I forget who it was, but a while back someone here posted a plausible explanation as to why so many dudes get sucked into the PUA garbage. Something about how re-framing sexual relationships as a "game" with "rules" and "strategies" makes it more digestible for the kind of shy, awkward nerds who really just want a girlfriend but have no idea how to get one.
That's a pretty charitable way to look at it.
I've never heard the term "negging." That's nasty shit.
...What these guys do is disgusting.
Before I ever heard of PUA, I remember guys trying these techniques on me and just being confused... WTF? Why is this guy being such a freak? In some cases, they were guys I might have been interested in if they hadn't been acting so fucking weird.
After I learned about the PUA scene and understood what was going on, my thought process was, this probably works on a certain percentage of women. What kind of women would it work on? Probably really insecure women with low self-esteem who come from family backgrounds that were emotionally abusive, if not physically abusive, and therefore on a fundamental and unconscious level don't believe that they are deserving of interactions that are more whole, or interactions that don't pluck at their sense of inadequacy.
And then I was sad, both for those women and for the men who fall for PUA and really don't know that all they are doing is furthering their own social dysfunction and eventual inevitable emotional pain by engaging in dysfunctional relationships with seriously damaged women.
Sure, there are some helpful messages about getting out there and meeting people, but they are inadequate shadows of the help these men could be getting through a good therapist or even a book such as the one by Horney that someone mentioned in the xkcd thread.
