An old joke

Question: What does a lesbian bring on a second date?

Answer: A U-Haul.

It is considered a staple of lesbian humor.[5] It is often attributed to comic Lea DeLaria,[6][7] who claimed in her 1997 comedy album, Box Lunch, that she had written it in 1989 — in the album, she gets the audience to yell back the punchline, showing it was already well-known at the time of recording.[8]

As there are numerous U-Hauls involved here, clearly it’s a polycule

I remember when I was a young lad seeing a magazine about some drama or another involving a ‘love triangle’, and, confused, asking my mother if one of the members of the triangle was gay, since I couldn’t conceive how a love triangle could work otherwise.

There’s a scalie somewhere who is very happy right now, probably

Not ace, am millennial, I also think there are too many sex scenes in movies. The kids are right.

They’re smarter than we were at their age.

Skibidi is the only one I hate, personally.

But my 20s are my most handsome years and now they’re over! In a paltry ten years I’ll have some gray hairs and creases! 😭

Doggo look like shrimp

Spite has kept me alive more than once.

It’s not good, but one takes what one can get in those moments.

like yeah I know but not too my professor, amirite?

Unless…? 👉👈🥺

Quit speaking, you!

Come to think of it, it’s a bit odd that she drank so many Pepsis yet remained so incredibly thirsty.

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men.

Aurelius must have had a meeting with Trump.

Ah, experiencing man-flu is now a universal experience between cis and trans men. Come, brothers, let us be miserable together

No, no, I enjoy discussing such things!

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations were not released during his lifetime - they were his, well, private meditations. It wasn’t a call for the citizens of the Empire to be obedient - there is a fascinating tradition of Emperors doing that, but it uses very different phrasing and is typically divorced from the Greek philosophical tradition that Aurelius drew upon when writing the Meditations. You find many other Emperors exhorting the citizenry to be dutiful and loyal to the Roman state, but Aurelius and Julian the Apostate are the only ones with serious philosophical inclinations that they express in their writings. I don’t think it’s too bizarre to think that, out of some 500 years of rulers, two were genuinely interested in and proficient with philosophy.

I should be rulecified for such an oversight

i wasnt trying to romanticize the era of hunter gatherers, but while rome might have been quite moderate at that time, practically everyone else were already patriachial to a point where most women would be second class citizens with little economic freedom, or economically free but sworn to celibacy, and their profits would return to their fathers

Many Celtic and Germanic tribes were still relatively gender-egalitarian (moreso than Rome, in many cases), as were many Berber and Arab tribes of the period, and Nubian/Ethiopian kingdoms, India, and the Scythians of Central Asia.

They were mostly still patriarchal, but less patriarchal than the European and Islamic civilizations that would later emerge where we get our ‘clearest’ view of Patriarchy from.

i mean, i dont know exactly what he had in mind when writing that, but, like, there are only so many things that concern an emperors mind.

It’s an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Aurelius was a philosopher in addition to an Emperor, and his writings are excellent-but-pretty-orthodox expressions of Stoic doctrine of the time.

The big three surviving philosophical schools of the time all had a very “Look inwards” worldview - Stoicism claiming that we decide ourselves how the outside world pains or does not pain us; Epicureans claiming that it is by learning to appreciate the simple pleasures of life that one achieves contentment with life; and Cynics claiming that mankind is happiest in a state of nature, and that the constructs of human society are window dressing at best - as such, one should act according to one’s ‘gut’ in any given situation.

perhaps rome at aurelius’ time was a wee bit more moderate, but i would not expect that to stay true farther away from the capital.

There were actually drastic changes between Constantine and Marcus Aurelius. The Empire effectively fell apart in the 3rd century AD, and was cobbled back together by warlords. By the time of Constantine, between changing norms and the weakening of Rome’s (and Italy’s) position as central to the Empire led to Constantine being able to push through changes like turning “Death penalty for anyone raping a freeborn person” to “Any woman who is raped is put to death if she doesn’t scream loud enough” (itself a violation of one of the oldest norms of Roman society regarding rape which dates back to the founding of the Republic). Christian values!

The provinces of the 1st and 2nd century AD were still heavily influenced by traditional Roman values, especially in the Western half of the Empire. And some of those provinces were more female-friendly than Roman traditions were. We have evidence of Roman businesswomen acting in their own names as far east as Syria and as far west as Britain.

thank you for your time writing all this, it was very interesting.

Anytime! Rome is a personal obsession of mine, lol.

perhaps i can interest you in the book that triggered my response in the first place? it tries to shine a light on what happened to drive men away from women, i.e. how the patriarchy came to be (probably) the english title is “the good book of human nature” … the mind boggles as to why the author shies away from just calling it “the truth about eva” which would be the direct translation from german, i can only assume it’s to not cause to big an upheaval among religious folks…

I’ve not heard of that book in particular, but I’ve read numerous articles in academic journals about how patriarchy arose in various societies. Ugly stuff.

While Roman society was MUCH more sexist than anything we would regard as acceptable in modern society, women had many rights at the height of the Roman Empire that later European societies would not keep. The right of women to own property was so strict that gifts from a wife to a husband were not legally recognized - if they divorced, claims that any property of the wife was a gift to her husband would not be recognized, and would be returned to the newly-divorced wife. Women often held significant amounts of property and ran businesses in their own name, and there is ample evidence for women as independent workers in skilled and semiskilled professions.

There is considerable writing at the time discussing the role of women in society, and while the opinions of Roman men are very far from ‘enlightened’, they also quite clearly regard women as more than breeding stock. The Roman author Musonius Rufus even advocated for women to be trained in the arts of war, and posited than any job a man could do, a woman could do also.

Women could divorce their husbands without need for any deeper cause beyond “I don’t want to stay in this marriage anymore”, and domestic abuse within marriage was grounds for civil lawsuits. All rape of freeborn persons (within the context of Roman governance; foreigners being conquered were less lucky) was subject to the death penalty. Bloodline descent (‘breeding stock’) was considered much less important, as Romans placed a higher value on a cultural/loyalty familial system in which adoption was widely accepted and direct descent was less important (though not nil) to being recognized as part of the descendants of the family. The idea of ‘securing the throne’ was not really applicable until later in Roman society when the norms of the city of Rome began to be eroded in favor of a more ‘cosmopolitan’ and universal imperial culture.

/Romaboo moment over