Why Pickup Artists Are Reading Ovid

The “Red Pill” community online frequently appropriates ancient classic literature as justification for their beliefs.

In 2013, the pickup-artist blog Chateau Heartiste—a resource for the sexually frustrated heterosexual man looking to learn how to seduce women—published a list of “Recommended Great Books For Aspiring Womanizers.” Compiled by the site’s main author, known online as Roissy, the list kicked off with the ancient seduction manual Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, written in A.D. 2 by the Roman poet Ovid.

Ovid is considered by some within pickup-artist circles to be a founding father of pickup artistry; the famed pickup artist Neil Strauss also names Ovid in his 2005 memoir The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists as a towering figure in the art of woman seducing. The Ars Amatoria instructs readers that they don’t need to be exceptionally handsome to be successful with women, but being well groomed, wearing clothes that fit, and generally behaving in charming ways can be helpful; it also contains passages that would seem to endorse ignoring women’s subtle hints that they don’t want to be approached and kissing and touching women without an invitation (even when they’re resisting). It also instructs the man who’s been rebuffed to “press on and eventually you’ll get what you want,” and perhaps most troubling to scholars—and held most dear by some pickup artists—is Ovid’s quip that “what [women] like to give, they love to be robbed of.”

This kind of thing doesn’t sit well with Donna Zuckerberg, who got her doctorate in classics at Princeton and is the founder and editor in chief of Eidolon, an online classics magazine; for one thing, it’s an oversimplified reading of Ovid, and for another, that oversimplified reading of Ovid is being used as inspiration for frequently unethical behavior toward women. As Zuckerberg argues, Ovid’s didactic writings on seduction were likely meant to be read as parodies of the didactic poetry genre, which more often instructed readers on less frivolous topics like agriculture or ethics, and not as actual instruction manuals.

But it’s not just pickup artists who appropriate the great texts of classical literature to justify their own beliefs. Zuckerberg (the younger sister of the Facebook CEO Mark) characterizes the “Red Pill” online community as the corner of the internet dominated by men’s-rights activists, the alt-right, pickup artists, and the sex-eschewing communities known as Men Going Their Own Way. According to Zuckerberg, virtually all these subgroups appropriate classical literature for their own purposes.

Zuckerberg first began spending time in Red Pill communities online when she noticed a 2015 Eidolon article titled “Why Is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?” getting unusually heavy traffic after it was posted on Reddit. “As I scrolled down the comment thread, something caught my eye: a comment attributing Stoicism’s resurgent popularity to the Red Pill community,” she wrote in a blog post this week. After that, she spent the next few years getting intensely familiar with the Red Pill community, and her book Not All Dead White Men, an exploration of this appropriation phenomenon and why sometimes these texts don’t quite mean what the appropriators think they mean, is out this week.

I spoke with Zuckerberg  about the rise of the Red Pill community, the long-held fear of false rape accusations, and pickup artists’ oversimplified understanding of Ovid. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley Fetters: How did you first stumble across this whole phenomenon—men in the Red Pill sections of the internet appropriating the classics for their own purposes?

Donna Zuckerberg: The first time I discovered it was actually in The Atlantic! It was an interview with Neil Strauss, when his follow-up to The Game came out—The Truth. The interviewer asked him something like, did he still stand by the seduction advice that was in The Game, if not the mind-set behind it? He said he thought the advice that he gave was still essentially sound, and then he said what works has always been the same, from Ovid to the present day.

I had already been thinking about Ovid and pickup artists, but from a comparative perspective: How did these two similar-looking things compare to each other across the ages? And that was my first glimpse into the fact that pickup artists might actually be reading Ovid and thinking about what Ovid meant to them.

Fetters: As a classicist, how did you feel discovering these guys were reading Ovid in that way?

Zuckerberg: It was such a disturbing stew of feelings. On the one hand, I already felt on some level like the Ars Amatoria was a pretty disturbing text. So seeing people with ideas that I found disturbing reading it, that part wasn’t really a surprise. But some of the texts that they were interested in [in other subsections of the Red Pill community], I had a feeling of grief. Like, am I ever going to be able to just enjoy reading this text again, knowing how much white supremacists love to talk about it?

Fetters: What were the other texts or authors that you felt that kind of grief over, after seeing that they were popular on Red Pill sites?

Zuckerberg: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I’ve seen it used so many times by Red Pill men that now whenever I hear somebody quote Meditations, I feel a slight thrill of apprehension: Is this person secretly a Red Pill person? Which is sad, because it’s a fantastic text, really a model of healthy introspection in a lot of ways.

Fetters: One thing I was shocked to learn from the book was how pickup artists claim Ovid as one of their own, as this prototypical pickup artist. That’s … something of a mischaracterization of Ovid, right?

Zuckerberg: Yeah. The most obvious differences between Ovid and pickup artists have to do with the social position of the reader and the social position of the putative “target.” The audience of a pickup-artist manual is pretty well understood within the community: awkward guys who are completely lacking in confidence when it comes to how to interact with the other sex and who need a set of protocols to follow. That person already feels marginalized by society; they already feel that there are a lot of people who just seem to know this stuff automatically, and that there are people who might be more attractive than they are, or more professionally successful or whatever, who will have an easier time picking up women. And they might have some resentment toward those people.

I don’t think that that was an audience that Ovid was writing for. Ovid is writing for a sophisticated literary audience, and a very elite audience. Extremely educated, probably extremely wealthy—books in that time were somewhat difficult to come by. They were possibly  reading the text at face value as a seduction manual, but also reading it as a literary text that is participating in several different genres at the same time. The Ars Amatoria is sort of mocking the form of didactic poetry, and there are also a lot of tropes from comedy in there. The young man who’s hopelessly in love with a meretrix, or an expensive sex worker—that trope is common in Roman comedy. There are places in the text where it almost seems like he’s writing a manual on how to be this kind of sitcom character. So it’s extremely literary in that way, and I don’t think you see pickup-artist texts working on all those levels in the same way. There’s an underlying sense in pickup-artist manuals that they are validating the reader’s fear that he is being sidelined in our society. Ovid’s text does the opposite: It assumes the reader is, if not on top of the world, very close to it.

And one of the fundamental assumptions of most pickup-artist texts is that the woman who you are attracted to has a lot of power over you, by virtue of that attraction. I think that the power dynamic in Ovid is a little different, because I don’t think that there’s ever any question in the reader’s mind that he is ultimately more powerful than the woman. [In Ovid’s time], he is the one with all of the social capital, and her financial well-being ultimately depends upon her desirability to men.

Fetters: You have a chapter on certain Red Pill groups’ fixation on false rape allegations and the pervasive belief, in that sphere, that women knowingly make false rape allegations quite often. I read it during the Kavanaugh hearing, and it felt really relevant.

Zuckerberg: That chapter was the hardest to write in a lot of ways; it’s just become more and more relevant over the past few years in a way that has been really disheartening. It’s so easy for patriarchy to wield this idea—that women make false rape accusations to ruin men—as a way of insinuating that women are too powerful. That the balance of power in society has tipped in women’s favor, that #MeToo has gone too far.

In reality, you see these fears about false allegations happening in societies that almost could not be more patriarchal. In classical Athens [as depicted in Greek historical myths like the Hippolytus myth, which involves a false rape allegation made by the female character Phaedra], women really had no legal existence; they were supposed to be neither seen nor heard in public, ideally. If that was the ideal woman in their society, and these men were still afraid that false rape allegations are going to ruin their lives, then it can’t be really about fear that women are too powerful. Even though that’s sort of how they always get framed.

Why Pickup Artists Are Reading Ovid. By Ashley Fetters.  The Atlantic , October 10, 2018

The works of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Greek poet Hesiod, and the Roman poet Ovid are examples of great classic Western literature—and popular references within the red pill community. Men who believe society is oppressed by women frequently turn to the Western classics to validate their misogyny and, as Donna Zuckerberg explores in her newly published book Not All Dead White Men, they have plenty of texts to choose from.

Aristotle believed that slavery is natural and women are inherently inferior; Semonides’ poem “Women” claimed there are 10 types of women, each of which can be compared to an animal (only one of which, the bee, is decent); and in Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love”), Ovid writes, “If she refuse to be kissed, kiss her all the same. She may struggle to being with… but if she fights, ‘twill be a losing battle.”

The red pill community’s attempts to co-opt the classics is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to confer the movement with legitimacy as the modern-day equivalents of these ancient Greek and Roman writers. In so doing, they also demonstrate various virulently sexist elements of the classics that, to date, have all too often been dismissed as unfortunate reflections of a two-millennia-old culture, rather than a serious shortcoming that should be addressed.

Zuckerberg’s book analyzes how different factions of the “red pill,” as members of the community refer to themselves, gravitate towards different texts. “Pickup Artists,” for example, consider Ovid to be a founding father of their theories of seduction. “Men Going Their Own Way“ (men who say they’d like to live entirely apart from women), are fans of the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod, who wrote that Zeus made women “as an evil for mortal men, a troublesome partner.”

Zuckerberg, who earned a PhD in classics from Princeton University and is the founder and editor in chief of the online classics literary magazine Eidolon, shows that red pill members often explicitly associate themselves with ancient thinkers. One redditor, she notes, wrote in /r/theredpill in 2016: “I am a classicist by training, Phd the whole nine yards. The Greeks and Romans were red pill in the extreme.”

In some ways, Zuckerberg says it’s no surprise that these men are drawn to the classics. “To a certain extent, I think everyone is drawn to these works,” she says. A predominant red pill belief is that “western civilization is the greatest ever construct of power and culture,” she says, and these texts reflect the origins of western civilization. “They [the red pill] can mine them for clues about what it was that made western civilization so great and so effective. That is their primary goal,” says Zuckerberg.

There’s no doubt that many ancient Greek and Roman texts express highly misogynistic viewpoints, and Zuckerberg says seeing the red pill community’s enthusiasm for them made her reassess for own reading of the works. She used to tell herself that these writers lived more than 2,000 years ago, and “we can’t judge them by their own cultural mores.” That no longer seems quite so convincing. “It’s easy for classicists to insist on the otherness, the foreignness of ancient Greeks and Romans, how different they were from us,” she says. “With the red pill, you see those boundaries dissolve, and an insistence on how much like us they are.”

Still, that’s not to say that members of the red pill are reading these texts correctly, or that ancient literature is nothing but misogynistic rants. Ovid’s works, for example, were likely written as parody of the didactic poetry genre of his time, and not meant to be read as a straightforward instruction manual. Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, which describes women who go on a sex strike to force the men of their lands to stop fighting the Peloponnesian War, is read by both feminists as an example of collective feminist action, and red pill men as a example of women denying men sex as power play, says Zuckerburg. And many of the Stoics explicitly espoused egalitarian views, but the red pill embraces the philosophy as a way to excuse a lack of compassion for others. After all, the Stoics claimed that the most rational should not show compassion for those who are ruled by their emotions. The red pill, says Zuckerburg, believes in a strong dichotomy: they are rational, and everyone else is emotional, and therefore inferior—and they apply this same divide to men versus women.

Red pill readers have adeptly found and in many cases coopted the sexism that proliferated in ancient societies, and classics scholars must reckon with that reality. “Classical scholars must accept that, in the 21st century, some of the most controversial and consequential discussions about the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome are happening…on the internet,” writes Zuckerberg in the conclusion of her book. Scholars must address the sexism in ancient writing that makes them so appealing to the red pill, while also highlighting the nuances and more egalitarian thinking that elevate these texts above straightforward misogyny. Classics readers deserve a discussion about the ancient world that is “neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive,” writes Zuckerberg in her conclusion. In other words, we need to acknowledge the misogyny in the classics, but we needn’t pass them off as red pill terrain entirely.

Red pill misogynists see themselves as heirs to Greek and Roman philosophy. By Olivia Goldhill .  Quartz , October 25, 2018

Lily Rothman :

It was interesting to prepare for this interview while watching the Kavanaugh hearings; I was reminded of your discussion of how different people get different things out of the Phaedra story. This one story — of an Athenian queen who falls for her stepson and, when he rejects her, tells her husband that he raped her — is read by some people as a warning about false rape allegations, and by others as a warning about the consequences of patriarchy. Did your research come to mind as you were watching the news?

Donna Zuckerberg :

Actually what struck me the most was what Christine Blasey Ford said about the two of them laughing, that they were laughing with each other. That reminded me of the research I’d done for my pickup-artists chapter about how the relationship between the two men becomes almost more important than whatever is happening between the man and the sexual object. That was what struck me the most. But yeah, a few friends who had also looked at the book told me that they felt that the Phaedra chapter felt really resonant to them as well, this idea that what it means for an allegation to be false is entirely determined by whoever’s in power.

Rothman :

What is it about Ancient Greece and Rome that make them so appealing as a source of authority for the ideas you write about?

Zuckerberg :

It’s not only Greece and Rome. [The people in the Red Pill community] are also interested in the Medieval period, various other historical periods, the Confederacy. But I think that Greece and Rome, for them, are really the origin of Western civilization. It becomes a coded phrase when they don’t want to talk about white identity [or] white history, because that brings with it all kinds of baggage. Instead they talk about Western civilization and it’s really a dog whistle.

Rothman :

You write that the Alt-Right has used “ancient Greece and Rome to fabricate a cohesive transhistorical ‘white’ identity and a continuity of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization.” What’s a more accurate way to see the idea of a Western tradition?

Zuckerberg :

To a scholar of ancient Greece almost all the cultural contact was happening between Greece and people who were to the East and the South. I mean, it is absolutely the case that the texts and the cultural artifacts that were produced in ancient Greece and Rome, and other parts of the Mediterranean, become really important later on in Western European history. In a sense, you can think of ancient Greece and Rome as really important foundations for Western European literature and culture.

Rothman :

So, it’s not that there is no Western canon, it’s that it’s created in hindsight?

Zuckerberg :

Exactly. The narrative is never as neat and as teleological as we want it to be. It’s very much constructed at any moment in time, usually with an agenda in mind. When you talk about Greek literature being rediscovered in the Renaissance, which is a line that people use, Greek literature was never lost. People were talking about it all along, in what we call the Byzantine Empire. It’s just a different narrative.

Rothman :

They might stumble across something in a pickup artist forum that suggests reading Ovid. What would your advice be for a layperson to read these texts with a smart, critical eye?

Zuckerberg :

It depends on how much time they have! For example, if you read almost anything about Ovid that is written by somebody who has read a lot of Ovid, they will talk about how difficult Ovid is to pin down and his literariness and all those issues that make it much, much harder to say that Ovid “means” anything specifically. When pickup artists say things like, “Ovid shows that women have always been the same,” that implies a reading of Ovid that almost nobody who has studied Ovid would support.

Rothman :

Would it be fair to say that if you encounter somebody arguing that some ancient writer teaches us something simple, that’s probably not the whole story?

Zuckerberg :

That’s safe to say. And it’s not just Red Pill-types who are guilty of that. There’s always a “yeah but” and then a giant string of objections you can make to any simplistic reading. But I think that’s also why people don’t like talking to scholars about these kinds of issues, because it’s so hard to get us to say anything really definitive.

Rothman :

You also discuss in the book that the same texts — namely, Ovid’s Metamorphoses — have been the subject of controversy over whether they might benefit from content warnings for descriptions of rape. Do you have any advice for people reading such texts that they might find problematic?

Zuckerberg :

Find the best translation you can and really read the introduction before you start. My personal experience with content warnings and trigger warnings is not typically that people do not want to engage with the material. It’s that they want to be prepared. They want to know what they’re dealing with. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for coming to a text without some scholar’s ideas and arguments, coming to it with fresh eyes. So there’s a trade-off implied there.

Rothman :

Was there anything you found in your research that really surprised you?

Zuckerberg :

Some of the texts that they deal with are really quite obscure. [It’s] not to classicists, but Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, for example — that’s not something your average layperson will have heard of. How wide-ranging they’re willing to be within the corpus of ancient literature to look for ideas that will support their views, that really surprised me.

Rothman :

What did you make of that?

Zuckerberg :

It seems that there’s kind of a weird sort of macho performance of erudition where you would then see in the comments section tons of people saying, “I’ve never heard of this text before, this is so fascinating,” but you’d also see a few people showing off that they knew what the writer was talking about — and sometimes getting things really wrong, which to me was funny.

I remember seeing an article on Marcus Aurelius and somebody was saying in the comments, “If you really want to be a pimp,” — which I think is the word he used — “you should read it in the original Latin.” Marcus Aurelius originally wrote in Greek. So… yeah.

Why Modern Misogynists Love Ancient History, and What They Get Wrong About It, According to an Expert. By  Lily Rothman. Time , October  9, 2018.

On Ovid and reading Ovid now,  this is of interest :

Ovid experienced a world of chaos and iron firsthand when, in AD 8, he was banished by Augustus. His wrongdoings were, in his own words, carmen et error (“a poem and a mistake”).

 The poem was the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a three-volume lovers’ handbook that explains the dos and don’ts of personal grooming, how to organise trysts with married women (get her maid “on side”), repairing a broken heart (surprise your “ex” while she’s in the middle of her beauty routine – yuk!), names the best places for “hooking-up” (try the races or the theatre), and offers advice on keeping your girl (be attentive when she’s unwell). Interestingly, the third volume was written for women – quite a revolutionary move in view of the gender inequality in the twilight years of the 1st century BC.

What irritated Augustus sufficiently enough to relegate the poet to the middle of nowhere was his perception that the Ars Amatoria made a mockery of his moral reforms. Not one for frolic, Augustus had spearheaded and implemented a series of legislative campaigns that raised the moral bar for the goodly citizens of Rome. Adultery, while always illegal in Rome, was made especially so under the watchful eye of the emperor and legal ramifications were more actively enforced than in previous decades.

The mistake that Ovid mentions is more difficult to identify – with scholarly opinions differing on what it was Ovid actually did to offend Augustus. Theories range from Ovid engaging in an affair with one of the imperial women – perhaps Augustus’ daughter (Julia the Elder) or granddaughter (Julia the Younger) – to his accidentally witnessing an imperial scandal.

Whatever the error, combined with the ill-themed Ars Amatoria, it was sufficiently serious to result in Ovid’s banishment to Tomis (Constanța in modern-day Romania). Tomis, at the very edges of the Roman Empire, was regarded as a barbaric, frightening and uncivilised place. Ovid certainly painted it this way in his poetic epistles, the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Pontus).

 Forced to exist in a place where his native Latin was scarcely heard, Ovid’s despair is evoked in one of his most memorable couplets: “writing a poem you can read to no one / is like dancing in the dark.”

For the optimal punishment of Ovid, Augustus chose his location well, and he never reneged on his decision. Nor did his successor, Tiberius (42 BC-AD 37). Ovid died in Tomis in AD 17.

 In one of the definitive pieces of scholarship on the Metamorphoses, Reading Ovid’s Rapes (1992) by classicist Amy Richlin, it is argued that the epic was completed during Ovid’s time in Tomis. This may not initially appear to have any bearing on its content or intent, yet Richlin suggests a profound relevance:

 The silenced victims, the artists horribly punished by legalistic gods for bold expression … read like allegories of Ovid’s experience …

Accordingly, Tomis not only gave Ovid time to augment the poem in view of his own experiences but, equally as important, its composition was being finalised during the emperor’s inquisition into the carmen et error.

Indeed, Ovid’s own silencing by Augustus may be seen to be enacted over and over again in the Metamorphoses in the most grotesque of ways. Ovid’s tales describe tongues being wrenched out, humans barking out their sorrows instead of crying, women transformed into mute creatures by jealous gods, and desperate victims bearing witness to their abuse through non-verbal means.

The Metamorphoses is an epic about the act of silencing. Jealousy, spite, lust and punishment are also consistently present in Ovid’s chaotic world. So is rape.

Rape is undoubtedly the most controversial and confronting theme of the Metamorphoses. It is the ultimate manifestation of male power in the poem and the hundreds of transformations that occur are often the means of escaping it.

 An early tale of attempted rape is narrated in Book I, involving the nymph, Daphne and the god, Apollo. Intent on raping Daphne, Apollo chases her through the forest until, utterly exhausted, she calls out to her father, the river god Peneus to rescue her:

“Help, father!” she called. “If your streams have divine powers!

 Destroy the shape, which pleases too well, with transformation!

Peneus answers his daughter’s entreaty, and Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree:

… a heavy torpor seizes her limbs,

 her soft breasts are encircled with thin bark,

 her hair changes into leaves, her arms change into branches,

 her feet once so swift become stuck with stubborn roots,

 her face has a leafy cover; only her elegance remains.

The tale of Daphne and Apollo, like so many stories in the Metamorphoses, is classified as an aetiological myth; that is, a narrative that explains an origin. But, as the excerpt above testifies, it is so much more than that.

Where does a modern audience begin with a story such as Daphne and Apollo? How do we begin to unravel the hundreds of other such tales that follow it?

During the last few years, the Metamorphoses has been challenged as a legitimate text for tertiary Humanities students. Defying the hundreds of years of pedagogical tradition that has seen the poem set for both Latin students and, more recently, literary students who study it in translation, the Metamorphoses has not only been interrogated by scholars such as Richlin, but has also been the subject of increased student complaints and calls for trigger-warnings.

In response to the growing number of objections to the work, academic and university executives have been called on to take a position – not only in relation to the Metamorphoses, but in response to other materials that are perceived to render the tertiary experience unsafe.

The Chancellor at Oxford, Chris Patten, has been quoted as saying that history cannot be rewritten to suit contemporary western morals. At the opposite end of this debate, are students such as the members of Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Council, who have challenged the inclusion of the Metamorphoses without an explicit trigger-warning in one of the core curriculum courses in the Humanities.

 How close such responses to the Metamorphoses verge on literary censorship or, in the words of one journalist, Literature Fascism, does not only depend on one’s philosophical or educational viewpoint. Equally as important to the debate, and the decisions that may ultimately result from it, is the life-experience of every individual in the classroom. Amid a class of students taking notes from a lecture on the Metamorphoses, for example, may be a rape survivor.

Current statistics from the United States in particular suggest that the likelihood of this is exceptionally high. Emerging statistics from across Australia are painting a similar picture.

 Such a situation requires alertness and sensitivity when handling texts such as the Metamorphoses. But should the work of Ovid be banned or placed among the shelves marked "Warning: Wicked Books”? What would such measures ultimately achieve? Would it augment safe spaces? Or, would it censor discussions around rape and shut down interrogations of sex, violence and female exploitation? Would it silence one of the means of opposition to the societal sickness of rape?

The Metamorphoses of Ovid has had a long and fascinating history. Its presence among the literary canon of the West has functioned as a strange but valuable mirror that has, for over two millennia, reflected social, moral and artistic customs.

 From the time that Shakespeare read Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation and incorporated so many of the stories into his plays, to the thousands of artworks that have been inspired by the poem, to Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright’s 2006 extravaganza, The Lost Echo, to the production in the 2016 Sydney Fringe, to the student protests and the calls for trigger-warnings, the Metamorphoses – much like Ovid himself – simply refuses to go away.

Much like the self-portrait by Albrecht Durer, Olympia by Edouard Manet, the works of modernist painters that enraged European Fascists, Tracey Emin’s My Bed, the installations at MONA, Joyce’s Ulysses, and a host of films and photomedia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses testifies to the fact that great art is not necessarily created to please.

Guide to the classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reading rape. By Marguerite Johnson. TheConversation , September 13, 2016.