The Ovid Method
A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women’s empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims — arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege. In Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, Donna Zuckerberg dives deep into the virtual communities of the far right, where men lament their loss of power and privilege and strategize about how to reclaim them. Here is an excerpt from the book looking at interpretations of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria.
The introduction to Julia Hejduk’s recent translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria opens with this declaration:
Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) has one of the funniest premises of any work of literature: namely, that Love — by which he means the initiation and maintenance of sexual relationships — is a eld of study, like chess or astronomy or agriculture, whose strategies can be analyzed and taught.
The Ars Amatoria is from the earlier part of Ovid’s career, when he focused almost exclusively on erotic works. It is an instruction manual for seduction in three volumes: the first teaches its readers how to seduce a woman; the second focuses on how to keep her interest; and the third teaches women how to seduce men. A follow- up volume, published a few years later, teaches men how to fall out of love with unattainable women.
Hejduk’s assertion represents the general consensus among scholars about the Ars Amatoria: it is nearly impossible to find an article or book about the poem that does not contain words such as amusing or ludic (from the Latin ludus, “game”). By awkwardly forcing a poem about seduction techniques into the genre of didactic poetry — a genre mostly used for long technical treatises on subjects such as farming or ethics — Ovid is playing a complex poetic game with the reader’s expectations. His use of the elegiac couplet, the meter of erotic poetry, instead of the dactylic hexameter, the meter of epic and “traditional” didactic poetry, emphasizes the disconnect between the poem’s form and its content. Imagine a college textbook about the history of cupcakes, and you have the idea.
But the classicists who find the poem’s premise so clever may not be aware of how seriously that same premise is taken by the pickup artist (PUA), or “game,” community. A pickup artist is an individual, usually a heterosexual man, who has intensively studied and attempted to master techniques to convince women to have sex with him; these techniques fall on a spectrum from flirting to manipulation to harassment to assault. A few influential members of the community run blogs or publish books to disseminate their knowledge. To paraphrase Hejduk’s claim about love in Ovid, pickup artists believe that “the initiation and maintenance of sexual relationships” are “ eld[s] of study . . . whose strategies can be analyzed and taught.”
The relevance of Ovid to the game community goes beyond a similar, strategic approach to seduction. In an attempt to give themselves legitimacy and gravitas, some pickup artists look back to famous seducers from history and reposition them as the intellectual predecessors of the modern seduction community — and Ovid is one such venerated figure. Neil “Style” Strauss, in his 2005 memoir The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, writes,
Sure, there is Ovid, the Roman poet who wrote The Art of Love; Don Juan, the mythical womanizer based on the exploits of various Spanish noblemen; the Duke de Lazun, the legendary French rake who died on the guillotine; and Casanova, who detailed his hundred-plus conquests in four thousand pages of memoirs. But the undisputed father of modern seduction is Ross Jefries, a tall, skinny, porous-faced self-proclaimed nerd from Marina Del Rey, California.
Strauss is not alone in naming Ovid the ancient father of seduction. The Ars Amatoria is widely accepted by the community as the starting point of the teaching of seduction. Ovid’s name is casually mentioned not only in Strauss’s memoir, but also in blog posts across the seduction blogosphere with titles such as “ e History of Pickup and Seduction, Part I” and “Recommended Great Books for Aspiring Womanizers.”
The reason for Ovid’s inclusion in these lists is clear. Ovid gives men advice for how to seduce women, and pickup artists are men who define themselves by their interest in seducing women, so Ovid was arguably one of their own. But the concepts underlying how we think about sex and sexual relationships today — our ideas about sexuality, gender, race, and class — have shifted considerably from the conceptual categories that existed in first-century Rome. Both Ovid and modern pickup artists may be concerned with how to successfully obtain casual sex, but what would casual even mean in a Roman context? If one defines sex as casual if it is enjoyable but without serious consequences, then in a world where adultery was criminal, birth control was less foolproof, and abortion and childbirth were both life-threatening, sex could never be truly casual. Ovid’s advice necessarily puts women at risk.
The category differences are especially stark if, as Ovid later claimed and as many scholars now believe, the Ovidian puella (girl, or in PUA terminology, target) is a meretrix (Tristia 2.303–304). A meretrix was an expensive sex worker, the sort for whom scholars o en use the old-fashioned word courtesan, although the modern category it maps onto most closely might be the “sugar baby.” The livelihood of the meretrix depended on leveraging her sexuality into financial security. So successful deployment of Ovid’s advice would be more than physically dangerous to the woman; convincing a meretrix to enter into a sexual relationship for free would put her in a fiscally precarious position. It could create legal challenges for the man as well. Despite Ovid’s early claim that he only promotes sex that is within the boundaries of the law (“there will be no crime in my song,” inque meo nullum carmine crimen erit), the poem sub- verts the leges Iuliae, the moral legislation Augustus introduced that punished men and women for both adultery and for remaining un- married for prolonged periods of time (Ars 1.34). As I will discuss later, Ovid’s transgressions against these laws in the Ars Amatoria would eventually have grave consequences for him.
Even though it was published two thousand years ago, the Ars Amatoria can still feel very relevant to today’s world. But it is ultimately a poem that Ovid intended for his time, not for all time. The superficial similarity between his suggestions for how to avoid buying your puella expensive gifts and advice on seduction blogs for how not to buy a girl drinks or spend more than twenty dollars on a date is misleading. Treating Ovid as “the original PUA” — or claiming, as Strauss did on Reddit, that “What works has always been the same throughout history, from Ovid’s writing on seduction to today” — is difficult to justify from a theoretical perspective. Although there are undeniable similarities, most are superficial, and the cultural conditions that shaped Ovid’s text are entirely different from those that shape the seduction community.
