Kooky Karen, Golf Cart Gail, Permit Patty, and BBQ Betty

Grover. Photo credit PBS.

In midsummer of 2020, the virus showed a vicious resurgence after many quarantine restrictions were lifted in several states including Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. We reopened far too quickly, as predicted. Governor Newsom no doubt caved to lobbyists and business leaders pressuring him to address the tanking economy and to let people return to work.

Robert Wachter, chair of the University of California San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, told the San Francisco Chronicle:

“When it comes to fighting a pandemic, we suck…what happened now is human, we let our guard down, we believed ‘Look how great we’ve done, the virus didn’t hit us like New York, we got lucky, we dodged the bullet, it’s time to go out and live our lives.’ And that’s where things went off the rails.”

Civic pride? Or entitlement? You be the judge. Actually, skip that. If you’re Anglo-American, you’re almost certainly biased. We all are. Hashtag sorry.

Other countries like South Korea and Italy flattened their curves, for the interim. We were nowhere near flattening the curve. It spiked at its highest point yet. We wanted to go out to eat. We were tired of indoor confinement, the lack of daily variety, and we missed human interaction outside our immediate households.

Jacqueline Gollan, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, coined a suitable phrase for the phenomenon that sabotaged much of the American public: caution fatigue.

Gollan compared social distancing motivation to a battery: when initial lockdowns were ordered, folks were charged with the drive to flatten the curve as recommended, but weeks and months went by and the weight of solitude and general disruption to everyday routines eventually taxed people to the point where they stopped making as strong of efforts required to implement an efficient quarantine, and started taking more recreational risks outside of essential outings. Strictly speaking, we couldn’t maintain the discipline other countries managed because we felt it was taking too long.

The class of 2020, be they grade school or high school or college, were robbed of a standard coming of age propriety, mourned throughout the nation by graduates and proud parents alike. Some few counties and school districts went ahead with them nonetheless. Wise people made do. Less wise people took the dartboard approach. It was a shame that collegiate level of adaptation didn’t overlap with the retail aisles of our stores.

A simple Sesame Street comparison:

“I can’t breathe.” – George Floyd, a knee on his neck.

“I can’t breathe.” – A Trader Joe’s Karen, refusing to wear a mask upon entry.

One of these things is not like the other.

What was the deal with white girls having public meltdowns about pandemic protocols?

“Karens” came out of the woodwork to show us how a surprising amount of bratty suburban housewives did not like their daily routines and expectations altered. The YouTube videos of women having full-blown tantrums when prompted to wear masks by polite, underpaid grocery and retail clerks were simultaneously amusing and disconcerting. I was at a loss regarding that. It reminded me of yowling alley tomcats in the dead of night, yammering for no reason other than to yammer.

Perhaps it was the Y chromosome I carry, but gosh, I would’ve thought that virtually all women, especially mothers, by and large would see the value in protecting others. It was one thing for us whiteboys to quack about God-given freedoms, but it was odd to see precocious suburbanite matrons howl about wearing a mask for twenty minutes while in the grocery store.

I admit, I expect higher levels of insight and empathy from women than I do men. From my own experience, they’ve consistently shown themselves to be smarter, more compassionate, and usually far more level headed than your average American male. So, to see those women operate on a level I usually reserve for my three-legged associates was confounding.

Yes, generalizing all members of a gender is foolish and there are exceptions to every rule. I don’t personally know many women who’d get into a fistfight at the checkout line with a clerk who asked them to put on a mask. A multitude of those ‘Karen’ incidents happened at places like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, rather than Wal-Mart or Target, though box stores experienced plenty as well. It may not have been a lower caste phenomenon after all. It might’ve been proportional to the middle or upper middle class, which made sense, in that the more entitled one is in the class system, the more stubborn they’re going to be when asked to flex.

Melissa Rein Lively, a public relations specialist and sometime customer at an Arizona based Target store, decided to confront her mortality by recording her own public temper tantrum as she destroyed mask displays, bemused employees looking on all the while. In an interview with USA Today, she revealed because of her tirade going viral, she lost all her clients, her husband filed for divorce, she checked into a psych facility for a week, and then underwent undergoing psychiatric treatment, citing the stress of the pandemic as the cause for her breakdown.

Near as I could gather from video evidence, on average it didn’t seem to be lower working-class moms or high society moms who were losing composure the most. It seemed to be the middle class folk, on average, the suburbanites who lived paycheck to paycheck yet could still squirrel away enough cash for junior’s college tuition.

There was a specific type of entitlement displayed by Karens in the ways in which they emoted their frustrations. It was privilege, sure, but there were additional expectations going on there, deeper roots, a wonky type of learned pandering, perhaps, and certainly the inherited benefit of years of whitewash in their root culture. The resistance was befuddling because it was more than likely they hadn’t had to deal with too many restrictions overall during the course of their lives, especially when compared with peers of color.

But geez, what an overreaction. That’s the row you want to hoe? That’s the line you want to draw? That’s the hill you’re gonna die on, maybe literally? After ten thousand years of patriarchal dominance and matriarchal submission, you want to go to war over your right to have those botox-infused lips uncovered while you’re squeezing the avocados? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry? All the troublesome issues facing the American middle class you could’ve chose to take on and you wanted to launch into hysterics over a required face covering during a global pandemic where hundreds of thousands of people were dying?

Seemed like a waste of power to me. But I’m a dude. My perspective is filtered through my Y chromosome. Only fellow women could really speak to this, I know that, but it’s no stretch to determine it was a fear-based defense mechanism. Joining the ‘lemmings’ wearing masks in a grocery store meant considering the prospect of death while doing everyday tasks like shopping. Who wants to get existential while they’re looking for the almond milk? (please don’t buy almond milk, Californians, that luxury crop is sucking up half our water). Nobody does. We didn’t choose the pandemic. It chose us. There was nothing we could do about it, except stay safe as best as we could and try and remember we were protecting others as much as ourselves.

Karens were the type of women who liked to speak to a manager about their employees, or complained to a chef about a failed expectation of an entrée. The social media trend of titling women who’d publicly exhibited such spoiled behaviors started well before the crisis, frequently originating from posts, threads, and pictures shared by peoples of color having experienced micro-aggressions from white girls showing passive implicit biases. Memes and tweets parodied the phenomenon in full, frequently using Kate Gosselin, a former reality TV star, and her bob haircut, as a visual go-to for Karen-style entitlement.

The proliferation of ‘Karen’ scorn escalated during the Black Lives Matter movement, most sensationally in the form of Amy Cooper’s interaction with African American Christian Cooper while walking her unleashed dog in New York’s Central Park. He was bird watching and asked her to put her dog on a leash. In response, she rang 911 and told them an African American man was threatening her life. He caught the whole thing on his phone camera and the incident went viral, showcasing a clear example of weaponized white privilege. Floodgates opened and a deluge of similar recordings of white women calling the police about mundane gatherings spewed forth, ranging from complaints about Black children selling lemonade to Black fathers watching soccer games. Trending terms ran rampant as they do, and we were introduced to the likes of ‘BBQ Betty,’ ‘Golf Cart Gail,’ and ‘Permit Patty.’

One of the more audacious examples was the incident involving Amber Lynn Gilles, a patron of Starbucks in San Diego, and Lenin Gutierrez, the barista on shift. Gutierrez refused service to Gilles for not wearing a mask. Gilles took his picture and posted a tirade on social media about it. A Go Fund Me page was set up for Gutierrez by his friends, a tongue-in-cheek measure for valorous behavior in “facing a Karen in the wild.’ Ha, ha. Over 100k in donations were received, which Gutierrez planned to use for school. In a staggering countermove, Gilles set up her own page to raise funds to sue Gutierrez for half the donations, claiming defamation of character and censorship on social media. Woof. She insisted, as many Karens did, that she couldn’t wear a mask for medical reasons. That trope was always bullshit. Even those with chronic lung conditions were advised to wear masks and suffer the discomfort, as Covid-19 attacked the respiratory system in truly destructive manners. The impudence of Gilles was incomprehensible. She had a meltdown in the middle of a coffeehouse, the guy was doing his job to protect his customers, the public ended up taking pity on him and lending a hand, and she figured she was entitled to half of it.

Peoples of color marking white women exercising privilege was nothing new, of course. It had been going on for time immemorial, notably during the Jim Crow era when ‘Karen’ was ‘Miss Ann.’ Racism exhibited by white women in the ruling class is part of a long tradition of American systemic bias. It was the carryover of privilege to the Covid-19 response that was harder to fathom. It seemed to be another degree of not in my backyard. It wasn’t going to be real to them until they got the bug, and even then, it probably would’ve had to have been a severe case for them to take it more seriously than a seasonal flu. It was a perpetuating tragedy that so many people failed to exercise empathy for others, that they couldn’t grasp the gravity of the situation through vicarious means, rather than dreadful, real-time experience. People were dying because of this failing. What that sector of Americana seemed to misunderstand was masking was really about protecting their neighbors, not themselves. But as we know, caring about strangers in the 21st century isn’t a strong skill set for the red, white, and blue.

It’s quite difficult to shock me. Nonetheless, I was perplexed that so many women were like…men.

I guess I was naïve.

Ignorance of a thing was pardonable. Willful ignorance was not. You couldn’t choose to unsee something once you saw it. There was no ostrich option for humans who wanted to continue residing in common reality. Putting your head in the sand wasn’t gonna cut it.

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