Ever since a woman named Karen called the police on a birdwatcher in New York City’s Central Park for pointing out that she was letting her dog run loose and failing to clean up after it—both illegal—the media has labeled any woman who behaves badly in public a ‘Karen.’
So, for example, I read a news story recently about a flight attendant dealing with a ‘Karen,’ or a demanding woman passenger who tries to start an argument and get service to which she’s not entitled.
There was another story sometime back about a ‘Karen’ who called the cops on a child who was selling lemonade on the sidewalk outside her apartment building without a business license. And it goes on and on.
Every time I see one of these stories I cringe. The media, especially the western media, has this annoying (in my opinion) tendency to find catchy, cutesy tags to apply to things and then to over-use them.
But, even more annoying to me, this seems to be done more with women and minorities (ethnic minorities, refugees, etc.) than with men, especially majority men.
An undocumented immigrant goes berserk and shoots his neighbors and all the news stories point out ‘Undocumented (or illegal) alien goes on shooting rampage.’ I’ve yet to see a headline saying, ‘Native born American kills his neighbors.’ Nor, by the way, have I seen one of these tags applied to men who do the dumb things mentioned in the paragraph above.
I think you might get where I’m going here, but just in case you don’t, I’m saying that, often without being consciously aware of it, many mainstream media organs display bias of the most egregious kind.
And, it really should stop.
We could start with this noxious tag, ‘Karen.’ Karen’s a name folks, not a noun that for some reason is always capitalized. If a tag is needed to describe, find one that’s not a name, and then apply it to everyone who acts in this manner, not just one gender or one demographic group.
So, I suppose that leaves out ‘witch’, ‘shrew’, or ‘crone’, because these are all nouns that are associated with a specific gender. Some other very appropriate nouns can’t be used because they’re profane. How about ‘idiot,’ or ‘jerk’? These are gender nonspecific and in the case of most of this behavior, totally accurate and appropriate.
Let’s give the Karens of this world their name and dignity back. People like Karen, a close friend of my daughter who is the kindest, most considerate person I know, and Karen, the clerk in my local good market who has a joke or friendly word for every customer.
And, while we’re at it, let’s just stop using people’s names to describe bad situations, unless you’re going to use the original offender’s full name so others who share the same first name won’t be impacted by it. It’s bad enough already that some names already come from negative origins: like Lola, which means ‘sorrow’ in Spanish, Rue, which means ‘regret’ in English, or Mallory, which means ‘unfortunate’ or ‘bad luck’ in French.
You out there who want to be or who soon will be parents, might want to keep this in mind and do a little lexicographic research before naming your newborn.
That’s a whole other issue to deal with. For now, let’s all pledge to stop the implicit insults that come with using names as shortcuts to describe negative things. It’s not that hard if we put our minds to it. | NWI
