Donna Zuckerberg | |
---|---|
Born | 1987 (age 36–37) Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S. |
Spouse | Harry Schmidt (divorced) |
Children | 2 |
Relatives | Mark Zuckerberg (brother) Randi Zuckerberg (sister) |
Academic background | |
Education | University of Chicago (BA) Princeton University (MA, PhD) |
Thesis | The Oversubtle Maxim Chasers: Aristophanes, Euripides, and their Reciprocal Pursuit of Poetic Identity (2014) |
Doctoral advisor | Andrew Ford |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Classics |
Sub-discipline | Ancient tragedy |
Donna Zuckerberg (born 1987) is an American classicist and author. She is author of the book Not All Dead White Men (2018),about the appropriation of classics by misogynist groups on the Internet. She was editor-in-chief of Eidolon,a classics journal,until its closure in 2020. [1] [2] She is a sister of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry,New York,in 1987 to a Jewish family. She is the third of four children. [3] One parent was a dentist and the other was a psychiatrist. She says the family was tight-knit and the parents encouraged their children to develop whatever talents they had. Her siblings Mark Zuckerberg and Randi Zuckerberg both work in the technology sector. [3]
After earning a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago,Zuckerberg earned her Ph.D. in classics at Princeton University in 2014,specializing in the study of ancient tragedy. [4] [5] [6] The title of her doctoral thesis was The Oversubtle Maxim Chasers:Aristophanes,Euripides,and their Reciprocal Pursuit of Poetic Identity. [7] Her doctoral adviser was Professor Andrew Ford. [7] While completing her graduate studies,Zuckerberg wrote a food blog called Sugar Mountain Treats. [8]
The classicist Natalie Haynes notes that Zuckerberg "is a classicist with a strong Internet pedigree". [9] Zuckerberg is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online journal Eidolon,which publishes texts about classics that are not formal scholarship. [3] Its authors are well-established classicists as well as new experts in the field. [6] [10] [11]
Aside from Eidolon,Zuckerberg's work has been published in numerous popular publications,including the Times Literary Supplement , Jezebel ,The Establishment,and Avidly. [12] She has also written for mainstream publications about the use of the classics by the alt-right movement. In a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post ,she argues that the sexism and racism found in classic texts should be studied and discussed rather than ignored or,as right-wing ideologues are doing,celebrated. [13] Natalie Haynes agrees with Zuckerberg's ideological stance,arguing that "ignoring these people is no longer the answer". [14]
Zuckerberg's first monograph,Not All Dead White Men:Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age,was published by Harvard University Press in October 2018. It has been described as "one of the first books to examine the online formation known as the Red Pill...also known as the manosphere". [15] The "manosphere" includes numerous factions such as men's rights activists,pickup artists,and Men Going Their Own Way. [15] The groups are united by the belief that they are disadvantaged by contemporary society which operates in favor of women. [15] Zuckerberg's book is a reception study. It describes how the Red Pill movement online finds support for its sexist ideology in texts from ancient Greece and Rome,tracing the phenomenon back to its origins and describing its misappropriation of Ovid,Euripides,Xenophon's Oeconomicus and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations . The book touches on the links between the Red Pill community and the white supremacy movement. [4] [5] [10] [15] [16]
The "Red Pill" is a cultural reference to the film The Matrix (1999),where Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) the choice of the blue or red pill,giving blissful ignorance or gritty,painful truth respectively. [3] Zuckerberg argues that "[t]he red pill metaphor really encapsulates for them [alt-right groups] the fact that they really see their misogyny and racism as a form of enlightenment. They are able to see the world more clearly than the rest of us…and what they see is that white,heterosexual men are discriminated against in our society." [17]
Zuckerberg's book also explores the popularity of stoicism within the manosphere. The book describes how Red Pill men use stoicism to support their belief in a dichotomy between the rational nature of males and the emotional nature of women. Zuckerberg argues that the point of the Red Pill discourse "is not for everything to hang together logically and to be totally immune to criticism. The point is to make people feel something—to make their audience feel validated and justified and scared and angry—and [get] any reaction [out of] them". [6] [13] [18] Zuckerberg takes a feminist approach to classical antiquity,arguing that the ancient world was deeply misogynistic:"it was a time when there was no word for rape,feminism did not exist and women's actions were determined by male relatives". [3] Alt-right groups are using classical texts,distorted and stripped of context,to add weight and authority to campaigns of misogyny and white supremacy. [3]
Zuckerberg's interest in the topic began in 2015 when she realized an article about Ovid in Eidolon saw heavy traffic from the Red Pill community on Reddit. In the same period,she read an interview with Neil Strauss,who mentioned seduction advice by Ovid. That research interest became a magazine article,then a book. [4] [5] [6] [16] [18] [19]
The final draft of her book was submitted days before the 2016 United States elections. It then became relevant outside academia,as the grievances of many of the groups she studied entered the political mainstream at the highest level. Zuckerberg says that while her book was in production,the Red Pill movement started to focus more on policing women's reproductive rights,away from the more traditional "men's rights" issues such as child custody. [6] [16]
The book has been generally well received. Natalie Haynes,Samuel Argyle,and Sarah Bond reviewed it positively,concurring with Zuckerberg's conclusions. [20] [21] [22] In particular,Sarah Bond locates Zuckerberg within "a new generation of classicists,archaeologists,and premodern historians [who] have begun to realize that an insulated approach to scholarship is itself a form of privileged monasticism that we can no longer retreat to". [21] Bond sees the work as shedding light into the crevices of the internet. [21] Rachel O'Neill applauds Zuckerberg's willingness to subject the manosphere to scrutiny,given the lack of scholarship on the topic. [23] It has been described as "a rare book from a university press that will probably be a crossover bestseller in non-academic markets". [24] Matthew J. Sharpe,Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University,has questioned whether Zuckerberg's portrayal of ancient Stoicism is wholly accurate. [25]
Zuckerberg has spoken out against social media,including Facebook,arguing that it has created a toxic culture and given men "with anti-feminist ideas [the opportunity] to broadcast their views to more people than ever before –and to spread conspiracy theories,lies and misinformation". [3] Zuckerberg asserts that social media has elevated misogyny to "entirely new levels of violence and virulence". [3]
Zuckerberg was the recipient of the 2017–18 Award for Special Service from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. [26] Zuckerberg spoke at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2019,where she was in conversation with biographer Patrick French and writer and editor Sharmila Sen. [27]
Zuckerberg lives in Silicon Valley with her two children. [12] [28] [29] She was previously married to Harry Schmidt,a software engineer and product strategist at Wildfire. [30] [31] [32]
Misogyny is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism that can keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the social roles of patriarchy. Misogyny has been widely practised for thousands of years. It is reflected in art, literature, human societal structure, historical events, mythology, philosophy, and religion worldwide.
Misandry is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men or boys.
The red pill and blue pill are metaphorical terms representing a choice between learning an unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the "red pill" or remaining in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the "blue pill". In Freudian psychology, the corresponding principles are the reality principle and the pleasure principle. The pills were used as props in the 1999 film The Matrix.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Daryush Valizadeh, also known as Roosh Valizadeh, Roosh V and Roosh Vorek, is a former alt-right American blogger and pickup artist. Valizadeh wrote on his personal blog and also owned the Return of Kings website, Roosh V Forum, where he published articles by himself and others on related subjects. Valizadeh has self-published more than a dozen dating and travel guides, most of which discuss picking up and having relations with women in specific countries. His advice, his videos and his writings have received widespread criticism, including accusations of misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, and having ties to the alt-right.
On the social news site Reddit, some communities are devoted to explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material. These subreddits have been the topic of controversy, at times receiving significant media coverage. Journalists, attorneys, media researchers, and others have commented that such communities shape and promote biased views of international politics, the veracity of medical evidence, misogynistic rhetoric, and other disruptive concepts.
A Voice for Men, also known as AVfM, AVFM, or AV4M, is a United States-based for-profit limited liability company and online publication founded in 2009 by Paul Elam. It is the largest and most influential site of the men's rights movement. Its editorial position is strongly antifeminist; it frequently accuses feminists of being misandrist.
The manosphere is a diverse collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism. Communities within the manosphere include men's rights activists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and fathers' rights groups. While the specifics of each group's beliefs sometimes conflict, they are generally united in the belief that society is biased against men due to the influence of feminism, and that feminists promote misandry, or hatred of men. Acceptance of these ideas is described as "taking the red pill", a metaphor borrowed from the film The Matrix.
Ian C. Johnston is a Canadian author and translator, a retired university-college instructor and a professor emeritus at Vancouver Island University.
Judith P. Hallett is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita of Classics, having formerly been the Graduate Director at the Department of Classics, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on women, the family, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Latin literature. She is also an expert on classical education and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alpha male and beta male are pseudoscientific terms for men derived from the designations of alpha and beta animals in ethology. They may also be used with other genders, such as women, or additionally use other letters of the Greek alphabet. The popularization of these terms to describe humans has been widely criticized by scientists.
The Women's Classical Committee UK (WCC) is a group of academics, students, and teachers who aim to support women in Classics, promote feminist and gender-informed perspectives in Classics, raise the profile of the study of women in antiquity and Classical reception, and advance equality and diversity in Classics.
Incel is a term associated with an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, and blame, objectify and denigrate women and girls as a result. The movement is strongly linked to misogyny. Originally coined as "invcel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to "incel" by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of misogynistic terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
Sarah Emily Bond is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on late Roman history, epigraphy, law, topography, GIS, and digital humanities.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classics, Women's and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University, and the Director of the Denison Museum. Her research focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of Classical Athens, Athenian tragedy, ancient immigration, ancient theories of race and ethnicity, and the reception of those theories in modern race science.
Men Going Their Own Way is an anti-feminist, misogynistic, mostly online community advocating for men to separate themselves from women and society, which they believe has been corrupted by feminism. The community is a part of the manosphere, a collection of anti-feminist websites and online communities that also includes the men's rights movement, incels, and pickup artists.
Elizabeth Gloyn is a Reader in Latin Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, the University of London and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research focuses on the intersection between Latin literature, ancient philosophy and gender studies; as well as topics of classical reception, and the history of women in the field of Classics.
Bronze Age Pervert, also known as BAP or B.A.P., is a pseudonymous far-right Internet personality, associated with the manosphere. The media have identified Costin Vlad Alamariu, a Romanian-American, as the person behind the pseudonym.
Jack Donovan is an American far-right writer and activist. A self-described masculinist, Donovan was an influential figure in the alt-right until he disavowed the movement in 2017. He has at various times advocated male supremacy, white nationalism, fascism, and the political disenfranchisement of women. He led a chapter of the Wolves of Vinland, a Norse neopagan organization and SPLC-designated hate group, from 2014 to 2018.
The alt-right pipeline is a proposed conceptual model regarding internet radicalization toward the alt-right movement. It describes a phenomenon in which consuming provocative right-wing political content, such as antifeminist or anti-SJW ideas, gradually increases exposure to the alt-right or similar far-right politics. It posits that this interaction takes place due to the interconnected nature of political commentators and online communities, allowing members of one audience or community to discover more extreme groups. This process is most commonly associated with and has been documented on the video platform YouTube, and is largely faceted by the method in which algorithms on various social media platforms function through the process recommending content that is similar to what users engage with, but can quickly lead users down rabbit-holes. The effects of YouTube's algorithmic bias in radicalizing users has been replicated by one study, although two other studies found little or no evidence of a radicalization process.