Thank you. Well said, well-written. One quibble--and no, I don't want to speak to your manager. ha.
I disagree that things like getting ripped off at the mechanic shop, asking for a raise, or other "personally" relevant things that, in the past, women were unable to assert for themselves, should be characterized as trivial. And while the coffee-thing seems, on a superficial level, trivial and entitled, (esp. during a pandemic among other things for God's sake!) we don't really have much information about that individual woman, do we?
What we know: White? Check. Middle aged? Check. Buying an expensive (but not really, let's face it) "gourmet hot beverage" (because we know by her physical appearance and attitude that money is no object for this woman, don't we?) Check, check. Haircut? Irrelevant because she's a Karen because she "fussed" about her coffee.
However, while improbable, it's also not impossible that she was raised by parents and in a community--maybe a religion or other system that devalued women--that taught and enforced the adage "children AND women should be seen and not heard."
And maybe, after years of being walked on, her therapist all but ordered her to stand up for herself. And maybe this woman hasn't quite got the hang of what constitutes the "big fights" versus what can and ought to be ceded--using some empathy and compassion--without losing herself again. Or she was raised in abject poverty somewhere in the world, and that $5 coffee is something she doesn't take for granted.
And even though it seems so petty, from the outside looking in, her complaint, asking the barista to make her another coffee, we really don't know. But her imperious attitude says it all. Or does it? Sometimes an imperious attitude is a facade for being and feeling terrified and powerless. Anger and rage, too.
The point? WE DON'T KNOW. There are a lot of "what-ifs" and variables here.
So, yes, I like where you're going here but one thing you failed to expound on is something the younger generation of women fail to understand : there are a lot of things they get to take for granted, things women like me and women of my generation, had to fight for the right to even make a FUSS about.
Even the word "fuss" is telling, projecting an infantile mini-tantrum onto women who "make a stink"--another telling phrase. A lot of judgment and not a lot of compassion going around these days. Memes on social media, specifically YouTube or Twitter, all telling in that they are all reductive, and they are all really about depersonalizing someone who is UNLIKE you/us.
Juvenile name-calling on juvenile platforms, pulling the classic no-win, Catch-22. If you complain, you're a ____. If you don't know something or know too much, you're a ____ and a ____. If you disagree with ___, you're a _____. If you agree, but you don't do it right, you're a _____. If you agree, then you're a __ and a ___ and also make yourself a target of _____ or for ____.
What I've observed: a continued theme, used throughout history, of creating pejoratives out of appearance, physical traits, and behaviors, that presume, over-simplify, over-generalize and demean people and/or their behavior based on a cursory, facile, and willful misunderstanding of the human beings behind those pejoratives.
This is the genesis of marginalization. Choosing all that's negative about a human being, and deciding they embody all that's negative about specific groups based on our lack of insight, compassion, empathy, and knowledge about them. Talk about irony.
Ripping out the voice box of a group of people serves, and has always served, a singular societal and cultural purpose:
To shut (whoever they are) the fuck up.
And we know it works and it's why the fight for social justice is so vital, so important, and why HOW we choose to fight matters so much. The "how" isn't about being polite or obsequious or "nice." It's about being self-aware. Being aware of what's behind us, what's in front of us, and the big picture, ahead, without us in it, maybe.
The technique to quash voices has been used for centuries to marginalize, discriminate, segregate, and ensure we remain at war, divided, using the one thing that has the power to build bridges and connect: language.
The biggest handicap when entering an unknown culture, creating the largest disadvantage, has always been the "language barrier." I wonder why that escapes our attention.
So, instead of bridges, we build weapons of mass-media destruction--redefining, defining, claiming, reclaiming words, honing them to sharp points, then hurling them like dirty bombs into a cyber crowd. Lighting catch-all phrases that spread like wildfire throughout the ether, then rendering words meaningless by using them categorically, in all-or-nothing generalizations, creating talking points which then get pointed at everyone else as the source of all our problems.
And while I'm not much of a savvy meme person and I don't know much about "Karens," the whole "Karen" thing is really the froth on the latte, isn't it? I mean, we DO have bigger fish to fry than our lattes being too heavy on the milk. Yes, we do.
I suppose my question is this: who the fuck am I to decide how important something is to someone else, and could that be why we're no closer to figuring out the fish-fry thing than we were 200 years ago?
Again, thank you for the article. It served as a great way to help contrast how we choose to view the world and how we, as individuals, choose to participate in it.
Peace--
J.A.
