The Mt. Rushmore of Karens
Today’s feigning femmes got nothing on these historical ho’s.
A talented and funny friend asked me to be on his podcast; I said yes immediately. What could be better than me talking about me? But then he said, “We’d love for you to come on and talk about Karens. You’re perfect for this topic!”
*Insert a tantrum only a true Karen could throw here.*
Sure, I am an adult white woman who has a face that looks best suited for logging complaints. How is that my fault? Just because my mother was absolutely a Karen, and all the women in her family were Karens on steroids, and just because I think DIRECTV customer service representatives should be thrown off the tallest building, does NOT make me a Karen. The most surprising thing about my connection to the “Karen” moniker is that none of the aforementioned women in my family have starred in one of these viral videos yet. I imagine they’re saving all their Karen firepower for a holiday meal where they will ask me what it’s like to live in Cuck-afornia and how nice it must be nice to be able to afford that fancy purse instead of having children.
At any rate, digging deeper into the world of white women setting all women back decades (and sometimes centuries), I was surprised (not surprised) to learn just how many Karens I could find in history. Sure, men are a scourge in ways women could never possibly match, but white women — goddamnit.
PHYLLIS SCHAFLY
Ugh, this nasty old hag’s influence on modern American policies still permeates political debate today. While she isn’t the sole reason we can’t have nice things like the Equal Rights Amendment, she also might be. She actively campaigned against the passage of this amendment that would guarantee equal rights to all people regardless of gender. What. A. Raggedy. Bitch.
While you might think she’s just a toothless, trailer park, hose beast, she was actually a lawyer, an author, and an activist. Can we be done with the line of thinking that all lawyers went into the field because they wanted to help disadvantaged people?
She warned that passage of the E.R.A. would lead us down the hideous path of genderless bathrooms, women serving in the military and that wives might someday not have their husband’s favorite lasagne recipe memorized.
I could tell you more about this wretched creep but FX did a whole miniseries about her called, “Mrs. America.” You should watch it if you like watching America make historical mistakes in real-time. You should also watch it because I hear her family thought it didn’t accurately depict the terrible woman they all knew and loved. Also, Cate Blanchett is in it. I love her. I love that Cate’s face and J. Lo’s ass get the exact same treatments at Kate Sommerville every Saturday at 2:30 PM.
KATE BRANCH
This delightful broad is said to be the reason for the Salem witch trials. Those trials were terrible but witches are cool as shit, so maybe she’s not all bad. Just kidding, she was a pawn in her rich boss’s scheme, which is the highest occupation a poor, white woman could ever aspire to.
This skanky house servant claimed to have fits in her sleep that would result in her waking up with bruises all over her body. Seems totally real. She claimed that two women in the town would appear to her as spirits in her sleep to pinch and hit her and try to get her to sign a deal with the devil. This definitely seems more likely than she was getting it in on with her married boss and they needed a believable story to tell his wife, aka, her other boss. Or, that she was sneaking out to bang the local pub owner ‘cuz free beer just tastes better, but hey, neighbors turning into ghosts to pinch you in your sleep — let’s keep going.
This went to trial. YES. TRIAL. One of the women she accused was convicted! It should be noted that the two women they blamed for literal ghosting also had some beef with Kate’s bosses. Luckily, this conviction was overturned but it essentially started the phenomena of shitty white women blaming their romantic affairs on someone in town they didn’t like, and boom, fire up the Duraflames — cue the Salem witch trials.
MADELEINE VINTON DAHLGREN
This B needs three names because two just doesn’t cover what a raging monster she was. Maddy-B was an outspoken anti-suffragist writer who spoke four languages. She could understand when another woman said, “Eat a bag of dicks,” nearly anywhere in the United States and Europe.
She believed that granting women the right to vote would threaten peace and happiness, create hostility in marriages, and produce an increase in divorces. It’s hard to imagine someone this insufferable had friends, but she was a very affluent socialite in her native Washington D.C. She became known for befriending the moms’ at her kid’s school by asking why they hadn’t joined the PTA yet.
She went so far as to lobby Congress not to grant women the right to vote just so her husband would keep calling her, “Mother” in bed. Her name might not be all that familiar to most people as she lived in the late 1800s, but considering Congress didn’t pass the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote until 1920, I’d say she earned her stripes in Karen history.
ROSIE CHAPPELL
At the pinnacle of the Karen wall of shame is this ass-clown. Rosie has the distinct honor of being one of the founders of the Women’s KKK. What is more befitting of an original Karen than creating a KKK of KKKaren’s?
This actual human accident wasn’t satisfied with letting the racist-backwoods-fucktard-men have all the fun. Who wants to just sew their man’s white robes when they could wear them too? Hold on. Was Rosie an accidental feminist? Nobody tell her! I don’t want her spirit to know where I live in case she tries to pinch me in my sleep. (There is a very good looking bar owner down the street that is in no way involved in the teeth marks all over my backside.)
In the 1920s, nearly 500,000 women, mostly women from middle-class, stable households, joined this organization. I don’t want to write any more about this shit-stain of a person because you know how it ends. The KKK still exists, and they send their women to Trader Joe’s to get, “Speculoos Cookie Butter,” they would simply die without.
I look forward to the day that Karen’s everywhere stop being so compelling with their breathless ignorance and limitless intolerance and instead, find better friends, better wine, and better hairdressers. Until then, please enjoy this great podcast, Mt. Rushmore Podcast, where I talk far too much about these women who continue to disappoint.
