The red pill is coopting the misogynistic parts of ancient Western philosophy - 2018-10-25
The red pill is coopting the misogynistic parts of ancient Western philosophy October 25, 2018,
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."
