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Was I hurt, or angry? No. I was flattered. And much as I’m ashamed to say it, I was grateful too. After all, it seemed scarcely believable that someone as fabulous as him could love someone as insignificant as me.
What an insane article. She negates her whole premise in the second paragraph.
Later she goes on to say,
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When I first heard about ‘negging’ in the wake of the furore surrounding Blanc, I talked to my girlfriends, and many shamefacedly confessed to having been on the receiving end of such behaviour, as young women and into middle age.
One said she was recently approached by a nice-looking, slightly podgy man in the local pub, who piped up: ‘You’re brave wearing skinny jeans.’ Then: ‘I’m really turned on by big women.’
She’s a size 14. She replied: ‘Sadly for you, I’m not turned on by middle-aged idiots.’
So clearly it doesn't work all the time.
I think something she and early PUAs both got wrong is that negging isn't necessarily about displaying social dominance or value. In fact it can be a very powerful form of bonding. What women ignore when they talk about negging is that men neg each other all the fucking time - we just say we're busting each others balls. And women do it to too, though often in more subtle ways. Gentle teasing and ribbing is a way of showing that you're comfortable enough with somebody to tell them a benign insult. In her first example her hair and makeup were prefect - the guy was playfully acknowledging that she was stunning by telling her she looked like a mess but loved her anyway. In the second example the insult wasn't benign. The woman was older and likely very sensitive about her nice size 14 body (my guess is it used to be smaller). In that case it was miss calibrated and seen as an outright attack. If instead she'd been younger, thin, and not sensitive about her weight it likely would have been a good neg.