The great works of the ancient world, Latin and Greek classics, are being embraced by a thriving online subculture. That sounds encouraging until you learn that those doing the embracing tend to be men who sift through the Stoics in order to bolster a worldview that objectifies and ridicules women. For them it’s less about finding enlightenment than justifying entitlement.
Donna Zuckerberg immersed herself in so-called Red Pill forums, where men trade their favorite quotes from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and wring their hands about the state of male-female relations. But Zuckerberg is no mere lurker: She’s a Princeton-trained classicist and editor in chief of Eidolon, an online magazine about classics. She wanted to explore how those texts were, in a sense, being weaponized by men who wished to give a scholarly gloss to their posts.
Much of what she discovered, which she chronicles in her new book, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press), disturbed her. She’s also found herself a target of men who don’t take kindly to an actual classics scholar — and a female scholar at that — peering into their boys’ club. They have responded with crude mockery, anti-Semitic insults, and barely disguised threats.
Zuckerberg spoke with The Chronicle about Ovid, writing for a general audience, and the occasional urge to step away from the internet.
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What does the manosphere get most wrong about classics?
I think in some ways they get a lot right. What they get wrong about classics, I would say, stems from the ideological motivations behind the way they use classics. The message that they tend to take from literature and history from the ancient world is that there is a set, immutable human nature, and the continuity they imagine between now and 2,000 years ago proves that this exists. And this is especially the case with women, the idea that women have always been the same and will always be the same because that’s just the way they were programmed to be.
And there’s plenty in those works that would tend to support their views, right?
But it doesn’t mean that they have to be read in that way or for that purpose. I choose to read Ovid. I enjoy Ovid. I think there’s so much value to be gained from Ovid that’s not using Ovid to prop up some idealized white-supremacist patriarchy — but you can do that. That’s an analytical choice.
It’s complicated, because I could sit here and tell you all kinds of things that any Red Pill writer gets wrong about a certain text, how much context and nuance they’re erasing. But to me that’s almost not really the point. If they want to say these are the great achievements of Western civilization and that they come from a society that was deeply patriarchal, then in that sense they’re not wrong.
Why do you think they hark back to classics? Is it to sort of appear erudite?
That’s a huge part of it. Part of it is that intellectual sophistication, and the other part is that they see Western civilization as this incredibly powerful construct and this tremendous achievement that is constantly under attack, or on the edge of decline, and needs to be defended. And even though they may not say so explicitly, Western civilization is a fairly obvious dog whistle for white culture. So it’s a way to be white supremacist, or to praise whiteness, without seeming to do so.
And, of course, that’s incredibly problematic as a scholar in all kinds of ways, not least of which is that whiteness is not that meaningful a concept to retroject onto the ancient world. But I think that kind of nitpicking misses the point.
So is it a useless endeavor to point out what they’re getting wrong?
There’s absolutely value in correcting their misconceptions and places where they get things obviously wrong, if only because we like to stop the spread of misinformation. But it won’t convince them. You can never convince a Red Pill writer by pointing out all the places they’re wrong, even if it’s indisputable that they’re wrong. This is one of the reasons they’re so frustrating to debate online.
That was a moment when I realized you can debate somebody on their side and it devolves into hurling Twitter insults at each other, and each side’s followers are absolutely sure that their guy won because you’re not really writing for each other — you’re writing for the people who are already on your side.
Have you heard from anyone you write about in the book?
A bit. I’ve been reluctant to deal with them for several reasons, largely because dealing with a two-month-old baby seems more rewarding than arguing with people on the internet.
I don’t get the sense that a whole lot of them have read the book. A few maybe have, but for the most part the people who are drawing me into debates seem aware of my book as an item, meaning they’ve already decided. And I’m not at all interested in that, because I know that to them I’m also an item based on markers that I would not personally choose. Like “Jew.” I am Jewish, but to me that would not be a primary element of my identity that would define who I am in this debate. But to them it is.
One of the better-known Red Pill writers published a particularly noxious screed attacking you.
People who say that words can’t be violent should read that and try to imagine it being written about you. Especially written by someone who had shared your address with his followers. What was interesting to me is that I didn’t feel humiliated. I felt horrified. I had to take many extremely hot showers. But I realized that he had this extreme misconception about my work, which was he thought that I cared what he thought of it. To me he was a subject of analysis. He’s not somebody whose opinion I value.
Nothing makes them feel more powerful than shutting a woman down. And nothing makes them angrier than failing to shut a woman down.
I’m curious what you’ve learned, as editor of Eidolon — which mixes the personal and the scholarly — about what readers respond to when it comes to classics.
What I discovered over time is that the pieces that I thought were the best, and the ones that were resonating most strongly with readers, were ones that took a critical look at the field of classics and what the field of classics was doing, but were written in a way that even non-classicists could understand and would hopefully find interesting.
There are a lot of great reasons to engage with the public, to my mind, especially if you’re used to writing for audiences of one to three people. It keeps your voice interesting and fluid and keeps you from falling into those academese traps. And it’s healthy, sort of emotionally, to write from a place where people would have a reason to read what you’re going to say.
In the acknowledgments, you write that when your friends and colleagues read the manuscript for this book, some of them said it made them want to to quit the internet. Do you ever have those moments?
I absolutely have those moments. It’s hard for me because of my lack of institutional affiliation — Twitter is my digital hallway, it’s how I connect to my colleagues.
I do have a block list. I do that for my own peace of mind. I have a rule that I set for myself that I try to go on Twitter only when I’m feeding my baby, and I look at what the trolls are saying about me only during nighttime feedings. Not only is it inherently self-limiting, but also I’m only partially awake, so there are several layers of insulation.
If I happen to encounter something that I think is important to engage with or interesting to incorporate in later work, I tend to remember it in the morning, but otherwise it doesn’t get stuck in my brain for me to obsess over.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
