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 dependant life was her firmly and delibertely 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.
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Hamas Killed My Wokeness
ALEX OLSHONSKY
In high school in the early 2000s, I assumed the role of Palestine in our semesterlong “Model U.N.” class. It was, in part, a feeble act of rebellion against spending weekends at a Conservative synagogue during my angstiest years.
Although my comprehension of the Middle East conflict was in its infancy, an innate sense of justice drove me to defend the Palestinian cause. To characterize my choice as merely “rebellion,” then, doesn’t capture the full picture. My mother, a New Yorker with fierce feminist beliefs, raised me with quintessentially progressive Jewish values. I was taught that we, as Jews, stand with the oppressed—because we were the oppressed. This sentiment was often reinforced by my grandparents who arrived in America penniless, the Nazis hounding at their heels.
I took my role seriously, making it my mission to call for an immediate halt to the bulldozing of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza. I plunged into extensive research and armed myself with the knowledge to effectively champion a two-state solution—a belief I passionately held in high school and continue to endorse today.
Later, as a man in his 20s, it was only natural that I found myself firmly situated within the progressive left. I never once questioned my political home. Guided by my Jewish values, during the George Floyd tragedy and the racial reckoning that followed, I wholeheartedly embraced anti-racism initiatives. I read Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and I even took on the role of facilitating international dialogues on collective sense-making and healing. I strove to be a good “white ally.” Truly, I did.
Then came a flexion point: During a 2021 Bay Area psychotherapy training, in a “processing session” around race, a woman vulnerably shared her firsthand experience with a horrific act of antisemitic hatred. To my astonishment, the two facilitators, both white women, chastised her—yes, chastised—stressing the session’s emphasis on anti-Black racism. This episode unveiled a disconcerting bias in this community that routinely minimized antisemitism, to the point it was no longer considered “legitimate” racism. The young Jewish woman who’d shared was cowed into silence. From within my depths, I could hear my grandfather’s groan from eternity: This, still, here?
At that moment, it became clear to me that “wokeness,” or whatever term we may use to describe the new progressive social justice ideology, didn’t seem fully compatible with the perspective I had developed in a family that was very liberal because of our lineage of Holocaust survivors.
Since then, I’ve struggled to find my political footing while maintaining a commitment to the pursuit of truth and justice. I started noticing the sinister shadow of postmodern progressivism everywhere: a seeming insistence on “pluralism” that, in practice, often lacks genuine embodiment and quickly devolves into its own form of dogmatic and reductive tribalism.
I began to feel as though I had been baited into an a priori virtuous worldview that, in a twisted way, sows more division than it does healing; more concerned, as it is, with retribution than reconciliation. That my Judaism was utterly swept away (even shadow-demonized) in the context of this conversation only left me more disillusioned.
Any ideology that ‘justifies’ or minimizes the tragedy of civilian casualties is broken and perverse.
Yet my affiliation with progressivism persisted. Say what one will about the oversimplifications and occasional insincerities of the progressive left, I told myself, their hearts were in the right place.
Then, two weeks ago, Hamas grotesquely murdered 1,400 Israeli citizens, including 270 at a pro-peace music festival, a gathering my friends and I would have joyously attended if we were in the Holy Land. While these events were deeply disturbing to me, and all fellow members of the diaspora, what was even more shocking was the response from segments of the online left back home. These are progressive groups that, ostensibly, should cherish all human life and abhor all wanton violence.
Instead, many celebrated—yes, celebrated—these attacks as a form of “anti-colonialist resistance.” Memes circulated, like the now infamous Chicago #BLM paratrooper, that quite literally glorified an unimaginable slaughtering. Student groups at Harvard decried Israel as “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ attack; groups at the University of Virginia went a step further in saying that “colonized people can resist occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary”; and groups at Tufts took the cake by praising Hamas’ ingenious creativity.
The straw that broke my proverbial “progressive” back occurred last Thursday, when students at a high school in the Bay Area, my home for the last 15 years, were seen chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They marched in the hallways of a public school ringing the jihadist rallying call that implicitly calls for the erasure of the State of Israel. And all those who live within it.
Do these high schoolers, who are the same age I was when I debated on behalf of Palestine in Model U.N., grasp the underlying antisemitic implications of their words? Or might they simply be aligning with a far-left mindset that unreservedly and reductively supports the “oppressed”?
Zooming out, it has become clear to me, and devoid of the Israeli-Palestinian context, there’s a dark reality: Our Western culture is riddled with ambient antisemitism. Screeds by such celebrities as Kanye West testify to the fact. As Israel is pulled into a conflict governed by jihadist game theory—where civilians are intentionally used as shields so that dead children can be broadcast as propaganda puppets on social media—antisemitism has and surely will continue to intensify around the world. In London, antisemitic hate crimes have already risen by 1,350%. Watch it grow, worldwide.
Yet, it’s the latter question—how so many hypereducated students have steadfastly embraced far-left ideology—that raises my greatest concern for our future. This should not have to be said, but if you find yourself mourning some civilian deaths while celebrating any others, there’s an objective problem with your worldview. And you. The notion that one can distill our world’s most complex, historically dynamic, and challenging conflict into simplistic binaries is so utterly absurd that it clearly exposes the shortcomings of “woke” ideology. Or any dogmatism, for that matter.
Outside of lacking vital historical context, I’ve been aghast to learn that this branch of the progressive left does not seem to understand why such horrors were committed upon Israeli citizens. Unfortunately, there is an explanation beyond “colonial resistance”—radical jihadism. Granted, not all forms of jihadism are based on terrorism, and all Muslims are, of course, not jihadists. But make no mistake: The ones who are responsible for these brutal acts of murder, rape, and mutilation are radical jihadists. Groups like Hamas are, quite literally, death cults that are not consequentially distinct from Nazism—the death cult that systematically annihilated my grandparents’ entire extended family. The cult that the Allied West had no confusion about needing to destroy. Hamas’ stated intention is the eradication, first, of Israeli Jews—then all Jews everywhere. That is a genocidal agenda. The IDF, with all its flaws, which are numerous and sometimes deadly, avoids civilian Palestinian deaths whenever and however possible. That is the opposite of a genocidal agenda.
I truly wish it were as simple as reducing this conflict to an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. I am waiting, with horror, as Israel prepares for a ground invasion that will claim thousands of thoroughly innocent lives. I do not want any Gazan children to be collateral damage. My Jewish values, along with what I’ve learned advocating for Palestinian statehood, continue to affirm my belief in the importance of upholding the rights of Palestinian civilians.
Any ideology that “justifies” or minimizes the tragedy of civilian casualties is broken and perverse. That is not to say that all such casualties are avoidable. Reform Jews of my generation are unified in a desire for a two-state solution that provides Palestinians with safety, dignity, and rights. Over the past two weeks, I have heard no American Jew wish violence upon Gazans; I’ve witnessed many American so-called progressives who wish violence upon Jews. In response to raped teenagers and headless babies, a common leftist online refrain has been: “What did you think decolonization looked like?”
That’s not progressivism. That’s bloodthirst.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/hamas-slaughtered-wokeness
****************************************************The Food Insecurity Lie
John Stossel
President Joe Biden says 24 million Americans "suffer from food insecurity!"
News anchors were shocked that there is "food insecurity in the richest country in the world!" ABC hosts turned "insecurity" into "hunger."
But in my new video, Rachel Sheffield, who researches welfare policy at the Heritage Foundation, explains, "Food insecurity is not the same thing as hunger. It just means that they had to rely on cheaper foods, store-brand alternatives ... or reduce variety."
Really? The alarm about "food insecurity" is based on that? Well, yes. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its fine print, admits that "for most food-insecure households, the inadequacies were in the form of reduced quality and variety of food rather than insufficient quantity."
"They always want to create a crisis," I say to Sheffield.
"Government programs want to keep themselves going," she replies.
She's talking about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; the Women, Infants and Children program; the National School Lunch Program and the other constantly growing handouts that make up America's welfare system.
The biggest effect of these handouts is to harm the people they want to help. They harm people by making them dependent on government.
Before government's War on Poverty began, Americans were steadily lifting themselves out of poverty. Year after year, the number of people living below the poverty line dropped.
That natural progress wasn't good enough for us.
We (I include myself because I believed it, too) who wanted to reduce poverty declared "War on Poverty." Welfare checks poured out. The poverty rate continued to drop for seven years. But then progress stopped.
What happened? Why did progress stop?
Because handouts taught people to be dependent.
Welfare payments did something remarkable. They created a new class of dependent people -- a nearly permanent "underclass," where generation after generation lives in poverty.
Today, government does things to perpetuate that, like claiming millions of Americans are "food insecure." Charities raise money using the same language.
But the opposite is true.
"Americans consume too many calories," says Sheffield. "Food insecure" adults are more likely to be obese.
When that became obvious, activists promoted a new myth: Poor people are overweight because they live in "food deserts," neighborhoods where healthy foods are much less available. Michelle Obama talked about that a lot. She claimed some poor people had to take three busses to buy healthy food.
Nonsense.
When government officials first labeled "food deserts,' they deviously ignored small stores, only counting stores with more than $2 million in sales. It's true that one "food desert" Obama visited didn't have a supermarket. But it had multiple smaller businesses selling fruits and vegetables. Government officials just didn't count them.
Now the media claim college students are food insecure.
But most college goers gain weight at school! At school!
It's bizarre that when obesity is the bigger problem, government hypes food insecurity. But of course, "that creates the rationale for expanding food assistance programs, expanding the welfare system," explains Sheffield.
Expanding welfare seems to be the government's goal. "We've spent more on the War on Poverty than all the military wars combined in the United States without any success," says Sheffield.
Really? More than all our wars combined? Well, yes. We've spent $23 trillion on the War on Poverty. So far.
"Actually," says Sheffield, "it's been a success in one way. It increases dependence on the federal government." That's what bureaucrats consider success.
The handouts are good for the people who dole out the money. They're good for politicians who get to look like "good guys."
But they're bad for poor people.
Before government handouts began, private charities helped people escape poverty. They encouraged people to learn how to take care of themselves. Work gradually lifted people out of poverty. "Work also has a lot of other benefits," Sheffield points out. "It builds a greater sense of community, gives people access to resources and friend networks that help them improve in their lives."
Encouraging self-sufficiency is so much better than what government does.
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/11/01/the-food-insecurity-lie-n2630606
*************************************************American tourist shocked to see $15,000 bike left safe, unattended on Singapore street
“The ultimate Singapore culture shock: a $15k bike left unattended,” Nick Whitaker wrote on X, sharing a photo of a yellow Pinarello Dogma F12 leaning against a wall next to a coffee shop.
The post has been viewed one million times on the platform since Monday, with users highlighting the obvious contrast in crime rates between Singapore and the United States.
Singapore, an island nation home to 5.6 million people, is notoriously tough on even petty crime and as a result has some of the lowest crime rates in the world.
In 2021, Singapore was ranked third in The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index, behind Copenhagen and Toronto, although the authors noted in terms of crime rates Singapore scored equal best next to Tokyo and Osaka.
Whitaker, founding editor of Works in Progress magazine — part of payments platform Stripe — is based in New York, which like other major US cities is experiencing an unprecedented rise in crime.
Many users questioned why Singapore could control crime while the US struggled. “About a month [ago] in Singapore, a woman left an expensive bag on an outdoor table to hold it,” commented travel writer Charlie Hub.
The island nation is known to be strict on petty crimes.
“She then went into the McDonald’s at Raffles City Mall to order. My old NYC brain realised what had been out of place. I no longer needed my urban danger vigilance. It was a deeply cathartic experience.”
Finance professional Lyall Taylor added, “When I first moved to Singapore, I was stunned to see a friend I was meeting at a busy inner-city restaurant for lunch, ‘reserve’ us a spare table by leaving his phone unattended on said table while we ordered at the interior counter outside of eyeshot. He had no concern whatsoever of it being swiped.”
Mr Taylor claimed crime was “virtually non-existent in Singapore” due to “extremely strong deterrence … coupled with care about who they let in the country” that had created a “remarkably safe country with a pervasive, productively law-abiding culture”.
One X user argued “this should be the norm everywhere” and “anything less is a policy failure”, while another agreed “we could have this here too”.
“This is the type of ordinary, first-world behaviour that surprises Americans because their country has fallen so low, that the concept of civility is outlandishly incomprehensible to them,” one person wrote.
Another said, “Aspiring to this level of law and order should be like aspiring to clean drinking water: obvious and uncontroversial. Tolerating routine crime and disorder is like tolerating a poisoned water supply.”
Former NFL player Jake Bequette wrote, “We could live like this in America, but our leaders decide every day they’d rather have crime.”
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) warns travellers that Singapore has strict laws, including caning and the death penalty for serious drug offences.
It also harshly penalises so-called “outrage of modesty” offences or being drunk and disorderly in public.
“You should avoid any action that could be interpreted as molestation, including inappropriate touching or language,” DFAT says. “Penalties include jail, fines and caning.”
Singapore also has “strict laws and penalties for acts that are legal or minor offenses in Australia.”
“These include smoking in public places or restaurants, spitting, importing or chewing gum, chewing tobacco, littering and jaywalking,” DFAT says.
“Penalties are severe for crimes that affect social, racial or ethnic harmony. These include racial insults and promoting ill will and hostility between different races or classes.”
The number of physical crime cases rose 5.4 per cent in the first six months of 2023 to 10,080, but remained lower than pre-Covid numbers, according to the Singapore Police Force
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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