Am I out of touch or is this bordering paedophilia?

[BeLuckyy]

This person popped up in my Facebook suggestions.
After having a look it seems they are a 'steamy romance' author.
However, the subject matter of this post (and some of the 'enthusiastic' comments) made me feel like it's just wrong.
Admittedly I've not read things like this, also, I was taken advantage of as a young teen by a teacher so maybe I'm projecting but isn't it bordering/stepping into the lines of child abuse?
(iPhone screenshot attached)

It's a common female fantasy to be involved with an older and powerful man. Look at how many affairs start between a woman and her male senior at work.

Not saying it's a good thing, but it shouldn't be surprising.

@Thedarkestblue It seems to be a female author

The school uniforms in the picture are a bit of a giveaway.

I'd report it, OP. Porn does not mix with school uniform, at least it shouldn't, and it's grossly offensive. The whole bullet point list sounds especially grim.

As for the author being female, many 'female' authors are nothing of the sort, some use stock photos and take on a persona to pretend to be a woman.

Not at all. I guess I felt it's a bit too close to the bone as I had unwanted sexual advances from a male teacher in his 40s when I was a young teen, so I do find it grim that other females would want to read it. Each to their own though.

This person seems to be a legit woman judging by the talks & media stuff they do.

Well yes but girls in school uniform won't be any older than 16 surely? Hardly two adults at work together. Agree that the sexualisation of girls in uniform needs to stop. It does normalise behaviour that should be completely unacceptable.

It’s not a shock that women can be dirty pervs too. Just on mumsnet where women are innocent and always the victims and men are evil rapists who want to murder everyone.

There are a lot of porn sub reddits that are dedicated to weird kinks and fetishes (fell down a rabbit hole one day!) and the users are overwhelmingly female.

It's as legal as any other "18+/barely legal" porn. All of which is totally grim, and has a significant, harmful impact on societal views of, and attitudes towards, girls and young women.

The very basic principle behind any kind of erotic fiction should be based on consent and choice. Anyone with any knowledge of 'kink' should have a very solid awareness of this.

Nobody should be mocked for finding something distasteful, upsetting or offensive. Having pornified adverts show up at random on Facebook is not respecting OP's consent, and yes, the subject matter is highly likely to be offensive for many.

Don't let anyone try and tell you you're being prudish if you're upset by porn on social media; your responses are your own and perfectly valid. You don't need to see this on your social media or be persuaded to approve of it.

I really don't like porn and think it is immensely damaging, but from the description this isn't porn, but erotic fiction, ie written words. I don't adult women having fantasies about power imbalance relationships has anything to do with paedophilia or would have appeal to pedophiles.

I completely agree it shouldn't be popping up on people's sm without their consent.

I agree however, hust to point out.
It wasn't an advertisement, it was a friend suggestion, which I looked at then found what they'd written about.

To clarify,

It wasn't an advertisement, it was a friend suggestion, which I looked at then found what they'd written about.

Well, is there a mechanism for telling Facebook you don't want to see this?

@ArabellaScott I can delete the suggestion of the person, so they won't come up again. I can also block them.
But I don't think there are any filters for who Facebook recommendations suggest to you. 🙂

Ahahaha.

I was reading Flowers in the Attic secretly in my room at fourteen. I'm forty now. And that was relatively tame. A friend accidently had the complete Gor series picked up secondhand for her by her mother. Mercedes Lackey used to do a very good line in erotica including detailed pony play. A teacher recommended Duncton Wood when I was about eleven which involved moles who got into someone really detailed torture at times. I later found his books on wolves in the library which were even more detailed and for some reason involved Nazis. And I believe Mills and Boon - found on just about every sweet and innocent grandmothers bookshelf - used to issue guidelines that the males should always be the type where the reader could imagine them taking them forcefully.

It's not rare. It's never been rare. It's never been difficult to get hold of either. As someone who spent my teens raiding every bookshelf in my vicinity it was a very rare female who didn't have at least some erotica hidden away in plain sight. I used to giggle to myself if I spotted someone reading something on their lunchbreak at work - which was also not uncommon.

The consent of the person reading it, yes sure absolutely. And the OP can relatively easily block the adverts and make them go away. Chances are the author doesn't particularly want her reading them either - most people advertising pay for each eyeball on them and people horrified by stuff are just wasted money. But social media algorithms are weird and sometimes go astray.

The consent of the characters though? Nope. Nope nope nopity nope.

It's very common to fantasise about things you'd never want to happen in reality. That's why it's fantasy. But in fantasy, the fantasiser is always in control. That's really the point.

Stuff for women usually has far more focus on the female character and what's firing off in her head than anything else. It's sort of the opposite of male gaze.

How on earth would someone get an orgasm out of that? I hope I don't regret asking :-).

Out of this kind of story?

From imagining being the young, innocent, desirable and fertile woman who isn't responsible for all the things the powerful older man causes to happen, driven by his enormous desire for her.

It strikes me as a very shallow piece of work and not something which I would find interesting. However if I was 13 I might have found it 'romantic'.

Wrong. There's a huge difference between literary erotica (which as you say has been around since the printing presses - centuries before the printing presses infact) and the medium of film. Especially when it comes to sex. There's plenty of research to back this up (JSTOR is your friend here). Men in particular respond far more to visual sexual stimuli than women. Also there is now emerging evidence in online porn that the more you serve to men, the more they click on increasingly extreme footage to get the same satisfaction.

As far as literature goes, Justine by Marquis de Sade is probably on the extreme edge of what you could read and it used to be quite difficult to get hold of. Now you can get stuff that would make de Sade blush on your phone in 30 seconds, and as an audiovisual image it's a lot more compelling and vivid than slogging through de Sade's lengthy, dull explanations of the diet that the monks fed Justine to get the right, er, result.

As thedarkestblue rightly said: Sexualising school girls has real life effects for school girls.

Absolutely it does. We seem to want to be willfully blind to it as a society, because men get off in it, but it’s disgusting. It’s abusive and it contributes towards girls and women feeling unsafe (and being unsafe) anywhere they are.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's utter shite, especially if it's self-published.

But the faintly menacing, powerful man who carries off the innocent woman (and is ultimately tamed by loving her) isn't a new or unusual romance/sexual trope. It's even the plot of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, although they sanitised it.