Why Does Pop Music Keep Riffing on Ovid?

“Love’s a game, wanna play?” Taylor Swift coyly croons. In the afterlife, Ovid shouts, “YES! Someone gets it!” 

In her 2014 single “Blank Space”, Swift’s protagonist tells us about her “game”: reeling in men just to toss ‘em back as soon as she’s bored. Catch and release! The song has an eerily similar vibe to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria—in which he actually compares women to fish, some of which “are speared … caught on a hook” or “trawled in billowing nets” by wannabe lovers (I, xix).  

The protagonist has a pretty simple strategy when it comes to snaring a new man: “[she’ll] find out what you want” and “be that girl for a month”. She’s definitely read Book I, Part XIX: Be Flexible and knows that “there are as many manners of heart as kinds of face,” therefore, “a wise man will adapt to many forms”. The speaker also appears to have studied up on Book II, Part XIII: Stir Her Jealousy (and probably Book III, Part XIV, also on the topic of using jealousy and fear to one’s advantage). She “gets drunk on jealousy” and has mastered the critical techniques of “screaming, crying,” and being the  “perfect storm”. To us, she seems pathologically insane, but to Ovid, Swift’s character has mastered his curriculum of courtship.

This brings us to the million-dollar question: if we have supposedly evolved so far beyond the more cringe-worthy moments within the Ars Amatoria, why are the main characters of so many of our popular songs still creeps? 

Because “Blank Space” is neither the only nor the worst example of a lyrical predator. Let’s consider a sample from Robin Thicke’s notorious “Blurred Lines”:

“I know you want it

I know you want it

I know you want it

The way you grab me

Must wanna get nasty”

This song came out in 2013. Let that sink in for a bit! 

Even much-beloved boy band One Direction isn’t wholly innocent here. In their smash hit “What Makes You Beautiful”, the male protagonist intently watches his love interest while she “smiles at the ground” and “turns away when [he] looks into [her] eyes”. If only she would let him explain why he “wants [her] so desperately”, even though she’s clearly uncomfortable with his attention! 

Although it’s tempting to believe that we’ve outgrown Ovid’s concept of love as a predatory action, where “the hunter knows where to spread nets for the stag” (I, ii), it’s clear that we haven’t. All three of these songs play on the dynamic of hunter and hunted, the watcher and the watched, the predator and the unsuspecting prey—and all three were immensely popular at the time of their release (Both “Blank Space” and “Blurred Lines” spent several weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100). 

Why is “love as hunt/challenge/game” still so appealing to us? I’m pretty sure most people would say that being “hunted” is not something they desire. And yet we play these songs and countless others on repeat. Perhaps there is something fun, exciting, or erotic in thinking about love in this way that we know is decidedly not fun and not okay in practice. Perhaps it’s simply that we have a deep-rooted cultural problem with thinking that people are something to be caught. 

Or perhaps we wouldn’t like those songs so much if they weren’t so damn catchy, right?! 

I don’t have a good answer for why we’re suckers for song sociopaths, but let’s at least try to keep them firmly corralled in the fictional realm. Remember: “Hungry Like the Wolf” is best as a karaoke song, not as a dating manual.