Today, I learned a new word. If you haven’t heard of “negging”, it’s grim.

Wiki Answers defines it thus: “Negging is a term used by pick up artists such as in the book ‘The Game’ and ‘The Mystery Method’. It means to insult a girl playfully to increase her interest in you.” The instructional douchebaggery website So Suave tells its desperate readership that a “neg hit” is “a remark, sometimes humorous, used to point out a woman’s flaws.” The top rated entry at Urban Dictionary calls negs “Low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to your advances.”

Oddly enough, a similar thing happens to Pro-Dommes, albeit in a financial context. We’ve all had it many times. A demanding stranger will insist that we give him free sessions, claiming that we can’t be real lifestyle Dommes and must surely be money-obsessed, gold-digging materialists if we refuse to do our actual job for free, for him.

When we were newbies, some of us were hit by a sudden moment of self-doubt when faced with the first influx of negging subs. The doubts quickly evaporated: “Do I deserve the title of Dominatrix?” we would all think for a fraction of a nanosecond. “Can I call myself a lifestyle and Pro-Domme if I don’t give this random clinger off the internet my undivided attention during a recession and then inevitably won’t be able to afford to buy myself food or heat my home? Wait… yes. Yes I can. That’s that settled then.”

Here’s a gem from my Adultwork inbox this week:

From: op90

*blocked*

Click here to see today’s XKCD’s comic strip where a negging man gets his comeuppance: