In what has to be one of the most ignorant interpretations of game and its associated techniques I’ve read in a long time, some mincing little betaboy named Conor Friedersdorf, who looks like he was born to be a stay-at-home cuckold, wrote an article lashing out at men who dare to learn how better to attract women. Andrew Sullivan, the jihadist Homosexualist gay man who knows what it’s like being a straight man picking up women, gave Conor (what a precious name!) a platform on his blog to berate men who use negs as a courtship tactic. Conor found great offense in a post he read by occasional commenter Sebastian Flyte at his blog Elysium Revisited, and cried emo tears of sanctimonious envy that his cotton candy la-la land of soulmates and Hollywood love was being crapped on so mightily by men who know a thing or two about how women operate.
Of course, the belief that one acts amorally by manipulating women quickly leads to abhorrent behavior. The rogue who is zealous for sexual conquest at least understands that he acts badly if he uses deception to get sex. The cerebral “player,” exemplified by [Sebastian Flyte], doesn’t grasp that anything is the matter with his behavior.
As a result, he is quite unabashed as he describes a male behavior that I’ve observed on many occasions, and that I abhor more than any other mainstream pickup technique. Though I’d never heard it referred to as such, Sebastian Flyte dubs it “the Neg,” and calls it “the Swiss army knife of pickup.”
All goal-oriented communication is a form of manipulation. When you try to convince a friend to see a movie that you saw and loved, you are attempting to manipulate your friend’s emotions so that he cannot resist the urge to go see it himself. Manipulation is as permanent and commonplace a feature of the human condition as is eating. Some of us are just better at it than others.
Friedersdork “abhors” the neg. It’s “abhorrent behavior”. Funny that something so abhorrent should cause women to respond so positively to its use.
I’ve never seen anyone do this to a woman [the neg] who hasn’t seemed to me a complete asshole even beforehand — and I’ve been dismayed at the frequency with which it works.
Betas like Conor HATE HATE HATE alpha males. The guy who doesn’t kiss up to women like the proudly chivalric beta champion of all that is noble and good is an automatic asshole. What motivates this tepid beta spittle? Is it that assholes discredit the Power of the Pedestal that betas reflexively place women upon? A lifetime of illusions shattered by one well-placed neg? I bet Conor is a feminist.
Fascinating, isn’t it? The author perceives a world wherein women unjustly pass over beta males in favor of alpha males. He justifies the insults in the same way that MIA justifies Third World robbery and murder: as a tool that is the only choice of the dispossessed to achieve equality.
This must be a first. Freidersdorf compared the neg to robbery and murder. A helpful clue, Conor: Women *like* being negged. It turns them on like a nice rack and a tight ass turns on men. Robbery and murder victims don’t get sexually intrigued by their assailants as far as I know.
Over at Sullivan’s histrionically Ghey Emporium of Steroidal Delights, our intrepid Master of His Own Domain further reflects on the seduction community and posts comments from readers.
The difference [between a neg and a compliment] is that while compliments or put downs can be either truthful or disingenuous, only put downs lower the self-esteem of the target. In most contexts, it seems obvious that it is wrong to gratuitously put people down for selfish ends. Why is dating different?
Newflash: The mating market is inherently selfish. How many women are offering free pussy access to homeless bums or pining niceguys? How many women expect *absolutely nothing* from a boyfriend or husband? You are a product, on display in a window case, for potential mates to inspect and deem worthy or unworthy. This goes for men and women. Humans are not exempt from the basic laws of the market just because we have the mental capacity to gussy up the dismal bartering of our innate goods and services with soul-sparing pretty lies.
Newsflash #2: Negs aren’t insults. They are edgy teasing. Is this distinction so difficult to grasp?
Newsflash #3: If “putting down” women is so wrong, why does it feel so right to them?
That some men cannot understand this really boggles my mind, and makes me suspect that they aren’t even thinking of women as being people (interestingly, some of these men seem to think of women as less than human, and others as superhuman). Every man can imagine how he would feel if a woman approached him at a bar, assessed his dress or some physical feature, and breezily made some cutting public remark: “You dress like a guy who has a small dick.” Yet numerous correspondents seem utterly unable to imagine that women might also feel badly if criticized this way.
Conor Friedersdorf, beta of the month candidate, has no understanding of negs.
Moreover, if I concede that some women find these kinds of put-downs thrilling — I’ll do so for the sake of argument — the problem remains that a guy out approaching strangers in a bar cannot reliably distinguish between that kind of woman, if indeed she exists, and the kind of woman who’ll be quite wounded by a deprecating remark made about her by a stranger.
Conor Freidersdorf suffers from the same mental disease that afflicts most betas and all women — the frantically held belief that women are individual wonders of joy and incomprehensible mystery who cannot ever be generalized about. Except that their belief is bogus. Women mostly share the same criteria in what they find attractive in men, and beautiful women with high sexual market value share these criteria even more strongly than less attractive women who must compromise more to find a mate. Men don’t need to reliably distinguish between women who like getting negged and women who don’t, because almost all women like it. It’s part of their prehistoric coding. The only distinctions men need to take into account when deciding whether to use a neg are the hotness of his targets and the edginess of his negs. The less hot the chick relative to his own status, the lighter he can go on the negs without dooming himself to rejection or the LJBF zone.
[T]hose who use “the neg” concede that the pickup techniques they use succeed in part because they are unabashed about getting shot down many times in a night before they find someone for whom the technique works. Thus “the neg” is used on many women who are insulted but unsold, and who haven’t any intention of having casual sex.
Selection bias is an overused gotcha! counterargument by betas who wish to believe men cannot control how many women find them attractive. They think they are onto the “real” reason PUAs do well with women — numbers of approaches! game only works on girls that game works on! — but they are engaging in tautological handwaving. Certainly there is a learning curve where a guy will approach a lot of women to get his technique down pat, but once his skills are acquired he can dial down his approaches to the same number of women he approached before he learned game and still experience much greater success.
Advice: being yourself from the beginning might result in fewer relationships begun — but it’ll also result in fewer relationships lost.
This sounds like the happy slogan of beta self-abnegators anonymous, but the opposite could just as easily be true. If being yourself results in fewer relationships begun, it will also result in losing more of the few relationships you do manage to get. For if women don’t like aspects of your personality up front, they are going to like those aspects even less two years deep into an LTR.
This pretty lie is heard so often by guys like Conor that it’s become a Rorschach test for glimpsing the sordid inner workings of the beta mind. To the typical equalist pissbucket beta, there is no such thing as a useful generalization. Women are all individual creatures of deep deep individuality who go for all kinds of men. So maybe you can arouse that girl over there by using a neg on her, but there are ten more girls who would never fall for it. So you must… MUST… treat women as individuals. Eventually, you’ll find that perfect match who LOVES YOU FOR YOU. Nevermind that a guy like Johnny Depp or Scott Peterson gets thousands of times more attention from women than Milton the stapler guy.
Friedersbeta goes on to quote his favorite reader e-mail:
How does one determine if a pickup technique has “worked”? What counts as success? You say that “the neg” does indeed work sometimes. What does that mean? I guess it depends on what the pickupper’s goals are. But I bring this up because that discussion about pickup techniques seemed to assume that women are all looking for nice guys to have solid relationships with – they could be seduced by “the neg” and then get burned. But women can spot pickup techniques that are disrespectful and still respond positively (outwardly). A man who uses “the neg” or some other slimy pickup technique can be taken to be someone whose feelings are not of great importance. So he could be used for free drinks, free tickets, meaningless sex, whatever – and all without guilt because, hey, he’s no better, right? It may not be moral, but it is fair. A man’s pickup techniques can signal exactly where he belongs on the relationship food chain. Has a guy who has used “the neg” and then ends up buying lots of drinks been successful? Depends on if he likes buying women drinks, I guess.
I hate to break it to this reader, but a man who knows about negs and uses them to great effect is a man who is smart enough to know not to buy women drinks. Until after sex. Heh.
Beta of the Month candidate:
[crypto-donation-box]
