This week I learned the term "negging" -- a technique used by pick-up artists. It suggests that a man can capture a beautiful woman's interest by giving a backhanded compliment or saying something negative about her.
Supposedly, it works by both presenting the man as a divergent thinker, and also undermining the beautiful woman's confidence just enough that she thinks "you can't do better than this guy."
I saw the immediate flaw: it only works if the man considers him a pick-up artist (few do) and the woman feels she is beautiful (few do).
I then wondered if it ever worked when the genders were reversed, and I winced as my memory flooded with every compliment I have blurted at a man.
It does in fact have some weird social effects on women who have lower self-esteem, unfortunately. (fortunately, most men are not *so* asocial and/or sociopathic to do it)(did I run into a couple of social-hacking "pickup artists" or attempted "pickup artists" in college? Yes, yes I did. Were those who saw it as definitely a legitimate method of interacting with people truly, incredibly awful? Yes, yes they were.)(did any of them succeed in having sex with me? Also no.)
Actual compliments do not work like negging does; it has to be a 'compliment' that highlights something the recipient is fundamentally uncomfortable with. If you regularly compliment men's bald spots or mention how cute they are due to being short, however, yes, you are probably causing some distress.
(But also, in pickup artist cases, they are not only out for causing distress, but *using negging to convince people to do things they otherwise would not do* - psychological manipulation - it's bad to do, period, but it's worse to do it as a strategy to get around someone's actual desires/inclinations.)
(it also doesn't work as well with the genders reverse because generally women are... well. Generally lower in confidence than men, at least white men, for behold, culture and misogyny. And also women's appearance [appearance being the easiest thing to practice negging on with complete strangers] is something that is easier to pick at due to bonkers societal standards and also the perpetual 'unless you are young you stop being beautiful' message.)
That said, I did laugh at the theoretical comeuppance to the low-quality attempted pickup artist in https://xkcd.com/1027/ (Black Hat Man and his girlfriend - the target of the attempted negging - are sort of... extremely intelligent villains? agents of problematic chaos?... within xkcd.)
I would not approve of someone doing this to a badly-executed pickup artist attempt in real life, however. At the very least, point to how to do the work to get out of the silver-bullet blame-other-things loop! But still, it's funny and mildly cathartic as long as it didn't actually happen to one of these still-a-human-being-but-wow-can-we-not-have-them-interact-with-society-until-they-get-better-at-being-human dudes.
Posted by: KC | September 22, 2024 at 10:40 AM
KC - I believe any time I've done it, it was with the intent of tamping down one of my already outrageous compliments because it was aimed at a man, and even though Gary would belie this point, sometimes I think I will hit the rare man who get embarrassed (or over-encouraged) by too many compliments.
Posted by: theQueen | September 22, 2024 at 09:18 PM
Getting embarrassed by too many compliments is a totally different psychological thing, fortunately! It generally leaves people inclined to self-deprecation, but not vulnerability to manipulation.
I think men get less over-encouraged by compliments as a woman ages. (in my teens, existing was enough to get hit on by a certain percentage of men; an additional fleet would take literally any comment as an invitation to ask me out and be miffed if I said no, because look, I was happy to see [obscure band t-shirt or similar] so surely that means I wish to have sex with the owner of said t-shirt or something... at this point, I am significantly more immune to this, however, and it is *delightful* to just be able to interact with humans as humans more or less, rather than going "oh, this is a male, if I express anything positive at all, he is reasonably likely to take it as a promise that I will say yes to sexual advances")(I would still avoid some compliments, probably. Nice butt: not gonna say it, not gonna ogle it. So there is that.)
Posted by: KC | September 23, 2024 at 11:40 AM
KC - I think my comments to men might have been met with mild interest, but I have only recently begun to notice the signs of interest: confusion, pulses, eyes getting a little bit wild and glassy. Up to now, I’ve just been oblivious.
Posted by: theQueen | September 23, 2024 at 08:11 PM