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In short, a neg will buy you the credibility you need to sincerely compliment her later.

That said, I don't necessarily advocate negs; they are in many ways a temporary patch to stick onto your personality while you learn to possess real confidence and strength of character.

Although this is a manipulative approach, it is not inevitably harmful. It also is not limited to the sphere of sexual relationships; humans often pretend not to care what other people think, and consistently attempt to be taken seriously by others. Additionally, for many people, flirting involves a certain amount of strategic ambiguity and plausible deniability, and negs are a useful tactic for that kind of game. Not everyone likes playing such tacit and confusing games, but many people do.

However, this is all cute and mild compared to how some PUAs talk about negs: some cite the neg specifically as a tactic to make the girl feel bad.

A well-known PUA who goes by the name of Tyler Durden once wrote that: "You use self-esteem negs to lower the target's self-esteem, and crave your attention to re-validate herself." Similarly, an especially pitiless PUA blogger who is sometimes described as "the Darth Vader of PUAs" writes that:

The best negs are those which are conceivably meant as compliments, but which linger in her psyche for hours afterward, undermining her self-conception and encouraging her to qualify herself to you [i.e. encouraging her to explain why she's worth your time].... [A neg] infiltrates a girl's subconscious so that she spends more mental energy analyzing her worth than she does analyzing yours.

One commenter adds to the above blogger's words that: "So long as you have a woman auditioning for you, power remains where it belongs -- squarely in your pocket."

In other words, a person who feels anxious and unworthy will be easier to control. These cruel PUAs have learned the same lesson as thousands of people in abusive relationships.

Here is an especially instructive quotation from the comments on "Darth Vader's" blog: "[Women] really are insipid, vapid airheads. If it wasn't for the pussy, there would be a bounty on them." That statement is interesting not just because of its hatred but because of its fear. After all, no one puts a bounty on targets that are not dangerous. The most misogynist corners of the PUA subculture not only discuss ways to aggressively manipulate women; they also paint women as selfish, deceitful and hazardous.

The various approaches to negging highlight both the different shadings of opinion across the subculture, and a particularly important distinction among PUAs themselves. Some of these men genuinely do enter pickup artistry out of a desire to connect to women. As one PUA told me, "When I first looked at PUA stuff, I was like, 'This is so sleazy and gross.' But I'd never had a girlfriend, and I kept telling myself, 'Dude, you are lonely and miserable and you don't want to die alone.'" On the other hand, many PUAs become PUAs because they want unilateral power and control over women -- and many PUAs attempt to justify this through narratives and jokes that encourage fear and anger against women.

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