To pick up a woman, first put her down

I actually caught an episode of  “The Pick Up Artist” one afternoon while I was home sick.  I missed out on many of the “rules,” that this character, Mystery, had imparted to his protegees, but most of them had slick sounding nicknames or abbreviations, like “negging.”  The whole show made me feel dirty and uncomfortable.  Maybe I am not their target audience, but if a guy in a bar used almost any of the prescribed “negging” lines on me, I would close out my tab and head off to another bar.  Some of the most used lines included:

• (Girl turns away, clearly not interested in the guy.)  Don’t be rude baby, the conversation is over here.  (If she still doesn’t turn around, guy turns to his friend and says,) Is she always so rude?  She doesn’t have to be a bitch about it.
• (Touches a girl’s hair)  Your hair would be pretty if it wasn’t so long (or short, or curly or straight, you get the picture).
• In any other bar, you would be the prettiest girl in the room.
• (My favorite!) Guys invite girl and her friend to his VIP couch section of the bar, then proceeds to ignore the girl he is actually into, compliment her friend, then whenever girl he likes starts to talk, he would put his hand in her face or shush her saying “Hey, we’re talking here.”  At some point, he turns the table, puts his arm around the girl he actually likes and ignores the friend until she leaves.

Are girls dumb enough to fall for this?  Do we enjoy having a strange guy put us down with a backhanded compliment.  It was difficult to tell from the editing of the show how long the boys were at work and how many women they approached before one “set” agreed to hang out with him on the couch. There were clips of multiple sets of girls telling a guy to “f- off when he pushed a little to hard on the rude segue into conversation.”  One guy was told to stop swearing or the conversation was over; he called her a bitch and she walked away, to which “Mystery” (watching on a hidden camera) shook his head and said, “not worth it man, move on, find a good one.”  Clearly, a true pick-up artist has no use for women with any kind of limits or self respect.

Success in this episode included getting a girl’s digits or agreeing to move onto the next bar together.

I would also be curious to find out if the girls in the bar knew they were being filmed.   I wonder how that would influence their behavior- would they be more or less willing to be abused verbally on camera?