I’ve always been suspicious of women who make a living through their physical beauty. I see a few problems with modeling as a career. First, you don’t have to produce anything useful that requires understanding the real world, like a programmer or a nurse. Second, you focus a lot on your appearance, and that’s not healthy, since it all fades out by age 35 anyway. Women who get a lot of attention for free typically don’t know how to treat men, either. They don’t learn because they don’t have to learn.

With that in mind, here’s an article by an aging 38-year-old model that illustrates the problem:

Earlier this month I opened the door to a bouquet of flowers.

They were from yet another man who wants to date me. He’s 35, tall, dark and handsome.

[…]And this week, as the gifts roll in from admirers for Valentine’s Day — I have already received two…

[…]I am 38 and have been single for four years.

So, the first thing to point out about this is that it confirms what I was saying about pretty women. Look at the way she talks about how all these men are paying attention to her. Like it or not, her worldview is going to be conditioned by this attention she’s getting from men. She isn’t having to write code to get attention. Or set a fracture. Or do anything. She just gets it because she was born with good looks. And she doesn’t see that it is her job to 1) prepare her character for attracting a man who wants to commit, or 2) choose men who are interested in commitment. Her job is just to be pretty, and then tell everyone how much attention she’s getting from men. Men who will not commit to her. She is mistaking the attention for intent to marry. But men who pay attention to dumb, pretty women don’t intend to marry them. They just want to pump and dump them.

But she doesn’t see her failure to prepare herself for commitment and to prefer commitment-minded men as her problem. On the contrary – her singleness at 38 is the fault of men being worthless:

And I hate to break it to any other single women in their late thirties, but all the decent men in our age bracket have been taken.

[…]While I work out every day, these men look a decade older.

Beer bellies, bad manners, little respect for single women and minimal hygiene — I’ve seen it all on the apps.

Over the past four years I’ve been on almost 500 dates trying to find Mr Right.

And while I have become something of an expert on dating apps — last year I got a congratulations from Tinder for getting 25,000 likes for my profile — unfortunately, I am still looking for The One.

My theory is all the good men were snapped up when they were young. All that’s left is the dregs.

Now, she doesn’t think that she is the dregs for being 38 and being completely unsuited to marriage. She thinks that men are the dregs – because they don’t have an attractive height and appearance. That’s what she’s looking for – and that’s the only thing she’s looking for. She’s had relationships with men, but they just LIVED WITH HER. They never committed, because she wasn’t looking for a man who would commit, she was looking for a man with appearance, height, fitness and hygiene. Someone who looked as good as her.

Doubt me? Read her own words – this is what she values in a man:

During my 500 dates, the only guy I have seriously dated was my age and had the best hair and teeth in the world.

He even had a “proper” job and took me out for fancy dinners. Alas, he wasn’t ready to settle down — or something like that.

Apart from that, there was the guy who looked like Superman on his dating profile but turned up with a long white Santa beard. His body had gone to pot and he was wearing unwashed clothes.

Then there was the wealthy consultant who took me to his club where cocktails were thirty quid a pop. He was generous but knew the value of nothing. Plus, he continually scoffed salt and vinegar nuts on our date — the odour was revolting.

[…]Then there are the beer bellies. If a man has one, I know we’ll have nothing in common as I’m active…

And so on. Everything is about appearance. She’s looking for exactly what she is herself: a pretty face. That’s what she knows, understands and values. And she has no idea that the willingness to commit is not related to external appearances. The important thing for her is the man’s appearance. And that’s why she has 5 billion dates and no commitment. Only a certain kind of man commits. It’s going to be related to his personal character – religion, morality, etc. – more than it’s related to what she can see with her eyes.

In order for a man to stick with a woman through childbirth and aging, he’s going to have to have some reason to value her beyond youth and beauty. And not every man has such reasons. That’s why it’s the woman’s job to do two things. 1) to develop the kinds of character traits that are likely to attract a commitment-minded man, like fitness, femininity, vulnerability, trust, kindness, etc. and 2) to evaluate men and separate the ones who have a worldview that values women for more than youth and beauty.

In the case of Christian men, we are looking for women who have self-control, sobriety, chastity, fidelity, etc. And we are especially attracted to women who take God’s goals as their own, and work independently to promote the things that God thinks are valuable. Women who can defend God’s existence and reputation are highly regarded. Women who put others above their own selfish desires, especially children and animals. Women who are content at home with a non-fiction book. Women who don’t seem to waste money on entertainment, fun and thrills. The woman has to have what commitment-ready men want, and she has to know which men are ready for commitment. SHE CAN’T READ THAT WITH HER EYES OR WITH HER FEELINGS. She’s going to have to ask questions and investigate what he demonstrates about his character with his actions and accomplishments.

I have spent over 24 years in information technology, and most of the companies were large IT companies. Large IT companies tend to emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion more than smaller companies, which have to perform in order to stay afloat. And that means making sure there is an equal balance of genders, ethnicities, etc. in every different area.

Here is a very interesting post on the relationship advice forum of Reddit:

Hi all I’m posting this on an alt because I know a few of my friends are following me on here and I don’t want this spilling out until I have some clear thoughts on what I want to do.

The author – who uses Commonwealth spelling – has a short summary of her post at the top:

A colleague (27M) joined our firm last year and since then he has had zero issues socialising with the guys we work with but always finds an excuse or says no to hanging out with the girls after work, even if we go out together as a whole he rarely talks to us and its making some of my friends uncomfortable.

And then here is the long version:

So early last year our firm hired Dan (27M). In the first few weeks he was really quiet and didn’t talk much and that’s just how we thought he was. Every conversation with him was short and to the point and never deviated from work, asides from pleasantries (Have a nice weekend etc). About 2 months in he started becoming a bit more friendly with the guys in our office and they would hang out every so often and have normal conversations. However, whenever any of the girls in the office tried to do so he would quickly change the conversation back to work or just not reply. Even now after a year of Dan working with us he straight up refuses to socialise with the girls in the office and it is making them feel uncomfortable. He avoids any discussion of himself outside of work related events and future plans and doesn’t ask any of the girls either. Where as he is, what I can only assume, pretty good friends with the guys in the office.

Even on work meals out to celebrate events he is only doing the bare minimum when it comes to conversation with the girls where again with the guys he talks to them like there is no problem whatsoever. I don’t know if I’m overreacting but one of the girls is considering go to HR about this because she is saying its creating a hostile work environment. Dan treats us like he treats clients we work with; cordial and strictly about business and its wearing thin now.

Any advice is appreciated.

Many young people today don’t see the workplace as being about work. They see it as a time of socializing. And they get angry when people don’t socialize with them. They want to be allowed into a man’s personal space, even though they are the kind of people who go straight to HR whenever anyone disagrees with them, or refuses to make them happy. Many of these women are single mothers who divorced the father of their kids.

I actually left my last job and took a lower salary job, because I was being harassed by a woman who had no college degree. Her official title was “Software Engineer”, but she didn’t write code. She just supervised deployments to production. She was very attractive, and had had cosmetic surgery done – her chest was super-sized. (I heard her explaining why she did it to one of the Indian workers one day). She was also about 6-8 years older than me. She started to get very angry with me for not giving her attention at work. She would come to my desk and talk about how politically conservative she was (she must have heard that I was conservative). But I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.

I blogged previously about a woman who accused a man of grooming her because he didn’t want to get more serious with her. Men are getting tired of this. If you know any young women who are wondering why men don’t talk to them, maybe it’s because many young women are not pleasant or safe to talk to. Even if a particular young unmarried woman is safe to talk to, men will judge her based on the majority of single, unmarried women. It’s just not safe for men to have non-business conversations in the workplace with young, unmarried women.

The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

A friend sent me a draft e-mail, that he wrote to a family member, who has rejected historic Christianity for progressive Christianity. He was asked to give the basics of salvation, and his attempt to explain the gospel to her is below. My advice included taking out the Christianese terms. Do you think he did a good job? I think his emphasis on what is not the gospel (what needs to be rejected) makes this a first-class explanation of the gospel.

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So, you’ve asked the 10,000 talent question (alluding to Matthew 18:23-35).  You are basically asking me what I think the Gospel is.  I’ll try to answer that in a minimalistic way, using my own characterization of it rather than just making doctrinal statements.

One must accept that there is a God, who is a higher authority than themselves.  How much one must first believe about that God is debatable, but candidate beliefs would be that He is personal (having a mind like, but greater than, ours), powerful, and the creator of this cosmos and everything in it — He owns it all.  Our natural intuition is to see beauty, order, complexity, and “design” in nature.  There is a difference in belief vs unbelief in that some think it is just the appearance of design and some acknowledge their intuition that it actually is designed.

One must acknowledge their moral intuitions, and recognize that there are actually right and wrong things in this world.  It’s not just whatever you want to do, or whatever society decides in a given time or culture.

Given that morality is then understood to be a transcendent thing (universal and independent of time and culture), the connection is made to God as the author of this moral law.

One must then recognize that he/she regularly fails to live up to this law, even according to just their meager understanding of it, and even by the standards of morality that they make up for other people.

One must not try to suppress this, or therapize it away.  One must recognize there is a problem and real moral culpability.  One must recognize that they feel guilty and have self-esteem issues because they actually do have guilt and issues.

One must make the connection between guilt and their standing before God.  Being good sometimes and in some ways does not erase the bad you do, past, present, or future.  One must be willing to bend the knee to God’s will regarding morality.

One must also come to see the moral failure (sin) in their lives as a bad thing that they’d like to be rid of, rather than excusing it as the fault of others, or revelling in it as part of the pleasure of life, or shrugging it off as just “who I am.”

One must appeal to God in these matters for both forgiveness and help in living as they should.

Given that God has provided a champion for the problem that humanity faces (the backstory of which not all will fully know), one whose heart is truly yielded to all these things will naturally and eagerly receive Word of this as Good News.  God has solved the seemingly irreconcilable demands of both justice and forgiveness in that champion.

Those with ears to hear will receive this solution — Jesus — and believe what He has done in life and on the cross for their sake — the resurrection being both confirmation of His divine authority and also the sign of the defeat of death which awaits us all, and is the only barrier between us and facing this God whom we fail at every turn.  They will believe on (or upon) Jesus as Lord and their means of salvation, surrendering dependence upon their own ideas of self-righteousness and earning the favor of God.

The outward expression that we have understood and accepted these things is that we have made Jesus Lord and committed ourselves to following Him, conform our character to His, resist our sinful inclinations, and are interested in learning all about Who God is and what has been done for us in Christ.

This commitment to the Lordship of Christ naturally leads to the acceptance of subsequent beliefs.  If Jesus is indeed Lord, then He holds all authority, and what He said and taught to His followers is our guide — the New Testament.  And if this is the divine story, as intended by God for men, then we have reason to believe that it is comprehensible to us, and He will insure (in spite of the fallibility of men and demonic plots) that its essential message will not be lost or corrupted until all things are competed.  Given that Jesus affirmed every categorical section of the Old Testament, and claimed to be its promised Messiah, then that, too, is a source of truth and understanding.

Those doctrines that are sometimes characterized as “essential” for salvation, are merely the highlights of this redemption narrative, which are those things being clear and consistent, and which indicate that someone has yielded themselves to the authority of Christ and the scriptures, and understands these things.  It is not that believing them is what saves, but they are what the saved naturally come to believe.  Confessing them is the tangible, verbal act of affirming the Gospel, but is not necessarily identical to a life committed to putting it into practice, which is saving faith.