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Donna Zuckerberg on pickup artistry, Red Pill, and the classics

The last Harvard University Press book I had a chance to review for the show was “About Abortion” by Carol Sanger, which was such a spectacular experience. So, I was incredibly excited when HUP sent me a copy of Donna Zuckerberg’s new book, “Not All Dead White Men.”

Not only do we take a critical look at pickup artistry, Red Pill communities, and how many members of these communities have co-opted the classics to serve their patriarchal vision, but we also talk about the ways that PUAs dehumanize women, approach dating, and treat boundaries and consent as optional.

It’s fascinating, important, and eye-opening, to say the least. (Also, we really had a blast recording the Patreon bonus – it might be even better than the full episode!)

Grab your copy of “Not All Dead White Men” at Harvard University Press or on Amazon. It’s such a thought-provoking read.

Plus, Patreon supporters – If you support the show at the $3 level and above, Donna and I talk about negging, seduction techniques, and pickup artistry moving online. What question might a PUA lead with on an app like Tinder and why does it get under Donna’s skin so much? Why is name calling and escalating to rage and threats part of the pleasure? Delight in it with us and support the show at patreon.com/sgrpodcast

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It’s true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram.

In this episode, Donna and I talk about:

• The Red Pill community 101: what it is and and what it claims its role is to the society, and the other groups that exist under it.
• The pickup artistry algorithm and how it affects the other men around the community and whose techniques are better and more successful in a show of one upping one another.
• The purpose of pickup artistry and seduction and how it teaches men to disregard boundaries and value their own needs above the humanity of those around them.
• How the many manipulative techniques of pickup artistry do not work in a place where women feel safe and secure, and the firm belief that women don’t really want those things but rather have a man to provide for her.
• Ovid, sex workers, and what gets missed by pickup artists quoting from the classics.
• Why pickup artist techniques fail in a place like Denmark and “succeed” in places like Ukraine, and what it really reveals about these communities.
• Donna’s shares her experience in engaging with the Red Pill community and her many approaches she took in writing her book, “Not All Dead Men.”
• The narrative around the false rape allegations and how the community firmly believes that women who come forward with these allegations have an agenda, and what is revealed when we look at the stories out of ancient Athens around this same fear.
• The many historical myths about women accusing men of rape as revenge because she was rejected by him feeds insecurity and fear that is still prevalent in society today.
• How we can re-claim history and the importance of encouraging new and different perspectives in studying the classics.

About Donna Zuckerberg:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Welcome to this week’s episode, everybody! I have a cold. So if I sound a little bit off in this intro, it’s because I am all stuffed up. But the good thing is I did not have a cold when I interviewed Donna Zuckerberg, who is this week’s guest. I’m really looking forward to sharing this episode with you. It’s been a long time coming I delayed it by a couple of weeks just so I could do a couple of things on my end. Now, it’s really here. 

Dawn Serra: The book that we talked about is “Not All Dead White Men,” which is by Donna and it’s out by Harvard University Press in just a couple of weeks. So early October 2018, grab the book, especially support Harvard University Press if you can. Otherwise, it will be on Amazon and everywhere else where books are sold.

But before we get to the Donna interview, I just want to address that there have been so many current events over the past couple of months that I have not had a chance to address. But the thing that’s hot in the news right now is Brett Kavanaugh, who is the Supreme Court nominee, that God help us, if he gets put up on the Supreme Court, God, we are going to be in real trouble. But you know, hey, maybe that’s the scare that a lot of folks need to understand just how bad things are.

That said, there are some complications right now with this particular Supreme Court nominee because someone by the name of Christine Blasey Ford came forward saying that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. So I just want to go on record and say I believe Christine Blasey Ford. 

Dawn Serra: As you’ll hear in a part of my interview with Donna, most people who make public allegations like this, who come forward and share things like this, know the cost of what is involved. They know, Christine probably spent a lot of time really weighing the cost of what it meant to say this in public – the death threats and the violence that would be directed at her, the gaslighting, the smears against her character. It is a violent thing to be someone who comes forward and says, “This terrible thing happened to me.” So I don’t take it lightly when someone puts themselves in the firing range. It is not a comfortable place to be. But it is a brave place to be. 

So I just want to say I believe Christine and anyone else who has come forward publicly taking that burden on. It is hard and it is complicated and it is scary. Not everyone has the privilege to be able to name their abusers, the people who have harmed them. Some people carry it with them for many, many decades before they’re able to say anything. If you are out there and this has been a hard time for you, if it’s been triggering or upsetting, I feel you. I believe you. I support you. You deserve to know that you’re loved.

Dawn Serra: The world is quite intense right now, which makes this episode with Donna all the more timely and interesting. We talk all about pickup artistry and the Red Pill community of which pickup artistry is a part of, which also includes the alt-right and men’s rights activists and a number of other communities who all feel men – specifically white men – are the ones who suffer most in our current society. 

So Donna spent years diving deep into these communities in reading blog posts and books and taking a look at the ways that they not only communicate and experience the world, but also the ways that they use things like the classics – ancient Greek and ancient Rome, poets and philosophers – to bolster their arguments and to position themselves as morally superior and intellectually superior. 

Dawn Serra: The reason that that’s important is because for so many of us, who are out in the world dating and hooking up with folks and meeting people at bars and using apps and websites and all the other things that come with it, the likelihood that you’re going to run into someone from the pickup artist community is pretty high. And really being able to understand the tactics and the approach of what it means to be a target by a pickup artist is an important way of protecting ourselves. 

It’s also really important that we talk about all of the ways that these communities really want to perpetuate whiteness and masculinity, – specifically, very toxic masculinity – and patriarchy and misogyny in an effort to cling to power. Because approaching each other as complex human beings rather than puzzles and algorithms to solve means doing a lot more work and taking a lot more time. So many folks want that hack, that quick answer, that one thing I can do to get my dick wet or to check that box saying, “I achieved the thing,” which proves their worthiness. 

Dawn Serra: So it’s a really important conversation. It’s what I’m so excited. I got to have with Donna. Because the work that she has done in this space and continues to do in this space is crucial. So I think you’re really going to enjoy this even though it’s a little bit different than some of the other interviews I’ve had. 

Let me tell you just a little bit about Donna and then we will jump into this week’s episode. So Donna Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley-based classicist, who received her doctoral training at Princeton University. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Eidolon, a prize-winning, online classics magazine. I highly recommend following Eidolon on Twitter if you’re interested in feminist, queer and POC critiques of the classics. It’s super interesting and they also just have a really awesome feminist perspective that they are sharing on social media and of course, check out the magazine. 

At the end of the episode you’ll even hear Donna say if you’ve got ideas for essays that you want to pitch, they are always accepting. So if you are someone who knows a little bit about the classics and you have a feminist perspective, that might be a really interesting way to get something published. So here is my chat with Donna Zuckerberg about “Not All Dead White Men.” 

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Donna. I am really excited and also exhausted about talking to you about your new book, “Not All Dead White Men.” So welcome to the show.

Donna Zuckerberg: Thank you for having me and imagine how I feel. 

Dawn Serra: Oh my God! I can’t. I can’t even imagine. For those of you who are listening, I just had an opportunity to read Donna’s new book, “Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age,” which is, as the back says, a disturbing exposé of how today’s alt-right men’s groups use ancient sources to promote a new brand of toxic masculinity online. It’s not for the faint heart or for those who get easily frustrated. But it is fascinating. 

I have to just give you kudos, Donna for the depth with which you must have jumped into the pickup artist threads and the alt-right threads and all of the things on Reddit and the blog posts. That is a special kind of strength. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. There were a lot of sort of dark rabbit holes that I went down and I would emerge an hour later with a haunted look in my eyes, I think. The people I work with and live with would be vaguely concerned about if I was doing okay.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. That zombie look of like, “Oh God. Another blog post on the moral superiority of men.

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. Also, every so often, I would– I mean, I always warn people before I send them, before I text them a snippet of something I just read because I don’t believe in just throwing that out to somebody without any buffer. But, yeah, they all got pretty used to that as well like, “You will not believe this awful thing I just read.” “Okay. Give me a minute to sit down and grab a glass of wine. Okay. What was it?” 

Dawn Serra: I’m so glad I’m not the only one that does that.

Donna Zuckerberg: Oh, yeah. Everyone does that.

Dawn Serra: Yes. So for people who are listening, I know many listeners are familiar with pickup artistry. Of course, just because of the news, the alt-right. But could you just give a starter definition for Red Pill and who exists under that umbrella since that’s where we’re going to go today?

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. Absolutely. So the Red Pill is a large, almost exclusively online community of, I guess, a few hundred thousand men – mostly men. There are some women there, too – who believe that they have a more enlightened view of the world. That’s the Red Pill metaphor from The Matrix. They’ve taken the red pill, they could see the world for what it really is. The way that the world really is is that it’s deeply unfair to men and especially white men. They’ve sort of had their eyes open to this reality that the rest of us believe that we live in some kind of patriarchy where we should support women and people of color, but really, it’s the white men who are oppressed. 

There are a fair number of groups under this umbrella and you could see– It tends to accrete new groups through time. I think that some of the oldest factions are the men’s rights movement, the fathers’ rights movement. I mean, you do see sort of legitimate grievances, I think. Then around 2014, you see the video game– Sort of more misogynist elements, the video game community get added, get brought under the umbrella. The pickup artists enter, probably, the late aughts. Then Men Going Their Own Way, which is a group of men who believe that the sexual marketplace is so tilted in women’s favor that the phrase that comes to mind is “There’s no ethical sex under john-aucracy.” Sort of there’s no ethical consumption or capitalism. But for them, in our female-dominated world, there’s no good way for men to engage in a sexual relationship, so they just opt out.

Donna Zuckerberg: Then in 2016, you see the addition of the alt-right to the Red Pill umbrella. Before that, I mean, there were definitely strongly racist undertones. But within– Racism has always been part of the pickup artist community, especially. But the white supremacist internet, places like Stormfront, we’re not really allied with the rest of the Red Pill movement until the 2016 election. So that’s the bigger umbrella of the groups that we’re talking about. 

Dawn Serra: Okay. So there are so many places I would love to go with all of the research and the amazing analysis that you’ve done. I mean, some of the stuff about racism is so important to talk about, but we only have a limited amount of time for our conversation today. So we’ll probably focus mostly on pickup artists and this fear, this just overwhelming fear of the false rape allegations that go through the Red Pill. I would love for us to just start with, for people who are familiar but don’t really know, what is pickup artistry?

Donna Zuckerberg: Pickup artistry, I mean, there are several definitions. But the most basic idea is that pickup artistry is a philosophy where you can learn specific techniques and strategies for self-presentation and for interaction with women that will greatly increase your chances of having sex with them.

What separates pickup artistry there from just being good with the opposite sex – or the same sex, sometimes, when we are talking about the pickup artist community — but typically we’re talking about the opposite sex. What separates that is that it’s not just about confidence or charm or charisma. It really is these finely, calibrated techniques for, “I’m going to say this. She’s going to respond in this kind of way. If she doesn’t respond in this kind of way, then I may go try my technique on a different woman instead. Or if she does, I will follow up with this protocol.” It’s almost like an algorithm. So that’s the basic idea – that you can learn these techniques and that they will lead you to sexual success. 

Donna Zuckerberg: So the offshoot of that concept is that there are people who can teach other people those techniques. That’s sort of an obvious extension. So then that’s how the community develops. You have people who are more successful, who have done this for a period of time, who then become teachers of other aspiring pickup artists. Then you get in-group fighting, factions, different kinds of techniques. 

This is all covered in Neil Strauss’s 2005 memoir, “The Game.” Although things have changed a lot since 2005. In 2005, it seems like it was really heavily-based — There were some MSN chats. But it was really… A lot of it was in-person. It’d be people running seminars and things. Now, I think it’s mostly online, mostly giant fora. The seduction subreddit has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Dawn Serra: One of the things that was so interesting as you were sharing the wormhole that you fell down, of pickup artistry and how they use some classics to really feel morally superior and intellectually – of course – superior in all the ways, but was really how Neil Strauss reveals this through his books as well, is that so much of pickup artistry becomes about seducing the men around you to buy into your techniques and your stories and how it really becomes about wanting to prove why you have the least likelihood of getting the sex, so when you get the sex it’s more impressive than this other person. This kind of one-upmanship of how much sadder you are, which makes you that much better at the game because you had more to fight against than this other guy, who’s a little bit better looking. It was fascinating, this twisting that they were doing to try and impress each other. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. That really blew my mind as well. The idea that it was a marker of status in the community to be ugly or short. That it made your sexual success all the more impressive and made you that much more desirable as a guru. I mean, that really is how I discovered the Ovid connection is through Neil Strauss. He mentioned Ovid in an interview that he did with The Atlantic about his follow up, “The Truth.” First, I kind of thought, “Well, that’s odd. A pickup artist talking about Ovid. 

At first, I assumed it was just him and that it was part of his persona. He’s more literary edging into a sort of literary-nerdiness persona that was, again, part of how he constructed his authority – as somebody who could maybe be a little intimidating to women because of how well read he was. But he managed to make them feel comfortable anyway.

I mean, I was surprised to find that there was actually a lot more interest in all of it in the pickup artist community than I originally anticipated. Although I do still think that that element is there. That there’s a pride in being the kind of person who can talk about Roman poets.

Dawn Serra: Yes. Just more fuel for that story of superiority. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Exactly. And superiority really is a key element because one of the major elements of having game is internalizing your sense of your superiority over the women who  are your targets. What they see is the fundamental problem with seduction is that if you’re approaching a woman, she’s already in a position of power because you want to sleep with her and you’re making the approach. So what you have to do is you have to reverse the power dynamic, so that she wants to sleep with you more than you want to sleep with her. So that internalized sense of superiority is actually a major part of it. But it helps reinforce this idea that she would be lucky to sleep with you.

Dawn Serra: One of the things that you wrote that I really thought was so important was that the purpose of pickup artistry and seduction technique is not to teach men how to become attractive to women, it’s to teach them that male desire is more important than female boundaries, that what women want, think and consent to is immaterial. So how are they using that perspective and then capitalizing on classic Roman poetry from like Ovid to bolster that view or to prove that throughout all of the ages, men have been this way. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Essentially, respecting another person’s boundaries is a form of acknowledging that they are a person with value. In a way, that’s something that is inimical to the whole pickup artist ethos, which is about thinking that your desire is the most important thing. 

So a lot of the advice that you see on pickup artist forums is touch her a lot. If she doesn’t want you to touch her, she’ll back off. But never let her make the first move. See if she’s into it. It’s always to be more aggressive. And the idea is that the worst that could happen is that you’ll come off as a creep and she’ll walk away and complain to her friends about it. The idea that you might be giving the woman a bad experience is not something that even occurs to them, really. Or, if it does occur to them, it’s not something that is as important as the fact that they might get laid. 

Donna Zuckerberg: That can be a difficult idea to internalize for people at first, I think, because a lot of people are shy about approaching other people and being sexually aggressive. So it’s very affirming to think, “Well, this poet, who wrote 2000 years ago, was saying the exact same thing that he was saying.” Brush dust off at the arena, even if it’s just imaginary dust. Make up all these little reasons to touch her and get her used to being touched by you. And then you can go further. The same kind of advice that has been given today. It really validates it and makes it have even more the ring of some kind of eternal truth.

Dawn Serra: It’s that sense of legitimacy that they’re looking for. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Exactly. Of course, that ignores Ovid’s social context. The idea of the very elite Roman male world. The fact that you’re not just saying sexual strategies have always been the same from ancient Rome to today, you’re saying I want to replicate this aristocratic Roman entitlement over the bodies of what are essentially sex workers. But the historical context gets completely derailed there. Most scholars agree that Ovid’s target – the women who are the targets for seduction in the “Ars Amatoria” – are meant to be marriage regles, so sex workers.

Dawn Serra: Do you find that specifically within the Red Pill and more pickup artist reasons, I think, they’re more interested in Ovid than some of the others? Do they not know about the sex worker aspect? Do they tend to just overlook it because it’s convenient? Because in my experience, a lot of people who are in cells and interested in pickup artistry have deep, deep loathing of sex workers because it’s almost like proof that “I’m so pathetic that I have to pay for it.” Which you know, we are very pro-sex work friendly show and we know that’s bullshit. But that’s the attitude that I’ve encountered a lot is like, “I’m better than having to pay for it, so I’ll just take it in some other way.” How does the sex worker element of Ovid’s poetry integrated or ignored by the pickup artists who are quoting him? 

Donna Zuckerberg: It is ignored, for the most part. But I don’t think that if you were to approach them and say, “Well, what would your response be to this?” I’m sure that they would have a very consistent response, which would be something to the effect of that we exist in a sexual marketplace. Where even women who don’t consider themselves sex workers are, and the word that they use is hypergamous. That we’re all gold diggers. Always looking to treat up to a higher status man, who is more financially successful and more professionally successful, more famous. In a way sex work is just a more honest reckoning of the kind of dynamics that are there always in heterosexual relationships. 

Dawn Serra: One of my favorite parts of your book, I underlined it and starred it and dog-eared the pages because I just loved it– 

Donna Zuckerberg: Is it the Denmark thing? 

Dawn Serra: Yes. Oh my God!

Donna Zuckerberg: Yes. The Denmark thing.

Dawn Serra: Yes. The Denmark– Okay. One of the leaders of the pickup artist community revealed the truth about what’s really at play. Because their claims are that white men are the most oppressed in our culture and their belief that women have all of this power. But then something happened in Denmark that he blogged about with rather a lot of rage. So can you tell us a little bit about what happens there and what it really revealed? 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yes. Absolutely. So the writer who we’re talking about is a Roosh V, who is sort of a leader in the community – although maybe a little less so these days. He has this series of pickup artist travel guides – Bang Poland, Bang Ukraine, Bang Brazil. It’s very much a brand. But then he came out with a book called “Don’t Bang Denmark” and what transpires is that he had a really difficult time picking up women in Denmark because of socialism and because the social services in Denmark– I mean, this is his perception, of course. We will never really know what happened. But his belief is that the social services in Denmark lead women to be confident and secure enough in their sense of self that they are immune to alpha male pickup artists tactics that position the man as inherently superior to the woman. That women there just feel good about themselves and they feel good about their place in society. So you can’t make them feel inferior in the same way that will make them want desire you and try to seek your approval. 

Dawn Serra: Which reveals a lot. Because, you know… It’s very revealing. Yeah. 

Donna Zuckerberg: It does. It’s very revealing. All of his descriptions of Denmark make it sound like just a wonderful place to live. At one point he calls it like a feminist utopia.

Dawn Serra: I know right.

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. it really– I mean, it really made me want to move to Denmark a little bit. 

Dawn Serra: Heck, yeah. It’s supposed to be one of the best places to live in the world. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. The whole idea is that the government provides education and maternity leave and all of these other things. So women don’t need men to provide for them. So positioning yourself as an alpha male who could take care of her is not something that’s going to be attractive. Sounds great, right? 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. It does. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Maternity leave? Imagine that.

Dawn Serra: Right and it just really flips everything on its head that then what we’re really seeing is that these techniques only work in a place where women feel unsafe and insecure and unsure in worlds and cultures that have a lot more patriarchy and sexism and misogyny and fewer access to health care and things like that. So I think that’s– I just find it so interesting that he was so open about that because it seems to really damage the stories that they’re telling themselves to justify why they do this. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Right. They are very invested in the myth that this is a game that women want to play on some level. Or, that really, by positioning themselves as alpha males, they’re giving women what they really want. Women may think that they want feminism and government support and basic health care, but what women really want is to have a man who will take care of them. So that idea that women are willing participants in the game is something that they hold on to very tightly. 

I think that you can see that in Ovid as well. That’s why Ovid has– One of the three books of the “Ars Amatoria” is for women on how to seduce men. So the idea that this is very much like a game that’s happening on both sides and both people are knowing players. But yes, I think that a text like “Don’t Bang Denmark” really shows what a lie that is essentially. It’s very revealing. 

Dawn Serra: Something else that you wrote in an essay separate from the book that I thought applies so beautifully to everything that you’re sharing in this book – for many reasons, I hope so many of you who are listening will read this because it’s so fascinating – is that basically, no amount of data or evidence is ever going to convince a lot of the folks within the Red Pill because they’re fundamentally convinced that they’re intellectually and emotionally superior. Which means anything you share with them is inherently beneath them, so they don’t even have to give it any credence or the time of day because it would be like trying to argue with someone who will just never understand you. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yes. That’s exactly right. People ask me all the time if I’ve tried to engage with people from this community. I mean, I have tried. It has been a spectacular failure because I’m female and Jewish and part of liberal academia. I have all of these tags associated with my identity that make it so easy for them to invalidate anything that I would say about my expertise in understanding Ovid. How could somebody with a PhD in Classics, if she is a woman and all these other things, understand Ovid as well as some pickup artists who’s read it in translation but is male and has the same interests that Ovid does? 

It’s true though. You cannot convince them using data or evidence or a greater body of historical knowledge. This is one of the first lessons I learned when writing my book. I approached the pickup artist chapter first because I knew that there was so much really rich material there. One of the major notes that my editor gave me back on that first draft was that it didn’t make me a better person than these guys because I was better at reading Ovid than they were. She really wanted me to minimize all the places in the chapter where I was saying, “Look at how bad this is as a reading of Ovid. Look at how shallow and incorrect this is.” Because essentially, in many ways, that’s a consideration that doesn’t matter. 

Dawn Serra: So what do you think does matter? What do you think– Having spent so much time reading and thinking about and analyzing everything that you experienced within the Red Pill communities, is there something we could do or is there some sliver of hope or is it more, “Let’s focus on the things we can influence and just leave the cesspool?”

Donna Zuckerberg: I think it’s a question of which audience you’re trying to reach. So things like historical nuance and context and detail do matter, if what you’re trying to do is reach a community that might be interested in Ovid, but not really know how to approach it and might be inclined to make sort of a superficial comparison between Ovid and modern pickup artists, then it’s really important to approach the topics with the perspective of, “Before you say Ovid looks just like a pickup artists, let’s talk about what Ovid’s texts really is.” 

I think there are a lot of people who are interested in ancient literature who are not pickup artists or not hardcore Red Pill devotees who can be reached with that kind of education. People always say to me, “Shouldn’t we try to appeal to these guys somehow?” or “Should we try to convince them, in some ways, ancient literature can be a bridge appealing to some sort of common humanity?” To those people, I always say, “If you want to try to do that, great. Go ahead.” We need people who will make that attempt over and over again, even though it’s kind of doomed to fail. There are people who take that approach and power to them. 

Donna Zuckerberg: But you also need people who will try to reach audiences that haven’t made up their minds yet or audiences that have maybe encountered pickup artists and want to arm themselves with the conceptual tools that they need to explain why pickup artist culture is so toxic. And why their readings of Ovid are not only wrong, but also are part of this worldview and ideology that is so damaging to women. 

Dawn Serra: So one of the other things that you dive into, which is, of course, something that I have certainly received in my email inbox when I talk about rape culture is this gripping fear, specifically of white straight, cis men of the false rape allegation and how often conversations about equality and healing and trauma and sexual assault get derailed completely by folks who come in and say, “But false rape allegations.” So what do you find around that narrative, which is a very loud and very prominent one in a lot of these circles? What did you discover and unpack around them? 

Donna Zuckerberg: It is very loud and prominent and we think disproportionately so. I mean, part of the problem when you’re talking about false rape allegation is that there’s no way to get any kind of good, solid statistics on it, on the problem. So, if men in the Red Pill community wants to claim that 95% of rape allegations are false, there’s absolutely nothing that we can do to prove them wrong. Not that even if there were anything we could do to prove them wrong, they would listen – as we sort of been discussing. But in this case in particular, they feel very empowered to assert their own version of reality, which is that most rape allegations are false. 

I think a large part of the problem there is an inability to agree on what words like rape and false even mean. I think that what they mean a lot of the time is this woman has an agenda, which might be true. I mean, women have– You have to have a good reason to come forward with a rape allegation. It’s so damaging and upsetting to your life. I mean, I wouldn’t use the word agenda because of all the negative connotation. But making an allegation against somebody, you have to… I think that women, a lot of women go into that with their eyes open knowing how disruptive it is going to be to their lives. So you have to really believe it’s the right thing to do. Of course, from the Red Pill perspective that looks like an agenda. Even if we were wanting justice. Crazy agenda there.

Dawn Serra: Crazy agenda.

Donna Zuckerberg: But, yeah. What I discovered looking at the ancient material is that this fear is very old and very powerful. Also that it has nothing to do with gynocentrism, which is one of the claims that the men in the Red Pill community make. But it’s proof that we live in a sort of female-dominated society, that so much credence is given to rape allegations. Now, of course, I don’t even believe that much credence is given to rape allegations. But let’s accept their premise for a second that women who make rape allegations tend to be believed. It’s really hard for me to even pretend that I think that’s true. 

Dawn Serra: I know.

Donna Zuckerberg: Okay. Pretending that we think that that’s true, is that proof that we live in some female-dominated society? Now, once you see that the myths and the ideas around false rape allegations were precisely the same in fifth century Athens, it becomes harder to maintain that fiction that rape allegations have anything to do with there being female power in society. Because pretty much nobody believes that women had any power in ancient Athens. So clearly what we’re seeing there are male anxieties and anxieties that are, in some way, born of patriarchy. 

Dawn Serra: It’s just like it’s hard to talk about this in a lot of ways because so much of… I mean, so many of the narratives that get shared around this fear of false rape allegations don’t actually bear the fruit that they claim it does. I mean, sure Harvey Weinstein maybe is not going to have his name on a marquee as often as it used to, but is he destitute and  not able to feed himself? No.

What was really interesting was in the “How to Save Western Culture” chapter of the book, you talked at length, and I’m probably going to say the name wrong because I’m not a historian, is it Phaedra?

Donna Zuckerberg: Phaedra is fine. Phaedra also, sometimes. I mean, pronunciation of ancient names is not an exact science.

Dawn Serra: So you talk about Phaedra’s story. I think that it’s a really, really interesting one. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about it? 

Donna Zuckerberg: Absolutely. Phaedra was the sister of Ariadne, the woman who famously helped Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from the labyrinth. The aftermath of that story, which is spoken about much less than the labyrinth-Minotaur part is that Theseus then abandoned, Ariadne and married her sister. Then fast forward several years, Theseus is off on yet another swashbuckling adventure. 

Through either divine intervention by Aphrodite or the mysteries of Pasiphaë and attraction, Phaedra falls in love with Theseus’ son from an earlier relationship with an Amazon. His name is Hippolytus. Again, it depends on exactly which version of the myth we’re talking about, but some kind of approach is made by Phaedra to Hippolytus to try to proposition him. In Euripides’ tragedy, she doesn’t approach him directly at all. It’s actually a slave of hers who approaches them. But sometimes she approaches him and tries to convince him to sleep with her and he rejects her. Hippolytus is very invested in chastity. He’s sort of this model of an ancient man going his own way. He’s very misogynistic, but also keeps himself completely separate from women. All he wants to do is go hunting. 

Donna Zuckerberg: So he rejects Phaedra and then she kills herself but leaves a note for Theseus, leading him to believe that the reason she killed herself is because Hippolytus raped her. She couldn’t live with the shame. And then Theseus returns, discovers that this has happened and punishes Hippolytus for allegedly raping his stepmother. Then it’s, of course, discovered that Phaedra been lying and Hippolytus was innocent and everybody’s sad. Hippolytus gets crushed by a chariot. So yeah. Theseus is left with nothing.

Dawn Serra: These Greek myths.

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. I mean, this is a story from tragedy. Tragedies are not known for having happy endings. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah.

Donna Zuckerberg: Hippolytus gets a cult site dedicated to him. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Donna Zuckerberg: That’s sort of a happy ending, I guess. He’s going to be worshiped.

Dawn Serra: Of course. 

Donna Zuckerberg: But yeah. So that’s the basic story. It’s similar in a lot of ways to the story of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph in Genesis. This older woman approaches younger man and when he rejects her, she claims that she’s been raped out of revenge. 

Dawn Serra: So these myths really feed this deep insecurity and fear that apparently has plagued men for thousands of years. But it really speaks to, “This is something I’m terrified of and these myths help to lend some weight to why these fears are founded.” 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yes. Exactly. The version of Phaedra’s myth that still exists to us from Greek tragedy is by Euripides. Euripides wrote several plays on the same model, where a young attractive man is propositioned by an older woman and when he rejects her, he gets accused of rape and the stories go in various directions from there. But the idea that saying no to a woman who wants you, may lead her to pretend that really she’s the one who rejected you and then force yourself on her, is a very old idea. And that this sort of trope still is really common in the discourse about false rape allegations. That women make these allegations out of revenge, because now they slept with somebody and they wanted a relationship and he didn’t want one. And so suddenly, became rape in their mind.

Dawn Serra: This is tingling something for me in my head. As you’re talking and as we’re thinking about Phaedra and the story that’s getting told about her lust and attraction for this “chaste and pure” kind of fellow – who’s actually very misogynistic – but there’s this rhetoric that we have that’s very disgusting, of course. But it’s speaking to the same thing around saying no to a woman will lead to these revenge actions of false rape allegations and how if it’s an “unattractive,” like a culturally unattractive woman, then of course, she wouldn’t have been raped because look at her– I mean, it’s terrible to say that aloud, but that’s kind of where a lot of these things go around, “Well, you couldn’t possibly have been raped.” And then that victim blaming that happens. I’m seeing elements of that in some of these myths around, like the older woman going for the younger man and then he rejects her, so then she turns it around and weaponizes that.

Donna Zuckerberg: And Hippolytus actually uses that argument in Euripides’ play. He says to Theseus, “Why would I have raped her? Was she more beautiful than other women?” So, yes. 400 something BC, you see that exact same argument. That sort of Donald Trump, “Look at her? I don’t think so.” 

Dawn Serra: So I would love to read a little piece from your conclusion and just talk about that for a couple of minutes before we wrap up. Because I thought it just captured so beautifully the places that you went in the book. I really hope that people who hear this are going to be like, “Woah. I really need to go read the book.” Is it okay if I read a little paragraph? 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Dawn Serra: Okay. Great. You wrote, “Although their analyses of ancient sources rarely display much understanding of context and nuance, Red Pill writers, nevertheless, are adept at manipulating ancient sources to make them speak meaningfully to contemporary concerns. They have appropriated the texts and history of ancient Greece and Rome to bolster their most important ideas.” Then the list of ideas is “That all women are deceitful and degenerate. That white men are, by nature, more rational then and therefore superior to everyone else. That women’s sexual boundaries exist to be manipulated and crossed. Finally, that society as a whole would benefit if men were given the responsibility for making all decisions for women, particularly over their sexual and reproductive choices.” So that is a terrifying reality for most of us. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. Sounds really bad when you read it like that. 

Dawn Serra: It sounds really bad. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of bizarre because it’s almost like they are– You know, we all do this in a way of like, “Oh. The good old days.” But taking it to an extreme of they’re whitewashing history and you have some really great stuff you’ve written about that around there was actually a lot of diversity in some of these ancient cities and they like to very much whitewash it. They like to very much really think about the ways that they imagine life was when men were elite, white ruling classes.

I wonder as you’ve done this research and you’ve really… God knows how you survived some of this research. You’re really thinking about how can we push back and how can we reclaim the history that is being taken by them? What do you want to see historians and classicists focus on? And what do you want to invite people who are interested in history to do, so that it’s not taken away and named in this way?

Donna Zuckerberg: It has to be a very multi-pronged approach. One part of the approach is really insisting upon the diversity and nuance and complexity and often problematic nature of these ancient societies. So, resisting the attempts that are made to paint ancient Rome and Greece as patriarchal, white supremacist utopias that we should try to recreate in the modern world. And saying, you know… And fighting back against that.

On the one hand, by revealing those fantasies for what they are, which is fantasies that often don’t have that much grounding and historical reality and that are being mobilized to try to imagine what a brighter future would look like. It’s looking back to a falsely bright past as a way to try to envision a brighter future for them – a brighter future for white men, darker future for everybody else.

Donna Zuckerberg: So exposing that discourse for what it really is, pointing out how wrong they are about the ancient world is part of that. But part of it is also going to have to be pointing out that they are sometimes right about the ancient world. That there is this element in Ovid where he’s essentially recommending rape. They’re not necessarily wrong to see themselves in Ovid, even though they would argue that neither they or Ovid is recommending sexual assault. 

So not looking at the Western canon with rosy glasses and saying, “No. they’re wrong with Ovid. Ovid has nothing to do with pickup artists.” Well, I mean there’s a reason why these texts are so compelling to them and being really honest about the material that we’re dealing with here and the ways in which it has impacted how we look at society. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Also, on another level – important problem that also, often gets forgotten – embracing inclusion and diversity in the field and fighting back against the idea of this is what somebody who is well-versed in the classics looks like. Because that’s often a subtle, but important part of what they’re doing is they’re reinforcing the idea that white men have this knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, that makes them– And having that knowledge makes you superior to other people. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I love that invitation of what would be gained by having people of color and disabled people and queer people really examining the texts and making meaning from them and critiquing them very honestly. There’s the potential for so much richness in all of those perspectives and that’s one of the things that I think is just so lost by so many of the conversations that are happening in these Red Pill communities. It’s just this circle jerk of sameness and then encouraging each other and also justifying each other’s rage when they don’t get the thing they think they deserve. Whereas having this multiplicity and this nuance of all these different perspectives could give us so much more space for so many interesting things to happen. That’s just– I know that that’s a terrifying prospect to most of them. But one that, to me, sounds really exciting and interesting. 

Donna Zuckerberg: I could not agree more. So many people tell me that that second prong that I spoke about – the part where we’re appreciating that there’s a lot of really problematic material in these ancient texts – so many people who are critical of the work I do tell me that I’m going to drive people away from classics because I’m making it seem like classics is only something that white men should read if they want to feel good, that I’m making people feel bad about these texts, that everything is so negative on the journal that I run. 

I think that the opposite is true. I mean, all those perspectives that you mentioned – this perspectives of people of color and disabled people – they’re already there. There are fantastic, classical scholars doing that work and amplifying those voices, I think, can only make the field a richer and more exciting place. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Agreed. We need more. So you and I are going to go have a little bonus chat for our Patreon supporters. I have a specific question for you about pickup artistry that I think would be fun to roll around in. 

But for people who are tuning in for this part of the show, how can they stay in touch with you? How can they find your book? How can they find your writings online if they want to follow along with all of the analysis that you’re doing? 

Donna Zuckerberg: So a place where I’m most often is my online publication,  eidolon.pub, where I’m editor-in-chief. The publication is really devoted to publishing these pieces with this more inclusive view of the ancient world. My book is, I guess, available at major book retailers starting on October 8th – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, that sort of thing. It’s with Harvard University Press. So you can buy directly from the source. If anybody has ideas for articles that they want to pitch Eidolon, if anybody has thoughts about that, then our our pitches are always open. 

Dawn Serra: Awesome. 

Donna Zuckerberg: Yeah. 

Dawn Serra: So I will, of course, have links to Eidolon as well as Harvard University Press for the book because we support publishers and supporting them monetarily whenever we can, when they put out rad stuff. Links will be at dawnserra.com for this episode, as well as in the show notes.

I just want to start by saying thank you so much, Donna, for being here and for sharing so many ideas and also for allowing us to share the misery that it must have been so many times for you reading through those blogs. Thank you for doing that labor for us.

Donna Zuckerberg: Thank you for having me.

Dawn Serra: You’re welcome. To everybody who tuned in, thank you so much for listening. If you want to send in any questions, you can do so at dawnserra.com. There’s a contact form there. You know I love hearing from you. Be sure to grab Donna’s book if you want to geek out all about this stuff because holy crap, there’s so much in there you’re going to want to underline and star. 

If you support the show on Patreon at $3 or above, you can hear our bonus chat, plus all the others from all the previous weeks and episodes at patreon.com/sgrpodcast. So thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you next week.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?