He’s just not that into you:

Negging and the Manipulation of the

Negativity

A man approaches a woman in a bar and says something

negative to her: “Your roots are showing”; “You look

amazing. What have you done?”; “If your face was as good

as your legs I’d have to marry you”; “Nice eyes – even

though one is bigger than the other”; “How brave of you

to wear an outfit like that”; “You have a great body. Are

you bulimic?” This is negging; a ‘dating’ strategy in

which the pick-up artist (PUA), or follower of the PUA’s

‘system’, systematically undermines the confidence of his

‘target’ to make her vulnerable enough to agree to sex.1

Negging, as a set of explicit techniques, emerged in

the 1990s, unsurprisingly correlated with the emergence

of the Internet. It also, again unsurprisingly,

correlated with the emergence of neoliberalism as the1 The examples and the description of ‘negging’ are takenfrom Woolf, who takes them from the PUA websiteSeductionScience.

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mode of contemporary capitalist governance. In

neoliberalism we are encouraged to conceive of our self

as a company or corporate entity. We subject our lives to

examination in terms of a cost/benefit analysis and this

includes our intimate lives. Michel Houellebecq’s 1994

novel was titled Extension du domaine de la lute, and described a

situation in which the struggle of economic success and

competition is extended to the sexual field. ‘Negging’ is

the emergent strategy for that new domain of the

struggle.

Under neoliberalism our amorous encounters become

negotiations between corporations. If we aim at a long-

lasting or stable relationship then we think in terms of

a corporate merger. The serial seductions of the PUA or

negger are more like a series of corporate raids,

designed to loot value from the other – a literalization

of asset-stripping. To achieve this hostile takeover the

voice of the negger is the pseudo-objective voice of

social value and the sexual marketplace. The negger is a

malign ventriloquist, suppressing their ‘self’ to

articulate a social negation of the ‘value’ of the

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targeted woman. For the strategy to work the woman must

be a ‘high value’ target, must be vulnerable to being

treated in an off-hand manner. Jesse Charger, in a

defence of negging, argues that it is a strategy only to

be used to bring down those women who ‘overrate’

themselves: ‘So if you’re a normal-looking girl with a

normal attitude, you probably will NEVER BE NEGGED in

your life. So for crying-out-loud, don’t worry about it.’

‘Negging’ is presented as an equalizing strategy, a

perverse inscription of the perfect marker in true

equilibrium, in which every woman is available. The

disavowal at work here is that the strategy is presented

as ‘making the field even’, when it is, of course, aimed

to accrue sexual success and value to the man at the

expense of the women and any competing men.

In case you think this description of negging as

signature neoliberal strategy is an exaggeration, then

consider this. A woman reports being the victim of a

successful negging strategy by a man whose opening line

was: “you’re a bit less hot than your friend, but it's

OK, because I fancy you.” She goes to his home for sex:

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“Anyway, at his house I found he had a

spreadsheet of all the women he was seeing,

colour coded with days and nights. Do I think he

was using those techniques sociopathically,

instead of natural charm? Yes. I think he was

terrified of having a typical relationship, and

he had set lines so he didn't have to risk actual

intimacy.” (in Woolf)

This ‘spreadsheet subjectivity’ is an almost too-perfect

model of the neoliberal self qua firm.

Negging is the obscene underside, to use Žižek

phrase, of the ‘affirmative’ culture of neoliberal

capitalism. It is the officially licensed domain of

obscene enjoyment that confirms the official

‘affirmative’ culture and supplements it with a neg-

ativity that expresses its ‘truth’. So the official

culture of neoliberal culture explicitly rejects bad

feelings, encouraging the attitude of ‘smile or die’.

This is given its most extreme form in New Age

ideologies, such as Louise Hay’s affirmations that

explain any illness or fault as the responsibility of the

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subject. The neoliberal subject standing before the

mirror enunciating their self-affirmations goes out into

the world to be, potentially, torn down by the strategy

of negging or, we could add, what negging reveals as the

culture of neg-ativity that is the true inverse of these

affirmations.

Into the Black House

Perhaps the best-known fictional portrait of a PUA is the

character Frank Mackey played by Tom Cruise in Paul

Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia. Not only is this

Cruise’s best career performance, his onstage ‘manifesto’

usefully condenses the form of PUA neg-ativity:

Respect the cock! And tame the cunt! Tame it!

Take it on headfirst with the skills that I will

teach you at work and say no! You will not

control me! No! You will not take my soul! No!

You will not win this game! Because it’s a game,

guys. You want to think it's not, huh? You want

to think it’s not? Go back to the schoolyard and

you have that crush on big-titted Mary Jane.

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Respect the cock. You are embedding this thought.

I am the one who’s in charge. I am the one who

says yes! No! Now! Here! Because it’s universal,

man. It is evolutional. It is anthropological. It

is biological. It is animal. We... are... men!

While this is fiction, and satire, it is also the perfect

summary of the delirious root of the pseudo-rational

strategies of the PUA, which are ‘informed’ by neuro-

linguistic programming, evolutionary psychology, and

other ‘scientific’ justifications.

The horror is the horror of dependency and the

desire for separation from the misogynist cliché of the

‘vortex’ of the vagina, which ‘saps’ energy and vitality.

In neoliberal selfhood the game is always zero-sum. This

is sexuality as resource extraction and exploitation.

Also, of course, the audience in the film give-up control

to the PUA artist, who ‘embeds’ the thought, the mantra

‘Respect the cock! And tame the cunt!’, which the

audience chant. Anderson’s film stages this embrace of

passivity, with its homosocial connotations, of obedience

to the guru figure. Of course this effect of passivity is

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then, in real life, quickly displaced onto the activity

of serial seduction and vengeance for all past

rejections. The PUA is the guru or mentor for those who

claim to be ‘dispossessed’, while engaged in systematic

acts of dispossession.

We can further probe this delirium by turning to

Roberto Arlt’s 1929 novel Seven Madmen. The central

character is the Dostoyevskian Remo Erdosian, who has

been systematically pilfering from his employer. Finally

caught and required to pay back his theft Erdosian tours

the ‘madmen’ of Buenos Aires trying to borrow the money.

He will eventually embark on a mad scheme of kidnap and

murder to fund the revolutionary plans of ‘the

Astrologer’, which include releasing plague and poison

gas, various schemes for mining gold, and a bizarre

fascination for the authoritarian.

Erdosian is wracked by sexual anxiety, alternating

between a naïve purity, he wears trousers to bed on his

wedding night, and an obsessional sexual fantasy life,

‘gratuitously offending and fouling his soul’ (8). After

his wife leaves him Erdosian has a breakdown in which he

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enters the figurative ‘black house’ of compulsive fantasy

and masturbation – the black house that is ‘deep inside

himself’ (122). Throwing himself ‘into the delicious

terror of masturbation’, Erdosian enters ‘a universe of

gelatinous ideas’ (121).

This universe is ‘an ever-changing world of females

that no-one could ever cast him from’ (121), a

kaleidoscopic fantasy world of revenge and satisfaction:

Like someone pulling banknotes earned in many

different ways from the same wallet, from the

recesses of the dark house Erdosian plucked a

fragmented but whole woman, made up from a

hundred such creatures split by the same desire

repeated a hundred times, always blooming anew in

their presence. (122)

In this financial metaphor, Erdosian composes ‘this

fantasy woman, made up from the bits and pieces of all

the ones he had been unable to possess’ (123).

Arlt’s madmen – with their fantasies of sexual

control, spiritual purity, amateur inventions, get-rich-

quick schemes, desires for authoritarian revolution

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(Lenin or Mussolini), and dreams of destruction by plague

and bombs – are hauntingly familiar types. The Red Pill

Right, Bitcoin enthusiasts, gamers, PUA’s, right-wing

accelerationists, tech-fetishists, paleo-dieters, and all

the bestiary of the internet offer an uncanny mirror to

Arlt’s ‘madmen’. Erdosian’s ‘black house’ is easy enough

to imagine as a custom porn search, and offers an x-ray

of the fantasy structure of the obscene underside of our

culture.

If Erdosian’s imagination turns of a particular

cultural expression of sexuality, in, pace Foucault, a

repressive form, now the repressive desublimation of

contemporary neoliberalism makes these fantasies public.

What was Erdosian’s ‘private’ realm of fantasy, his

internalized ‘suffering’, his ‘black house, is now the

‘open house’ of what is shared through the internet. Of

course on the internet neg-ativity appears as the

province of a self-elected elite, like Arlt’s madmen.

Although ‘public’ it is the work of those in the know,

the non-duped, who claim to know how the world ‘really

works’. Like Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt

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(1943), these men know what others, prototypically women,

don’t:

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know,

if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find

swine? The world’s a hell.

This cultivated cynicism is the style of the neggers who

see the world ‘for what it is’, for the ‘elementary

particles’ (Houellebecq) of neoliberal subjectivity that

confront each other in the war zone of the market.

The control of the ‘inner’ delirium is one

channelled to manipulation and to a belief in the supreme

value of manipulation. While neggers are themselves

manipulated by their PUA guru’s they exempt themselves by

the notion of a revelation of an absolutely manipulable

world, in which to get on top only requires a mastery of

the puppet strings. The result is the construction of the

world as hell, but, like Milton’s Satan, ‘Better to reign

in Hell, than serve in Heaven.’ Of course they do not

‘rule’, but construct a simulacrum of mastery, with

violent and toxic social effects, to bolster their

conception of the world.

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The Ugly Soul

Hegel’s analysis of the ‘beautiful soul’, in The

Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), can provide some crucial clues

to unlocking the neg-ativity of the ‘ugly soul’ of the

PUA/negger. The ‘beautiful soul’ splits itself from the

world and finds its certainty only in itself. This

‘absolute certainty’ of the self means that ‘this world

is the utterance of its own voice, which in like manner

it has directly heard, and only the echo of which returns

to it.’ (#658) This is the ‘voice’ of the negger/PUA,

which voices only the certainty of the self, a self which

is the vector for the ‘voice’ of the (sexual) market. The

result is an echo chamber, in which the voice produces

the victim as the subject that conforms to the

negger’s/PUA’s schema: either rejector/castrator, for

those who resist or dismiss, or ‘slut’ for those who

respond and accept this ‘seduction’.

Hegel argues that the beautiful soul, which flees

from actuality to preserve ‘the purity of its heart’, is

trapped by its own negativity: ‘The hollow object, which

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it produces, now fills it, therefore, with the feeling of

emptiness.’ (#658) While ‘purity of heart’ may seem an

odd phrase to use to analyse negging, we can note it

described the self-deceptive ‘gallantry’ of the

negger/PUA, as well as the hypocritical projection of

negativity on to the victim. This is the ‘game’ of

control, in which all control is on the side of the

nagger/PUA, but which produces a void, an object which is

not an object. Hegel remarks of the beautiful soul that

‘its activity consists in yearning’ (#658).

The final result of the beautiful soul is madness,

as the negativity it projects onto the world returns to

consume it. It lives in the contradiction of its claimed

purity and the world’s disorder, which then evacuates

both into abstract emptiness. Hegel writes:

Thus the “beautiful soul”, being conscious of

this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy,

is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness,

wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in

consumption. Thereby it gives up, as a fact, its

stubborn insistence on its own isolated self-

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existence, but only to bring forth the soulless,

spiritless unity of abstract being. (#668)

We do not, of course, seem to witness much of this self-

consuming madness with the PUA or negger, although it may

be out there. Certainly we do witness the madness of this

split and the resulting ‘spiritless unity of abstract

being’ in their behaviour. In fact this ‘spiritless unity

of abstract being’ unlocks the unity of capitalist

subjectivity as empty abstraction.

The empty abstraction, of course, has a bearer.

These are ‘visceral abstractions’ (Ngai), and visceral in

the sense particularly of the assault on the victim. This

is not to deny the violent materiality of negging and

generalised neg-ativity. Abstraction, in this sense, is

certainly real, and certainly a real act of violence. It

results, however, in the construction of a ‘spiritless

unity’, in which the negger/PUA, while claiming power and

authority, is reduced to the bearer of this abstract

violence. While they construct women as abstract units on

a spreadsheet or score sheet, this calculating approach

(in both senses) rebounds to construct the PUA/negger as

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empty, or as empty except for the violent raging neg-

ativity which constitutes their ‘inner’ being.

This is, again, a vision of absolute manipulation.

The world is evil, for the negger, because it is a world

that rejects the negger, while the negger should be

rejecting it. In this second rejection the negger de-

links from the world, which becomes a series of abstract

units of value that can be manipulated ‘at will’. The

manipulator too, however, is reduced to another abstract

unit in this world. The capitalist marketplace is the

‘final’ ruler.

Counter Counter-Culture

The style of the subcultural milieu of negging is one

that draws, as we’ve seen, on many sources. It is

motivated by revenge. This revenge is one taken on women

but also, of course, on feminism and various other social

gains that emerged from the revolutionary moment of the

long 1960s. If neoliberal governance is the overarching

roll-back of those movements, while absorbing and

retooling elements of the counter-cultural programme,

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negging is another twist on this recuperation. The

neggers claim a freedom that they see as at threat from

any infringement on their ‘rights’. They claim and

pervert the French 1960s slogan ‘Enjoy without shackles’

[jouir sans entraves]. Alain Badiou has noted how this slogan

implies a ‘de-linking’, a nihilism which then turns to

the notion that any enjoyment can be bought (55).

The line between ‘radical’ nihilism and capitalist

nihilism is a short one. While the counter-culture has

its own well-documented problems with feminism we should

note that it also formed an horizon from which questions

of liberation could be posed. Feminism was a revolution

in the revolution. The reworking or recuperation of these

radicalisms by the capitalist restoration, which begun in

the 1970s and accelerated since 1989, aims to nullify or

pervert those radical negations into the service of the

market. Therefore negging is expressive of the empty core

of capitalist subjectivity and this process of roll-back.

Negging is not simply one of the ‘new’ counter-

cultures, which freely borrows elements from past

counter-cultures to construct its ‘retro-sexism’ as the

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expression of a ‘true’ freedom. It is a counter counter-

culture, amplifying the worst elements of the counter-

culture (sexism, a de-linked vision of life, radical

individualism, etc.) and using those to neutralize any

thinking of freedom as a social form by confining freedom

to the freedom to enjoy on the sexual marketplace.

While the social conditions that made the counter-

culture possible have exhausted themselves, while that

dynamic is ‘saturated’, as Badiou would put it, this does

not mean this ground should simply be ceded. The neg-

ativity of negging is the sign of what comes to fill the

absence: the cultural forms of capital lack their own

dynamic capacities are operate as parasites on past

invention, draining or perverting their content to serve

the cultural marketplace. What negging reveals is the

violence in this process. Abstractions turn malign and

absorb and channel a negativity become malignant once it

is blocked from the process of the realization of

freedom.

This is why negging is an activity, an endless

yearning that freezes liberation into the form of

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liberation into abstraction and the ‘joys’ of exchange

rendered as violent exploitation. Although definitely a

minor and peripheral form, this activity attests to a

wider series of strategies that inhabit the mode of

scandal and shock as affirmative of the status quo. The

signature expression of these strategies is the line: “we

are just saying what everyone really thinks”. Invoking an

uneven and socially necessary policing of speech as

‘totalitarian’ oppression and manipulation, what we are

‘all’ really thinking turns out to be the molten core of

capitalist ideology: racism, misogyny, class hatred,

fantasies of dominance and control.

Where once the counter-culture aimed to reveal the

manipulations of capitalist ideology, the counter

counter-culture of neg-ativity reveals the

‘manipulations’ it imputes to any attempt to regulate,

control, or restrict the commodification of existence.

This is why the neg-ativity of negging is emblematic of

the blocking of any transition of negativity to the

affirming of freedom. Instead it offers a pseudo-freedom,

which is ‘pseudo’ because it is bought through the

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subjection of the Other, qua victim, and the concomitant

emptying of the self. It inhabits neg-ativity as a state

of ‘yearning’, which only confirms the world ‘as it is’,

or better the ideological vision of the world as

violently colliding elementary particles.

Against Neg-ativity

To rupture the culture of negging does not involve

refusing negativity, but rather the perversion of

negativity into neg-ativity. Those who promote

‘affirmative’ solutions form, as I’ve suggested, merely

the flipside of neg-ativity. After all, neg-ativity

itself is affirmative of the success of the negger/PUA at

the expense of all other subjects, or more particularly

at the expense of the female victim. The ‘freedom’ neg-

ativity offers is the freedom of what Badiou called de-

linking, a claimed ‘freedom’ from manipulation inhabiting

the position of the manipulator. This does not involve an

escape, but a flight further into manipulation – figured

especially in the PUA guru, but also it this vision of

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the subject who ventriloquizes the market and the order

of subjectivity reduced to value.

If negging reveals this state we are already

rupturing with its claimed isolation and claimed ability

to ‘master’ the market. Negging, instead, inscribes the

neg-ativity of neoliberal governance that exceeds the

compass of negging. What remains, however, is the more

difficult to task of negating this neg-ativity. To simply

condemn negging, which obviously requires this gesture,

is to leave it isolated in its imaginary position of

mastery, which can easily flip-over into claims of

victimhood, as we see with the ‘men’s rights movement’.

Instead, this neg-ativity needs to register its own

isolation and the untenability of this position. The

‘manipulator’ is the one who is also manipulated or, as

Lacan put it, the non-dupes err.

This would require another cultural revolution,

another rollback of the rollback. The conditions that

made the counter-culture possible in its particular form

no longer hold. This offers the capacity for re-

invention, as so much of the counter-culture was directed

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against the codifications of the Fordist dispensation. It

was this that gave the counter-culture a certain power,

but also a certain proximity to the neo-liberal counter-

revolution, which also targeted those ‘codifications’ in

the name of the market unleashed. If those codifications

are gone then the rationale of neo-liberal governance, in

its self-image as ‘revolutionary’ market creed, its

‘accelerationist’ imagination, is also put under threat.

Negging reveals this, as it desperately tries to find

forms of coding, notably PC, to react against. If negging

has little to actually negate its own hollowness is

revealed, as well as its fundamental violence.

What we might suggest is to need to valorize and

retool forms of codification in the name of a real

freedom, a concrete freedom directed toward actuality,

rather than the ‘freedom’ of flight and escape that forms

a common horizon today. Not more de-linking, but less.

Not least in the revelation that this de-linking forms an

abstract horizon of subjection and ‘manipulation’ by the

forms of value and state power. In this way the

‘yearning’ of the ‘beautiful soul’ is brought to confront

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its own limit, its own negativity, which allows the

transformation of irrational neg-ativity into the

negativity that would form the transition to rational

freedom. To neg the neggers, then, is not to merely

insult them, to return neg for neg, gratifying though

that might be, but also to confront them with the

emptiness of their claims, their own inhabited

abstraction, and to offer them a path of re-education to

a concrete freedom.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Harrison Fluss for his comments, for

his coinage ‘neg-ativity’, and for his advice concerning

Hegel.

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Bibliography

Arlt, Roberto, The Seven Madmen [1929], trans, Nick Caistor

(London: Serpent’s Tail, 2015).

Badiou, Alain, The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed., trans.

and intro. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: Verso,

2012).

Charger, Jesse, ‘Negging Women – 10 Awesome Negs that

Work’, SeductionScience (2010):

http://www.seductionscience.com/2010/negging-women/

Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, Marxists Internet

Archive:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/

phindex.htm

Ngai, Sianne, ‘Visceral Abstractions’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay

and Lesbian Studies 21.1 (2015): 33–63.

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Woolf, Nicky, ‘“Negging”: Anatomy of a Dating Trend’, New

Statesman 25 May 2012:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/05/negging-

latest-dating-trend

Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the

University of Chichester. His most recent work is Malign

Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014).

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