Redpill pickup artist news site Return of Kings is taking a right old slamming in the news this week. Site owner Roosh V will probably be denied an Australian Visa for saying rape should be legal on private property. His planned meetup in Canada doesn’t look great either.
Pro pickup artist Julian Blanc was ousted from hotels where he planned to teach choking as a seduction technique last year, along with proteges like Jeff Allen.
Redpills are essentially the dating and romance wing of the Men’s Rights Movement. They’re sick of how they believe society treats relationships – the man pays the bill, the man must pursue, the man must leave the burning boat last. Rules that most men and women ignore in the 21st Century.
It began as a subforum of Reddit where the About section reads,
The Red Pill: Discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.
The Red Pill references the pill that wakes Neo up from a long dream in the 1999 film The Matrix, shows him “how deep the rabbit hole goes”. I guess they want to know how deep the pit of loneliness can burrow?
So, is this a modern thing? Have we always had people like Roosh V and his lonely friends who try to find the formula for seducing strangers while they complain about them?
In most of Modern history, not so much. Before that, there were a ton of guides. The first pickup guide may have been written by a woman.
Two smooth Greeks play Spy vs Spy with their genitals.
Philaenis of Samos was a courtesan. She is credited with writing a guide to sex in the 3rd or 4th Century BC. She describes positions, aphrodisiacs, birth control. One of her lovers, the poet Aeschiron of Samos, denied she was the author. Well guess what Aeschiron, her name is right there in the opening sentence.
It inspired the Roman poet Ovid to write Ars Amatoria. Things get more pickup artisty now. He tells men to let the one they admire miss him, but not for long. The theatre is a great place to find gaily dressed women. Wash and groom yourself often.
Then he writes advice for women. Beware false lovers, deliberately make him jealous, reward your lovers with poetry. The men’s section details how to seduce women and vice versa, because says Ovid, he was only into mutually satisfying pleasure. This was why Ovid was “not aroused by the love of young boys”.
It was a different time.
A couple centuries later we have the Kama Sutra. This book is far more about how to score than the handbook of hanging your wife from the ceiling and tying your junk in knots that people think it is.
It’s aimed at the wealthy and goes through the whole process. There’s a list of hobbies and occupations that make a person better in bed, mostly working with the hands. There’s a chapter on breaking into a harem, a chapter on how to let a eunuch seduce you or let him down. It tells a man to dip his bits in honey and pepper to add stimulation, tells the right way to scratch and leave marks.
The Kama Sutra is a guide to being a bear.
Taoist sex manuals appear in medieval China, aimed at men and calling the woman ‘the enemy’. This is a guide to sex as a spiritual practice where the whole universe is divided into black and white, male and female, opposing forces. The woman would see a man as an opponent if they wrote any manuals for women.
The world becomes richer in manuals around this time:
- The Elephantis by Constantine the African, 11th Century
- Ananga Ranga, 12th Century, India
- Speculum al Foderi, 15th Century
- The Perfumed Garden by Sheikh Nefzoui, 16th Century
In Modern times, people stopped talking about it. Victorian culture was rife with rogering and billowing with bunga bunga, but it was a huge taboo to discuss it in public. England produced more pornography than anywhere else. The only place to learn one’s way around a body was in medical manuals or all that porn.
This is the Early Modern lay guide, so dull that the writer is named Gray. Any book with the colour grey as a theme is a horrible place to learn this stuff.
Modern manuals started to reappear in the ’20s, though there were no real descriptions of positions in the mainstream media until Dr. Alexander Comfort’s The Joy of Sex arrived in the ’60s. The Joy of Gay Sex followed, picking up the man on man ball that Ovid dropped.
Pickup artists tend to give two examples that show only women were taught seduction in the ’90s: Beauty magazines and The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. This was a book of old rules like waiting three days to answer messages, making him wait in mother’s parlour, never giving away too much. Play hard to get, play games.
They later wrote a guide to landing a perfect marriage that would last forever. It was released during Fein’s separation from her husband.
Commentators like Dr Meg John Barker and Neil Strauss have suggested that trying to make women easy with seduction guides were a response to this hard-to-get attitude.
All the while we see what’s called antifeminist literature – Dante and other medieval poets warned readers to resist the wickedness of woman. Until modern times it was often accepted in the law that women couldn’t control their desires and it was the man’s responsibility to stop her cheating. They never grumbled while seducing like Redpills, only while avoiding lust.
The manuals seem to imply that there was no great anxiety about finding a partner, just a big luxurious desire to have a better time with them. Ovid advised that it’s useful to ignore a partner’s faults rather than bitching about women. He wrote for both genders as if the other had feelings, never treating anyone like an emotionless door that opens to you when you say the right words. The redpill community seems to be something that we in the 21st Century can call our own. Aren’t you proud?
Yet the Redpill philosophy has nothing to do with the Matrix. Oh well. We don’t really need a red pill because like the women they try to hypnotise, we have choice. Ask Morpheus.
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