So at this point you presumably all know about James Franco’s less-than-successful attempt to text his way into the pants of a 17-year old fan — which, if it wasn’t just a publicity stunt for his latest movie, which happens to be about a creepy teacher preying on a student, was pretty creepy for real.
You might have been struck by the, er, bluntness his approach, which could be summarized as the “I’m James Franco, are you technically of legal age in New York State, can I get you alone in a room with me right now, no I’m really James Franco, really” technique.
But what you haven’t seen yet is an analysis of Mr. Franco’s TEXT GAME by a recognized expert in the field. And by expert I mean our new friend Christian McQueen, the Alpha Playboy with the Obviously Fake Name.
Mr. McQueen asks the timeless question: Was Mr. Franco’s TEXT GAME desperate or just direct?
To some it may seem like he’s being ‘thirsty’, but is he really? Or his text game actually the type of game that high value men use?
After going line for line through Mr. Franco’s conversational gambits with the wary teenager — which, you may recall, not only failed to convince her to come to his room but also created a bit of an embarrassing scandal for him — McQueen concludes that Franco’s game was …. “solid.”
No, really.
You see, when you’re James Franco, you can just go ahead and behave like some dude straight out of the CreepyPM subreddit, because you have “so many options, that [you] can go Ultra-Direct in [your] text game and many players who are on a great level utilize this.”
Don’t bother with small talk. Don’t bother with charm. All you need to do is state your famous name, determine if she is of legal age in the state you are in (and she was, in New York), and then proceed to work out the logisitics. And BAM, you’re in like Flynn. (Though one imagines that the real Erroll Flynn actually tried to work some personal charm into his approach with women.)
McQueen sums it up for us mere mortals:
[H]is ’game’ was not ‘thirsty’, but simply Direct. While not great, it was solid.
He is a celebrity, so it’s less about him using Game and more about him asking questions as though they are completing a transaction. She gets to fuck a celebrity and he gets her pussy. Simple.
Yeah. Except that none of that happened and now a guy who could have slept with any one of literally millions of enthusiastic volunteers over the age of 18 is now the poster boy for celebrity creepiness.
He could have been smoother and possibly gotten the bang, but he probably does not care.
Yeah. Unless this is all a publicity stunt, I’m thinking that he probably does care just a little bit now.
This is classic I Don’t Give A Fuck Game.
When your value is high and your time is precious, you don’t give a fuck if she rejects you. This is Next Level.
Well, if by “Next Level” you mean “an approach so crude and creepy that it not only squicked out the 17 year old fan that it was directed at but also millions of female fans who’ve now seen the texts online.”
He put out minimal effort to prove it was him, which was understandable considering she doubted it was him, and when she balked, he ejected quickly.
I guess he’s got a point here. It would have been even worse if Franco had stuck around and tried to pressure the fan to see him.
Remember gents, when your Game is tight and you have High Value, you can go Direct. Men of High Value don’t have time to be wasted. You may get rejected immediately, but you also won’t waste time with girls just seeking attention and validation.
You may, on the other hand, be exposed on the internet as a creepy predator. But I guess Men of High Value don’t care about that, which is why Franco didn’t go on Live With Kelly and Michael shortly after this broke to apologize for it all. Oh wait. He did.
Huh. That doesn’t sound High Value at all.
Seems like Minty is looking for friends, or at least people to talk to, since his former buddies kicked him out of the treehouse.
Literally. 😀
Yuuuup x10000.
The minute I turned 18, all the 30yro guys who used to hover around me offering free alcohol disappeared and people stopped telling me that I looked sooo much older than I was or that I was “really mature” for my age (both of which have always been total BS – I’m petite, have a babyface and bratty mannerisms ). Aggressive sexual harassment from strangers was worst when I was 13/14. I sometimes get catcalled or have people mistakenly try to solicit me, but I don’t get much of the overtly threatening shit I used to. And no, it wasn’t because teenaged girls are more “nubile” and naturally appealing to men – I get hit on a lot more now, but by more age appropriate and/or attractive men.
Yuuuup x10000.
The minute I turned 18, all the 30yro guys who used to hover around me offering free alcohol disappeared and people stopped telling me that I looked sooo much older than I was or that I was “really mature” for my age (both of which have always been total BS – I’m petite, have a babyface and bratty mannerisms ). Aggressive sexual harassment from strangers was worst when I was 13/14. I sometimes get catcalled or have people mistakenly try to solicit me, but I don’t get much of the overtly threatening shit I used to. And no, it wasn’t because teenaged girls are more “nubile” and naturally appealing to men – I get hit on a lot more now, but by more age appropriate and/or attractive men.
Exactly. It’s not that sexual attention goes away or decreases when you become an adult, despite what PUAs would like you to believe. It’s just that the really obviously predatory attention tends to decrease, leaving you with proportionally more of the kind of attention that you might conceivably welcome.
I’m guessing I don’t have to spell out for anyone here what the fact that PUAs believe that sexual attention in general vanishes at the point at which many of us are observing that the creepy, scary, predatory attention tends to decrease (and the good kind of attention either stays the same or increases) means about the men who hold that belief.
Or they think about non-creepy, non-predatory men. Along with women over 25, men who like/respect women are also invisible to PUAs. Heartiste, for example, constantly dismisses men in LTRs as “herbs”, “omegas”, and “manginas” and pretends like they don’t count, when in fact they’re the ones moving the world forward. Partnered men build things of consequence: households and families and social networks and lasting bonds. They don’t just spin their wheels endlessly on a series of bleak bar pickups. Adult relationships are beyond PUAs and always will be.
*Or what they think (left out a word up there)
Buttercup – yeah, that was my first thought. These scumbags are willfully blind to actual happy relationships of whatever combination.
Yep, basically these scumbags despise anyone who isn’t living their lifestyle. People in LTRs, people netween relationships, people who don’t want relationships but enjoy happy consensual sex with whatever number of partners, asexual people, basically if you’re not a het man pursuing PiV sex with the maximum number of women for bragging rights, they believe you are contemptible.
The feeling is mutual.
The thing is though, they’re not actually living their lifestyle either. It’s a bunch of dudes sitting around in their lonely apartments telling each other tall tales about imaginary women who think their cocks are class A drugs.
That’s actually quite true. While I still get creeped on a lot (and as I mentioned, mostly by much older men), I have to say positive sexual attention has increased a ton in my adulthood, whereas when I was an adolescent and younger, pretty much the only sexual attention I got was predatory.
PUA blogs are erotic fiction designed to make the reader feel bad. If you’re a normal person, you weep for humanity and the lost souls of innocent sentences. If you’re a PUA wannabe, you feel jealous and inadequate because you weren’t out at a bar dazzling blonde international studies majors with your superior command of Crimean ethnic history.
They’re such a small minority, and yet they expend so much energy dissing the rest of the world as an aberration. I guess it’s part of the fantasy of being on top of the pyramid. If their grapes were any more sour, they’d be fluoroantimonic acid.
Nope…I’ve learned to recognize certain stock phrases like “demonizing men’s sexuality”, which always crop up right when rape, harassment and the like are being discussed. The fact that these guys conflate “male sexuality” with harassment and assault is very telling indeed. As is the use of “mangina”, etc. for men of non-toxic masculinity. These guys are clearly the predators’ lobby, and they’re oh-so-offended when anyone names the problem, and diagnoses it back to THEM. If it’s a woman like me, she’s a castrating ugly lesbian bitch; if it’s a man like David, he’s a “white knight”, “mangina”, fatty-fatty-two-by-four. All of which only underscores the fact that these guys are abusers, and they resent any efforts to stop the abuse, even if it’s just a very tentative dialogue to expose the problem in the first place.
This sounds SO familiar! I very rarely get creeped on now, but I get all kinds of really nice attention from guys who are not only age-appropriate, but even significantly younger than me. And I’m in my mid-40s. So much for the PUA myth that a woman’s looks and ovaries just magically dry up at 25 (or 18!)
The only sexual attention that counts is from them, don’t ya know. If you don’t accept PUA love, you’ll be forever alone.
@tealily:
Actually you pretty much nailed it. My last ex was pretty wild and we went through a very long stage where we were polyamorous. My first exposure to the game was actually in this period, because the two of us thought it might help us find third parties interested in participating.
Surprise surprise, guess whose system is fuckin useless the second there’s actually a woman involved and heteronormativity is out the window?
The sad part was, reading the actual book, “The Game”, and these dipshits spend the whole time chasing a FFM threesome like it’s the holy grail, but if you actually have a woman who is LOOKING to do it, suddenly all their shit is useless. It’s really telling.
Real playboys understand consent and prefer their partners to be enthusiastic.
How many of you found that the really aggressive, scary sorts of harassment and attempts to get you to do sexual things that you had expressed no interest in at all dropped dramatically as soon as you were visibly an adult?
Well, I’m a trans guy, but I noticed that the harassment dropped precipitously after I left college. When I hacked off hair and tits, it pretty much vanished, even though I was still read as female the majority of the time. When I was on hormones and started being read male more often, it was pretty much gone.
Now that I’ve been off hormones for a year, it’s coming back again and I’m like NOOOOO!
As for how the playboys do it, my husband was never wealthy, but he was quite the banger back in the day, before ending with me. Most notable was the time he ended up the rebound guy for an entire freakin’ bar. Pretty much, he was cordial and friendly and looking for one-night stands, word got around that he was a good lay, pleasant to be around, and good about safer sex, and suddenly he was man of the hour. He’s not poly, but he was definitely in demand for a while there! It helps that my husband’s good with social skills and very good at making folks feel at ease.
Wow. I’ve always been underwhelmed by Franco, but I thought his character in This is The End was a caricature. I guess he really WAS playing himself. I’m glad Emma Watson carried an ax when she was around him.
I don’t see the problem. How is he creepy? He is grown and she is legally grown in his state. She seemed enthusiasthic about doing it. I guarantee given the chance, she would have. Also, how is he the poster boy of celebrity creepiness? From what I see no woman is holding that against him, and are still swooning over him.
Blahface: You don’t see a problem with or anything creepy about a 35-year-old trying to have sex with a 17-year-old?