Harvard (2018) h/b 270pp £20 (ISBN 9780674975552)
Z., a Silicon-Valley based classicist who runs a prize-winning online Classics magazine (www.eidolon.pub), has ‘spent years reading articles, posts and comment sections on Red Pill websites large and small’. These sites are designed for males who feel that white men, who are (in their view) the true guardians of intellectual authority and defenders of the cultural legacy of Western civilisation, are being attacked on all sides by liberals and feminists. Their aim is to fight back by promoting patriarchal and white supremacist ideology. To do this, many of them use classical literature to legitimise their views.
It is to this topic that Z. addresses herself, not so much on the issue of racial politics, for which the ancient world does not provide such useful leverage, as on gender politics. Here the ancient world is deemed to offer rich pickings for those who feel that Greeks and Romans are the ultimate proof of the cultural and intellectual superiority of white men, proving that women should be kept subservient to the ‘natural’ male order of things. A caveat here: while one can understand how, having excavated all this distasteful material, Z. must have found it difficult not to lay it before the reader, the Pills do in fact have only one basic contention, and its repetition in different forms to maintain the argument throughout the book does become rather monotonous.
In the first chapter ‘Arms and the Manosphere’ (defined under the heading in Goggle as ‘a vast, diverse network of blogs and forums’ set up for the purpose of counteracting feminism), Z. maps out the contours of the Pill community and its various sub-groups, totalling something over half a million individuals. She cites their use of passages hostile to women from Hesiod, Semonides and Juvenal to illustrate how they justify their views of the way the world should be.
In chapter 2 ‘The Angriest Stoics’, Z. offers a brief summary of the main tenets of Stoicism and explains how the Pills misuse it for their purposes, citing its self-help view of the world, its elitist stance, and among some thinkers the inferiority of the female brain. White males are more rational and more stoic and thus have a right to rule. As Z. points out, this requires the Pills to turn a blind eye to much of what in reality Stoicism has to say.
The Ars Amatoria is the subject of chapter 3 (‘The Ovid Method’). Z. rightly starts by pointing out that it is a joke, a ludus, from beginning to end—an attempt to turn the battle of the sexes into a discipline like agriculture or astronomy. It hardly needs this reviewer to explain how this text is meat and drink to the Pills.
‘How to save Western Civilisation’ is the subject of the final chapter. Sex, coercive or not, with anyone at any time so that no one cares about rape any more is the Pills’ solution. This leads Z. to discuss ‘rape-culture’, with special reference to the opening chapters of Herodotus, Lucretia, ancient laws of rape and, in particular, the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus. Z. admits that this story involving a false accusation of rape does not feature large in the Pills’ mythography, but still thinks it worth reading that story in the context of Pill ideology because both feminist and Pill definitions of rape are ‘predicated on assumptions about how patriarchal our society is and how patriarchal it should be’. The argument in this section is quite difficult to follow.
Z. concludes by suggesting that the Pills ‘have conclusively proven that the ancient world remains a valuable toolkit for thinking through the issues and concerns that plague us today’—well, up to a point, Lord Copper—and that while she disagrees with their ideology and methodology, she agrees that ‘ancient Greece and Rome remain highly relevant to the modern world’. She expresses the hope that her book will show that ‘nuanced, feminist interpretations of the Classics can counteract Red Pill distortions’. But given what Z. has told us about the methods of this repellent sect, and what even this ‘digital hermit’ reviewer understands about the nature of discourse (if it can be called that) on twitter and the web, he finds it unlikely that the Pills are open to even the sweetest of reason. Still, it is important that the issue is laid bare.
The book has a glossary of Red Pill terms, as well as extensive notes and a combined bibliopharography.
Peter Jones