Mystery was the founder and main proponent of negs. To really understand negging, we can't look to the plethora of people who taught negging after him, but rather to what he taught about negging himself.

Mystery, on the the moderated Alt Seduction Fast Forums, said that his all time favorite neg was simply blowing his nose in front of his potential girl.

That's not an insult, but it was his favorite neg. The reason why a lot of people don't understand that is because a lot of people don't truly understand negs.

Everyone thinks that a neg is an insult, but it is most certainly not. It is a NEUTRAL comment. The point of the neg is not to make the girl feel bad about herself. The point of the neg is to help the girl realize that you, as a man, are not hopelessly stricken by her looks like every other guy in the bar. A proper neg is not an insult. It is any kind of statement made to prove that you're not trying to impress her.

And even though nick Savoy kind of moved away from negging in Magic Bullets I find that it is still one of the most effective techniques in the game, and when done properly, it doesn't do emotional harm to anyone.

So rather than dismissing negs as an outdated peice of PUA technology, I think it's important that we learn to neg properly, and embrace the neg as a valuable technique in our opening/attraction tool box.

It's common knowledge that when opening a set, it's incredibly important to disqualify the girl you're interested as a potential lover. For example, even in Magic Bullets, Nick Savoy says that it's important to present yourself as a challenge. In other words, one way or another you must initially show some relative disinterest in the girl that you wish to attract - otherwise, you are no different than the hundreds of other men that she encounters every day. If you do not display disinterest, you are simply becoming the type of lovesick man that girls are evolutionarily programmed to dismiss.

Now any techniques that negatively effects a woman's self esteem is wrong. However, that is nowhere what a neg is intended to be. A neg is intended to be a verbal SOD (statement of disinteres). Rather than condemning negs altogether, let's learn to use them properly and responsibly.