Why We Should Stop Calling Women “Karens”

A name should not be a judgmental slur

Anne Emerick
ILLUMINATION
Published in
3 min readOct 5, 2022

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Which of the four females pictured is ‘a Karen?’
Photo credits and the answer at bottom of article

To all the wonderful women named Karen, I think society or the media owes you an apology.

I’m sure you’ve noticed, people are using your name as a term for an overly-demanding, privileged white woman. There are a few theories of how this happened.

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Anne Emerick
ILLUMINATION

Programmer by day. Author by night. As I put on running tights, I imagine I’m a superhero. Creator of Unemploymentville.com and No-Work Spanish.