Valued commenter chris alerts the CH readership to ♥another study♥ vindicating a game technique, this time the notorious, and notoriously misunderstood, seduction tactic known as the neg.
First, before we begin, a note about negs (aka “negative hits”):
Negs are NOT insults. Negs are backhanded compliments. The purpose of a neg is to subtly ding a cute girl’s self-esteem so that she becomes more romantically receptive to your advances. The field-tested effectiveness of the neg rests on the premise, accurate by all accounts, that hotter girls have higher self-esteems than uglier girls. For this reason, it’s well known among players that the best negs should be reserved for prettier girls. Less attractive girls don’t even need negs, unless the man hitting on them is of equal or lower SMV.
A neg is only successful if the feeling of confusion and self-doubt it creates is sufficiently disavowable by the speaker. That is, a good neg should, as the author of the article linking the relevant study wrote, “leave the speaker blameless”. Straight up insults don’t leave the speaker of the insult blameless for any temporary bad feelings it causes in the listener. But negs do. A proper neg is like a clue to hidden treasure that the girl is meant to discover on her own; except in this context the treasure she’s meant to find is her own slightly deflated ego.
If you insult a girl, she’ll turn on you. If you neg a girl, she’ll turn on herself. Any questions?
So once again SCIENCE has come around to confirming the efficacy of well-known game tactics for scoring poon.
Walster (1965) investigated the influence of momentary self-esteem on receptivity to the romantic advances of a stranger. The researcher arranged for a group of female participants to interact with a male research assistant who flirted with them. The female participants were then given positive or negative personality test feedback. After their self-esteem was increased or decreased in that way, they were asked to rate their liking for the male research assistant.
The results of the study indicated that women who had their self-esteem temporarily lowered found the male research assistant significantly more attractive than the women with temporary high-self esteem. Walster (1965) theorized that this effect occurred for two reasons. First, individuals who feel “imperfect” themselves may demand less in a partner. Second, a person usually has an increased need for acceptance and affection when their self-esteem is low. Overall then, when an individual is made to feel “low”, they find potential romantic partners more attractive.
*boom* And the mic gets dropped… on a dumb feminist’s and game denialist’s pointy heads.
You can argue about the ethics of game till the cows come home, but what you can’t argue is that game doesn’t work. It does, and though the tactics may strike one as manipulative and even mercenary, they exist in their form only because the sexual nature of women is what it is. If women responded sexually to effusive praise and sincere compliments that raised their self-esteems, men would be spitting lines like “You are very beautiful and so very very smart. You will be the first female President of the United States, I can tell. May I touch your wizard sleeve?”, until they were practically supine and begging women to walk on them.
But of course no men besides suck-up orbiter beta males playing the looooong game spits those kinds of lines. If a man of sound mind did that, it wouldn’t take him more than three minutes to figure out it was getting him nowhere with women.
The article includes a section on wifely nagging, which the author attempts to equate to negging. The comparison is a stretch; women become aroused and curious when they are negged, which is very different than what men feel when they are nagged. (Hint: Negged women want to interact more with their alluring tormentors; nagged men want to get the hell away from their annoying termagants.) Plus, wives don’t nag with the goal of getting sexual favors from their husbands. They nag because they’re feeling unsupported or frustrated or menstrual. Men, in stark contrast, neg with the specific goal of inflaming a romantic tryst.
[crypto-donation-box]
