Move Over Boomer Karen: It's Time for Millennial Lauren

The newest common enemy

I haven’t heard anyone say “OK Boomer” or “Karen” in quite some time. In fact, I’m wondering if Karen, the entitled boomer (or maybe Gen X) difficult customer, notorious racist and aging bratty princess, is falling out of fashion.

I think she is—and she’s being replaced by Lauren, the “cringe millennial white woman.”

Karen, in its inception, was a descriptor primarily used by people of color and service workers, to illustrate the quintessential difficult older woman—the lady who demanded to “speak to the manager” every time she didn’t get her way. Karen might also be seen calling the cops on a Black person drinking coffee on his own porch, or issuing an 8-year-old lemonade stand purveyor some kind of citation for selling without a permit. Physically, Karen was fashioned from Kate Gosselin of Jon and Kate Plus 8, complete with the bizarro reverse-mullet hairstyle worn by the reality star. I even made several Karen comics myself:

As you can see from the below chart, interest in the term “OK Karen” peaked in 2019-2020. This collided with the rise of the infamous “OK Boomer” Bernie supporter girl. At this point in time, there was a general consensus that boomers were cringe, and the most cringe, evil form of a boomer was Karen.

But women who saw themselves, or their older counterparts, as inaccurately maligned Karens pushed back around 2020-2021. Journalists and writers, often female, wrote thinkpieces asserting that the “Karen” meme was ageist and sexist, and according to some more conservative writers, racist, or at the very least, prejudiced. At first I chalked this up to more Karens complaining, as they are wont to do, until I noticed that the “Karen” meme had gone from describing specific women who appointed themselves the hall monitors of society, to literally any woman who took issue with anything—from politely sending food back at a restaurant because the order was incorrect, to voicing legitimate safety concerns about harassment or mistreatment from men.

Even I was not immune from the Karen meme. Because my husband and I had conceived after a severe infertility diagnosis, I was extremely specific during my pregnancy about what I felt comfortable eating—not because I wanted to make anyone’s life more difficult, but because the stakes of a miscarriage seemed impossibly high and I had trauma issues stemming from the infertility “journey” and preexisting OCD. When I was out with some friends and had specific questions for waiters about whether food was cooked thoroughly (which I like to think I asked politely!) they jokingly told me I was being a Karen. When I asked Reddit on a throwaway username if my dietary restrictions were unreasonable, I was mercilessly downvoted and labeled a Karen. One person even told me they “felt bad for my future children.” (The crime? Asking a waiter if a dairy product had been pasteurized.)

Increasingly I saw “Karen” being used not by people of color or various victims of real Karens, but by irony-poisoned white men, former nerds who identified as temporarily embarrassed high school bullies, who wanted to make offensive jokes about women, but didn’t want to lose their faux-leftist cred. Over time, it really started to seem like the joke wasn’t about Karen being white, but about Karen being a woman—a woman who had opinions and spoke up for herself, no less. Hillary Clinton, their perpetual sleep paralysis demon, was a “Karen.” Their mothers, no doubt, were Karens. Their ex-girlfriends were Karens. Every woman who had opinions and voiced them was a Karen.

So for a while, it seemed like Karen had fallen victim to the same phenomenon that birthed it—cringe. Saying “OK Karen” had become, arguably, more cringe than being a Karen. But those jokes had to go somewhere. So where did they go? Presenting…Lauren.