At the time this stuff was popular,  I was severely overweight and everytime a guy hit on me,  I assumed he was actually hitting on my hotter friends and using the DUFF theory with me - Designated Ugly Fat Friend. The idea was that if you hit on the fat girl, the other ones would then compete for your attention. It…

Oh, I think it is almost impossible to get through life without breaking a few hearts. Mine was really broken as a child and didn’t heal until I put some serious work into healing as an adult. Those guys didn’t so much wound me as reinforce old wounds.

I have, since childhood, been frequently and repeatedly accused of flirting with boys and men on various occasions and in various scenarios.

Ah yes, because if a man and a woman are sitting together on a bus they must be a couple.

Think about the type of clown who needs to use a strategy like that to try and trick women into hooking up with him.  Anyone with that little social and emotional awareness is going to screw up negging as well. 

I just remember the hat, and being stunned that any woman would allow herself to be picked up by a guy who wore it.

This guy apparently is not familiar with the widely held belief that you can tell a lot about a person’s character by how they treat servers. Why the immediate assumption that women are flirting?  Maybe they are simply being nice, which they’re socialized to do from birth. Would he think it more normal if they were…

The thing that struck me about that stupid mystery show was how much the “techniques” were just shit like dress nicely, approach women with confidence, try to be charming and funny, approach a lot of women to increase your odds, etc. That’s all relatively obvious, and harmless, anodyne shit that anyone, man or woman,…

I have to admit that in my twenties I fell for negging a time or two. It worked on me because I had trauma-induced chronic self esteem issues. So I would try to resolve cognitive dissonance by chasing the approval of men who didn't like me very much. So,  you know, congrats you guys on taking advantage of my…

You start this post saying you never called a woman a tease and finish it saying that all women are teases for some desperate self esteem reason. 

I saw the same from men when I worked as a bartender. What do you think makes it a gendered thing, other than wanting a reason to shit on women?

There was so much negging and it never worked! I just remember it being like ‘hey you’re kind of mean, I’m going to go sit somewhere else with my friends’

Wow, your interpretation of normal human behavior is bizarre. Flirting is fun to do- that’s why people do it. People in relationships will sometimes flirt with people who are not their partner and it doesn’t mean anything, again, because flirting is fun. It is weird to assume that just because someone flirts with you,…

Both men and women ‘test’ each other to some degree to figure out what the person thinks, believes, is about.  Calm down. All women are not out to get you.  We are human beings, as you are.  Not video game conquests or a breed of evil fucking witches. 

Men are a lot less likely to chat with female waitstaff when on first dates. And men are definitely less likely to chat with female passengers on the bus when with their girlfriends. Both of those are recipes for disaster for a man. Women do it more often. And men are more likely to put up with it. If a man does it,…

By the time, I knew what negging was, it was universally understood, which defeats the purpose?

Oh man, yeah I remember that show, and I thought he was a clown (I mean he literally wore clown clothes, right?) who was feasting on weak dudes.  Crazy that VH-1 ran that infomercial at all.  

Yes, thank you. I’m a woman. Back when I used to go on dates, I would sometimes become hyper-chatty with the waiters and bartenders. However, it was because I was very nervous and the pressure of trying to impress my date with direct conversation at the point was too much for me to bear but I still wanted to show my…

Women with men feel they can give you a compliment safely, because you will see they are with a man and won’t hit on them. Women alone or with other women who call out compliments (however G-rated) to strange men are risking their compliments being taken as an advance, and an angry response if they turn it down.

I’m a man, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced these sorts of behaviors from women, nor has any woman I know told me she routinely engages in these sorts of behaviors. Maybe the women I know just missed the meeting where they all agreed to do this shit?