Why Pickup Artists Are Reading Ovid

In 2013, the pickup-artist blog Chateau Heartiste—a resource for the sexually frustrated heterosexual man looking to learn how to seduce women—published a list of “Recommended Great Books For Aspiring Womanizers.” Compiled by the site’s main author, known online as Roissy, the list kicked off with the ancient seduction manual Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, written in A.D. 2 by the Roman poet Ovid.

Ovid is considered by some within pickup-artist circles to be a founding father of pickup artistry; the famed pickup artist Neil Strauss also names Ovid in his 2005 memoir as a towering figure in the art of woman seducing. The instructs readers that they don’t need to be exceptionally handsome to be successful with women, but being well groomed, wearing clothes that fit, and generally behaving in charming ways can be helpful; it also contains passages that would seem to endorse ignoring women’s subtle hints that they don’t want to be approached that “what [women] like to give, they love to be robbed of.”