The Hard Truth: “He insulted me — and I can’t forget it”
Ever interacted with someone who seemed to be expressing interest in you…by making fun of you?
For two months, a woman spent several hours a week talking to a man on the phone (a Bumble App match up) who seemed disinterested, teasing and critical.
This confusing behavior is known as negging, and oddly, it’s often used as a form of flirting.
If you were around in the early days of the pick up community, the neg was supposed to take ice cold women and turn them to silly putty in your hands.
The neg was designed to strip women of some of their value by way of backhanded compliments, insults and criticism. To prey upon women and seek to break them down and build them back up. Primarily for sex and access to their bank account.
The ‘Neg’ reinforces the false belief that the negger has a lack of interest and further injures the woman’s self-esteem. It is not a valid or even effective way to flirt, no matter what pickup artists might say.
Negs can be disguised as constructive criticism, sometimes backed with false facts or universal qualifying generalizations (universal generalizations have no referential index).
For example it was said to me recently, “You women ruin romance before it happens.”
The use of the word “you women” presupposing all women in the sentence makes the sentence a Universal Quantifier. “You women” as a word is a universal generalization and it is very non specific. When you read the sentence as applying to you, it may result in part of your conscious mind asking “what, every single woman?” The thing is that “everyone knows it to be true! Or is it true?!”
Why do they insult? Really, what is this phenomenon? Is there something more to it?
Research done by Steve Stewart-Williams and colleagues asked 245 men (average age 29 years) to report how many times in the last month they had insulted their sexual partner using one or more examples from a list of 47 insults, arranged into 4 categories: physical insults, insults about personal value, personal interests or mental capacity (e.g. “I called my partner an idiot” “why do you like that”), accusations of sexual infidelity, and derogating their value as a person (e.g. “I told my partner she will never amount to anything” “Your tastes are disgusting”).
Men who habitually insult their wives or girlfriends do so, somewhat paradoxically, as part of a broader strategy to prevent them from leaving for someone else — what evolutionary psychologists call ‘mate retention’.
The researchers said insults might serve a mate-retention function, by making a “woman feel that she cannot secure a better partner, with the result that she is less likely to defect from the relationship.”
Does it really work? Absolutely not. Negging as a flirting technique can never lead to healthy sexual or romantic attachments.
“If your goal is to connect to others successfully, then criticism is a poor communication strategy,” says licensed therapist Adam D. Blum, MFT of the Gay Therapy Center.
Any kind of manipulation is not a solid foundation on which to build intimacy.
When you’re being negged, you might feel very unsure of yourself. Therefore, it is great to know in advance some ways that you can respond if you realize you’re being negged.
You can directly confront the person and tell them you do not like the way they are talking to you. However, be aware that the person may then respond to your confrontation with more abusive behaviors, such as gaslighting.
As I’ve already established, negging is a harmful, abusive, and unsuccessful flirting technique. To flirt in a healthy way, be as genuine as possible when showing interest in someone.
