I would dispute this point. The term is, at least, derogatory to women who are named Karen -- whether or not they are "Karens".
What you're really doing there is showing why it isn't sexist even though it's implicitly female. The detail is only there for color, not as a core component of the archetype.
You argue that "Karen" doesn't refer to whiteness, the middle-classes or the female gender - it just refers directly to the stereotype and therefore it's OK.
I invite you follow the same logic here.
Consider the stereotype of a gun-toting street gang member. Our prejudices may tell us that person is probably a young black male that lives in a big city. So he gets a name we associate with the young black urban male like "Deshawn" .
The logic is the same, yes?
If you're OK with "there goes Karen calling the cops on the Walmart clerk again", you should be OK with "there goes Deshawn shooting the neighborhood up again".
Are you?
Only a serious level of bigotry would make someone pretend it's not racist or sexist if the word can also mean something else, in this case a simple name. It's what you meant by it and what you associated that with that matters.
It's the same reason calling someone a "fag" is meant as an insult for both that person (even if they are straight), and for homosexuals since you obviously consider this trait of theirs only suitable for an insult. It's an attack both on the people you address it to, and on the ones you based your insult on. Something an uneducated bigot would readily use but never realize why. They usually feel threatened by everything they don't understand or like (different gender, color, sexual or religious orientations) and "weaponize" that as a cover for their own ignorance. ;)
You could argue that Karen was chosen over Steve or Jeff purely by coincidence because obviously 50% of people are female so why shouldn't it be a female name? Actually a technical author I really like, who doesn't like the singular "they", solves the problem by just using the pronoun "she" for every unspecified person ("if the reader doesn't believe this theorem she can check it herself..."), which I think is fantastic... why not use she over he? But the fact this is so surprising is exactly because it is so unusual. It is, sadly, the default, to use male pronouns and names for things, so when a female name comes up it usually has a connotation (although I just gave an exception). Whether you mean it or not, using "Karen" for someone with that type of personality type heavily suggests that women are more likely to be like that.
That is all already true without an additional fact: historically, it is sadly a stereotype that women's opinions are more petty and unimportant than men's. The use of the word "Karen" for someone with unimportant, ill-informed opinions is directly playing into an existing stereotype. And it is totally avoidable.
Suppose I use "Shaq" as a stand in for a generic basketball player. I'm obviously making reference to a specific famous basketball player who happens to be a black man, so is that racist and sexist? Asians can play basketball. Women can play basketball.
It's not chosen at random, it's chosen as an exemplar of the category. The original Karen (from /r/FuckYouKaren) was a real person named Karen.
> historically, it is sadly a stereotype that women's opinions are more petty and unimportant than men's. The use of the word "Karen" for someone with unimportant, ill-informed opinions is directly playing into an existing stereotype. And it is totally avoidable.
I don't think it is avoidable. If using a woman's name is sexist then so would using a man's name. Either way it would cause the reader to be more likely to picture the person with the contemptuous attitude as that gender. But so would not specifying one at all, which we know generally causes people to picture a male. So you have to make a choice one way or the other.
And if it's "fantastic" to select a female in the contexts where the subject is a meritorious student or engineer, sometimes it goes the other way too.
Assuming you mean a negative stereotype, so for example not just a basketball player but one who does it instead of studying academic subjects: then certainly, yes. Imagine someone saying "oh those guys won't have a clue, they're just a bunch of Shaqs". Even if Shaq is the name of a real person, the racist undertone is clear.
> ... so is that ... sexist?
Not so much, maybe borderline, just as Karen is only borderline racist.
> The original Karen (from /r/FuckYouKaren) was a real person named Karen.
I dispute that many people using the term know exactly who that Karen is, and even moreso the people hearing it. To most, it simply sounds like a generic name that white middle-class women are likely to have.
(After a little Google research it seems there actually isn't an original Karen. KnowYourMeme (not exactly a reliable publication but relevant here!) had a few candidates but no clear winner - in fact the main contender was just a bad comedian using it for an unspecific annoying woman. In a post I found on /r/FuckYouKaren itself no one had any ideas. But that's all irrelevant anyway, if people using the term don't know.)
> If using a woman's name is sexist then so would using a man's name. ... And if it's "fantastic" to select a female ... sometimes it goes the other way too.
Actually, by "avoidable" I meant there's no reason to use any name at all. But let's put that aside.
Look, I get it, I honestly do. Equality really means treating people equally, and that means if we're allowed to use a male name as an insult then we ought to be able to use a female one too, right? I actually do think it makes a lot of logical sense.
The problem is that it only makes sense if the current base line is men and women already being treated equally - then adding extra opportunities, compliments and even insults equally would preserve equality. In practice, current societal norms are absolutely flooded with little microagressions that subconsciously make men and even women themselves think of women as somehow less important than men. I remember a very awkward encounter at a team building exercise where a colleague (actually a fantastically nice guy) jokingly let me go first at something with a cheeky "ladies first" comment, only to realise a female colleague was actually nearby (near enough to cause a bit of confusion!). Note that one woman jokingly accusing another of being a man would never be an insult, even jokingly.
Yes I realise there's the odd extreme feminist that genuinely thinks men are less important or worthwhile than women (e.g. those that say that men accused of sexual assault by women should be assumed guilty). But those numbers are absolutely dwarfed by men who think less of women. In that context, your idea (allowing insults that reinforce stereotypes against women in the name of equality) does not make sense.
Karen isn't derogatory to women, it's only derogatory to Karens. There is no implication that women are all Karens, only that Karens are contemptible.
> In fact you seem to be claiming, in this case, that you would only ever object to the term "Karen" if you actually have the characteristics that the term refers to. But, just like with race and gender, you can object to that term even if its implied meaning genuinely doesn't match your personality type.
Except that race and gender aren't personality types, whereas that's exactly what "Karen" is, and it's just the personality type that would object to the term.
> to make it a bit more concrete, imagine the term "little black men" had been used instead. Upon objection, you replied "no, no, no, the term term doesn't necessarily refer to actual black men, just people that behave a bit like black men". That is very much what the term "Karen" is like.
The analogy to "little black men" would be something like "white female busybodies" which is completely different because it's putting the focus specifically on that race and gender.