So-called male ‘pickup artists’ have been doing it for decades now. So, why couldn’t I?
“I went on a date with a real-life Hitch,” she shouted in my ear, splashing champagne on my dress. “I totally fell for him but then found out what he did for a job. I felt like the biggest idiot!” We were at on the dance floor and 11/10 drunk.
“Dude, you went out with a dating guru? GIVE ME HIS DEETS!” I shouted back. And she did, by way of Insta handle.
The following morning I Insta-druced myself as “Lisa’s friend who needs your dating advice.”
What for? I like to partake in dating experiments and the night Lisa spilled champagne on me, I’d decided I wanted to try Negative Dating.
What’s Negative Dating?
Negative dating, ‘negging’ or The Neg – is a form of emotional manipulation that uses backhanded compliments to put women on the back foot, make her feel unwanted thus fuelling her to seek The Neggers approval. Eg:
“You’re pretty, for an Asian.”
“You remind me of my little sister, cool.”
“Shame that dress shrunk, it’s really nice.”
It sounded mean, extremely immature, and in truth, really unattractive. So why does it work on us? According to Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler (friend of Freud), the main motives of human behaviour is superiority and power, partly in compensation for a feeling of inferiority. Aka we just want people believe we are great, and also tell us.
Thanks to Neil Strauss’s book The Game (when he infiltrated a group of pick-up artists and exposed their dating techniques), there was loads on the topic: how to neg a woman, what you can say, how to bring her down a notch with just a few phrases… but, I couldn’t see any by women on how to neg men. Would it work if I put my thing down, flipped it and reversed it?