The Scold's Bridle

Five years ago, I enrolled my then four-year-old son in a young gymnastics class at the local YMCA. It was a simple tumbling session, giving the kids an outlet to expend energy while learning a few basic rolls and jumps. The class was run by a nice young woman, only a year or so out of college, with much too soft a demeanor for the raucous cadre of children in her care. The classes were a mess, with kids running around and wrestling with each other as the instructor tried to regain control. For my part, I just sat against the far-wall reading, figuring that even if the class was useless, at least he wore himself out before bedtime. It was as close to a break as I ever got back then.

In the third session I was interrupted from my book by a woman with short white hair and thin rimmed glasses, glaring at me.

“Is that your son?” she asked, pointing at my pale, blonde-haired boy.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know he just hurt my granddaughter?” She said, pointing to her dark-haired girl, the same age, laughing, playing and oblivious to the drama. Apparently if he did really hurt her, the girl hadn’t cried long. “He was wrestling with her.”

“Oh. Sorry, I’ll tell him to cut it out.” I replied.

I calculated her as an annoyed grandma who went mama bear in defending her daughter, which was fine. I saw no reason why the apology followed by a quick talk with my son wouldn’t take care of it. Instead of walking away though, she stuck her nose up, seemingly unconvinced I showed appropriate remorse.

“He’s a bully.” She sneered.

I have a strong bias given I’m his father, but there isn’t bullying bone in my son’s body. He has his faults, like a mild arrogance and a want for attention, but never felt a need to dominate and hurt a weaker human being. My blood boiled, but my options were limited. There’s no way a man my size could dress down a petite grandma without looking like a total jackass.

“I’ll talk to him.” I said, biting my lip.

“I think I’m going to the front desk to tell them about this.” She added.

I looked over and saw her daughter actively chasing my son around, clearly playing a game and having a good time. She dwelled out of the scope of simply a protective parent and turned into a crybully. I wondered how far she would take this. Would she try to get my kid removed from the class? Would she go as far as demand my membership get revoked? Out of nowhere I had to deal with an old harridan with a personal vendetta.

“He’s a bully.” She repeated, staring off in the distance, like she was trying to get the tone just right, the expression and poise perfect for maximum effect when she repeated this incident countless times.

Turning red, I took a deep breath, repeated I would talk to him, got up, and walked away. A man who talked this way to another man would need to be wary that such rhetoric didn’t leads to physical conflict. This woman had no such fear. All of society is designed to protect her from stronger men, even if she’s clearly in the wrong. I was tempted to call her on her offer and walk up to the front desk myself to give my side first, and in retrospect I should have. As it happened, the class soon ended and I left with my kid, giving a mild rebuke for being too rough and not listening to the teacher, and drove home. The next week the grandma wasn’t there, but the lack of structure and the grandma incident made my wife and I decide the class wasn’t worth it and stopped going.

This archetype of person has been around for forever, as even medieval villages had their scolds, busybodies, and rabblerousers. In modern nomenclature, they are called Karens. They’re not necessary women. Weak, low-status, passive aggressive men often use the same tactics to get their way. As a general rule, Karen-like behavior follows this basic formula.

1. Show great offense at a perceived personal slight, whether it is a social taboo being broken, poor service, or lack of respect.

2. When the party tries to reconcile with a reasonable compromise, she vehemently refuses.

3. Threaten to get higher authority figure to act on her behalf. i.e. “I’d like to speak with the manager.”

The Dictionary.com term for Karen is: “Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, and entitled middle-aged woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.” Overall, it’s not a bad definition, though I would make a few caveats. First off, the women do use their privilege, as it is, but many people who do Karen actions are of fairly meagre status. Her weakness makes it more likely she is listened to by a more powerful figure who only hears her side of the story and wants to avoid trouble.

I would also argue her antics are rarely part of a plan to gain more power for herself or increase her status in life. Things rarely improve for her even when she does make people cower. It’s largely a one-off act of pettiness for its own sake. At least when one backstabs someone for a promotion or destroys someone’s reputation so she can take their position, there’s a murmur of higher consciousness. It’s not just a sadistic animal desire to kick someone down for personal pleasure or to establish oneself as a perpetual victim.

In recent times they’ve tried to pinpoint the Karen meme to only white women, thereby creating a racial angle. This is laughable, as during the BLM riots ones of my wife’s friends was the victim of one of the most nasty and pointless terror campaigns I’ve ever seen. Essentially this quiet, nice, mom makes bows and sells them on Etsy as a side hustle. For this purpose, she had some of her friend’s kids model the bows, all of whom were white. She was threatened by a black social media influencer who said she would run a campaign telling everyone she was a racist and ruin her business if she didn’t showcase her bows with black girls. The poor mom complied.

The Karen phenomenon really took off during Covid, where nasty busybodies realized how much institutional power they had and relished in destroying people. In my personal experience I had a male Karen in the form of a bagger in a nearby Kroger try to keep me out of the store for not wearing a mask. He went as far as trying to get the manager to ban me, though he had no authority to do so.

Still, through all this I underestimated how destructive these people are. While it’s obvious they are capable of ruining friendships, scaring people into compliance, and generally being a nuisance, this still understates their true impact. In the last week, the actions of a single Karen have literally taken bread out of families’ mouths and destroyed an entire network of moms working for the common good.

Stealing Bread from the Mouths of the Poor

When you go into fancy supermarkets, it’s likely you’re going to see lots of high-end stuff. Some of these are because of the ingredients used, and many are because of ingredients NOT used. In this case, it is the expensive artisan bread that uses only organic flour, water, and salt. They don’t even use dry yeast, using sourdough instead. These breads are fantastic and incredibly healthy but go to waste fast. One of the biggest examples of the joke that anyone in America is truly starving is the fact that this company does not send these almost expired breads to food banks because they don’t want them. People who go to food banks prefer the sugary and cheap white breads in your standard grocery store.

My wife knew someone who knew someone (mom networks are incredible) that had a contact in a local baking company where they got permission to get the almost expired bread from stores in the area, put them in a truck, and deliver them to families and others who wanted it. Our local Church had a peanut butter and jelly ministry where they would deliver sandwiches, chips, and other small lunch items to the homeless. They were interested in getting some free bread because of their shoestring budget and requested a couple dozen loaves.

This, along with several other families being on board, made it easily worth it to drive hundreds of loaves of high-quality bread around to wanting families. Our family stocked our freezer with around forty or fifty loaves, while other families took even more (a lot of these moms have 6+ kids). Our Church had their “PB&J Party” where we made the sandwiches with the free bread, the tired moms got quality food that didn’t require constant baking, and a network of people worked together to makes life a little easier for everyone. Everyone’s finances lightened a little, and the small baking company got to do meaningful service at no expense.

It happened like clockwork the second time, then the third time, with two-month intervals in between. Recently, when my wife was inquiring about the next shipment, she got a terse, subdued response. The company wasn’t doing it anymore.

It ends up one of the recipients of the free bread got into a heated argument with their staff. According to her, she found a chunk of wood in one of the loaves. Given they bake their bread on wooden pallets, a faulty one might have chipped and made its way in. The staff member did what anyone does and ask what they can do for her. Mind you, this is already above and beyond what was necessary, given the bread was FREE after all. The lady, livid, wasn’t interested in good faith negotiation. She wanted revenge, and said she was going to report the incident to the FDA, which she did.

The company, understandably, decided this entire ordeal was not worth the hassle and discontinued the charity service, likely giving the excess bread to farmers to feed to their animals. High quality, designer bread now goes to waste simply because that lady got irate. Now the church needs to buy the cheap bread from the store, and a dozen or so parents saw their food budget go up, and their oven baking more to feed their brood of children. We are trying to contact the bakers, explaining the good they were doing, but aren’t optimistic. They did a charitable act and got punched in the mouth in return, all the while having their company put in danger by an unscrupulous woman siccing the authorities on them. They don’t have the lawyers to deal with it, even if they wanted to.

We have no idea who the culprit was, though I assume our contact knows. She didn’t relay the information. I would like to think that the culprit would be embarrassed by the trouble she caused to a local baker, the mom network she hurt, the good-will destroyed, but I doubt it. She probably got a good rush of power in beating down enemies who slighted her. She was probably embellishing the story to her friends within hours of calling the FDA, exclaiming how reckless the company was, how she could have choked, and how unapologetic they were. She likely has the story of her victimhood queued up for repeating hundreds of times to relay to sympathetic audiences. Rest assured; this likely wasn’t the first time she wrecked a good thing or terrified someone into compliance. She probably ratted out her classmates in elementary school. She likely was the sniveling Mean Girl in High School. She likely started water cooler gossip about a co-worker she didn’t like. She was probably the first to write bad reviews on businesses who didn’t follow Covid protocols to her standards.

I could go on for a long time with examples. I could talk about the lady terrorized my neighbors, one of the kindest and generous families I’ve ever met, going as far as to take them to court while over a simple HOA dispute. She also threatened to sue her softspoken concer-stricken neighbor when their two dogs got in a mild and inconsequential fight, culminating with the poor lady eventually leaving the neighborhood. She so poisoned interactions in our suburb that people stopped planning block parties, and only now after she’s gone have things went back to normal.

I could talk about the rich dad whose daughter took piano lessons from my wife. He got angry when my wife justly said his kids weren’t practicing enough and removed them from the studio, then demanded a refund from my wife and threatened character assassination through contacting music pedagogy organizations in our area if he didn’t get his way.

There’s no end, and the limited acceptable means of conflict resolution allows crybullies to thrive. In earlier times, there were punishments now deemed barbaric by our modern sensibilities. At first glance you can see why. There was the Scold’s Bridle, a deeply uncomfortable contraption designed to make the wearer unable to speak. There were the stocks, where rabblerousers would get placed so everyone can jeer and throw produce at them. They were brutal, humiliating, and totally foreign to modern sensibilities and you wonder what was wrong with the deranged people who instituted them.

Then you deal with the type of person the punishment was designed for, and understand. While largely directed at women, some men were sentenced to such punishments also. The villagers understood the gossip, back-biting, and disorder caused by these people threatened their cohesion and made their lives miserable, and measures needed to be taken to put them in their place. While we can’t go back to tried-and-true methods, the issue seems to be sorting itself out.

The Low-Trust Vibe Shift

The Karen personality uses her weakness as a weapon, putting herself in a position where any sort of retaliation places her as the victim. She understands her antics only work if authorities will instinctually have her back. These also require a risk-free confrontation, where her abusing and harassing a victim has no chance of retaliation. They are spiritual and physical cowards that will only cause trouble if they know their victim can’t fight back. It requires everyone thinking they’re on the same team, with a predictable authority structure and social network with no surprises. That’s becoming less and less the case. My last example notwithstanding, I’ve seen shifts in perspective that might spell their doom.

We have a resident of our neighborhood who is a hyper-feminist shitlib. Every election-cycle her lawn is littered with campaign signs for all the worst people running for office. You know the crazy lady with the Ginsberg “I dissent” and “We won’t go back” bumper stickers? That’s her. Unsurprisingly, she also had notoriously thin skin, going so far as to complain on the neighborhood Facebook page when I put a pro-life sign on our lawn in an attempt to bully us to take it down.

This election, she did her usual thing. Soon, though, the signs were stolen from her yard. She put more out, and they were stolen again. She posted the neighborhood Facebook page, exclaiming how this was illegal and grandstanding about how she would continue to plant yard signs on her lawn. A few years ago, both conservatives and liberals would defend her right, as insufferable as she was. Instead, nobody cared.

While I don’t condone stealing people’s yard signs, and Karens can come from Republicans as well as Democrats (a couple of my examples were Trump supporters), there’s the new vibe of our new low-trust reality that we’re not going to bat to defend simple acquaintances, nor people we don’t share the same worldview with. Whether you blame this on Covid, BLM, immigration, or the hollowing of American institutions, the high-trust civics of the last century has gasped its last breath.

Cancel culture was the first element of power the Karen lost. I read with amusement when a man from The Huffington Post, forgetting it’s not 2016 anymore, tried to harass The Watergate Hotel into cancelling The Passage Press Coronation Ball. The hotel’s response was delicious.

“The Watergate Hotel prides itself on being a luxury destination that reflects the values of inclusivity and respect. As a hotel with a long-standing reputation for excellence, we prioritize the safety, comfort, and dignity of our guests and our dedicated team of employees.”

In the service industry, this is as close as you get to someone giving you the middle finger. The spiritual Gollums got drunk with perceived power for years, and now it’s coming down on them like a bad hangover.

As trust weakens, so does the environment where Karens thrive. She can no longer count on a homogenous culture to take her side, but may be dealing with essentially a warring tribe, her attempts to manipulate people possibly causing animosity between two rival tribes to spiral out of control and put her directly in the crosshairs. Also, even if she’s trying to take someone in her own tribe down a peg, others are far less likely to tolerate someone damaging group cohesion. The Karen is only tolerated in an environment of abundance and safety. The once predictable authorities that took their side during Covid and BLM are now far more heterogeneous, and calling upon them now bears of real risk of going poorly for them.

This has permeated to the corporate sphere also. I’ve noticed customer service is now much terser and suspicious. A few years ago most companies would take defective items back, no questions asked. Now when we tried to take back a few defective Christmas items they asked for extensive documentation about how the item was handled to ensure they were handled properly. While things still got worked out, the high-trust “customer is always right” mindset has turned far more defensive. I don’t consider this an effect of greedy corporations either, but dealing more and more with dishonest actors that damaged their bottom line. The Karen can only get what she wants by being a dishonest node in an honest system. That’s not the case anymore.

In the end, what will end the Karen isn’t a medieval Scold’s Bridle brought to modern use, or a new technological mechanism, but a change in group dynamics that has no time or patience for this type of personality. While I applaud the demise of the Karen, I mourn how it came to be. While there will always be some of them among us, we can collectively sigh relief their numbers will dwindle as tribalism continues to take over. For those that stay in their ways, we can use more…. unique methods to keep them in line.

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