the last groups one can hurl targeted abuse online without being canceled. All over Twitter and Facebook, one sees evidence neither male nor female progressives have a problem with a meme that stereotypes white middle-aged women as entitled, whiny, and stupid at best — and at worst, obscene wielders of racist privilege, like Amy Cooper in Central Park. Her 911 call against a black, male bird-watcher trying to get her to put her illegally off-leash dog back on its leash arguably rose to the level of attempted assault-by-proxy, given how police approach black men deemed threats. She was Karened, named, quite rightly heaped with contumely, and fired from her job.

But the vast majority of the Karenings do not reach that level. On the contrary they are merely excuses to heap scorn on random middle-aged white women. A sampling of recent examples includes a group of white women in a grocery story removing their underwear and using it as masks as some kind of joke (“Quarantine has caused the Karens to lose their minds”), an apparently paranoid white woman fleeing a white mailman (#KarenStrikesAgain), and a woman defending her right to sometimes call a manager (“that’s what a manager is there for”).

No progressives — nor even standard-issue conservatives — would be caught videotaping and stereotyping any other group in the way they feel comfortable going after white middle-aged women. The fact is, it has never been politically incorrect to trash women as women — that is, women who cannot also claim to belong to another disadvantaged group by virtue of race, body weight, sexual preference, or disability.

But why in an era in which policy is being made overwhelmingly by white men at the national level have women become the villains of the Covid era? Part of it surely is that it is easier and less scary for people to film women acting out than men doing the same. But the rise of the Karen meme since the pandemic started — from 100,000 mentions on social media sites in January to more than 2.77 million in May 2020, according to an analysis conducted by Brandwatch, the vast majority of them negative — points to something deeper at work.

The Karen meme was first served up on a smorgasbord of woman-hatred on Reddit, home to adherents of the men’s movement, where users egged on an angry man whining about an ex-wife named Karen. Reddit’s “FuckYouKaren” thread is still replenished regularly with cruelly captioned random pictures of white middle-aged women and their ugly haircuts.

The tendency to divide women into Cool Girls and uncool women has a long history in art, culture, and politics. But in the Trump era, the right has been effectively working to intensify divisions like this; the Trump campaign bought targeted dark messaging portraying Hillary Clinton as a racist aimed at suppressing the black vote in 2016 and driving a wedge between different groups critical to her election.

This is not to say white Democratic women are not as infected with racism, the all-American scourge, as their white male counterparts.

And righteous anger at white women on the part of the anti-Trump resistance originates in the exit polls of November 2016, which indicated 52% of white women voted for Trump. Only much later did actual vote counts reveal white women went 47% for Trump, 45% for Clinton — still outrageous, but closer to a statistical tie, and also a better performance among white women than that achieved by former President Barack Obama.

No progressives — nor even standard issue conservatives — would be caught out videotaping and stereotyping any other group in the way they feel comfortable going after white middle-aged women.

The Trump election was, first and foremost, a kick in the face to women. The disastrous effects of the regime on women’s rights under the law, on the job, and in American society have yet to be fully assessed. Because of what came after — governmental chaos, Nazis on the march, brown children in cages — the threat Trump poses to 51% of the population receded in relative importance.

But women did not forget. Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol’s studies into the grassroots, anti-Trump resistance communities found middle-aged white females constituted a wide majority among both activists and leadership in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Building on research begun after the Trump inauguration and into the lead-up to 2018 midterms, Skocpol and a team in early 2019 surveyed resistance networks in those key swing states and found (italics mine) “most participants in resistance groups are middle-aged or older white, college-educated women.” Male members of local groups were “often partners or friends of the female members,” and their leadership teams were either all-female or, in two instances, included a woman teamed up with one or two men.

“The ‘who’ of local anti-Trump organizing is very clear and may come as a surprise to some,” Skocpol with colleagues Leah Gose and Vanessa Williamson wrote in a paper published this year in Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance.

“Although national media outlets and researchers who have studied national resistance organizations often suggest anti-Trump activities are spearhead by young people and Americans from minority backgrounds,” the authors note, “the vast majority of grassroots resistance group leaders and members are actually white, middle-class, college-educated women ranging in age from their thirties and forties to retirement years.”

The researchers estimated that “across all states and places we know, from two-thirds to 90% of volunteer resistance activists are female, white, and college-educated.” Without them, Rep. Nancy Pelosi would still be the minority leader, Trump would not have been impeached by the House, and Republicans would have free rein to enact Trump’s whims without a single legislative brake.

Political reporters generally ignore this fact, except for a blip of interest just before the midterms, as in this piece from the Pacific Standard.

Misogyny has been a problem for the American progressive movement since women eschewed housekeeping and mothering to join men in the revolutionary ’60s. They signed up to fight for civil rights first. But the movement treated women so abysmally it belied the goals of social justice at which it claimed to aim.

In the anti-war movement, when women objected to being relegated to service roles like typing, a male Berkeley organizer could reply, “Let them eat cock.” And get a roomful of guffaws. Civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael famously said, “What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone.” Women who spoke up were hissed and booed at public events, like those at an anti-war protest against the second inauguration of Richard Nixon, whose speeches were drowned out by men who catcalled and yelled at them to strip.

The ideological grandmothers to the progressive women in the Democratic Party today were abused worker bees, assigned traditionally female work like typing or administrative duties, subject to sexual harassment and ridicule if they asked for more power. The women’s liberation movement was born out of this milieu. If women were oppressed, the New Left reasoned, their problems paled against those of disempowered brown people all over the world. Women’s demands could be dealt with after the class struggle had been won. Some of the women would later say they served this sexist movement with docility as a kind of expiation for their privilege.

Over the last half-century, progressives achieved some — but not enough — change. Women helped elect the first black president. An out gay man ran for president in a major party primary. But the failures of Democratic female presidential aspirations and the breadth of the #MeToo revelations across the political spectrum have exposed just how little has improved for women of any race.

The Karen meme especially benefits the right in 2020 because the Trump campaign has long been worried about losing suburban women. Trump is not on target to win the white female vote this time out. Fifty-two percent of white women support Biden, 41% Trump (compared to 56% of white men, Trump’s true base) in the latest Quinnipiac poll. According to some assessments, Trump has the lowest approval rating among women of any president since polls began tracking it in the Eisenhower era.

How better to get some of those middle-aged, suburban white women back in the fold — or at the very least, to sit out the election — than to stoke progressive misogyny with a social media assault that heaps contempt on white suburban women? Divide and conquer is a tactic that never fails to stump the diverse left.

Ever since 1980, a majority of men have voted Republican for president, while Democratic presidential candidates have won the majority of the female vote. In return, the party’s presidential nominees have always supported women’s reproductive freedom. But the party’s attitudes about women in power have genealogical roots in a misogynistic recent past.

The left’s misogynists channel their anti-feminist instincts into things like the social media funnel of the Karen meme.

Progressive women today field misogynistic attacks from their male comrades in a way that women on the right never do. In 2016, anti-Hillary Democratic men dubbed her “Killary” and “Shrillary.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren was tagged by her own ideological side with the Biblically misogynistic “snake.” After she dropped out, Warren accused Sanders of not controlling the “organized nastiness” among his supporters. “I’m talking about some really ugly stuff that went on,” she said. “It’s not just about me.” To his credit, Sanders denounced the attacks on Warren and her campaign by those claiming to support him, saying he was “aghast” and “disgusted” by them. But it is also likely Sanders has a blind spot for sexism, having got his start as an activist in the movement that preferred its women typing and handling the bills.

Why is misogyny on the political left toward its own women so hard to stamp out? The right has an outlet for its misogyny through the antics of toxically masculine Trump and his commodified Vegas showgirl/porn star feminine ideal, exemplified by fashion cipher Melania and bleached and botoxed Foxbots.

The left’s misogynists channel their antifeminist instincts into things like the social media funnel of the Karen meme, taking a common woman’s name from a certain era and transforming it into a pejorative catch-all for suburban white women — women who, in fact, might well be their comrades in arms in the fight against Trumpism. The abuse arguably discourages women from speaking out at all, weakening the resistance movement.

This is why I believe the first woman president will come from the right. As progressive women fought for civil rights and against the war, conservatives got behind Phyllis Schlafly, who built a power base promoting traditional female roles and destroying the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly’s political granddaughters are the millennial women of Trump, women like Ivanka Trump, who give lip service to “empowerment” but work to make their own power palatable to threatened men by hobbling themselves in spike heels, adhering to the patriarchy, and supporting limits on other women’s freedom.

The women of the left today have no similarly effective way to entice retrograde men on their side to be comfortable with their power. They continue to be unsung worker bees of the progressive movement, scorned for whiteness, age, ridiculous clothes, and laughable haircuts, and still taking it on the chin for the cause.

Originally published on Medium’s GEN site, May 28, 2020