Flirting with insult

Negging? Please.

Between flirting and hate crimes rests a stretch of gray so long and gradual it can be hard to know where to get off.

Seinfeld sucks

I’ve always felt left out of certain things I’m supposed to like but had a knee-jerk revulsion to. Despite being Jewish, I’ve never tried lox, nova, or white fish, all of them having this wet, sweaty look that reminds me of the smells and temperature dysregulation you see in a particular species of babushkazim whose fleshy, chilly corpuses, through the magic of vasoconstriction and various levels of black magic, can defrost and sweat at the same time and who I would prefer not touch my bagel or anything.

I also hate Seinfeld. I’ve seen a few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is written by Seinfeld creator Larry David, but Curbed is infinitely funnier to me than Seinfeld, which just always seemed like a bunch of neurotics bitching about minor things that aren’t worth thinking about. It always felt like the dialogue was overshooting the premises. Much ado about nothing. Too much of what I already get in real life.

Not on my bagel.

Compare Seinfeld to the more recently written I Think You Should Leave (of which I’ve only seen the first season) and you get an interesting contrast. Seinfeld shows people making big deals about nothing whereas I Think You Should Leave shows people doing extremely bizarre things while most of the characters seem not to notice and you get left looking for a single person on set with whom you could make some kind of knowing eye contact and yet this person never emerges, leaving you uncomfortable with the ensuing awkwardness. I know TV/comedy historians may take umbrage with this aesthetic preference of mine against Seinfeld but I’d rather watch fantastical premises with understated dialogue than dramatic dialogue with mundane happenings. But maybe I just hate Seinfeld because I see myself in it, always sweating the small stuff to distract from the fact that you and everyone you know will someday die. As it says in Hagakure, “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”

What’s for certain is that if I were single, I wouldn’t go back to a girl’s house to watch Seinfeld unless I thought we’d be necking before the first episode ended. Better yet, if a cute girl, knowing nothing about me told me she hated Seinfeld and thought it was one of the most overrated shows on earth, I’d be DTF no limit. By countersignaling the expected script that everyone is supposed to like Seinfeld, she’d establish a little humor and unpredictability, if not authenticity, all sexy qualities. The type who shows awareness of the social games people play, the game here being that you’re just supposed to like this show in the same way you’re supposed to like apple pie. (Don’t get me wrong—I am promiscuous with my pastry selection but apple doesn’t even break my top five slices.)

In fact, if I loved Seinfeld and a cute girl told me she thought it sucked zebra penis and that maybe I was a little slow-witted or something, I’d probably be even more turned on by her ability to just say what she thought when so many others lie. So many would have the same opinion of any other show that took the slot not because Seinfeld is generic but because people are, some of whom will watch Saturday Night Live their whole lives regardless of the quality. Imagine this lady tells you she’d rather you inseminate her on the floor than watch the first two minutes of your boring ass, normie show. You’re probably not too worried about your compatibility at this point. If this is her negging you, you want more of it, not less.

Angry women and annoying men

Yes, girls can neg too and once you see it, you’ll regret all the times you didn’t have hot passionate sex with all the women insulting you over the years: girls in class, human resources directors, a lady who flipped you off in traffic, who you threatened with the ice-cream licking motion that doubles as the universal sign for analingus. Yes, all of them wanted to have sex with you but now none of them will have sex with you. The problem is that over the last two decades negging has gotten a bad rap because:

• Annoying guys do it.

• They do it in annoying ways.

• If you make a woman cry or publicly degrade her via insult she will probably not even do hand stuff with you.

Ladies and veterans of the game we call human sexuality will note that all of these things travel together as it is often annoying guys treating people in annoying ways that make women not want to have sex with them. This is not the only way to get women to not have sex with you. It’s not even the only way to neg them.

Not an actual Harvard grad.

For example, one game people play comes down to humility or humble-bragging. I’ve noticed a lot of people who go to Harvard won’t reference their attendance directly unless pressed (which they sometimes try to get you to do) since they don’t want to be seen as bragging, holding up proof they’re better than you, which is gauche and will downgrade their reputation. Instead, when asked where they went to school, they’ll say Cambridge, which is either an invitation for you to ask them to clarify or it serves as a tip of their hat to anyone in the know. No one is more self-conscious about going to Harvard than someone who actually got in (save for people who almost got in), so the obvious move here is to say you’ve never heard of it, not Harvard nor Cambridge and totally obviate their insecurity by being cartoonish. When you are shameless, no one will feel shame in front of you. So you basically let them know you’re a few steps ahead of them and don’t want them to feel awkward either.

Stop being mean to slutty women

Slut-shaming is what you do when you want women to never have sex with you and, while you don’t have to high-five everyone for tarting it up all the time, letting someone know you disapprove of things they can no longer change about themselves is a good way to put them on the defensive, even if you feel morally vindicated in doing so.

I’m farting.

Like the dashing young woman dying to dislocate your Jordaches on the carpet, when you let the Harvard graduate know you’re fun but sophisticated enough not to embarrass them if you wade into more delicate waters, often enough they choose to proceed with you. In criminal circles, this is called a confidence game. I just call it charm. It’s one of the reasons people who are good at interviewing others try to get them a little disoriented by saying things that are difficult to respond to gracefully. Every time you deftly navigate difficulty, their trust and respect increase. A lot of the world is run by people who went to Harvard or people like them and so showing them you know what to do with them and that you will not break out pitchforks to lecture them about what a bad job they’re doing can endear you to them. Here in The West, most women get to decide whether you have sex with them and getting in good with people who went to Harvard requires a lot of the same skills that getting in good with women requires.

When you hear someone describe something as manipulation and it doesn’t involve money or prices, it’s usually a woman speaking.

I’ll come back to this in a second, but when people hear the word “negging,” they usually apply an overly stringent Red Pill definition that posits you are saying something negative about a woman to her face to lower her self-esteem such that you are later in a position to lift her up with your discerning attention and gaze. But I think the Red Pill guys got it wrong or at least partially wrong. They did something that worked and then took the wrong message from it or explained it poorly to guys too literal and inexperienced to understand the gray area between flirting and committing hate crimes.

The Red Pill guys think that the effective mechanism is the insult whereas I think the effective mechanism is saying something unpredictable. Insults can be unpredictable, especially if they happen at unpredictable times but if you say something unpredictable that’s too spiky or antisocial, it won’t work. For every one of Elon Musk’s baby mama’s, there are thousands of women who would refuse him sexual access and he’s regularly the richest man in the world, likely in human history. At every social station in life there are things you cannot have.

You can’t afford it.

If we back up, you’ll see the person who went to Harvard, they want to communicate in neutral terms (read non-braggadocious), something that makes them look good while letting you know they’re mature and aware of how it looks and that they are not trying to seek adulation.

If you neg them by saying you’ve never heard of it, you aren’t exactly insulting them. In fact, you’re demonstrating that you know they’re a big deal by flagrantly and unconvincingly pretending you’re too important to have heard of it. Because the person who went to Harvard is so universally considered to be above your station and yet you show you possess the social acumen to know what Cambridge is supposed to imply, you demonstrate your social value as someone who can navigate conversation with the upper crust without having to kiss their asses (angry traffic hookups notwithstanding). Rich, smart people like jokes too and they hate people who treat them like they can’t handle them. What is the point of being rich and smart if everyone is going to treat you like a child everywhere you go?

As you can tell, negging is a misnomer for what’s actually going on. A better term would be something like, social adeptness or humor but I don’t really care to change it since people will inevitable decide negging is one thing and humor is something different. It would just be better to explain why everyone is talking past each other in service of or against negging.

It’s somewhat time-sensitive in that it’s an interview tactic since once you know people for a long time, they will probably know if there was actually malice behind any barbed statements you may have made and once you’ve already done the nasty it’s just regular old flirting/married life. Negging is something you do to someone who doesn’t have enough information about your social acumen to prove you have it in spades. The proof is something you supply by demonstrating your verbal chops and social awareness. Just one of many reasons why I think Seinfeld sucks and the Red Pill got it wrong.