BDSM had something of a PR job done on it in the 90's. Suddenly everyone was talking about how consensual the whole scene was, you had films like Preaching to the Perverted which showed the whole scene as innocent hedonists unfairly blamed by moral crusaders and were shown as very self-policing to make sure everybody involved was consenting. Consent, consent, consent. If you say it often enough it becomes true.
My dalliances with such circles, well - yes, there's a whole party layer where it was just a fun club night sort of excuse to be a bit raunchy by people who aren't really that invested in it. And you can say that there's low enough pressure there that it's mostly consensual. But I think the portrayal of the scene as all consenting adults is rather sanitised. In fact, I think it's rather parallel to the trans portrayals some years ago where it's all very acceptable and cool to be into it and never mind any dark side - that's buried or is cast as"no true Scotsman BDSM'er"
But though I'm big on personal responsibility, even I find some of the "consent" to be dubious. Vulnerable people can say "yes" to things they really don't want. More confusingly, people often don't really understand what they want and let others guide them in that. I personally believe that until you're in your mid-twenties you very often don't even have clearly defined boundaries and desires. You're still deciding if you want something or not, quite often.
"Age play" is a major red flag. Paedophiles are not (so far as I understand it) attracted to children because of the physical form so much as the power dynamic, the loss of innocence and other very dark drives. There was an AMA on Reddit some years back where a person pushing the "MAP" angle, portraying it as a 'just wired to find this attractive, it's like being homosexual' sort of thing initially got a bunch of sympathy from others there. Only over the course of questioning with things like "if a fully adult person looked like a child would you still find them attractive" and answers of "no," did the redditors start to understand that it was the preying on someone, the vulnerability, that drove him.
Something which I'm sure most here already know but it was news to them. The relevance of all this being that "Age Play" is someone trying to satisfy that same dynamic. So to my mind it's the most obvious thing in the world that it links to and bluntly segues into, actual paedophilia. Because it IS paedophilia - the essential root of it.
I was never really into BDSM. I was only into it in so far as it was sex. Give me an attractive and fun partner in any other context and I was as happy. But I ran into the people who need it, for whom it's not just sex with tight costumes or some role-play, but something they require for its own sake. I'm older now and I look back it with more reservation than I did at the time. It's not a red flag by itself for me. But it is a flag. And "Age Play" is a big warning sign.
Oh, slight tangent, but about the "showing women's faces and not the men's"..The text seems to be suggesting that this is a power dynamic thing. I'd say it's just market demand. Most porn shows the women's faces and not men's because the largest consumers of porn are men. And I'd bet the locally made stuff is intended primarily to be shared with other men, too. Men want to see women's faces and they want men in the video to be anonymised and rendered just to objects without bringing in any personality, because that's distracting to other men. For all that Feminism declares porn objectifies women, porn consumers often want the woman to feel real as possible to them - especially with abusive porn where the emotional reaction is what the consumer is really getting off on - whilst men are minimised as much as possible to just the stimulus provider. Men don't want to see other men's o-face, basically. Other than that, I agree with most of what was written.