WeaselCon, New York City, 02/20 at 4:30 pm

I am bungeeing through the New England area, and I do not have time to see everyone I would like.  Basically, Gini and I will be driving all night on Wednesday, having lunch at Babbo on Thursday, seeing Book of Mormon that evening, spending the day in New York to celebrate my Godson’s birthday on Friday, spending the day with my dear old Dad on Saturday, and driving back on Sunday.
But we do want to see you!
So here’s the deal: we have all of two hours free, and we’ll spend those two hours at the Beer Culture bar in New York City at 4:30 pm on Thursday, February 20th.  If you can read this, you’re welcome to show up and say hello to Gini and me.  (Though it’s nicer if you tell me you’re coming.)  It’s not a ton of time, but I’ll have a beer and happily say howdy.  We may get there earlier, depending on how Babbo goes – but we’re not rushing that fine meal, so no promises.
I will provide nametags.  I will also post a picture of what Gini and I are wearing that day on my Twitter feed, so you’ll have the best possible image of me.  I will also pontificate at length about the new corduroy pillows.
Feel free to show up, if you wish.  I like people.  So odds are pretty good I’ll like you.

Do Women Make Less Money? No, Yes, And Then Maybe Yes Again.

The Daily Beast debunks that old canard that women don’t make 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.  As they say, and correctly:

The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers.

So it’s not true, and I wish people would stop pushing that bad factoid.
…But on the other hand, it is true in a sense – because if you look at the source of the discrepancy as listed in that very article, it’s basically that “women enter fields that make less money.”  The ten least remunerative (and God, I love that word) majors are dominated by women, whereas the most-lucrative majors are infested with men.
So on the one hand, yes, women don’t make any less when compared to men – they just take crappier jobs.
And why do they take crappier jobs?  Quite possibly because, if you’ve been paying attention at all, the way women are systematically treated in the lucrative technical fields is so hostile that a lot of them quit.  (And that girls are systematically encouraged to not go into those fields by being given different toys, which subtly signal what’s okay for women to do.)
So yeah, trotting out that canard irritates me.  It’s not that if you place a woman next to a man, they earn significantly less* – it’s that women are steered via societal forces towards jobs that pay them less.  And fixing that problem requires a whole bunch of different solutions – ones where we have to look deeper at the questions of what women are encouraged to do, and why, and what can we do to make those careers more welcoming to women.
And – and I wish I could find a link I read a while back – there was a discussion of some of these high-paying and very technical professions, and how in other countries where women do flock to these professions, they tend to get paid less.  The theory was that when women crowd a profession, it becomes viewed as easier to do, and hence gets paid less.  And I can’t find that, so I can’t research it – stupid browser crash – but it passes my sniff test as something that could be true.  After all, nurses often know a hell of a lot more than doctors, but because nurses are largely women, they often get shrugged off as not knowing what they’re doing.  I’d have to look into it more, but who knows?
So there’s a problem.  To my mind, quoting the ol’ “women get paid less” makes the solution seems like a simple thing, as if we just passed a law that smashed wage discrimination this would all go away.  But it won’t.  The issue is more insidious, and deeper; we have layers of incentives and disincentives, in some cases, applied almost from birth, that quietly encourages women to move into fields that will reward them less.
That’s a deeper issue.  You have to combat that with other societal incentives.  And I don’t know all the ways we could fix that, but I’d at least like to see the issue focused on.
* – Which is not to say you can’t find pay disparities if you look for them, but on the whole the problem is different.  If you are saying, “Ferrett is not concerned about women earning less!” then you have clearly turned your brain off for the day.

JESUS CHRIST WE DO NOT NEED MEGGINGS

I AM SO ENRAGED I AM GOING TO TRY NOT TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS okay wait I’m gearing down wait I’ll talk normal now.
Let’s talk about “Meggings.”  These are leggings for men.  Yes, men, if you want to wear colorful skin-tight pantyhose-style things on your legs, you now can!
Except you totally could have before.  Like, you know, men have worn leggings for years – in military outfits, in ballet outfits, in all sorts of Renaissance wear.
You know what none of those guys had to do before?
Assign their clothing a different name to protect their precious fucking masculinity.
Look, I’m well on record for wearing nail polish – I like nail polish.  It makes my nails look pretty.  I like pretty.  And I’m comfortable enough in my guyhood that I don’t feel that I’m somehow sliding into Icky Girl Territory if I want to have something pretty on me.
And I especially don’t have to try to assign some existing product a whole new fucking name – like NAIL ARMOR – to ensure that nobody knows I’m doing something girly.  It’s not a “murse,” it’s a fucking purse, and yes maybe girls have purses but I don’t have to mutilate the language just to ensure that I’m not carrying icky icky girl stuff on my body.
When a girl wears jeans, she doesn’t have to call them “vajayjeans” so no one will accidentally mistake her for a guy.  (They have “girl jeans” because girls are usually different shapes than guys, but that’s just so we know where to shop.)  That’s because guy stuff is generally not considered so toxic that having it on your body sucks the hormones out of you.  I mean, sure, maybe if you start wearing a mustache it’ll be a girlstache, but simple items of clothing and decoration?  Fuck that noise.
Girls have leggings, and so do guys.  Girls wear purses, and so do guys.  Girls wear nail polish, and so do guys.  And maybe some jackholes will think you girly if you have these accoutrement on your person – but honestly?  Clutching your pretty pretty princess nails to your chest and shrieking, “This is NAIL ARMOR!  In MILITARY GREEN!” will not make these people think better of you.
It’s okay, dudes.  Wear your leggings proud.  Or not, because, well, they’re leggings, but you don’t have to make everything SUPER-MANLY to justify it on your person.
 

A Perfect Description

So it snowed here yesterday.  Like, really snowed.  Like eight-inch drifts everywhere, to the point where walking the dog down to the end of the block was literally all the exercise I could take; walking through deep snow is deep cardio, mang.
Gini took the evening shift, as she always does, and between the constant crush of snowplows packing the snow in and it riming over with ice, the snow had a hard crust.  Which made it no easier walking around the end of the block, where nobody ever shovels.
“I was struggling,” Gini told me when she got back.  “My feet were punching through the ice, and I had to yank my legs out of the morass.  Meanwhile, fucking light little Shasta here was walking across the top of the snow like she was goddamned Legolas!”
When I took her for a walk this morning, indeed.  I’m thrashing through the snow, she’s daintily walking across the top.  Just like goddamned Legolas.

Why Don't I Get Invited To Anthologies Like This?

Circlet Press would like you to write erotica about… the editorial staff of Circlet Press.  To wit:

Like A Circlet Editor is an anthology that plays off of how our readers imagine what working for Circlet must be like. The focus is not on the mundane work of editing manuscripts or running a business but on the fantasy on what it must be like to put together the hot and memorable Circlet books. The stories can be serious or satirical. We’re looking for stories 5,000-10,000 words in length that play on the fantasy of what it’s like to be part of Circlet Press. What sort of research does a Circlet editor have to do to ensure the hottest fantasies for a book? What might vampires or aliens or robots coming across a Circlet book make of how we’ve eroticized them? What really goes on at those editorial board meetings? Make it funny, make it sexy, make it fantastic, make it Circlet.

My favorite bit is this:

Originals only, no reprints.

…just in case you’d gotten Clarkesworld to publish your Circlet Press-editorial-staff smut.