Esme Gordon-Craig is a twenty-something contributor for the Times (in the UK). She recently wrote a piece about falling for “negging”.
Negging is a manipulation tactic. Negging is frequently employed by pickup artists, pushy salespersons, and even itinerant preachers. Your nosy neighbor may employ it too.
Negging consists of using subtle insults and backhanded compliments to shame a person into a desired outcome.
Non-drinkers like myself are frequently on the receiving end of negging. When I decline an alcoholic beverage, I am occasionally asked if I am a Baptist. I reply deadpan that, no, I am an idolatrous Roman Catholic. That usually puts an end to the interaction.
Ms. Gordon-Craig relates how a group of older men approached her and her Gen Z girlfriends at a bar in the UK. (Since she was in the UK, it was probably a “pub”.) The older men (I’m guessing they were in their late 30s or early 40s) offered a round of drinks.
One of them became specifically interested in her:
“One bought my friend a drink and another offered to buy one for me. I politely refused but he persisted. In all honesty, even if I wasn’t done for the night, I doubt I’d have accepted the drink — he wasn’t really my type or anywhere near my age.”
Then the man uttered the words that flustered her and broke down her defenses:
“You need to stop being so uptight… You need to let loose… Learn to express yourself, be more open.”
“Soon I was flirting,” she writes. “Half an hour later we were exchanging Instagrams and then making light of the fact that he’d insulted me earlier.”
The next day, one of her friends broke the news: she had fallen for the psychological manipulation tactic of negging.
And apparently that made her retroactively offended. “An older man basically telling a girl in her early twenties to get drunk and start flirting.”
(Perhaps the “girl” in her early twenties should not spend so much time in bars. Just a suggestion—and her liver will thank her someday.)
@thetimes “What is negging, and how did I fall for it?” “It was a Saturday night and a man told me to ‘stop being so uptight’ at a bar. My reaction obviously should have been to grab my friend and go. Yet I did the exact opposite” | 🗣️ Esme Gordon Craig *FOR NEWS PURPOSES* #negging #dating #genz #news #mentalhealth
♬ original sound – The Times and Sunday Times – The Times and Sunday Times
But I also understand what Ms. Gordon-Craig went through, and I can sympathize with her feeling of being “duped,” “had”… “manipulated.” I’ve been there myself.
For one week during the summer of 1985, I found myself at a youth camp in West Virginia. I was 17 years old.
One blistering hot afternoon, the camp counselors took us swimming at a nearby public pool. Before entering the pool, however, we had to shower.
The water coming from the public shower was ice-cold.
I don’t mean that the water was tepid or room temperature. The water was nearly frozen.
I was a pampered kid from the suburbs. I was used to hot showers. I didn’t want to step under the cold water. Neither did any of the other boys who were there.
Then the camp counselor uttered the magic words.
“Come on,” he said. “Be a man!”
That was all it took. I practically jumped under the stream of Arctic water. So did the other boys.
Then I heard the camp counselor whisper an aside to another adult. “See,” he said, “that always works!”
In that instant, I realized that I had just been manipulated. That was “negging”—the 1985 youth camp version.
But I learned my lesson. I have rarely been manipulated in that way since.
Ms. Gordon-Craig states that she feels “deeply unsettled” at the discovery that strange men in bars might resort to subtle manipulation techniques when trying to score with women they find attractive.
Here is where I would encourage her to discard the excessive sensitivities of her generation. Yes, older men sometimes hit on young women in bars. Get over it.
A Gen X woman, circa 1996, would have reveled at laying bare yet another tool of male artifice. She would have anxiously awaited the opportunity to neg the next guy back, to blast his confidence with some negging of her own.
Turnabout, after all, is fair play. It’s also a far more effective weapon than being performatively “appalled.”
-ET