for the love of god can i look for a rubber boot that will actually last me through a couple years without running into weird gendered stuff about FEET

So this is an awkward advice question - sorry! At the moment, one of my friends is a guy who I get along with pretty well - we have similar interests, he's good fun, etc.I know that a lot of our friends are expecting (and hoping!) that we start a relationship. I quite like him, but my only problem is that I'm not physically attracted to him at all. I don't know what to do - I feel like I can't refuse him based just on that and honestly, I feel pretty bad for feeling that way at all. Any ideas?

[Disclaimer: The answer to this is going to be HEAVILY subjective. So know that my opinion on it, is not the law of the land and may not even be close to the general consensus.]

My right-off-the-bat opinion: You can refuse him for any reason you want. ANY. You are not obligated to like, love, be nice/cordial/agreeable/compassionate (etc.) to anyone. You are allowed refuse anyone for simple, stupid reasons. Reasons such as: 

They have a cat shaped freckle next to their ear and you like dogs.

Their hair color clashes with your eye color.

They have bad teeth.

They voted for Trump.

They like you.

They mow their lawn with guinea pigs instead of a lawn mower.

They’ve never climbed a tree.

They don’t remember a time before blue M&M’s existed.

They like you.

They prefer Stephen Colbert to Jimmy Fallon.

They believe astrology is an actual science.

They like you.

Your friends like him.

You don’t like him as anything more than a friend.

Being pressured to be in a relationship with a guy (OR ANYONE), is NOT OKAY. He could be the DEFINITION on perfection and you are in no way shape or form obligated to be in a relationship with him. Or to see him as anything more than a friend, or as a guy who doesn’t hear or respect the word: No.

I live in the U.S., and here there is a very, very, very dangerous narrative that when a guy likes a girl, she is somehow obligated to like him back. That when she says “no” she really means “I’m playing hard to get.” That when she is not attracted to him, that means he has to do more to prove why she should “come to her senses” about him.

I cannot say this enough: You don’t own anyone anything. No one—I MEAN NO ONE—should ever make you feel obligated to like them, or someone else. 

Okay, rant over. Moving on!

There are many different ways to love and show affection to someone. You can totally be in a meaningful, loving, romantic, or more than friends relationship that does not include physical attraction. But it helps when both parties are aware that one (or both) party is not physically attracted to the other. [ @sarahviehmann please help me if I’ve botched this, or not articulated or represented these ideas well! It’s still not an area I have a lot of experience covering. Thanks!]

That being said, are you physically attracted to other people? Like do you want a relationship with someone you can kiss and touch and have sex with? Cuz that’s where (for me at least) the line is. If you want a relationship that includes those things, and can see yourself wanting those things with other people, then this boy is not the boy for you.

It’s not fair for you to be in a relationship with him simply because he likes you, or because your friends think you’d be cute together. And it’s not fair to him either. And again, don’t feel bad for not liking him. You’re not obligated to like anyone. 

Another thing I’m just going to randomly add is:

Does he pass the scent test? Meaning, when you catch a whiff of his scent, does it turn you on? Does it make you want to sleep with a shirt he wore under your head so you can breath in his scent?

I ask because the human sense of smell is very advanced. Our bodies can differentiate a good many things from scent that we cannot put words to. So a good percentage of the time, when someone doesn’t smell good to you, that’s your bodies way of picking up on something about him that signals he would not be a good person to reproduce with. And that sounds SO archaic. I know. But it’s (to some degree) true. There is a reason we don’t get turned on by the scent of out siblings. We might enjoy the scent of out parents or our children because those relationships are different. But we don’t get turned on by their scent.

Seeds of Thought : Wicdiv #27

I slightly rushed this this month because uni stuff is a bit all over the place lately. Feel free NOT to point out typos as I’m about to dive in 4 hours worth of administrative law notes and I really need to believe in myself right now. Thoughts and opinions on the new issue under the cut, not spoiler-free.

 KEEP POLITICS OUT OF US !

 “Roll credits !” would say one particular YouTube channel. After four issues, Wicdiv actually provided us for an in-universe explanation for the title of this arc : Imperial Phase (part I) isn’t just our intuitive understanding of it, it’s “a well-supported model” for any Pantheon that enters its second year. And while this information only shows up toward the end, this issue seems constructed like a pop-up book of that point, developing the variations of what this could mean for each character. The issue opens with Baal’s mission, ends with Cassandra’s obsession, and in the middle ? Anarchy in the UK.

 Now I’m not going to go and unpack everything this issue does and says about its characters, not only because I don’t have the time, but also because hovering over every loaded panel is something even more interesting : the nagging feeling that none of them, taken individually, really matters. I’m sure there will be much talk about the odd structuring at the core of the issue, but personally I found the actual disposition less meaningful than the effect it had on the reader. Because of the changing divisions between the different snippets, you cannot get into a page by focusing directly on one storyline : first, you have to seize it in its entirety, spot the junction lines and decide which block to read first. Before jumping into one, you have to catch a glimpse of the others, have your eyes drawn to every panel standing out because of a contrast in colour or close faces. When you read a block, you can’t help but deviate to an adjacent panel, read a word or two, get back on track. You get in and out of blocks, move on to the next one, try to draw meaning from their juxtaposition, to find alternative reading orders ; you wonder if the links between them are deliberate or just your own interpretation.

You are like an analyst starring at a data spreadsheet, trying to wrap their head around all the info, to find order in the apparent chaos, highlight common trends, spot outliers. Seize and interpret. A single panel means nothing, and there are no solitary ones in these pages. Out of sample size comes accuracy, on the sum of individualities you build meaning. And because we’re the analyst leaning over the page, and not one of the insignificant data lost on it, we can stamp our general understanding onto every individual story. We never come into one data fresh. Each exists and makes sense relatively to the others.

 This ties in to the permanent double layer of Wicdiv, which I’ve discussed here : there’s always a filter to our connexion with the gods. No matter how close we get as an audience, we’ll always be infinitely closer to the in-world audience, the adoring public, the reporters, the historians and the psychologists. Before we are the gods, we are the ones watching them. And while Fandemonium was about what it’s like to be a fan, Imperial Phase (part I) takes us to the world of scholars. In the kaleidoscope of what it means to be a public figure, we’ve left the stadiums and twitter accounts for the museums and the monographies. Another facet, another layer forced on your reading. The gods are not simply obsessed, they’re not simply losing it, they’re reproducing a well-supported model. Their teen angst bullshit doesn’t just have a body count, it has an archive section, a conference cycle and a study department.

I said in my previous SOT that despite the time we’ve spent around them we really do not know the gods that well. And this arc provides us with another shade of not getting to know them : through the glasses of historians, sociologists, scientists and theologians. The gods are never really just themselves. Never free of scope.

 And it seems like Wicdiv has mined this topic before, doesn’t it ? Yes, despite having Baphomet on the cover, if this issue has one figurehead, it’s none other than Tara. Tara was crushed by the impossibility to reconcile her self with the layers upon layers of significance that were thrown on her. She made clear in her letter that this crucible doesn’t start at godhood. Existing as a young woman of colour is a political act. You can never be free of the meaning that will be forced on who you are : it is impossible to dissociate yourself from the political signification of yourself, even when you try to create a public persona that will carry these layers for you.

This theme comes back in full force in this issue, as Cass helpfully spells out its subtext : the personal IS the political. Everything the gods do bathes in our political and sociological understanding of it.

When Baal, a young black man from suburban London, says he belongs in the House of Lords, it’s political. When Cass, a trans woman, is having fun in public, it’s political. When Woden uses a sex worker to symbolically assert his power over a woman he fears, it’s political as fuck.

The gods have no control over this double layer : this is something that is imposed on them, no matter how much they’re willing to accept it. Minerva cannot fall apart because if so she’ll just be “another teenage cautionary tale”, and indeed, before she even said it there were speculations on whether or not she’d follow the classic implosion road of the child star. Even when the gods refuse to see anything political in what they are, the audience will be there to imbue that meaning in them. Sakhmet’s quest for emotional impenetrability is something we immediately link to her being a probable abuse victim, despite her never even mentioning that fact. They are never just a teenager off the rails or a woman who has survived abuse, they have to be the flagship of their demographic.

 As public figures, the gods are especially vulnerable to this dispossession of their individuality. Exposition allows you to confound your own psychological needs and issues with actual politics. The gods are lost in the blurred lines between a personal research and a political statement. Baal takes a national security issue and makes it about whether he can maintain control, linking it to his personal insecurities. Reciprocally, Amaterasu takes her mysticism and egomania and turns it into a religion.

 But at its core, Wicdiv is more about youth than it is about celebrity. As stars, the gods can put a political meaning forward, but as youngsters they cannot push it out of their lives. This is after all the one constant characteristic of the reincarnations : they are young. I’m 23, which would make me one of the older gods in wicdiv ; but even so, this issue aligns perfectly with how I see my demographic treated in society at large. Young people are the single most objectified and objectifiable age segment : from denigrating articles about millennials, to politicians “catering” to us in the most improbable way, we are simultaneously a curious beast that needs to be seized up and a formless plague on society’s values. In a world that doesn’t belong to us yet, everymen and scholars alike are trying to appraise us using a language that wasn’t conceived to fit all of us. The language of oppressors. So we’re being chopped up in representative samples, aligned in databanks, made into statistics. It’s normal to talk of the young as a unified group because the world doesn’t know who we are outside of the political meaning it has stamped on us. We are young, and we are never just ourselves. And this can be draining. I’ve never seen anyone over 30 as hyperaware of how they make “their generation” look as any young person. Never seen any of them as self-conscious when it comes to talking about ourselves, how we can shape the future of language. I believe that there hasn’t been a single time in History in which young people weren’t the most political group of a given society. Being political is not, at first, a choice ; it’s something that has been done to us.

 Regarding this, just how special really are the gods ? Them too, them especially, carry at all times the burden of being simultaneously more and less than themselves. More because they cannot exist out of the political understanding of themselves ; less precisely because of that. They are part of a cycle : emerge, burn out, leave the world. A new generation emerges, at the same time completely cut out from the previous one and yet repeating without knowing it the same pattern. The gods are youth personified. In the last pages, David Blake’s speech is mirrored panel by panel to the gods going awry. What can they do, with all their might, to prove this mere human wrong ? Even if they turn out different, outliers, nothing more. Chosen ones, in a long line of chosen ones, a centre page and a footnote, exceptional and yet so, so banal. The gods have never looked more like icons than in these last pages : Batman and Robin in the storm, two lurking shadows, a sacrificial victim, a human sun over her temple – or is it just an illuminated statue ?

Case studies, all of them. David Blake holds the theory. He holds the meaning, he holds the power. And we, as an audience, can only go as far as he can see. Just like him, we are not trapped on the stage ; when the show is over, we’ll pack up and go home. We’ll blog about it and post pictures, until we get tired of it. Those of us who haven’t already will say goodbye to their youth, and will look with various degrees of understanding at the new generation, wondering just how much and how little has changed.

The gods of Wicdiv will never get to grow up. This power will never be theirs. Loved, hated, brilliant. For others to see.

  WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE :

 Holy shit, you guys.

 Well if anything, after this people should stop complaining that I’m being too negative for a while.

 Because holy shit, you guys.

 I feel like those of you who’ve been reading me for a while know me enough to guess I loved this issue. And you’d be about as right as the word love can describe how much I adored this. My feeling might of course change, but as of right now there is no question for me that this is the best thing Wicdiv has ever done. It’s notoriously hard for me to connect with something on a pure emotional level, and while it does come handy to lay out themes and ideas, I always feel like I’m missing something by never being able to just be taken aback by a work of art and not know what to say. The last time it happened to me was when I went to see Mad Max : Fury Road and there was just so much beauty on the screen it sent my brain in overdrive and I wasn’t able to think again until we got out of the theatre. And this is what happened here. The thoughts I laid out above didn’t occur to me until this morning ; from Wednesday to Saturday, all I was able to do was pick up the issue and read it again with my mind completely blank.  Congratulations, Wicdiv team : you made something so good it finally got me to shut up about it.

 If I am to analyse, I think a good part of my appreciation comes from how little I expected this issue to turn out as it did. From the previous ones, there was no indication that Imperial Phase (part I) was going to be anything more than enjoyable and slightly more conceptual than the arcs before, which after the way-too-conventional-for-my-taste Rising Action felt a bit underwhelming. And if this issue has one flaw, it’s that it’s so good it makes me a bit harsher on the previous issues : #25 and #26 were perfect for what they were, but still a means to an end, and #24 almost feels like a throwaway prologue than could have been dealt with in a couple of pages. I’ve heard somewhere that a good song can make an album, but a great one can kill it. And yes, I’m a bit afraid for the structural integrity of Imperial Phase, but I’ll pass my judgment after the arc is good and done.

But despite my surprise, I think deep down this is the issue I’d been waiting for Wicdiv to make : something as offbeat, subtly sinister and anxiety-provoking as it had the potential of being despite always presenting as too “normal” for its own premise. More than the weird, I’m a lover of the uncanny, in the Freudian sense of the word ; the “disturbing strangeness”, as we say in French. Nothing in this issue is outwardly, consciously weird, yet everything feels slightly wrong, slightly worrisome, like the dark space between the neon lines linking the panels, a record that isn’t really broken but always seems to drag a little, in a way you can’t quite place. This issue caters to my tastes so much I imagine others are going to have a hard time getting behind it. The only thing that could make me love this more than I do is if they’d found a way to cram a Dodo bird in there somehow. I love Dodo birds.

 But yes, this is Wicdiv as I wish it always was : slick and messy, grim and bright, cynical and sincere, direct and twisted. Cracks on the marble columns. A dissonant symphony. Madness is looming, but it’s not quite there yet, just something in the air. Who knows what will happen in next issue. Who knows what happens on the first of May. Wicdiv has always thrived in this chiaroscuro, between the lights of the Shard and the shadows of Valhalla. But even if Wicdiv never goes down this rabbit hole again, I’ll always be grateful for this issue, as I am for everything that knocks me off my feet and reminds me just what you can do with Art. Sex and drugs and rock n’roll. Very good indeed.