How ‘Jessica’ became the internet’s millennial stereotype

Helen Coffey, The Independent

Way back in 2020, the question was first floated on Reddit: if “Karen” was the derogatory name given to baby boomers and older Gen X women — usually white — who apparently stuck their noses into other people’s business and demanded to “see the manager” at the slightest provocation, what was the millennial equivalent? Discourse rose and subsided online at various points over the intervening five years, with a spread of contenders mercilessly thrown to the wolves. Those whose names were in the firing line did their best to provide alternatives, but despite impassioned pleas for Ashley, Jennifer and even Lisa, one name has now emerged victorious. The modern “Karen” is officially — according to certain corners of the internet, at any rate — Jessica.

My heart goes out to anyone cursed with that moniker, including my own beloved niece. No amount of fame or money can shield against the unwelcome (and sexist) connotations, as Alba, Biel and Simpson will soon discover. Just as Karens everywhere found that their name had gone from unremarkable to wildly insulting almost overnight, so my generation is having its own unfair moment of reckoning. And it is unfair. While finding a derogatory term for the kind of Caucasian woman who would call the police on a Black man innocently birdwatching is understandable, the term “Karen” swiftly devolved into something far more misogynistic. It wasn’t long before the barb was being used to shame middle-aged women for having the temerity to complain, be “demanding” or speak up and exercise their agency, rather than remaining quietly submissive people-pleasers. And shaming women into silence is, whichever way you slice it, extremely problematic.

In fact, the judge presiding over an employment tribunal in June last year said that calling someone a “Karen” is “borderline racist, sexist and ageist”. Back in 2021, meanwhile, comedian Shaparak Khorsandi dubbed it “a sexist, ageist term” in a piece for The Independent: “The ‘Karen’ meme began as a way to call out a certain kind of person but now is being used to describe any woman of a certain age, just as ‘mansplaining’ gave us a license to berate and mock any man.” To be clear, Karen wasn’t landed on by accident in the mid to late 2010s — and neither was Jessica. In fact, both choices were bound to put as many noses out of joint as possible, because both names were picked precisely because of their popularity.

In the 1960s, Karen was the third and fourth most popular girls’ name in the UK and US respectively. This meant that by 2017, when memes featuring the “Karen” stereotype started going viral, those girls had grown up to become women in their late fifties to late sixties. It made sense, then, to use a name that would immediately be an obvious shorthand for a specific age demographic. Calling someone a “Karen” conjured up a middle-aged woman with a certain kind of hairstyle (a short, choppy cut in the manner of Sharon Osbourne) who might have entered her entitled era — the time of life when she expected things to be a certain way and wouldn’t hesitate to complain if they weren’t up to scratch.

Likewise, officious millennial women have now been christened with an age-specific epithet. As one popular social media video outlines — using graphs, no less — of the names previously being bandied around as potential Karen replacements, Jennifer and Jessica had the highest rates during the 1980s in the US. Throughout that decade, the pair ruled the roost: Jennifer was the top dog from 1980 to 1985, with Jessica usurping it for the next five years. Ashley jumped up to second place in the latter half of the decade — hence its inclusion as a potential heir to the Karen throne. Jessica continued to dominate throughout the first half of the Nineties before dropping off in popularity, making it, like its predecessor, very much tied to a particular generation — in this case, millennials.

But, as was evidenced by the original choice of “Karen”, popularity is only one component; it takes more than that for a name to become a slur. By rights, Lisa or Susan — the former the No 1 in the States, the latter No 1 and No 3 in England and the US respectively during the 1960s — should have been crowned. But there was just something about the name Karen, specifically; you really could imagine a certain type of woman demanding to be taken into the stock room because she didn’t believe the shop assistant had checked it “properly” the first time round. It turns out that “Jessica” feels a similarly natural fit for these unflattering character traits, too. “I’m guessing it’s going to be Jessica because, I don’t know, I feel like ‘Jennifer’... Jen seems nice,” as @wouldyoukindly broke it down in an Instagram video musing on which name would naturally take up the Karen mantle. “Jessica will mess you up. Jess is going to fight somebody if she gets angry. So I think it’s going to be Jessica. I just feel it.

“I’m sorry Jessicas out there — but the next Karen’s going to be Jessica.” Little has been said, so far, about what kind of millennial-specific behaviour would mark one out as a “Jessica” in this new epoch.