HR is the Mean Mommy of the Workplace

It's easy to hate the HR lady--for the same reasons it's easy to hate "wine moms" and "Karens."

If you spend as much time online as I do, perhaps you’ve seen left-wing guys (usually white themselves) talk derisively about “white women” when it’s clear they really just hate women. (Has anyone else noticed middle aged white women are “spiritually Israeli?” Heauheauheau)

I always assumed the whole “white” addendum was there in an effort to look progressive while still being misogynistic. Maybe it is sometimes, but now having seen men on the right do it as well (who are sometimes openly racist) it seems less likely that “white” is simply a hedge to seem woke. After all, if AryanRapist1488 is talking about the evils of “white women” it’s unlikely he’s doing it in an effort to appeal to the sensitivities of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D’Angelo.

I’ve come to realize that the whole “white woman” thing (especially when it comes from white men) is really about being mad at Mommy as opposed to an actual grievance with white women as a group. There’s a reason it very seamlessly transitions to a hatred of “Karens” or even more on-the-nose, “winemoms.” Maybe they’re mad at their own mommies in a very literal sense. One famous red pill influencer was purportedly radicalized when his mom made him take anti-diarrhea medicine at the age of thirteen. And every now and then, I’ll see grown men still angry about the fact that Mommy Teacher made them sit still in class thirty years ago, insinuating that in the good old days, boys were spending their education roaming the forests with sticks and not kept in line much more dogmatically by sadistic nuns—literal Mean Mothers, or at least Mean Sisters.

But sometimes, the Mommy Ire seems less directed at one’s literal mom and more directed at Capital M Mommy—the nebulous “longhousing” force of women in charge who are simultaneously privileged but inferior, inept but all-too-powerful, sadistic but passive aggressive. And right in the middle of the Venn diagram of girlbosses, cat ladies, Gen Z Boss and a Mini, Karens and liberal resist winemoms lives the most reviled demographic of all: HR ladies.

I used to hate HR too, and I have no vague resentment toward women at large, so I want to give the HR-haters at least some benefit of the doubt. It’s extremely easy to loathe HR.