Sex educator and author Dr Caroline West breaks down the psychological effects of 'negging', the act of subtly knocking down someone's self-esteem to make them more receptive to sexual advances.
With major dating apps seeing a decline in popularity, a lot of people are expressing how fed up they are with dating. There are many reasons behind this shift, but it seems to me that one of them is how women are treated. One aspect to consider is the prevalence of negging.
The practice of negging involves subtly knocking down someone's self-esteem to make them more receptive to sexual advances, sexual advances that have already received a refusal, or ones that might not receive a 'yes' in the first place.
Examples include 'you're not my usual type, so you're lucky I'm interested', ‘you're not like the other girls’, ‘you're smart for a girl’, and so on. The insults are dressed up as compliments, but they are not well-meaning.
Negging is also very often gendered and targeted at women. There are entire careers made off of teaching men how to trick women into intimacy, rather than treating them with respect.
Negging has become such an everyday act of covert violence that we can see it on our screens on reality shows.
On Love Island a few years ago, a contestant called Danny faced backlash following an interaction with Lucinda, saying:
"I'm not this type of kid to chase you, like a little dog. I knock you down a couple of pegs, have a little banter with you". "You're like a matte black Lamborghini that I want to drive, but I put the key in, and it just doesn't work…I've changed a couple of parts, and it still doesn't work. It's still in the garage."
Groups such as Women's Aid call out these examples, but it's hard to reach everyone that these shows target.
It's even harder in the absence of holistic sex education that doesn't protect our young people by explaining what dating abuse looks like in reality.
Ignoring these remarks or dismissing them as abuse harks back to the days in the playground where girls were told that boys liked them if they pulled their hair or snapped their bras.
Negging is simply cruelty dressed up as seduction. It involves, at its core, making someone else feel bad in order to manipulate them into sex or intimacy. It's manipulation and coercion, and it does not enable consent.
Consent involves being free to make your own decisions about who and why you decide to engage in intimacy, and when you are being manipulated, consent becomes harder to be truly freely given.
In this way, we can see that negging is a part of coercion. Coercion, in regard to consent, involves the use of manipulation, threats, or pressure to make someone ‘agree’ to sex. It is not respecting a person’s 'no', their boundaries, or their body.
The disguising of this violence dressed up as ‘dating tips’ is grim, and it can signal to men that they should trick women into sex in order to uphold some toxic idea of masculinity.
This is particularly worrying when we look at new research from Dublin Rape Crisis Centre's We-Consent campaign that shows that 27% agree that "sometimes people say no when they want convincing". A belief that 43% of men under 45 hold.
Positive masculinity does not involve coercion - it involves compassion. That's what's attractive to women: not being made to feel rubbish about themselves by someone who claims to like them in order to use them for sex.
Research from Mardi E Wilson, an Adjunct Academic at Griffith University, Australia, working in the domestic violence sector, found that the men in her research were aware of using coercive tactics such as negging and were skilled at using manipulation.
She frames negging as part of rape culture, where a ‘no’ is not respected.
How do we address this? By talking about it, educating others, and asking those who do engage in it to reflect on their behaviour, and for appropriate consequences for those who do choose to engage in coercion.
Mardi excellently sums up how we can enjoy a world where consent is respected and negging is consigned to the dustbin where it belongs, by advocating for "a sexual landscape in which women are understood as equally agentic within sexual exchanges and men, comfortable in their own masculinity and sexuality, are not encouraged to coerce unwanted sexual activity to assert patriarchal manhood".
Is this unachievable? No. But it involves effort, uncomfortable conversations, compassion, recognising problems, and understanding how abuse works in real life.
Mardi’s description of this world without coercion sounds heavenly:
"In this landscape, people acknowledge and value both verbal and non-verbal refusals, genuinely invite communication about sexual boundaries, women's and non-men’s pleasure is focused on in a way that decentralises penetration as the ‘main event’, and unwillingness to have sex is not responded to with coercion."
That's where true sexual consent, sexual freedom, and sexual joy lives - not in insults and manipulation.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ.
