Whats The Deal With Pickup Artists?

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The Question

Hi Dating Nerd,

I know the whole 'Pickup Artist' thing is dated these days, but I still find myself wondering whether I should do some research on it. One of my friends (pretty ugly guy, OK job) still manages to get laid pretty frequently and tells me he's borrowed some of his flirting techniques from PUA forums. It seems really shady and obvious, and yet it seems to work. What the hell is going on?

- Pickup-Confused Nerd

The Answer

Hi PC Nerd,

Good question. I want to talk to you about a pickup artist technique -- specifically, what they call 'the neg', because pickup artists have a dumb word for everything. See also ‘kino’, the pickup artist term for touching people. Also ‘peacocking’, the term for wearing odd, flashy clothing that gets you noticed. The nomenclature is fun, but very, very silly, sort of like the “bang”s and “pow”s in comic books.

I feel as if the pickup artist movement is something that has to be publicly disavowed by every man who wants to belong to polite society. We all have to say that they're douchebags and misogynists. Of course, whether or not you believe that isn't not the point here.

Nevertheless: privately, most guys are fascinated by PUAs and all of their unseemly techniques. We've scoured the message boards replete with probably apocryphal accounts of being abruptly blown by a flight attendant after amusing her with a subtle hypnosis. We've read The Game, the book where Neil Strauss describes the existential despair that plagues pickup artistry, complete with confessional moments that come off as rather insincere, like a banker from Goldman Sachs expressing his distaste for Wall Street culture over lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

This is all fascinating, for obvious reasons. If there's a secret, we all want it. The vast majority of heterosexual male activity is at least distantly connected to seeing somebody naked, either briefly or over and over again until the relationship dissolves or Viagra becomes necessary. But most of us are walking around figuring out how to have just a little more cred than the day before -- a more impressive job, a more finely worded quip, a more correctly tousled head of hair. We want to be just a sliver less disgusting. We want to accomplish things we can brag about, then figure out how to brag about them as casually as possible.

This is all really time consuming. Life would be so much easier if we could just read a manual about how to get straight to women's hearts directly (or women's other things), rather than spending our lives attempting to become a sketchy charade of a real human being so that someone might care about us. So the pickup artist gig seems good, even if we're skeptical.

Which brings us back to 'negging.' A neg, essentially, is a backhanded compliment that you pay to someone you want to sleep with. One classic example is "Your hair looks beautiful tonight -- that must have taken a lot of work." The second half of that sentence is what makes it a neg; it's a little barb, the intention of which is to convey that you're attracted, but distinctly unimpressed. The concept behind this is that the most effective way to make someone want you is to wound them a little bit. The neg is a combination of flirt and insult -- along with displaying your interest, you lower your target's self-esteem slightly, so that they need your approval. This is gross, but it kind of makes sense in a weird, twisted way.

But the real question, obviously, is whether it works. And my professional opinion is, yes, actually, I think it might, if you can pull it off. In fact, I think a lot of pickup artist techniques work... just not for the reasons that pickup artists think they do. And negging is a perfect example. The reason negging works isn't that it's a masterful tool of psychological manipulation. It's not a magic spell. It's way simpler than that. As everyone in the world knows, confidence is attractive. And if you can confidently give someone a backhanded compliment with a smile on your face, that's a display of confidence. That's all it is.

Pickup artists are the romantic equivalent of the religious guy who thinks he's been saved from cancer by the God, when the responsibility more likely rests with the laser that zapped out his tumor. They make up these crazy stories for why they're able to get laid a lot, and concoct pseudo-scientific terms to tell those stories with. Hell, if this weren't a story about pickup artistry, you might think that "sarging an HB7" -- which means trying to pick up a somewhat attractive woman -- refers to the work of an elevator mechanic. But if pickup artists do have success, it's just because they talk to women. A lot. They've made their lives about picking up women, so they get out there and do it. Given 10,000 hours of practice, even the least interesting or attractive guy will be better at flirting than a halfway decent guy who never once chats up someone he's into.

If there's any lesson you should learn from pickup artists, it's that. Take yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit. Try (and fail at) flirting with women a bunch of times, until you're not scared of failure anymore. That's a way better use of your time, I think, than scrolling, lonely and sweaty, through Reddit threads with creepy undertones. It’s vile to view women as a computer program where you can punch in a cheat code and make sex magically come out. It’s an unhealthy attitude. Even if it was useful in helping you get laid here and there, and I don't believe it is, it will certainly hurt any future relationships you have when your partner discovers how you really see her.

Moreover, if anything, trying to maintain a complicated interior bag of seduction tricks seems like a recipe for failure. It’s the conversational equivalent of fumbling with a condom wrapper; it’s hard to maintain the spontaneity. When you're nervously talking to somebody you're attracted to, it's probably easier to just talk like a normal human (hard as that might be) than remember some psychological incantation or scripted mind game.

My fellow nerd: There's no perfect solution. Just leave your home and talk to someone -- or stay in and download a dating app.