Bang Rome
Ovid and the Original Sin of Pickup Artistry
In an October interview with The Atlantic about his new book The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships — a palinode of sorts to his 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists — author Neil Strauss defends the concept of “game” by pointing out its timelessness: “It’s like the same ideas were in Ovid’s The Art of Love and are in the classic texts like The Art of Seduction.” Others have also endorsed the idea that Ovid was the “original” pickup artist (PUA).
I can imagine why the idea of Ovid as their OG (“original gangster”) is so attractive to PUAs. The idea of an ancient Roman predecessor gives them legitimacy by implying that the seduction community has deep historical roots. And if Ovid can be claimed as one of their own, his status as a brilliant and influential poet reflects well on the entire movement and gives it intellectual credibility.
Embracing Ovid as the OG PUA is a significant choice. The extensive similarities between Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (called The Art of Love by Strauss, a translation I’ll return to momentarily) and the advice given by PUAs reveal some of the most consistently problematic elements of PUA ideology—the erasure of female subjectivity, the use of sexual partners (often interchangeable and indistinguishable) to bolster status within a community of men, the near-total disregard for affirmative consent.
Ovid may be the seduction community’s OG, but he also reveals their original sin: there are underlying flaws in the concept of seduction as a teachable skill that inevitably lead to negative consequences for men and women alike. By focusing on the conquest of women (“closing”), the women themselves become unimportant. The act of scoring, especially in front of your peers in the community via “field reports”, becomes the goal. But the negative consequences of treating seduction as a lifestyle go beyond the objectification of women. The men who succeed at becoming master PUAs often end up alone, unable to form healthy attachments, while those who fail can turn toward violent misogyny. In the end, it seems this truly is a strange game where the only winning move is not to play.
Is it anachronistic to call Ovid the OG PUA? Yes and no. Obviously, ancient Rome was a very different world than contemporary America and Europe, and Ovid’s advice for how to seduce women is conditioned on assumptions about typical male and female behavior that aren’t always the same as ours. Nevertheless, the Ars has many similarities in both content and appearance to recent PUA texts.
The title of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is usually translated as The Art of Love. This is a lazy, misleading translation — although, surprisingly, his Remedia Amoris (the sequel to the Ars) is often translated correctly as “The Cure for Love”. Just as many English-speaking readers have been puzzled by Socrates’ unapologetic tone in Plato’s Apology, not understanding that the Greek word apologia literally means ‘self-defense’, readers of Ovid’s erotodidactic works shouldn’t expect to find artistry or love. Ars is less about art in the modern sense than it is about finely honed skill and methodology; the Romans often contrasted it with ingenium, natural talent. Amatoria also doesn’t mean ‘of love’ — it literally means ‘of the lover’, the amator. Ars Amatoria means less “the art of love” than “the seducer’s craft”.
This is more than just semantic quibbling. Naming conventions are universally important, but they seem to have special significance in the world of seduction, both in ancient times and today. Roman elegiac poets came up with pseudonyms for their lovers that hint at their dual role as both sexual partners and literary muses. Ovid’s Corinna and Catullus’ Lesbia (aka “the Lesbian woman”, Sappho) both refer to famous female poets, while Tibullus’ Delia and Propertius’ Cynthia both take their names from epithets for Apollo.
Modern PUAs rarely bother mentioning the names of their sexual targets, preferring to refer to them as HB (hot babe) followed by a signifier or element of her physical appearance (e.g. HB10 or HBRedhead). But many use pseudonyms for themselves. These pseudonyms are not really intended to mask identity — it’s fairly well known that Style is Neil Strauss and Mystery is Erik von Markovik — but having a PUA name seems to signify acceptance within and dedication to the community.
Mystery, a main character in The Game who seems to have since disappeared from the PUA community, is best known for the set of PUA techniques known as the ‘Mystery Method’. But Mystery’s original name for his techniques was ‘the Venusian Arts’. Foundational to his worldview is the idea that humans are programmed to survive and replicate. Skills that tend toward survival are the martial arts, named for Mars, the Roman god of war. So skills that tend toward replication are the Venusian arts, named for Venus, the Roman goddess of love. (Too bad ‘Venusian’ really means ‘of or relating to the planet Venus’, and the term he was looking for is ‘venereal arts’. Then again, there are more pressing reasons for not using that term.)
Ovid also thought of his work in terms of the push and pull between Mars and Venus. He begins the Amores, his books of elegiac love poems, by claiming that he intended to write about war, but Cupid stole one of the feet from his dactylic hexameter and turned it into elegiac couplets (Amores 1.1.1–4). In the Ars, it becomes clear that for Ovid, love itself is a battlefield: after Venus demands that he write a book of instruction for women on how to seduce men, Ovid constantly worries that he’s arming the enemy against himself:
What am I talking of, madman? Why show a naked front
to the enemy, and betray myself on my own evidence?
The bird doesn’t show the hunter where to find it,
the stag doesn’t teach the savage hounds to run.
(Ars Amatoria 3.667–70, trans. A. S. Kline)
And when, in the Remedia Amoris, Ovid teaches men and women how to recover from love, he imagines Cupid looking at the title of his book and assuming that Ovid is preparing to battle against him (Remedia line 2, “Bella mihi, video, bella parantur!”) The venereal artist is, in his own mind, a warrior.
Ovid’s conception of how to be a venereal artist, however, sometimes involves techniques modern PUAs would scoff at. The Mystery Method, and many of the systems created since, are based on the basic concept that the way to pick up a woman is by proving your value. This is done through a “demonstration of high value”, or DHV, and avoidance of “demonstration of low value”, or DLV. A DHV might be telling a great story that shows how awesome you are, or rebuffing her attention and thereby showing her that she hasn’t earned your attraction yet. A DLV would be showing too much interest in the target, thereby implying that her value is higher than yours. A good way to lower her conception of her own value is through well-timed “negs”, insult-compliments such as “those shoes look really comfortable” (i.e., not attractive) or “is your hair real?”
Mystery’s techniques are now seen as somewhat passé by the community; game is ever-evolving, from Ovid to Ross Jeffries to Mystery to Roosh V (the preferred nickname of Daryush Valizadeh, proprietor of the site Return of Kings). But the basic concept of sexual attraction as resulting from a display of value has remained influential in the seduction community.
Ovid sometimes gives advice that would definitely constitute DLVs. He advises the reader to send eloquent love notes (1.437–42, 455–62), to cry in front of his target (1.659–63), to always be by her side (1.487–504). Most of all, he repeatedly tells the reader to compliment his target effusively (1.621–30), although you should never go so far that you might get caught in a lie (2.295–314). On the other hand, euphemisms are great (2.641–62) — if she’s so skinny she looks like a skeleton, tell her she’s “slender” (2.660, ‘Sit gracilis, macie quae male viva sua est’).
He gives the opposite advice in the Remedia Amoris to men trying to fall out of love, telling them to turn all of the assets of their beloved (or, in PUA terminology, ‘oneitis’) into faults (Remedia 325–30; the opposite of the above is 328, ‘In gracili macies crimen habere potest’). In fact, the Remedia, with its extensive advice for how not to care about the person you used to love, often seems closer to modern PUA technique than the Ars itself. Roosh V, author of erotodidactic works such as Bang, Day Bang, Bang Poland, and Don’t Bang Denmark, in an article on his website called “7 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Game Right Now” writes:
Stop Using The Word “Hot” To Describe Women. Have you noticed how easy it seems to attract girls you’re not attracted to? Since you think of hot girls as so much more valuable than mediocre ones, you’re more likely to behave in a way that makes it clear to her that she is indeed too valuable for you, without even realizing what you’re doing. This is the phenomenon where bad, needy game “leaks” out as a result of your thoughts, without conscious effort on your part. If you want to get physical with hot girls, you need to master how you think of them first. From here on out, no girl is hot, and there are no tens. She’s either “cute” or “alright.” Don’t be that guy who falls captive to every girl he sees. Instead, trick your mind into lowering her value so that you spit tighter game.
Ovid seems to operate under the same principle later in the Remedia:
She’ll soon drop her disdain, when she sees your indifference:
this too’s a gift you’ll gather from my art…
Don’t let her be too pleased with herself, nor have the power
to despise you: be brave, so she gives way to your bravery.
(Remedia 511–2, 517–8, trans. A. S. Kline)
Much of what’s in the Ars also ends up looking, ultimately, like a less sophisticated version of PUA advice. Ovid’s recommendations for brushing imaginary dust off a woman at the theater (1.149–56) resemble PUA techniques for escalating kino; his suggestion that you try to befriend the husband of the woman you want (1.579–84) is a predecessor to established PUA methods for disarming the AMOG (“alpha male of the group”).
And even if some of the specifics of Ovid’s advice might not make up “tight game”, he certainly has what PUAs call “inner game”: supreme confidence in his own value and skill. And he has total frame control; when he calls himself the magister (teacher/master) of seduction (Ars 2.744, 3.812), we believe him.
Where Ovid foreshadows the techniques of today’s PUAs, he also foreshadows the most disturbing parts of their mindset. Even his third book, ostensibly meant to give advice to women on how to seduce men, often ends up being little more than advice on how to pick hairstyles and clothes that flatter your face and body. It echoes the PUA truism that men need years of honing their game, while women just need to be hot.
But that reinforcement of the idea that a woman’s value lies solely in her physical attractiveness is relatively harmless compared with Ovid’s views on consent. Forget “no means no” and “yes means yes” — for Ovid, no means yes. Advice on how to pick up women, either in an internet forum or an ancient Roman poem, may seem inconsequential. But the stakes can be high: at best, unhealthy relationships and “blurred lines,” and at worst, rape and murder.
Ovid perpetuates the idea that a man is entitled to the woman he desires — his desire will naturally induce hers:
First let faith enter into your mind: every one of them
can be won: you’ll win her, if you only set your snares.
Birds will sooner be silent in the Spring, cicadas in summer,
an Arcadian hound turn his back on a hare,
than a woman refuse a young man’s flattering words:
Even she you might think dislikes it, will like it.
(Ars Amatoria 1.269–74, trans. A. S. Kline)
Some PUAs might disagree with this sentiment, saying that seeming too eager is a DLV. But that’s nothing compared to later in the book, when Ovid explicitly states that women enjoy being raped:
Though she might not give, take what isn’t given.
Perhaps she’ll struggle, and then say ‘you’re wicked’:
struggling she still wants, herself, to be conquered…
Who takes a kiss, and doesn’t take the rest,
deserves to lose all that were granted too.
How much short of your wish are you after that kiss?…
Though you call it force: it’s force that pleases girls: what delights
is often to have given what they wanted, against their will…
And she who might have been forced, and escapes unscathed,
will be saddened, though her face pretends delight.
(selections from Ars Amatoria 1.664–78, trans. A. S. Kline)
Reading that passage makes me wonder why Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the text that’s been singled out for trigger warnings, when the Ars explicitly advocates rape. And the PUA community has inherited that toxic ideology.
To be perfectly clear, I don’t think PUAs are rapists. They are probably no more or less likely to be rapists than any other sector of the population. But they do have some disturbing ideas about consent, and how to obviate the need to obtain it.
There is a massive amount of content online dedicated to avoiding ‘last minute resistance’, or ‘LMR’. It’s a common trope in the seduction community that women will try to put the brakes on immediately before sex, but that the right techniques will allow you to “smash through” her reluctance. One manual dedicated to the subject created enough outrage that it was removed from Amazon. While none of these go quite so far as Ovid, they do advocate the idea that men shouldn’t take no for an answer: a ‘no’ is just a ‘yes’ that you haven’t manipulated enough yet.
If you’re reading this and you’re a PUA or part of the manosphere, you probably don’t care what I think. After all, I have short hair (which means I’m “damaged”) and I sometimes write for a feminist publication. But even non-feminists and anti-feminists can see some of the potential drawbacks to dedicating one’s life to seduction.
Seduction and the Ars Amatoria supposedly got Ovid exiled from Rome — he lived out his last days miserably in Tomis, a city in modern-day Romania where few people even spoke Latin, begging to be allowed to return to Rome. (If only he’d had Roosh V’s Romania manual to help him, maybe he wouldn’t have written so much whiny exile poetry.) Mystery seems to have vanished from the seduction community, while others have publicly repudiated their earlier ways. As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, Neil Strauss has followed up The Game with The Truth, while Tucker Max, author of I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, the back of which proudly proclaims “My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole,” recently reinvented himself as a relationship guru and published a book entitled Mate: Become the Man Women Want. He recently told Dr. Drew, “I went down that path, it was totally awful and unrewarding, and I came back and realized all these different things.”
The cynical approach to these retractions would be to say that they’re cash grabs, Max’s and Strauss’s attempts to have their cakes and eat them too: first profit off the PUA community, then profit off denouncing it. That’s not an unfair criticism, especially of Strauss. His first book is notable for spending hundreds of pages diving into the psychology of why various men became PUAs and how it affected them while never really considering the motivations of any of the women the men desire. The Truth is largely the same — in spite of occasional ‘diary entries’ from various women he’s involved with, the 450-page book is still really about him and his psychological journey toward not caring that he’ll only be able to sleep with one woman (who will, horror of horrors, necessarily get less attractive over time!) for the rest of his life.
That journey (modeled on The Odyssey, according to him) takes him through sex addiction therapy, a polyamorous conference, the world of swingers, a disastrous attempt at a quad with three women who can’t stand each other, a free love commune where he almost gets murdered with an axe by a jealous boyfriend, to a sexually liberating but emotionally empty open relationship, and then finally back to a healthy relationship with the woman he cheated on at the beginning of the book. But it’s not surprising that his odyssey back to Ingrid De La O, his Penelope, is so tortuous. After all, his earlier book, The Game, contained gems like this: “She was all holes: ears to listen to me, a mouth to talk at me, and a vagina to squeeze orgasms out of me” (p. 397).
Max and Strauss both try to present stories of redemption: game made them immensely successful with women, but ruined their ability to have relationships. Now, by their own accounts, they’re both happily married fathers (although, as Solon told Croesus, count no man happy until he’s dead — and Strauss would do well to remember that, in the epic cycle, Odysseus eventually gets murdered by the son he impregnated Circe with on his adultery-filled journey home).
But the dark potential of successful game is less scary than the potential of failed game. Both Ovid and the PUA community claim that anybody who learns the techniques of seduction — its ars — can be successful with women. You don’t need good looks, money, or professional success. In fact, those things make seducing women less impressive to your peers, because they’re seen as natural advantages, whereas the ‘unnaturals’ who can seduce women without those qualities are revered.
When you teach that any man can become successful with women, however, then men who fail to obtain the sexual access to women they feel they’re entitled to can turn violently misogynistic. Ovid peppers his seduction advice with illustrative examples from mythology, but myth isn’t known for its abundance of romances that end well. In fact, the first mythological reference of book 3 is to Penthesilea, the virginal Amazon whom Achilles desired and then killed.
This sublimation of sexual frustration into violence also seems to have affected Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter. Rodger frequented a website called PUAHate, a site for those left scammed and disappointed by the techniques of the seduction gurus. However, it is clear from his postings that Rodger’s hatred was less for PUAs than for the women he had failed to sleep with. One of his posts reads, “Eventually these frustrated men won’t be able to take it anymore and will explode in rage and fury, and the female population will suffer the consequences, as they rightfully deserve. Once women are brought to their knees, things can be reformed.” (The PUA community’s predictable response to the shooting was that if someone had only taught Rodger game, it would have saved the victims’ lives. That article was then followed by one arguing that Rodger was secretly a feminist.)
All of these consequences are the result of conceptualizing seduction as a teachable skill. Scholarship on the Ars Amatoria has tended to assume that Ovid is being playful or ‘ludic’ to some extent in this text — that is to say, he isn’t entirely serious. Scholars assume that almost everything Ovid wrote is ludic, and he does often take that tone. But the playful tone is frequently applied to deadly serious content. And when ideas that are similar to Ovid’s are used non-ironically — didactically, even — in contemporary pick-up artist manuals, it invites us to reconsider how seriously Ovid’s text takes itself and how seriously it should be taken, especially when the results can be so horrific. Some think the seduction community is harmless, but they’re wrong: game ruins lives. It ruined Ovid’s.
Of course, Strauss’s positioning of Ovid as having “the same ideas” as more recent PUAs blurs the significant cultural differences between Rome in 2 CE and America in the twenty-first century. It assumes that gendered behavior and heterosexual relationships have changed little in the past two thousand years — an erroneous assumption, since heterosexuality as a concept didn’t even exist back then, and expectations of what constitutes natural and typical male and female behavior are socially constructed and evolve over time. Ignoring these basic principles is a major component of PUA and manosphere ideology: they want to believe that masculinity is a concept with a fixed reality, grounded in pseudo-evolutionary principles, that has remained constant throughout the history of humanity.
That Ovid nevertheless fits so easily into the role of pickup artist is a sign of just how much the ideology of the PUA community is consistent, seductive, and toxic. In other words, be careful swallowing that red pill — it could be poisonous.
Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Her first book, currently titled Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.
