AWFULs, defined: The proper’s disdain for liberal white ladies

[ad_1] A brand new villain has emerged in right-wing discourse: the Prosperous White Feminine City Liberal, or AWFUL.

Speaking heads on Fox Information and right-wing YouTubers describe AWFULs as smug , entitled , and even “ a cancer on the nation .” AWFULs, their argument goes, are the reason that ICE actions in Minnesota have turn out to be so violent. These ladies are pushed by their sexual frustration ; their lack of real problems ; their empty, childless lives . ICE Watch is full of them . Renée Good was one, which is why her demise, whereas tragic, is ultimately not the fault of the man who shot her .

The acronym seems to have emerged across the finish of the Biden years. In 2024, the Washington Examiner was bemoaning the affect of AWFLs (no U) on the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, and musing over whether or not this demographic was “so annoying and repulsive that they’re driving centrist voters, significantly males, away from the Democratic Occasion.”

The thought seemed to be that wealthy white liberal ladies had gotten too preachy, too virtue-signaling. They needed folks to put on masks and get vaccinated in the course of the Covid pandemic. They marched and protested over the demise of George Floyd. They saved speaking concerning the local weather disaster. How annoying!

Liberal males did that too, however that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was that every one of this habits felt female; it reminded folks of their mothers, who, by their nature, usually are not cool. The Washington Examiner cited the Democratic strategist James Carville, who theorized that Democrats had been dominated by “too many preachy females.” The celebration’s speaking factors, Carville told the New York Times in 2024 , had been all, “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch soccer. Don’t eat hamburgers. This isn't good for you.’ The message is simply too female: ‘The whole lot you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve obtained to eat your peas.’”

The AWFUL label emerged into the mainstream in January, after the taking pictures of Renée Good. Conservatives rushed to place not simply Good, but in addition her whole demographic, because the villain of the encounter. There was, right-wingers agreed, one thing about how smug these ladies had been; they wanted to be taken down a peg.

Fox News’s David Marcus described Good and other liberal white women as “organized gangs of wine mothers,” including, “The video of Good and her associate heckling and, let’s be trustworthy, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most individuals’s pores and skin crawl, is only one of many. We see these self-important white ladies doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists and even bystanders, usually with a bizarre and disturbing glee.”

That there’s no equal time period for the white liberal males resisting ICE factors to the truth that misogyny is on the core of the precise’s downside with AWFULs. However it’s additionally price noting that they obtained this playbook from the left. The AWFUL script is a direct copy of the progressive disdain for white ladies prior to now decade.

The proper goes after white ladies as a result of the left confirmed them methods to do it. Right here’s how they obtained right here from there.

2017: The primary Ladies’s March makes headlines.

2018: The second Ladies’s March is stricken by tales of the misbehavior of white feminists. In the meantime, social media posters begin making enjoyable of Karens.

2020: The Karen meme goes mainstream.

2024: Distinguished Democrats begin arguing that liberal ladies are making the celebration look dangerous. In the meantime, conservatives begin speaking about what an issue AWFULs are.

2026: Renée Good is killed, and the AWFUL meme breaks containment.

How Karen obtained deradicalized

The AWFUL’s speedy antecedent is the Karen: equally white, feminine, and entitled. A meme that emerged around 2018, before exploding in 2020 , confirmed a parody of the form of girl who's impolite to service employees, racist to folks of shade, and at all times needs to talk to the supervisor.

The Karen meme was, partially, used by people of color to explain an actual downside with white ladies utilizing the quilt of their race to be abusive towards Black folks, an evolution of the Miss Ann and Becky tropes. It was used to check with ladies like Amy Cooper, who known as the cops on a Black bird watcher , and Lisa Alexander, who called the police about a Black man writing “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on his own house : inarguably racist incidents that deserved to be known as out and named.

However there’s one other layer to the Karen meme that's rooted in a disdain for girls generally.

As Aja Romano laid out for Vox in 2020 , a part of the explanation Karen is named Karen is due to a Reddit consumer who grew to become internet-niche-famous for posting lengthy, bitter rants about his ex-wife, Karen. Different Redditors compiled the Karen lore into the subreddit r/FuckYouKaren, which then overlapped with the independently creating Karen meme to turn out to be a spot the place folks posted tales about ladies they deemed to be Karens misbehaving in public. On the root of the meme, then, is one man’s invective towards his ex-wife: not precisely somebody punching up.

Because the Karen meme grew to be extra common, it started to lose its edge. Lots of those that unfold it did so not as a result of they cared about racial politics, however as a result of they had been excited to have a brand new phrase they may use to insult any girl they discovered annoying, regardless of her race or politics or whether or not she ever tried to speak to the supervisor.

Within the Guardian in 2020, Hadley Freeman described posting on what was then Twitter that she thought there have been sexist, ageist, and classist undertones to the Karen meme. Quickly, she stated, her replies had been stuffed with “males gleefully calling me a Karen (‘OK, Karen’) and telling me to make them a sandwich.” Freeman added, “Do I actually need to spell out the sexism of a meme a couple of girl’s title that took off from a person griping about his ex-wife and has turn out to be a approach of telling ladies to close up?”

Progressives activate the feminist within the pussy hat

As Karen rose in prominence, so too did her shut cousin: the white feminist.

Criticism of white feminism, like criticisms of Karen, originated in communities of shade. However whereas Karen was brazenly terrible to Black folks, the white feminist was extra susceptible to microaggressions.

The central critique was that mainstream feminism prioritized the experiences and wishes of white ladies. White feminists, particularly, had a historical past of ignoring the methods wherein multiple axes of oppression intersect and exacerbate each other .

“White Feminism exists to advertise the consolation and security of middle-class and prosperous White ladies,” wrote Black feminist academic Monnica T. Williams in 2019 . “At its core, it's a racist ideology that claims to talk for all ladies whereas ignoring the wants of ladies of shade and suppressing our voices when our agendas and priorities don’t align.” Amongst different issues, Williams known as out the failure of mainstream feminism to combat for higher well being look after Black ladies, who die in childbirth at three times the rate of white American women , or acknowledge the way in which the legal justice system disproportionately impacts ladies of shade.

Williams argued that the 2017 Ladies’s March was significantly responsible of ignoring the issues of ladies of shade, and she or he was not alone in that evaluation. Whereas some described it as “probably the most various march for girls’s rights ever,” many ladies of shade stated they didn’t really feel welcome. Even the pink pussy hat — the march’s most enduring icon — became a symbol of division (as a result of not all pussies are pink, and never all ladies have pussies).

Because the criticisms of white feminism entered the bigger dialog, they — very similar to the concept of the Karen — misplaced their political edge. If anybody needed to speak that they thought the women in pink pussy hats protesting in opposition to Trump had been form of annoying, the phrase “white feminist” was proper there.

“Let’s speak white ladies, lets?” comedian Bill Burr said in his Saturday Night Live monologue in 2020 . “The best way white ladies one way or the other hijacked the woke motion, generals all over the world needs to be analyzing this. Simply to refresh your reminiscence, the woke motion was speculated to be about folks of shade not getting alternatives, the advance that they deserved, lastly making that occur. And it was about that, for about eight seconds. After which one way or the other, white ladies swung their Gucci-booted ft over the fence of oppression and caught themselves on the entrance of the road. I don’t know the way they did it. I've by no means in my life heard a lot complaining from white ladies!” Burr burst into fake sobs. “‘My life is so onerous with my SUV and my heated seats. You don't have any concept what it’s wish to be me.’”

The preliminary criticism of white feminism was supposed to attract consideration to the way in which each misogyny and racism have an effect on ladies of shade. However it additionally gave cowl to loads of individuals who had been delighted to make use of it to dismiss any girl involved about her personal oppression as oblivious and annoying.

As Democrats headed into the 2024 election with a woman of color as their candidate , they discovered themselves in an odd place: Feminism, which had appeared such a political win circa 2017, was now a legal responsibility. It was too blinkered and tame for the progressive left, and too radical and threatening for the precise. Who needed to be like these terrible ladies with the pink hats? Everybody knew they had been cringey and retro, complaining over nothing.

The Karen-AWFUL switcheroo

The AWFUL meme pulls off one of conservatism’s favorite tricks , what you may name the “reverse racism” maneuver: It takes critiques utilized by the left to explain a structural energy dynamic, after which reverses the ability dynamics to say that, in actual fact, it's the proper who's being oppressed by these snobby elitists on the left.

The Karen meme is rooted in an unkind stereotype of a conservative white girl: suburban , unfashionable , anti-vax , rude to service workers , with lots of annoying kids . The AWFUL meme, in flip, is rooted in an unkind stereotype of a liberal white girl, pulling from each the white feminist and the sooner period of anti-feminist critique: shrill, indignant, virtue-signaling, both childless or just a bad mother .

In every case, the meme’s leftist roots supply cowl to the people who find themselves utilizing it. It was wonderful to make enjoyable of the Karen as a result of she was impolite to working-class folks and abusive to folks of shade. Ostensibly, you weren’t mocking her for being a lady; you had been mocking her for her racism and classism. When progressives take jabs at white feminists, they’re ostensibly not mad as a result of these are ladies complaining about their issues, however as a result of they're oblivious to the struggles of individuals of shade.

In flip, the folks now deriding AWFULs usually are not explicitly bothered that they’re ladies protesting in public. They’re merely making enjoyable of those ladies for being liberal scolds who lord their wealth and social capital over the courageous blue-collar ICE employees they're protesting in opposition to. It’s the identical sort of social cowl that the Karen meme provided, appropriated and rejiggered to assist a conservative worldview.

In every case, we’re meant to imagine that it’s only a coincidence that the annoying, clueless, and bigoted folks being mocked simply occur to be ladies. However it’s notable that Karen’s male counterpart, Ken, by no means obtained as a lot consideration as Karen did. And whereas conservative commenters don’t appear thrilled about white liberal male protestors, they've but to provide that demographic a catchy little acronym. They smeared Alex Pretti as a violent radical , however they confirmed maybe much more disdain of their smearing of Renée Good as an annoying radical.

The overlap in all of those memes about white ladies is entitlement. If used sincerely by individuals who genuinely care about racial justice, the memes may very well be taken as a significant critique of white feminine complacency. When utilized in dangerous religion, they begin to look much more like discomfort with seeing ladies have opinions in public.

None of that is to say that white ladies are past reproach, or that they'll by no means be complicit in classism and racism. However it's notable how steadily authentic criticism of white ladies coming from communities of shade turns into an excuse for left-leaning white males (or different white ladies) to inform ladies to close up and cease complaining — all of which provides cowl to conservatives once they wish to inform ladies to return to the kitchen with out sounding like chauvinists. That doesn’t really assist the folks of shade, whom everybody claims to be so outraged on behalf of.

What may be most useful right here is to show again to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality , or the concept that folks from totally different id teams expertise oppression in numerous and typically overlapping methods. Crenshaw initially developed intersectionality as a authorized concept, to push courts to know that girls of shade expertise discrimination each on the idea of their intercourse and on the idea of their race, somewhat than only one or the opposite. In different phrases, intersectionality was meant to provide us a language for speaking about extra types of oppression, to not inform some oppressed folks to be quiet.

So the subsequent time a enjoyable new phrase about how annoying a sure form of girl enters the zeitgeist, maybe think about: Is your aim in utilizing this phrase to make a critique of structural racism within the US? Is utilizing this phrase the one approach you present up for folks of shade? Or are you extra excited about telling a lady you don’t wish to shut up?