THE PSYCHOLOGIST : TikTokers are Romanticizing the Stay- at-Home-Girlfriend Experience

TikTokers are Romanticizing the Stay- at-Home-Girlfriend Experience

The feminist writer excerpted below refers to history a lot but is very judgmental about it. She seems oblivious to the fact that men and women are different. And part of that difference is that women have always accepted the role of being economically supported by men. She is firmly convinced that that is always a bad thing. That women might live happily in that situation seems beyond her.

Her principal evidence for her beliefs is that her mother was unhappy as a bored housewife and became happier only when she got a job. I have no argument with that. I am sure there are other women who have had that experience. But generalizing that to ALL women is just plain dumb. As the old saying goes: "One man's meat is another's poison". Some women may be perfectly comfortable living in traditional sex roles. To deplore them doing so is simply arrogant.

Let me counterpose her examples two other examples from my own life

1. My mother was a classic stay-at-home mother. And she wanted nothing else. Hints from my hard-working father that she might get a job were firmly rebuffed. She lived entirely on the money his work brought in. A dependent life was her firmly and deliberately held choice. So was she happy? She mostly was. How do I know that? I know that because she was a compulsive talker, like rather a lot of women I know. And she did not stop talking when she was home alone. But a lot of the time I was home so she talked to me, kid though I was. And she talked with great frankness. I heard just about everything that passed through her head. She was quite a critic of other people but I can remember no occasion when she said she was unhappy or even looked unhappy. She read novels, had afternoon naps cooked very basic dinners and attended to her four children with great devotion. Her traditional role was a choice and she was happy with it. I think she was rather wise.

2. Not entirely coincidentally, I married a rather voluble lady who also thought that the traditional female role was a great racket for women. When I met her she was a single mother working with three children. We formed a good relationship and I soon told her she could quit work and become a full-time wife and mother. She leapt at it. She accepted my offer without reservation. She was profoundly glad that I enabled her to spend lots of time with her children while they were growing up. And she was NOT bored. I also gave her a small car and while the kids were at school, the car was rarely at home. She would frequently go out to go shopping, see friends, pursue hobbies and do anything that pleased her. She was a happy woman

So in MY experience, women who choose to be supported by men may make GOOD choices, choices that can suit them very well. I feel rather sorry for women who take the hard road, as feminists do

When I first discovered the stay-at-home-girlfriend (SAHG) viral trend on TikTok, I thought it was a new form of entertainment. I just couldn’t look away as I watched several of the videos.

I’m the last person who ever intentionally judges anyone for how they live their lives, but what I saw upset me. I couldn’t help it, I found the videos to be disturbing, regressive, and anti-feminist.

Was I really seeing what I thought? Is this a genuine new lifestyle trend or a gigantic ruse to drive Social Media views and make buckets of money?

Why would anyone want to be a stay-at-home girlfriend?
What is the stay-at-home-girlfriend trend? It’s typically a young GenZ woman who doesn’t work, relying primarily on her partner’s income.

The self-proclaimed leader of the SAHG movement who receives millions of views is TikToker Kay Kendel, 26, who showcases her routine in meticulous detail (as shown above).

Her daily life consists of performing household chores, drinking green drinks, managing hair and skin care, performing exercise regimes, and catering to her millionaire boyfriend, Luke Lintz, 23.

The trend, which started in 2020, is growing. TikTok videos with the hashtag #stayathomegirlfriend have more than 200 million views, which has raised lots of red flags for people like me.

The videos primarily portray decadent and luxurious lifestyles — showcased by mainly 20s, Caucasian, childfree women living off their partners.

How do aspiring young women hop onto the SAHG experience? The formula isn’t all that complicated. To succeed, they have to look hot, find a rich boyfriend (or girlfriend), and then create endless videos about their perfect lifestyle.

Even if you can pull it off and snag a rich boyfriend who hands over his credit cards, is the fantasy anything like reality?

Another TikTok trend is the sugar baby lifestyle, similar to the SAHG experience.

The #sugarbaby tag has been viewed 1.9 billion times on TikTok. The difference between the two submissive lifestyles of the SAHG and the Sugar Baby is whether you live with someone caring for you.

Naive people don’t realize the potential death-related dangers tied to entering the sugar baby arena. If you strip away the cool labels, SAHG and SugarBabies are just different names for the working girl.

A common denominator in all viral aspirational pay-to-play girlfriend trends is that they’re created by and designed for young girls and women. They emphasize attaining the shallow goals of picture-perfect hair, skin, make-up, and bodies.

The SAHG trend is harmful because it glorifies extreme weight loss, eating disorder culture, and unhealthy attitudes about food and weight. It also promotes a life of emptiness and subservience, which puts women at potential risk of abuse.

Influencers hop on the latest microtrends constantly being introduced.

Shockingly, many of the latest potentially harmful beauty trends are mistakenly labeled as ‘empowering’ and ‘feminist.’ They also imply female aging is the worst thing a woman can experience.

Feminists are constantly fighting against the reinforcement of gender norms and beliefs that aging is anti-feminist and ultimately supports patriarchal agendas.

https://medium.com/bitchy/tiktokers-are-romanticizing-the-stay-at-home-girlfriend-experience-fae482807aa6

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

TikTokers are Romanticizing the Stay- at-Home-Girlfriend Experience

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