Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love

"This is the first known seduction manual. It was published around 1 or 2 AD. It consists of three books—two for men and one for women—about where to find women and how to win them over, and similarly how to find and keep men. It’s comforting to know that people have had the same concerns for millennia. As well as being the oldest seduction manual, it’s probably the world’s longest banned book. It is thought to have contributed to Ovid’s exile on allegations of immorality in 8 AD; it was thrown on the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence in 1497; it was banned in England in Elizabethan times and believe it or not, seized by US Customs on the grounds of obscenity as recently as 1930. “Playing hard-to-get does have a physiological basis, drawing on the dopamine hit of variable rewards” The remarkable thing is how contemporary the advice reads. There are a few lines that are problematic from a modern perspective about forcing women, but scholars differ on how seriously to take them given Ovid’s style and the text that follows. In any case, as Mary Beard has said: you’re not going to find gender equality in ancient Rome, and the book for women indicates an understanding of their sexual agency, which is in and of itself revolutionary. Ovid offers grooming advice for men (“Do not let your nails project, and let them be free of dirt; nor let any hair be in the hollow of your nostrils…”) He recommends giving women compliments and not asking their age, and he talks about the pleasures of mutual orgasm. The section for women could be straight out of Cosmopolitan —covering hair, make-up, how to dress to impress… And again, it’s rather provocative because he suggests sex positions; tall women, for example, are advised against straddling their lovers. That’s why people are not sure how seriously to take the questionable passages. Ovid is quite tongue-in-cheek. He counsels playing hard-to-get for both men and women to increase interest, as almost every how-to dating manual has done since. So playing hard-to-get to stoke interest is one of the oldest tools in the box. The attraction of manuals is that we want an element of control in an area of our lives that’s not entirely in our hands, both in terms of the serendipity of encounters and whether our feelings are reciprocated. The uncertainty is what makes it exciting, but also causes us difficulty, and makes it an emotional rollercoaster. So we love to think that there might be a set of rules that we can play by to achieve what we want. As painful as it is to be on the receiving end of the strategy, hard-to-get does have a physiological basis, drawing on the dopamine hit of variable rewards. Research shows that while we want to be wanted, we’re attracted to uncertainty even more. All addictive internet technology, including dating apps, is designed to exploit that human vulnerability. However, the fundamental problem—and, I think, why we haven’t seen a dating manual in the past decade sell as many copies as The Rules did in its day—is that for hard-to-get to work, you need to be seen as a prize rather than just a commodity. With the abundance of options on apps, it’s very difficult to make yourself appear unique, when there are hundreds of people who seem just like you on the same app. If you try to make yourself seem scarce, the person on the other side of the screen will just move on to the next quasi-indistinguishable profile. Well, listen, people will always try to game it, or pretend it’s possible to game it for profit. There’s certainly no shortage of seminars and online forums to discuss this stuff. Although pick-up artistry has fallen out of public favour, its playbook, The Game, remains in print, and there is a huge industry of pick-up artists, or PUAs, who have rebranded themselves as ‘seduction coaches’ teaching techniques including ‘overcoming last-minute resistance’."