Neg: PUA Strategy That Manipulates With Insults

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Game" by Neil Strauss. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

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What is the neg PUA strategy? How do negs work for PUAs and what is the purpose of negging a girl?

The neg PUA tactic s is when you offer a woman a backhanded compliment in order to injure her self esteem and make her more likely to want the PUAs attention. Like many other techniques, the neg PUA method played on gender power dynamics and depended on women lacking confidence in order to manipulate them.

How to Neg: PUA Mystery Method

When Mystery was 21 and still a virgin, he began studying how women reacted when he hit on them. Over 10 years, Mystery pieced together the principles of social interaction and the patterns of male-female dynamics, which he called the Mystery Method. This included the neg PUA strategy. Negging women became a regular part of life.

The Mystery Method was designed to be a subtle, indirect approach. If Mystery’s technique was executed correctly, a woman wouldn’t know that she was being hit on, but she would want to be. This included the tactic of negging a girl.

The keys to the Mystery Method were:

Make yourself seem like the most fun and interesting person in the room.
Confuse your target (the woman you’re trying to hit on) with negs. The neg PUA tactic refers to a backhanded compliments or vague insults. Negging women was one of the core elements of the Mystery method.
Use gimmicks, such as magic tricks and ESP tests, to impress and intrigue her.
Maintain a push-pull balance, in order to keep her engaged and wanting more. For example, if your conversation with a woman is going well and you show that you’re interested in her, then look around the club for a moment, as if you’re distracted or looking for someone else.
Never be the aggressor. For example, lead the woman into offering her phone number—but never explicitly ask for it.

Further provoke your target with a neg. For PUAs, a neg is a backhanded compliment or vague insult—for example, offer her gum after she talks, or tell her that her hair would look better if it were up/down. The neg reinforces your lack of interest and further injures the woman’s self-esteem.

Negging Success Reveals Style’s Inner Doubt

After the workshop, Style learned how negging a girl works, and set out to practice. One day, Style nervously approached a woman in Office Depot. Following the prescribed routine, he used the neg PUA tactic, showed her an ESP trick, and made up a false time constraint.

Style asked the woman how they could continue their conversation, and, to his surprise, she offered her phone number and email address. PUAs never give their phone numbers and never ask for a woman’s number directly—they must get the woman to offer her number.

The woman had claimed to be a model, so when Style got home, he looked her up online. He discovered that he’d just scored the Playmate of the Year’s phone number.

Although Style was thrilled, he felt unworthy. He’d learned the strategies, but hadn’t yet built the confidence to back them up. He never called.

Style Polishes His Pickup Game

Despite—or possibly because of—Style’s success in Belgrade and his status in the community, he felt tremendous pressure to prove himself at the next workshop in Miami. As it turned out, his months of preparation, meetings with gurus, and hypnosis training paid off.

Mystery, Style, and the workshop students were at a Miami club when two gorgeous, confident women walked in. They were 10s, as PUAs would say—in fact, one of the women was an 11.

Style was after the 11, and planned to use the neg PUA tactic:

Style knew that he’d have to practically ignore the women, because almost every man in the club was gawking at them. PUAs never do what everyone else is doing.
When Style approached the women, he had to do so indirectly. He struck up a conversation with a transvestite next to them, and then he accused one of the women of copying the transvestite’s outfit. Style had to neg the women hard to make himself stand out from all the men drooling over them. It worked.
Style had to shift from vaguely offending the women to initiating a conversation that they’d want to continue. His priority now was to let them know that he wasn’t intimidated by their looks. Style told them that he lived in LA, which is full of beautiful women, and that a woman’s outlook and personality counted far more than her beauty. Again, it worked.
Style stood with his back to the woman he was interested in—the 11—to make her wonder why he wasn’t paying her more attention, but he turned to engage her just often enough to keep her from losing interest.
Style told the 11 two cold-reading truisms—fairly obvious observations that seem uncannily perceptive, bordering on psychic—that appeared to seal the seduction. Ironically, as the 11 showed more interest in Style, the 10 began giving him more kino (physical contact).
Once Style knew he had the women hooked, he strategically pushed-and-pulled. For example, when one woman hugged him, he playfully pushed her away, which only increased her attraction.
Style had to isolate the 11. He managed to sit down with her in a booth, where he showed her an ESP trick and they soul-gazed. Finally, they kissed.

Style was victorious—not only because he’d kiss-closed an 11, but because he’d perfectly executed a difficult pickup. He was hooked on the game.

Negging women is a manipulative tactic that PUAs use, leading women into sexual encounters they otherwise may not choose. However, the neg PUA strategy is still common in the PUA community.

Neg: PUA Strategy That Manipulates With Insults