The whiteness of Classics cannot be assumed a priori: critiques of classical antiquity as an authority for the supremacist idea of ‘the West’ must be couched within an epistemic framework that gives no quarter to supremacist logic by working only along a single vector of gender, race, class or ability.
Not All Dead White Men maps and deconstructs the reception of classical antiquity within a community of mostly white, mostly young men called ‘The Red Pill’ whose meeting place is the online forum Reddit. This community is named after the central plot device of ‘The Matrix’ (2000), in which Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) a choice between taking a blue pill and existing in a world of comforting illusion or taking a red pill and ‘seeing how far down the rabbit hole goes’. The Red Pillers turn this scene into a full-blown ideological commitment to hierarchical binary gender: they claim to have thrown off the shackles of ‘gynocracy’ and see the world as it ‘really is’.
Z. argues that the uses of classical antiquity by the Red Pill community are worth critical attention not least because online radical extremism produces ‘real world’ consequences. Z. hopes that her critiques of the Red Pill's classical receptions will allow for the ‘develop[ment of] strategies for counteracting its pernicious influence’ (p. 10). So, while the volume aims to speak to ‘people who have an interest in Classics, but never studied it formally’ (p. 6), it implies that social responsibility for classical reception online belongs to Classicists. Such a position also participates in current urgent discussions about who bears accountability for the culture and institutions of the internet.
Chapter 1, ‘Arms and the Manosphere’, maps out various groups that cluster under the umbrella term Red Pill. Z. lucidly shows where the ideological friction and overlap exists between three main sub-factions: Pick Up Artists (who are mostly focused on the ‘seduction’ of women), ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ (a separatist fantasy) and ‘Men's Human Rights Movement’ (who seek to combat ‘misandry’). These groups, however, are united by the ‘belief that feminism is causing the downfall of Western civilization’ (p. 46). Z. provides a helpful appendix of the self-created terminology that these factions use to describe themselves, their activities and their world views. Z.'s intentionality around using Red Pill terminology, explaining her choice to use native terms rather than create her own critical vocabulary to map out this territory, reflects a commitment to self-reflection in her analysis.
The second chapter, ‘The Angriest Stoics’, observes that for Red Pill pundits Stoicism is the point of greatest contact with ancient thought. Against the background of a surge of popularity in wider culture, Z. tracks how the ‘manosphere’ engages selectively and in distorted ways with late Stoic thinkers. Z. is ready to correct the most egregious distortions of the ancient material, and her interventions are judicious ones: sometimes following the rabbit down the hole is disorientating, and it is useful to have pointed out clearly, for example, that ‘the sexual ethics of Stoicism are incompatible with the manosphere’ (p. 65). The Red Pill's predilection for Stoicism as a cultural authority masks the inconsistencies between their world views and the ancient ones. The idea of the Stoic sage appeals to the Red Pill because they conceive of (white) masculinity as untouched by emotion, overlooking the various ugly emotions that structure their in-house conversations. Towards the end of the chapter, Z. valuably discusses pitching the ‘aggrieved entitlement’ of the Red Pill community against the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman/Man, identifying the politics of rage as an expression of resistance to structural injustice by those who have (in historical fact) suffered, particularly feminist thinkers of colour.
The third chapter, ‘The Ovid Method’, focuses on how a subset of the Red Pill fashion Ovid into a literal authority on seduction. ‘Pick Up Artist’ writers such as Erik von Markovik, Douglas Galbi and Roosh Valizdeh style themselves as modern-day Ovids by overlooking 2,000 years of social history and by reading Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris without irony. Between the Ovidian praeceptor and the Pick Up Artists, Z. observes two ‘parallel tendencies … the prizing of male subjectivity over female subjectivity, and a project of gradually intensifying the violation of women's boundaries’ (p. 108). Z.'s analysis that the Red Pill community sometimes highlights an element that exists in Ovid's world view is important. The observation that ‘pickup artist guides teach men how best to exploit their myriad social advantages over women for sexual gain’ (pp. 139–40) holds true for ancient Rome as it does for contemporary America (though not, as one Pick Up Artist found to his chagrin, in Denmark, where decades of social investment by the state has protected women from material inequality).
In the final chapter, ‘How to Save Western Civilization’, Z. illuminates how the attitudes of the Red Pill community around rape can be tracked back to the sexual politics of the ancient world. If the previous two chapters examined how Red Pill men construct relationships to antiquity, this chapter demonstrates why ancient Greece and Rome might be so appealing. In the convoluted logic at work in Red Pill discourse, the myth of Phaedra, for example, lends credence to both the idea that we live in a ‘gynocentric, misandrist’ society (women level false rape claims against innocent men) and that they receive punishment for these claims. Sketching out the ancient historical realities of the restrictions on women's legal, social and economic activity in Athens and Rome, Z. argues that the Red Pill desire for antiquity is a utopian one.
The volume pulls off a tricky two-hander with aplomb: Z. combines the expertise of the classical scholar with the knowledge garnered from having spent a terrific amount of time in the grimmer corners of the internet. Furthermore, Z. has confronted a particular problem in classical reception studies and found a meaningful way to resolve it. Rather than simply note that the engagement with ancient Greek and Roman visual iconography and thought is superficial (though pervasive), Z. steps back to ask what is at stake in this nimbus of ancient referentiality. The overall injunction that we should be alive to the social responsibilities of producing knowledge about the ancient world today is a salutary one.
The volume is a confident and critical first step to disentangling the reception of classical antiquity from contemporary forms of misogyny. In closing, Z. declares that ‘Feminists deserve a better internet’ (p. 189), and this is surely right. The question that comes immediately to mind then is whether Classics deserve a better internet, given that our discipline is still so uncritically complicit with the notion of ‘Western civilization’. As a first step, then, the scope of Z.'s analysis stands to be followed up in order to build a properly feminist discipline of Classics as well as the feminist internet, that she (and I) hope to see. This means including race as an essential part of the analysis in future studies of classical reception in contemporary culture and in the history of classical scholarship: the category of ‘white woman’ performs harmful erasures if it is made, even implicitly, to stand as a cipher for oppression tout court. Race repeatedly emerges as important in the analysis though Z. has explicitly bracketed it off as being too diffuse to synthesise (p. 15), though elsewhere she acknowledges: ‘(r)acism is at the forefront of the discourse in the Alt-Right’ (p. 79). Red Pill racism manifests in many forms: in toxically phobic views about Islam, Black masculinity and Jews. Race, along with gender, formulates the Alt-Right's vision of ‘Western civilization’ that requires saving as well as the racialised threats to that utopian vision.
Z.'s achievement is to have met the Red Pill on their intellectual turf. The Red Pill shibboleth of ‘Western civilization’ is predicated on racial supremacy, colonialist extraction and violence towards bodies that are not those of rich white men (dead or alive). Strategies of resistance will therefore need to be intersectional. An intersectionally feminist Classics will divest from the notion of ‘the West’ altogether and will build knowledge about ancient Greece and Rome recognising the intellectual brilliance of those who have come to confront dead white men. Such a framework of knowledge production is therefore the path out of both the overt epistemic and material violence of the Alt-Right and the sotto voce defensiveness of those within the academy who resort to the hashtag that this book seeks to skewer.
