Could be worse. One moment you’re a small town Ohio dentist with the perfectly normal name of Dr Gay Hitler. Then WWII breaks out.
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(Oh, but I do.)
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The person I was replying to is married to a woman named Karen. She’s not having a great time since her name was appropriated as a slur for racists. Prolly wouldn’t feel great if the internet suddenly turned your very name derogatory.
My Aunt Karen approves, so no.
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In high school I was called Dick and various derivatives. I disliked it quite a lot. I’d rather people not make fun of people named Dick or Richard for their name.
If the day ever comes that I hear someone call a racist a dick and I interject that its not cool because of the collateral damage to people named Dick, please slap me
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Would you prioritize it above or below solving systemic racism?
Because if we solve that, we’ve solved the other.
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I’m sorry for your wife’s angst, no sarcasm. But to this question:
I guess I’d answer that context is everything. I’m regularly on work calls where a couple other people have my name, but I can generally tell who others are talking about by context. I know that every time someone utters something that includes my name, they don’t necessarily mean me. And I would hope people talking to your wife would have a very different tone if they were asking her Karen for something versus talking about a “Karen” incident.
At this point, I think the horses have left the barn.
Do you have any suggestions for other terms we might try to adopt in the bbs? It won’t change your wife’s experiences in the wider world, but I’m game.
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Karens get people killed, not women that are assertive. Calling someone who is assertive a misogynistic slur is out of line. Calling out someone who is putting others in danger is the right thing to do. This isn’t rocket surgery.
And I really don’t appreciate being mansplained about something I’ve experienced literally all my life.
He’s very much trying to get a woman to shut up, because he doesn’t like what I’m saying.
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“Men”
“Release the Kraken Karens!”
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Or any of the Dicks. Dick Head, Dick Braen, Dick Burns… (real people, i assure you.)
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Again; Willie, Johnson, Dong, Wang…
All real names that get “unfairly” connotated with peen.
Maybe I’ll start caring more about ‘all the poor women named Karen’ once POC, Trans-people and everyone else who is constantly being abused, marginalized, ostracized and persecuted has full equal standing in society and under the law.
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From the Wikipedia article:
“Dr. Gay Hitler” redirects here. It is not to be confused with Gay Hitler.
OMG there are two of them.
Won’t someone think of the Gay Hitlers?
As one does when one is trying to support women
Obligs
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I’ll be grateful once people stop insinuating that protecting entitled women from criticism or scrutiny for objectively horrible behavior is more important than protecting people from literal death and assault.
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There are a lot of interesting sociological questions about karens.
Are karens a significant problem? Are they a growing problem? Are there any metrics that anyone can come up with for figuring this stuff out?
There are some things that get the kinds of media attention that we’ve been seeing for karens that lately that are not legitimate problems. Violence at BLM protests gets way amplified out of proportion based on media coverage. White women going missing has long been a popular one as is child murders. (Is there a connection between sarahs and karens?) These are just artifacts of our attention in media.
On the other hand, it seems clear that the media attention on police violence is only being given the tiny sliver of actual attention that it needs now because of phone cameras and police body cams. Police violence against minorities has historically been terrible but mostly ignored until very recently.
So which category do karens fall in? Are they an imaginary architype that we are just projecting Kat from Taming of the Shrew into our youtube entertainment? Are they possibly an actual thing but are mostly harmless? Are they a thing that has been dangerous to our society and to minorities for a very long time and that we are only realizing now because of documentary evidence?
Is there any way to tell how many people have been unfairly put in jail because of karens? To what extent can we blame lynchings in previous centuries on karens? How regularly are do people actually lose their jobs because someone “wants to speak to the manager”? How regularly are the people who do lose their jobs minorities?
While it seems obvious to me that some people have been emboldened to be publicly racist during the previous presidential administration, is this enough to account for the current prevalence? Do karens actually fit a particular demographic? Are they more likely to be working class Republicans or upper middle class Democrats?
If karenism is a problem, are there ways to address it other than by shaming them? Is it something that racial sensitivity training helps address? What are the actual causes of karenism that aren’t being looked at? Is it a paradoxical function of patriarchal structures?
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Fuckin’ A.
‘Hurt feelings and wounded egos’ don’t mean shit to me when actual marginalized people are being abused and killed.
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#notallkarens
