I AM WHITE, from a working class background and now in my 50s, and I tend to not just ‘be kind’ when someone tries to make off with what is mine. Call me a Karen.
Scottish Nationalist Mhairi Black just did. She has just told the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that gender critical arguments are fuelled by ’50 something Karens’ and ‘akin to white supremacy’. Well pardon me, Mhairi. I am happy to be a Karen but tell you what? I’ll never be a Mhairi. I know it’s a bit unfair to select a name and then make judgements about a person. But that’s the Karen in me. You do it to others, then it’s only fair I do it to you.
From what I can see, a ‘Mhairi’ is a fake Glasgow hard-woman who swears a lot and hangs around with powerful groups (such as men) and feels that the views of, say, women or older people are to be dismissed.
Usually lower middle class, and from a nice area and background but who is known for an exaggerated accent which doesn’t grate intensely on the nerves of some voters, a Mhairi is not like other girls. Other girls are stupid and boring to a Mhairi.
Debates with a Mhairi are to be avoided as reasoning without logic feels a bit insensible and a bit thick. (God what happened education?) Anyone who disagrees with a Mhairi is just not very nice. Or a Nazi, or Hitler, or a Tory. Out the window goes the sense, when a Mhairi walks in the room.
A Mhairi is like a fly swat of reasoning, slapping down and maiming any buzzing logic in a room until logic is wiped out and all that’s left is a slogan-shrieking Mhairi, grinning fiendishly as she thinks of how clever she was for killing debate.
Here’s an example of when a Mhairi is needed. A woman finds herself being raped, by a penis-wielding thug. She finds herself in court saying what happened and refers to said thug as ‘he’. An objection is raised because now said thug rapist is a woman and is now (say) Gillian. When Gillian is found guilty and her crime is recorded as a woman and she wants to attend a woman’s prison, the actual victim is a bit cheesed off and insists on questioning the sense of it all.
A Mhairi would then ask her ‘are you good people or bad people?’. A Mhairi would have been ejected from any sensible debate in the past when adults would talk with nuance. But it works today as the world of adults hads been replaced by half-witted children and nuance and discussions have been replaced by ‘shut up Uggo’.
Worth mentioning of course that the black man and woman of course must be pleased that Mhairi Black is with them, in 2023 and can use the whole civil rights movement to leapfrog and score some point. When Martin Luther King Jr had a dream, it is possible that his dream included Mhairi Black dismissing views of a minority group because of their colour and class group.
But probably not.
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Photo of Mhairi Black – https://www.flickr.com/photos/paisleyorguk/28344610275/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56930364
