Jennifer wrote: ↑22 Sep 2018, 06:07
Jadagul wrote: ↑22 Sep 2018, 05:56
(This is why "negging" has such a bad reputation. The idea as originally formulated is
pretty decent and reasonable.
I just don't know what to say to that, Jadagul.
I mean, the point is that "negging as understood by popular culture" isn't the same as the original idea. Which as I understand it was basically that, when you're picking a woman up in a singles bar, you shouldn't approach with a boring compliment, or a line she's probably heard five times already that night. Instead, you should say something a bit more complex, that doesn't fit cleanly into any preconceived scripts she has, so she isn't immediately sure how to respond and has to actually pay attention to you and to what you said. Preferably something a bit intriguing, so she wants to continue the conversation and figure out what you meant.
Unfortunately, the typical examples that drove the understanding were sort of ambiguous compliments---things that sound like compliments but then you realize they're a bit more ambiguous and have to think about what they meant. (And also are now in the position of needing to establish that you are interesting, rather than simply sit in judgment of your suitors---it's a bit of a script flip). This is really effective if you can do it well.
(I explained this to one of my friends once, and she sort of jerked upright and said "wait, I negged my boyfriend the night we met!" They had a bunch of mutual friends and she'd heard stories about him, so the first thing she said after meeting him was, "Oh!
You're [name]!")
But this is hard to do well without making it sound like you're just insulting people. And most of the people trying to borrow the technique missed about 90% of what I just said, and translated it into "if you walk up to a woman and insult her, then she'll have sex with you."
(And to make things even worse, a big part of the point was to shake the person you were talking to out of established and boring scripts. Once this became a recognized, boring script, it couldn't possibly work as intended any more).