as someone that was groomed as a teenager, it doesn’t matter if a teenager says “its okay”. it is ALWAYS the adults responsibility to leave children alone. period
SEE cause I wish more adults would get that. We have an age of consent for a reason and strict rules around that age of consent too. It is absurd that we have to come out on the other end of that and call people out for that.
Seriously though. I thought it was awesome when I was younger that all these older guys liked me, and didn’t even understand how damaging that was to my development until I was an adult unpacking it in therapy. It’s almost like ✨adults are responsible for their conduct with children✨ not the other way around
@@fishgirlblubblubthe sad thing is that some people don't see how effed up a dynamic is because they had similar experiences of adults crossing boundaries and other adults saying it was okay. (Not remotely excusing groomer apologists - it's fucked up, every adult should feel a responsibility to protect kids and young people from this stuff. It's just another way r**e culture is toxic for everyone)
@@lovely2wiceThey dont bruh. They enjoy making people uncomfortable. Ive worked customer service my whole life and middle aged women will straight up grope you if youre a young man. Its super fucked cause when u call them out they play innocent and start the waterworks.
I’m a 16 yr old as well and I find it absolutely disgusting that they think it’s ok because “it’s only jokes” or “I didn’t see his bio” and with Alex some of them were like “so what he has a wife”. And I think is horrible that people forget EVERYONE has feelings, and are capable of feeling uncomfortable and even if you didn’t intend for it to sound like that. Like she said in the video, I don’t care if you like smut, but there are certain boundaries that should be very clear. Like maybe take the extra two seconds, and click their profile to make sure, and if it doesn’t say, and they sound like a teenager. Maybe don’t say stuff like that just to be safe. And the thing with Alex, the hockey player, I think people kind of assumed that he’s an adult it’s fine, and there are certain boundaries no matter what age you are, that you should not be Very clear to not sexualize everyone you see just because they resemble a character that you read in a smut. Again I am 16 and I find it really disgusting and sad that I understand boundaries more than some of these grown women do who are old enough to probably be Jesse’s parents, or some thing, don’t know boundaries, no matter when it’s adult or and it never should be a minor.
I'll never forget the first booktok video I came across. A GROWN ASS WOMAN saw a motorcycle in the parking lot of a barnes & noble, and literally jumped and squealed in the parking lot. She then went inside and wandered the bookstore trying to find the guy, and when she did she peeked around the aisle cap squeaked out "uwu" and then ran. The whole video was so unsettling. Like ma'am you're pushing 40, can we not stalk and harrass random 20 y/o men trying to buy books??
Part of me thinks, let her live, since someone will inevitably be into that. But then the more sane part of me thinks, wow, let's make shame great again. We should bully each other, at least a little bit. Then she'd figure out that a guy who has a motorcycle isn't gonna wanna have a manic pixie girlfriend long term.
@@sarahfarley12 yeah i’m not sure how i feel about that anymore. it’s still weird. staged or not, it sets and example for younger people. even if it’s supposed to be “making fun” of people who are like that, there are people like that, and people who will be encouraged to do that because they dont know its a joke
@@remipoyntz7657younger people under 15 should not be on social media especially tiktok, and around the age of 16 they should know what to do and not do in public, and have the critical thinking to understand that almost everyone fakes things online for views, and think logically about whats normal in public, if someone genuinely over the age of 16 went in public and did what the og comment said, it truly sounds like they’d be slow as in have Asperger’s or autism to have no understanding of social norms and act eccentric, and hopefully someone gets them professional help to understand what’s acceptable and what isn’t in public
The internet needs to stop sexualising kids. It’s disgusting. Thanks for bringing this up. It doesn’t matter if he thinks it’s okay. He is a damn child. I am so sick of people saying ‘oh they are almost an adult’ when we can all admit NONE of us felt like adults when we hit 18. Even those of us who went through traumatic hell and had to raise ourselves, we are still kids then. We need to be protecting kids more not less
THIS!! He's 16, he doesn't fully understand the implications of what these women are saying and why it's so gross. The fact that so many of these adult women are taking this as a green light to continue acting predatory angers me. Like yall are the adults, yall know better! Leave this boy alone I beg of u.
@@fullmetalfrogeit’s so gross !!! the weird ass comments people make when they see someone cosplay casca from berserk make me sick, or just any cosplay in general :(
@@lotusrr i personally see it a lot in the bungou stray dogs fandom, there's a really loved cosplayer from this fandom that is a minor and has been sexualized to hell and back. And that cosplayer has said many times how uncomfortable they are with those comments
My rules are: If i would be uncomfortable if someone did this to myself, then i don't do it. If it's creepy for a man to do it, then it's definitely still creepy when a woman does it.
While I agree with the sentiment, the second one isn't entirely true. A 40 year old man saying "I like your dress" gives off very different vibes than a 40 year old woman doing the same
@justaperson4656 personally I don't find it off or weird when an older man compliments my clothes, and I think that's because of my upbringing, but for some, it can be a bit weird
@@justaperson4656 the commentary was talking about role reversal, instead of a man commenting on a girl, it would be just as creepy for a woman commenting on a boy.
@@midnightpebble4377 nah I get it. I had a rough upbringing myself so I'm wary around all men. Something about older men complimenting me especially screams danger. Not as creepy if a woman does it, because most trauma I have with women is physical, and most trauma I have with men was psychological
@@captaincaspian42 ik ik, I just thought it was a point I'd bring up because it adds to it: things that are unacceptable for men to do are acceptable in a wider scale for women to do. It isn't any less wrong for women to do or say these things, but there's a false sense of security and a lowered guard with women, if that makes sense? Like, a lot of kidnappers and human trafficking rings are women or use women as a lure because the general population see women as safe and meek. Men are dangerous, women aren't. Of course, that isn't true, and more awareness needs to be brought to that fact
That child is literally my son's age. Looking at those profile pictures, those women were way too grown to mess with anyone under 30. What in THE world is wrong with them?
The world is pretty messed up imo. The age of consent is so low in some places, of course people act like this, right? We can't expect people to do better than what they are taught to be okay with. I'm 32 and can't even tolerate 18 year olds on dates let alone go for someone with even less life experience, and they do hit me up too, some lying about their age to be on the dating app, but that's the thing you gotta realize as the good person in the situation: you know better, they don't or are choosing not to 🤷🏾♂️ hopefully your dude is just obsessed with video games or sumn more manageable, cuz the stuff I've seen on snapchat alone is so twisted, the internet is the wild west nowadays.
@@nailinthefashion ye bro its sad, also it is not like you have even any choice, because most of the women on dating apps are often 18-22. What are you gonna do after you are 30+? Or 40? I guess just unalive myself because older women are hard to even get close to or get some contact because they are not so active on social media or straight up no going out anywhere from home. And if you decide to date anyway, well enjoy now being called pedo because "it looks weird". Oh, how about we make it like, illegal then? And if not, just let people date and have some fun in life without stressing about slightest possibility of tiny mistake and getting lynched for that automatically. And women get away because yes, they just can, noone is trying to even make them think if it is appropriate so ofc they gonna "joke" I dont even think most of them do it on purpose. We live in society...of morons
As a 16 year old (almost 17 now but still a minor) and an avid reader, the situation with Jesse makes me so angry. Not only were they being weird and “UwU such a baby” over him reading Hunger Games and Maze Runner (both great books, esp for a teenager) but they had the gall to suggest this MINOR read a book about SA and child abduction. Like actually wtf is wrong with people! I hate it when I have to say this, but it is true in cases like this; imagine if this happened with a 16 year old girl and a bunch of adult men. SUPER creepy. Ugh just makes me angry for that kid. PS: everyone I know says “school”. I’ve never heard a highschooler call school “class,” so you’re probably right about the school-class thing. I think it’s just because of how differently highschool and college are structured.
I'm 32 and not only read all those when they first released but actually just watched all of the HG movies again for the new prequel. They're so good wtf. Some of the best storytelling ever. And, on top of that, when watching the behind the scenes for it there was a school who has an optional school wide read, for which they chose the Hunger Games. It was written with everyone in mind: the young girls it would inspire, the adults it would enchant, and the future we should be trying to keep as clean as possible. Of course it's a great introduction to deeper works, but, on its own, Hunger Games has the power to not just entertain anyone, but educate them too.
i find older millennial women rlly exploit the fact that young boys being harassed by women is different than with girls. it’s fucked. any decent person cares WHEN ANYYY CHILD IS BEING HARASSED!!! scary honestly. i’m glad more people are talking about it because we need to treat people the way we want to be treated. gross. i’m sooo angry for him
Women dont seem to understand that theyre equally capable of committing sexual harassment, and dont realize that thats exactly what theyre doing when they say stuff like this to men I utterly agree that when men do this, theyre torn to shreds (as they should be). We need to be better at calling women out as well. Too many think theyre immune
Women just do it in a different way. As a service worker ive been straight up assaulted by middle aged women grabbing my arse and stuff. Obviously its not as big of a threat as when a women gets harassed by a man. But its fucking degrading as shit. And if you get angry at them they turn on the waterworks and make themselves out to be a victim. At least i know i could knock them out if they tried something violent so its not as scary as if i was a woman. But its a helpless and degrading feeling.
Hopefully things will balance out in a couple years, maybe it will take decades. Since women have only fairly recently in history been able to express basically anything, it feels like not everything has caught up to it. Women and men are equal in the amounts of bad we can commit, with the freedom we have. There needs to be more awareness that women should be as equally punished as men for being creepy. It isn't always in our biology to be "loving and caring" and "motherly". Men too, need to stop pushing the idea that gender determines who you are and what you are "meant for". I'm afraid I'd accidently drop a baby if I had one. Natural selection does include that any children of unfit parents usually die to prevent further spread of the poor genes. Which is sad for the children.
exactly. and of course, many women are intentionally predatory, but i think a lot of women just think it's okay because they're not a man. but just like making men aware of how their actions affect people is important, we need to put the same effort into women's awareness of their actions.
On the other hand you have hordes of men online attacking women for no reason. Remember when women on Twitch were a big video topic? Like jeez if you want to criticize women so bad at least go after the ones who are actually doing bad things
Oh this creeps me out deeply. Very very much. Those messages about keeping him “innocent”? As a woman who is not interested in men and has been infantilized by men for being “short” and “cute”: NO. No no no NO.
Right i find it gross that theyre calling this 16 year old boy, who is 2 years away from being a grown adult an “innocent baby” because he didn’t know what booktok was and doesnt read smut.. Edit: i know he wont suddenly be like super mature and knowledgeable when he turns 18, im just saying he will literally become an adult and not some baby who needs to be protected😭
@@lovely2wice He is two years away from graduating high school, not being a grown adult. When he's 18 he will still be a teen, but with more rights. When I turned 18 it's not like I immediately became an independent adult, or like I immediately became capable of consenting to grown ass adults who would have an age and power imbalance with me. Yes, he's no longer a child but he would still be vulnerable. However, I agree with you that its creepy they're infantilizing him, and it gives very "pdf file" vibes.
@@ettaetta439 As somebody who is in the same age range as this guy, I agree with *both* of your comments here. Don’t infantilize, but definitely don’t also treat things like we’ll be 100% emotionally & mentally mature the moment we’re 18. The brain’s still not done developing for a hot second, and there is a shitload of things to learn about the world that we’ve largely not even come close to experiencing yet.
@@Azeathe Yep. The fact that they're infantilizing a literal teen even more than his actual age is disgusting. 16 is very young, but it doesn't mean that he's "innocent". It doesn't mean he's oblivious to anything sexual. Not being able to consent to adults isn't the same thing as not having sexual knowledge or expertise, since a fair amount of teens are having sex and watch/read smut. It's obvious they're infantilizing him because they're into the idea of an innocent kid they can "corrupt" (which is often a rhetoric that dark romance books push). Trying to get him to read their smutty abuse books is a form of grooming, since pdf files often get their victims to read/watch CSAM or similar types of material to make them think that it's okay. Why these women think it's okay to do this is beyond me.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who absolutely HATES being told things like "oh you're so innocent 🥺must protec." or when I ask what something means and they're like "you don't know? I won't tell you because that would corrupt your pure mind." it boils my blood but I always feel like I can't say anything about it. in middle school I didn't swear and it was especially bad. it felt like no one even saw me as a person.
@@skysirensixfeetlmfao i kinda get mad at that bc it’s from a song of ice and fire and ik most people using the phrase havent read the books or even watched game of thrones 😂
those comments get on my last nerve. just because someone doesn't have sex on their mind 24/7 or doesn't understand something does NOT make them a "cute wittle innocent babie!!"
watch hours of corn per day 2000. "this guy is probably not normal" refuses to watch corn because it is bad for health 2024 " this guy is probably not normal"
16 is a child, full stop. I’m 32 and I remember guys saying disgusting things about waiting for me to turn 18 etc. I feel so bad for this kid. I really hope he doesn’t get traumatized by all of this.
i lovee smutty and romatic books- but its going wayyyy too far, especially with all these mafia and stalker crap. like please i uust want some smutty fluff 😭
Same! I really don't mind romance as long as it's not sexual. Like I'm obsessed with the Hunger Games currently and I LOVE Peeta's and Katniss' romance story, because it's not the main point of the series and they're just so cute and sweet and the most sexual thing is a kiss. I haven't found a single book like that on booktok..
this reminds me of people being creepy towards cosplayers. cosplay doesn’t equal consent and just because you’re turned on by x character doesn’t mean i want to be apart of that. had a dude grab my ass at a con because of that. don’t touch people and don’t sexualize them!
The best part about going to a con is interacting with people imo... I had a lot of fun flirting with all the shirtless dudes and asking for a flex or a pic or whatever. It can be sssooooo mutually fun. People used to ask if they could feel my hair back when it was long and never just touched it so i can't understand why that doesn't get respected more. Maybe its the fun, casual environment but personal space is personal 😭
@@nailinthefashion i used to mostly cosplay as Samus Aran from the Metroid franchise. she wears this skin tight blue suit outside of the huge one she typically dawns in, the Zero Suit. idk if the dude thought it was an okay idea because the character he was also cosplaying as has had history with Samus but regardless, don’t touch people’s asses when they ask for a photo. me being in a skin tight suit doesn’t equal consent. people are weird man 😭😭
@@chozolady nah don't even try to rationalize his logic, he thought you were hot and wanted a cheap feel. It's disrespectful. The way to do it for me would be "I know how creepy this is but can I pretend to grab your butt for a tiktok, youre really cute mind a hug, that looks great on you can we do a little photoshoot" a tap on the shoulder, a little exchange, then you might actually be into it.. I don't just walk up to big arms and squeeze em lmao. I hope you do see the silver lining though, and can shrug it off knowing you're hot. I would be super creeped out but lowkey look forward to next convention even more with a lil secret validation
Seriously. Years ago I cosplayed as Sebastian from Black Butler for a local con and lost track of the amount of times I was groped or tackled, by other women no less! It was treated as completely harmless at the time. I should also point out that these women were grown adults and I was only sixteen.
As someone who has read all types of books, before even watching this I think that the amount of books with these weird immortal creatures getting into relationships with teenagers (especially girls) is just gross. Oh and the amount of unhealthy relationships that are showed in a positive way. It's just really odd and really unconfutable.
It really does lead people to think in a strange dichotomy. Like, they assume a loving relatively healthy relationship = boring/not kinky. Why would a happy couple be incapable of roleplaying/kinks/etc? It's bizarre.
Yes! it has always creeped me out because these immortal beings who are hundreds of years old may look like teens, but they arent. They are old men in a teen skin suit. So for them to hook up with teenagers is just gross frankly.
Something that has always bothered me is the "dark" romance genre. Like, it's not "dark" as in finding love in a misunderstood beast or less-than-ideal situation... it's an immortal guy masquerading as an 18-year-old to prey on an explicitly-written-to-be-naive, barely-an-adult girl, in a relationship that exhibits every toxic trait whatsoever; being a straight up asshole, refusing to communicate, lying, purposefully isolating her from social circles. Like, there are situations where I understand immortal x mortal, for example, a mortal that is a mature adult and an immortal that acts like a mature adult, and that isn't that hard to write (I've done it myself), and yet, for some reason, they just INSIST on a repeat of Edward and Bella every time. Another thing: authors have been known to write toxic relationships to illustrate how and why they're bad, but its the fact that booktok is chalk-full of toxic relationships presented as GOOD ONES is fucking crazy to me.
I'm a survivor of domestic violence stalking online gr00ming/pdf-philia and emotional incest I swear I can't go anywhere in a fandom space without encountering this shit and ripping old wounds open and having a psychotic episode istg no one tags shit properly either so any media or content filter tools are still basically useless I hate it here
The problem is how it's framed not the actual content. Elements of "dark romance" have become more and more normalized in regular romance books for a while now (blame Twilight I guess), and are often presented uncritically. There lies the problem. If you write a dark romance with the understanding that "yes, this is messed up and wrong," I don't necessarily see a problem. People have dark fantasies and finding fictional catharsis for them is okay.
as a kid who also thought sexual comments towards myself were fine as long as they were jokes- they weren't they come back to make you feel uncomfortable years later you try to reason with the adult who did it, but you can't figure out WHY an adult would do something like that, and you're just left feeling a bit gross
exactly this. this right here. all of it. had no idea how damaging it would be in the long run. I thought it was fine, and that I was so mature to be unbothered... over a decade later and I am VERY BOTHERED, to say the least. and that was just a handful of adults. I can't imagine getting bombarded on socials like he is. christ.
The part I hate is rationalizing how creepy it is. Kids have daddy/mommy kinks fer sure sometimes but that doesn't mean enable it lmao it's supposed to stay a theory, a fantasy
Middle aged women are wild bro. Work in the service industry as a man and youll get fucking groped and everything. Lady once smacked my arse and slipped me a 20 like a whore lol.
Hey there! As a 16-year-old boy, I'm glad to hear someone with such a large platform talk about this predatory section of TikTok, and how young boys are also affected by it. Thanks for this video, it makes me feel safer knowing not everyone is gonna accept those adults' behavior. ❤
what’s worse about the kraken situation is that after the wife asked booktok to stop sexually harassing her husband, rather than doing that, they decided to harass her instead. they would leave the nastiest comments on her instagram saying she was jealous her husband was getting attention and that he was probably cheating on her. these people are absolutely insane and delusional.
Over the years, I have gone from being an active member in the BookTok community to abandoning and shunning it all together. I would get called "vanilla" and "precious/innocent" (as a minor) whenever I would discuss how romance wasn't my go-to genre. (I prefer high fantasy/fiction and mystery with romance only being a subplot.) Hell, I've even been teased by an old friend of mine for not wanting to read ACOTAR. BookTok has many, many problems; there are too many to list here. I'm glad that some of the shady parts are finally being exposed.
ive also had a similar experience i was only 13 at the time getting told agggtm and shatter me was too innocent and i needed to get introduced to haunting adeline i really hope you and others are ok and can recover from stuff like this
OMG mee too! I LOVE action/sci-fi/fantasy stuff! Especially if the main characters are animals instead of humans. I don't know why, reading about the adventures of say, a young lion are just infinitely more interesting than reading about some bitchy little teenage girl.🙄 And I get called a FURRY for it, as if liking animal characters is an insult!
All of the videos like this just make me even happier that I'm not on TikTok. I'll read my books in peace and not bother anyone. As a queer asexual person, I am trying to find queer stories or literally anything other than romance. But BookTok doesn't give much of a shit of anything outside of straight sex Edit: tysm for all the new additions to my reading list!!
Agreed, I love reading books but the romance aspect always takes it out of me. Especially when the book isn’t a rom com yet people only talk about the two “lovers” in the novel.
If you're open to recommendations, I really enjoyed the Simon Snow series by rainbow rowell. There's like two 'sex' scenes that are only a page or two long, but not in great detail, just as warning in case you'd rather not read those!
While I understand what you mean, people say "spicy" as a substitute word to get around restricted words on platforms . Big yikes if you're using "spicy" out in the wild when you don't have to. 😂
I want to scream every time I see someone asking "but is it spicy??" in the comments of literally any book video. Like.. is that genuinely all you care about???
@@l.t.7590 It's fine if that's all they care about, the problem is they're not honest about it. They're interested in erotica, but want to pretend they're interested in romance or fantasy, infecting these genres with erotica. You'll ask for a fantasy suggestion and you'll be recommended ACOTAR or Fourth Wing, which are both written for erotic gratification.
i feel so bad for that kid man :( these women actually need to be behind bars. they're way too open and proud about their predatory behavior. its disgusting. i hope jesse is alright :(
also so unnerved by the infantilization. it may not be romantic or sexual in nature but its so gross to belittle ANYONE for not reading smut. like,, youre not special for reading that kind of thing. stop treating others like they're inferior for not also doing so
I'm 18 and even tho I'm legal, I would be so uncomfortable if I was in his situation. This reminds me of grown women sipping over Kit Connor when Heartstopper first came out, calling him "hot" and "daddy"... he was 18/19. As a girl, I genuinely feel so bad for young boys especially if they're in the public eye and being sexualized by older women bc of their fantasies.
Though seriously, as a 31 year old woman, most "adults" don't even know those boundaries. They're essentially children who grew up without consiouness and are just doing whatever. It sucks. It really is one of those things that makes you go spiral down. But just kids teaching kids essentially. Sorry, just grew up in a very not so good environment 😮💨😔
A lot of people just don't respect boundaries and it's kinda concerning. I literally need to tell my mother not to cross people's boundaries sometimes 😭
@@CalliNightmare yeah, my mom isn't too bad, but if I told her I didn't want a hug, she'd force me to hug her. You ask her not to do something, and she does it right after telling her not to. It's mostly small stuff
@@MoodyMickey ah man. God damn. Smh. This is JUST a theory, but I thought about it alot, but I feel like most (not all) people who have kids are narssasists (big label I know). I just feel that people who KNOW they have problems (big ones) or deny them but have kids anyways, just aren't suited to have kids. And we're sorta the outcome. If they can't get past the instinct to breed, then they are no better than animals. I dunno. BUT like I said not all. I know some really amazing parents that just parent like.. Jesus. I tell them so often I wish they were my parents haha.
As someone who used to ID as a girl and had grown men saying creepy stuff to me while I was underage, I only laughed or smiled because I knew I wasn't safe. This poor kid is likely trying to justify it as jokes for his own mental health so he doesn't have to grapple with how CREEPY these women are until his brain is fully grown in ten years
Wtf 💀 he's 16, a literal CHILD. Why can't these grown women stick to the bikers who are actually playing along with this dynamic and are obviously okay with it. Not random people or minors. I'm 24 and I could literally never 💀💀
You are right. As someone in college, I use "school" and "class" interchangeably mostly using "class" in most cases. When I was in high school, I just used "school". So its just weird that people cant pick up on context clues and just ignore that this person is clearly a minor 😬
I was about to comment the same thing. I mainly use class when I’m talking about it but I remember only saying school when I was in high school. I didn’t even notice that but thinking on it it’s definitely super noticeable in terms of context clues and especially when you can normally just click on someone’s profile to see their age
Tbh, I can’t pick up on those nuances as I still refer to University (or any education system) as school. But a simple info check can easily tell you wether or not someone is a goddamn child.
as someone in both high school AND college rn, i do the same. when im going to the school campus (high school + college campus) i say im going to school, and when i say im going to a college class, i say im going to class,,,, most of the time
Shoutout to my high school friend who, after watching a live performance of "I See the Light" from Tangled by a guy and girl cosplaying as Rapunzel and Flynn at our school talent show, said to me, "If they weren't siblings, I'd totally ship them." I had no words for him to convey how creepy that was. And the straights accuse us queers as being predatory 🙃
When I was 15, I had a major crush on a Starbucks barista. I went every day for a whole fucking summer. He was 19 and a saint. Was essentially borderline rude to me in an effort to tell me to fuck off while being trapped at work. I cringe now at how awful I must have made work for him. And that was a much, much smaller age gap than these women. I was barely 17 when I realized how inappropriate it would have been if he reciprocated. I went to college a little late, so I was 25 around 18 year olds and they were infants to me. I agree completely with you. The very fact that he doesn't yet (no blame!!) comprehend that this is predatory is proof that he isn't yet at a stage to meaningfully consent. Shameful behavior. And shout out once again to Nick, the angel of a barista for doing literally the bare minimum.
I'm a writer of VERY problematic fanfiction, and there are two rules in problematic fic communities that don't seem to be followed here. 1. Leave real people out of it. 2. Make sure people know what they're getting into before reading. You can write whatever you want as long as nothing is real, that's the beauty of fiction. You also don't have to baby the reader through knowing that a bad thing is bad as long as you're writing for a mature audience. However, what is expected in fanfiction communities is that you appropriately tag the content and that real people aren't dragged into it. Even live action is a sensitive topic with a lot of debate on the ethicality of certain things to the point where a lot of people(including me) don't touch it. It's generally agreed that you shouldn't sexualize characters played by underage actors though, and in general, sexualizing a real person who doesn't want to be regardless of age is unacceptable. Even in the corner of the internet where writing whatever in fiction is considered fine, sexualizing an actual teenager or someone who doesn't want it will get you rightfully called out. I just got to the point where a dark fantasy book was recommended to a 16yo, and that would also NEVER slide. If you have anything NSFW on your profile, you're expected to make it 18+ only. If someone is caught sharing NSFW to someone underage when they're an adult, they will be considered a creep, and for problematic content, It's generally accepted that you only recommend it to someone who you know also likes the content as even adults have boundaries.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I read very problematic fanfiction sometimes. No real people, no blurring that line either in any shady way l, and label it correctly.
Some people never had a lemonfic phase and it shows 😔😔 (lemons or lack thereof aside, what the ACTUAL fuck is wrong with grown-ass adults who thirst over internet teens like, please, straight to jail --> )
The Fandom and Stan behavior with real people as you mentioned is so out of hand with so many fandoms. One of the reasons I stopped going on Twitter was because it was filled with grown women constantly fighting eachother about a metal band I like (which consists of grown men, half of them are fathers by the way) and I was getting sick of it. It's the type if behavior I had at 13 years old over the Jonas Brothers. I thought once we got to adulthood we realized celebrities and people on the internet are just people. But it's seemingly gotten worse and worse w over sexualizing and roping these people into fantasies and drama and everything else.
@the_goddess_1859 no....but their fandom is just as bad. I was referring to Motionless In Whites fan base. I love them as a band. Love them as dudes, but damn do their fans take things wayyy too far. They are just dudes.
ive always found it weird when people project their romantic/sexual desires onto real, living breathing people. it's one thing with fictional characters, but with idols, youtubers, actors/actresses, etc? it's creepy to me. aside from the fact they could possibly see what youve written about them, it's just such a violation of boundaries and basic respect imo. and the fact that some people dont see a problem with it makes it even worse 😭
Same, I knew that booktok and bikers overlapped but that was all. What side of booktok are you on? Would love creator recommendations that are not smut oriented (nothing wrong with that, just not my thing).
Some of them are even older than me at 32 lol. Maturity does not know an age, some of these comments the kid is half my age and knows not to go poking that kinda bear. So comforting
stg booktok is just a way for some people to talk about their barely masked 9orn addictions 😭😭😭 you can’t go into the comments of any online author nowadays without people asking “but is there spice?” like bestie chill…
like omg 😭😭 i once saw someone give a book -- categorized as young adult -- a bad review because it focused more on lyricism than romance. they assume that because a book is for an older audience it must have "spice."
Fandom/stan culture too, I've existed adjacent to the mha fandom since like 2018-2019 and good lord the amount of shit I've seen over the years as a minor.... I should be eligible for a veterans discount for the amount of groddy shit I've seen from stans. Let me tell ya that this shit absolutely is not new it goes back to tumblr fandom culture and even back to the 60's with the star trek fanbase. Oh also god forbid you were anywhere on the ace spectrum have childhood trauma or s3xual trauma or are a person of colour your existence and boundaries would be deliberately denied from the get go. God don't even get me started on the reader-chan debocle some cishet white girl who I'm going to assume is a minor who doesn't know any better to keep my sanity intact, got their panties in a twist because how dare you headcanon their husbando as asexual or ship them with another fictional character that's satanic! (I'm not exaggerating those were things reader-Chan said) good lord I hope they grew up at least if they were a minor at the time because that shits embarrassing
Fr!!! While it’s not all of booktok the loud minority are the ones in the forefront. I swear these woman who only consume adult material have brainrot and simply refuse to admit it’s an addiction.
A lot of these booktokers just have absolutely no concept of consent!! It’s not just asking someone to have sex, it’s not using someone’s photos or videos for your smut/fetish writing, it’s not being sexually charged on a public platform where that isn’t expected aka instagram and tiktok. Sexualizing a stranger and making posts/content about it is doing so without said stranger’s consent and yes it makes you a bad person.
Yiiikes, I’m actually shocked by those grown ass women. I never seen grooming in such a collective way. It’s actually terrifying and that’s not a joke. I’m at least glad some people realized how creepy it is and replied by calling them out.
i’ll never forget the booktok i saw that was a writer advertising her smut books with a quote from her book that read something along the lines of “he stabbed the knife into the bed and told me to ride it” EXCUSE ME???
@@keelinmacken9552 the team deleted all the booktok content from their page and unfollowed the creator that they had flown out to the game. people are still thirsting after the players a little too openly, but it’s definitely calmed down a LOT
I remember hearing about this 😭 although they did play into the hype at first, they have every right to not do it anymore if they don’t want to. And to harass the players was just insane to me.
i keep getting booktok stuff recommended to me because i had a huge tumblr/ao3 fanfic phase the algorithm needs to stop exposing me and bringing up my past trauma lmao
Pushing boundaries in fandom spaces has been a problem since FOREVER- like you mentioned with 1D very briefly. Being in anime/anime-adjacent fandom spaces makes my head hurt. People have zero boundaries with voice actors 😭 more than one VA had to make a public announcement to stop sending them porn of their own characters because people were just dming them crazy shit. I would love to know to sociological/psychological reason people are like this. I know it’s not new per se, but the internet makes everything so much worse. It’s such a win for feminism that now women also get the chance to be predators in public!!! (/sarcasm)
I’m so suprised people found this out NOW. Booktok always was weird, and mainly the ‘dark romance’ section of it (which can literally be considered the whole thing, but I have hope it isn’t). They have been calling r-pists, stalkers, murders, and just shit people ‘daddy’ for so long, but im happy people are talking about it now.
Not to be rude, this video was very informative about this situation, however I think it’s very funny that some people don’t already know about weird behavior surrounding irl people with in fandoms (and this is a fandom even though it is about books all of the books share a similar story between all of them) and I believe that there is a larger topic to discuss, as in a full discussion about predatory behavior with in fandoms that consist mostly of women when it comes to men and vice versa of course
@@gamechimp869You tone comes across a bit defensive but I’m not sure if that’s what you meant. Either way, their point isn’t that people don’t try to fight the creepiness. Just that there are groups of people who weren’t involved in this before things like TikTok and aren’t aware of these portioms of the internet were this creepy shit already happened.
@@gamechimp869 I completely understand, however the fact that sexual objectification with in fandoms still happens frequently, it makes it important to talk about this from a larger and less confined perspective, IE what Annamarie is doing with in this video, as she said before she is not part of “book tok” however it is valiant (imo) to still decide to talk about it with in this video, thus I think that it is important to talk about lesser known and if I’m being honest, un respected fandoms such as the cosplay community and furry fandom. It’s not that I think that the common people don’t find it weird, I think that it should be discussed on a larger scale and about more fandoms that frequently have a majority of one gender, I apologize for how long this is if you even cared to read, I’m just very passionate about this issue.
as someone who has grown up in the biker community and who likes to read young adult romance books (i just turned 18) this is creepy af people should not be thirsty to strangers like that especially to a minor like wtf, some people need to check themself
I started haunting Adeline, but I dnfed it at about like 30% because like what, the main stalker was trying to put an end to human trafficking, S@s the protagonist and then they end up together 😟
This one hit a bit too personal, because when I was a young teen I had a lot of adults online act very inappropriate with me and talk about smut and sexual shit with me, while being fully aware that I was 15. At the time, I saw no problems with it at all, it made me feel validated and grown up, I was in a really bad position irl too so I was very vulnerable to creepy adults who wanted to take advantage of that. Now I can look back on it and be absolutely disgusted. Even if I was ok with it at the time, it REALLY messed up my sense of boundaries and relationships and sexuality which still affects me and is smth I'm still working through many years later. So yeah adults please have some braincells and be careful with how you talk to minors online
Honestly it's not even just booktok tiktok in general has a major issue of people oversharing their fantasies about people or even fictional characters and it's honestly just disgusting
HONESTLY. Like, I don't think there is anything wrong with reading dark or erotic romance or whatever as long as its handled well and is read critically. (NOT TO MENTION KEPT STRICTLY WITHIN FICTION.) But why would you admit to reading it, like you couldn't water board that out of me. Soooo many booktok videos are just, so horny and cringe. Like bro keep that shit to ur selff. And the book they recommend are, honestly just, bad. (COUGH, COLLEN HOOVER COUGHH)
i've legit been waiting for more people to talk about this. i'm someone who's moderately active in biketok (only moderately cause i dont make content yet) and watching this unfold was absolutely insane. i've followed jessie for a while bc i find him funny and we're around the same age so it was kinda shocking to see spicy dark romance booktok women in the comments objectifying and/or infantilizing him. i remember being shocked and horrified when i looked up what haunting adeline was bc of the comments recommending it to him. it's happened to ALL of the creators i follow and since almost of them are adults, it's like "oh. ok. get those views dude. pop off" cause they definitely play into it. and like get that bag all the more power to you. however, i've had conversations with people i know who want to make mask/motorcycle content (booktok has been doing similar things to the masktok and masked cosplay tiktok accs but from what i've seen it hasn't been as extreme iirc) and they've all expressed how they're super uncomfortable with starting cause they don't want to be treated the same way just for showing their interests (i 100% agree with this tbh). on the bright side tho, i've noticed the comments on jessie's videos have leaned more to his target audience (other biketokers and motorcycle enthusiasts) and less of the weird comments. (after quickly looking thru his last few vids to double check, it's like 50/50 for booktok comments on a video or not but i think that shows it's calmed down a bit) i just hope this eventually dies down so people stop getting objectified in every video they post (i've kinda already accepted this side of booktok probably most definitely won't face any consequences for their actions and comments)
I think the difference between masktok and biketok is specifically that a lot of creators on masktok do make rather suggestive content and they’ve gained their own audience, but I don’t necessarily think that’s what these women are looking for.
I can confirm. I'm not on TikTok but I dip my toes into the fandoms on RUclips, maybe Instagram, of Wings of Fire and Warrior Cats, and it's chill there. Mostly, lol, back when I was young, people argued about the colour of a cat's collar. And then there were shipping wars. Kinda like how people argued about Mangle's gender in FNAF and shipped Chica with either Bonnie or Foxy, which led to many debates. Edit: But I do also enjoy more humanoid fiction too- I'm not entirely a furry or something. I watch shows like The Owl House and The Dragon Prince too. Fantasy with humans! And TDP has a book version for each season so I'll be reading those. Already read two graphic novels.
Annamarie you NEED to talk about booktok more. Booktok and booktwitter are insaneee. There was an author who faked her death for money and attention only to reveal she was actually alive, all the Reylo books and fanfics, the George and Ginny incest fanfic that inspired the City of Bones series, don't even get me started on the whole Corrain drama (withcindy did a great video on it), every day it feels like someone is losing their mind and it's so hard to be a reader or author online anymore because all I wanna do is talk about books I like and share my short stories and all of a sudden some male author dedicated an extremely dark romance smut novel to a reviewer who gave him a bad review (Long story, withcindy did another amazing video on the situation) and that's all people talk about for weeks until the next idiot does something stupid for attention.
@Minxable24 the author originally wrote that incest fanfic and when deciding to write city of bones pulled stuff from that fanfic to use. Makes the whole incest thing in the books even weirder
I’m on biketok because I’ve always found motorcycles interesting and I remember one day I checked the comments on a video and they were so foul 😭 guys not all bikers are dark romance protagonists they are real people with real lives
i saw a booktok person doing a roleplay of someone asking for a book with no romance or sex and the person and most comments were almost horrified? like?? some of us dont wantthat in every story
The whole thing is so gross to me. When I was in 6-8th grade I was groomed by an older man in my parent's religious group. One of his tactics was to recommend me books with adult themes he knew my parents were not familiar with, then question me about those themes after I read the book. The part where grown women were recommending a book with themes of child trafficking to a.. child!? hit too true to me. Especially the part where he said he was ok as long as its jokes. Its always "jokes" until it isnt anymore and then you gaslight yourself into not getting help.
I'm honestly so thankful that you decided to talk about this. Booktok has been giving me some major icks recently, the thristing is getting out of hand and people are reading actual crime and romanticizing it, I've seen PLENTY of minors read 'Haunting Adeline' because Booktok recommended it as a romance when it clearly is not.
it's just like when grown women, well into adulthood, read the twilight series and were horny for edward and/or jacob, then projected that horniness onto the actors when the movies came out, even though taylor lautner was still a minor. they terrorized him with their extreme levels of horniness. always felt so bad for the kid. he's been so open about how damaging it was to him longterm
I love and write queer kinky fiction (I don’t use the terms spicy or romance to deflect from that), and yes sometimes it’s very smutty. But as I said, it’s all queer because I have no idea what to do with straight smut/romance. It doesn’t represent me or anything I align with. I do have some reservations about the type of comments people have been leaving under other user’s videos. Some of that is very much unwanted sexual attention.
tw grieving, parent loss hi annamarie, I've been a silent follower of yours. two years ago (in december) my mom passed away from ALS. since then, winter holidays have been difficult to deal with because of grieving. thanks to the 12 days of sinmas, holidays have become less stressful and taxing. thank you so much for what you do on youtube. love youuuuuuu :)
The second I heard smut I was like "I thought you were talking booktok not AO3" since I never hear it outside of fandom spaces. We also tend to read much darker stuff than dark romance. So it's interesting to see how what's dark for people who read books vs people who read fanfiction. Unless someone is asking for certain fic recommendations you don't recommend lemon, heavy angst, dead dove: do not eat, non-con, ect. it should be the same for actual books. If a bunch of teens and young adults can do it, older women should definitely know how. (I am a teen if I can do it so can you) I also think Booktok could use a nice dose of don't like don't read. Edit: Yeah I think in general real people fanfiction (Unless it's Y/N) is really uncomfortable for most people
I'm glad I'm on the correct side of book TikTok. I saw about this situation after the fact and wanted to vomit. I will never understand why people are comfy talking to minors like this. It's disgusting.
Side not 3:45 The deal is an AMAZING book for people who have been SAed… when I tell you it opened my eyes to a whole new thought process and I did cry. It’s awesome.
The idea of men being objectified and sexualized by women is something that's often "bragged" about but I think you really nailed it in saying that any adult is responsible for the boundaries they cross with a minor (no matter the gender). It never matters if the kid says they don't mind, they don't have the mind to understand consent. I wish more women were held responsible for this kind of injustice.
As a former high school teacher And current middle school teacher. This is so gross. Are these women the ones that assault their students because they sexualized them. As far as I'm aware, I haven't worked with a teacher guilty of this but did know about a teacher moving away with a classmate and they eloped once he graduated. He was younger than me.
you're so right about the school and class thing. high schoolers are in school all day going to multiple classes so they wouldn't refer to going to school as going to "class" bc there's not just one. but in college you typically only have one class at a time so it makes sense to refer to it as going to class. I know it's a small thing but I wanted to affirm you and explain for someone who may not understand!
No, I don't think they did. In fact I think a lot of these women missed very important canon events that taught tasteful shame, like fanfic and the like.
I will never understand how people feel entitled to the lives of famous people. It's like when Chris Evans got married and women were harrasing him and his new wife. It's just crazy to me. Just because you are a fan doesn't mean they owe you anything.
As a woman who LOVES romance and the fictional men that come with it, it seriously MAKES ME SO MAD when other romance readers sexualize evveerrryyything. It's a double standard that I need to die because wtf is wrong with half of them. It disgusts me so much bro. This is so horrible that this kid went through this!!
I think it's very important to never blame the underage people who are playing into the booktok stuff because they're children getting positive attention from adults and they're being groomed into believing it's okay. they're the victims who even if they know better they're still children and will make childish decisions because adults are approving them
Sure, but there's still a population regularly committing sexual harassment to non-minors as well. It is a valid issue people are upset about. No one is implicating all of BookTok, just trying to address the issue.
@@the_goddess_1859 i know that, i’m just pointing out that most (at least the people i follow and talk to) are very normal and just obsess over the characters.
13:10 while I totally agree that the women on booktok are being inappropriate, the scenario you describe (men commenting weird stuff on minors pages) happens CONSTANTLY
Thats what i was gonna say, and there isn’t always outrage like she suggests…so many girls suffer in silence with people complicit in it, girls like me, girls im friends with. Nothing happened to the men
As a 19 year old technical adult, I don’t even know where that boundary line is. If people said stuff like this to me I don’t think I’d pick up any sexual intent. I can’t even watching this video so if Annamarie wast saying “this is weird and wrong” I would have 0 clue. Edit: I mean the comments on the 16 year olds page. Not the outright sexual ones but the “let’s protect him” ones.
Those statements are ambiguous because it gives the commenter plausible deniability. The protecting the child from sexual harassment because he's pure/innocent implies that it would be tolerable or appropriate if he wasn't. Identifying this stuff gets easier with time and experience so as you get further into adulthood it should get clearer. For where you are in life right now at 19, you're doing great. Hope this helps!
@@saraschu2735 Oh dang. I never even considered that it would imply that it would be tolerable if they didn’t consider him pure or innocent. That is creepy
@@Ahahahahstayingalivealso 19 and same, I thought it was weird but I never considered "protect him from sexual harrassment because pure and innocent" had the implication of "if he wasn't pure and innocent the sexual harrassment of a TEENAGER, a NON-ADULT, would be fine if he wasn't so pure" 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
i'm a big seattle kraken fan and i remember being SO confused when booktok started showing up on my fyp. turns out it's because they were openly harassing one of our players and couldn't take it when the wennbergs spoke out to say enough is enough 🙄 i honestly have no idea how the kraken social team thought that engaging with the booktok community would do anything but encourage them to take it WAY too far
Engagement=money, they probably felt pressure from the team manager to accept it until the public was on their side enough for them to be able to speak up
I… was not expecting this video to go this direction this is horrifying! I’m a high school teacher, sixteen year olds are kids. As much as I care for my students and love working with them, they can’t think actions through to consequences. I absolutely agree that him saying it’s okay doesn’t really matter, the onus is entirely on the adults in the situation to be appropriate. It’s so deeply upsetting that grown women would be so openly predatory in a corner of the internet which is supposedly based on a love of reading.
I'm 21, and both book series that he showed would get me excited to talk about those books because they're my favorite series. I only follow a few book tok creators because they don't act like creeps and give very genuine thoughts about a lot of books that book tok idolizes despite how horrid they can be. I'm horrified that grown adults we're being so predatory towards a child while it was very obvious he is a child.
as someone that was groomed as a teenager, it doesn’t matter if a teenager says “its okay”. it is ALWAYS the adults responsibility to leave children alone. period
SEE cause I wish more adults would get that. We have an age of consent for a reason and strict rules around that age of consent too. It is absurd that we have to come out on the other end of that and call people out for that.
Seriously though. I thought it was awesome when I was younger that all these older guys liked me, and didn’t even understand how damaging that was to my development until I was an adult unpacking it in therapy. It’s almost like ✨adults are responsible for their conduct with children✨ not the other way around
@@fishgirlblubblubthe sad thing is that some people don't see how effed up a dynamic is because they had similar experiences of adults crossing boundaries and other adults saying it was okay.
(Not remotely excusing groomer apologists - it's fucked up, every adult should feel a responsibility to protect kids and young people from this stuff. It's just another way r**e culture is toxic for everyone)
I'VE DATED MIDDLE AGED MEN THAT SAID THEY WOULD IF IT WASN'T AGAINST THE LAW AND IT HAUNTS ME
period slay.
As a 16 yr old, I cannot imagine being so sexualized by grown women
Right like why do they think their disgusting actions are acceptable just because theyre “jokes”😧
@@lovely2wiceThey dont bruh. They enjoy making people uncomfortable. Ive worked customer service my whole life and middle aged women will straight up grope you if youre a young man. Its super fucked cause when u call them out they play innocent and start the waterworks.
Its disgusting honestly
Omg a Imbibitor Lunae pfp
I’m a 16 yr old as well and I find it absolutely disgusting that they think it’s ok because “it’s only jokes” or “I didn’t see his bio” and with Alex some of them were like “so what he has a wife”. And I think is horrible that people forget EVERYONE has feelings, and are capable of feeling uncomfortable and even if you didn’t intend for it to sound like that. Like she said in the video, I don’t care if you like smut, but there are certain boundaries that should be very clear. Like maybe take the extra two seconds, and click their profile to make sure, and if it doesn’t say, and they sound like a teenager. Maybe don’t say stuff like that just to be safe. And the thing with Alex, the hockey player, I think people kind of assumed that he’s an adult it’s fine, and there are certain boundaries no matter what age you are, that you should not be Very clear to not sexualize everyone you see just because they resemble a character that you read in a smut. Again I am 16 and I find it really disgusting and sad that I understand boundaries more than some of these grown women do who are old enough to probably be Jesse’s parents, or some thing, don’t know boundaries, no matter when it’s adult or and it never should be a minor.
It's like I always say
"BookTok fans (esp CoHo fans) are people who didn't have a fanfic phase as teenagers"
Omg TRUE they behave the same way we did, except most of us were under 16 years old and they're full adults
FR , omg I read the type of things they read in wattpad when I was like 14
this is insanely on point.💀 I’ve never thought about it that way but you are so right.
at least we had some sort of a grip on ourselves
Accurate.
I'll never forget the first booktok video I came across. A GROWN ASS WOMAN saw a motorcycle in the parking lot of a barnes & noble, and literally jumped and squealed in the parking lot. She then went inside and wandered the bookstore trying to find the guy, and when she did she peeked around the aisle cap squeaked out "uwu" and then ran. The whole video was so unsettling. Like ma'am you're pushing 40, can we not stalk and harrass random 20 y/o men trying to buy books??
I saw that too and felt the same way until I found out they were already a couple, that video was staged which kinda makes it more weird
Part of me thinks, let her live, since someone will inevitably be into that. But then the more sane part of me thinks, wow, let's make shame great again. We should bully each other, at least a little bit. Then she'd figure out that a guy who has a motorcycle isn't gonna wanna have a manic pixie girlfriend long term.
@@sarahfarley12 yeah i’m not sure how i feel about that anymore. it’s still weird. staged or not, it sets and example for younger people. even if it’s supposed to be “making fun” of people who are like that, there are people like that, and people who will be encouraged to do that because they dont know its a joke
@@remipoyntz7657 no one said it wasn’t weird
@@remipoyntz7657younger people under 15 should not be on social media especially tiktok, and around the age of 16 they should know what to do and not do in public, and have the critical thinking to understand that almost everyone fakes things online for views, and think logically about whats normal in public, if someone genuinely over the age of 16 went in public and did what the og comment said, it truly sounds like they’d be slow as in have Asperger’s or autism to have no understanding of social norms and act eccentric, and hopefully someone gets them professional help to understand what’s acceptable and what isn’t in public
The internet needs to stop sexualising kids. It’s disgusting. Thanks for bringing this up. It doesn’t matter if he thinks it’s okay. He is a damn child. I am so sick of people saying ‘oh they are almost an adult’ when we can all admit NONE of us felt like adults when we hit 18. Even those of us who went through traumatic hell and had to raise ourselves, we are still kids then. We need to be protecting kids more not less
THIS!! He's 16, he doesn't fully understand the implications of what these women are saying and why it's so gross. The fact that so many of these adult women are taking this as a green light to continue acting predatory angers me. Like yall are the adults, yall know better! Leave this boy alone I beg of u.
When your argument becomes ‘but they’re ALMOST an adult’ you need to stop, sit down, and think about what you’ve done
Booktok has always been creepy when it comes to ppl that dont have a full frontal lobe yet.
They are becoming a bunch of kiddy likers😨
@@NOSTALilyChris Hansen gonna come in and say take a seat if they ain't careful 😂
This also a HUGE problem in the cosplay industry, like holy shit stop people
REAL i cosplay a lot of genshin characters and when i was still a minor i got a lot of weird comments
@@fullmetalfrogeITS SO BAD
@@fullmetalfrogeit’s so gross !!! the weird ass comments people make when they see someone cosplay casca from berserk make me sick, or just any cosplay in general :(
@@lotusrr i personally see it a lot in the bungou stray dogs fandom, there's a really loved cosplayer from this fandom that is a minor and has been sexualized to hell and back. And that cosplayer has said many times how uncomfortable they are with those comments
especially the call of duty cosplays ☹️
My rules are:
If i would be uncomfortable if someone did this to myself, then i don't do it.
If it's creepy for a man to do it, then it's definitely still creepy when a woman does it.
While I agree with the sentiment, the second one isn't entirely true. A 40 year old man saying "I like your dress" gives off very different vibes than a 40 year old woman doing the same
@justaperson4656 personally I don't find it off or weird when an older man compliments my clothes, and I think that's because of my upbringing, but for some, it can be a bit weird
@@justaperson4656 the commentary was talking about role reversal, instead of a man commenting on a girl, it would be just as creepy for a woman commenting on a boy.
@@midnightpebble4377 nah I get it. I had a rough upbringing myself so I'm wary around all men. Something about older men complimenting me especially screams danger. Not as creepy if a woman does it, because most trauma I have with women is physical, and most trauma I have with men was psychological
@@captaincaspian42 ik ik, I just thought it was a point I'd bring up because it adds to it: things that are unacceptable for men to do are acceptable in a wider scale for women to do. It isn't any less wrong for women to do or say these things, but there's a false sense of security and a lowered guard with women, if that makes sense? Like, a lot of kidnappers and human trafficking rings are women or use women as a lure because the general population see women as safe and meek. Men are dangerous, women aren't. Of course, that isn't true, and more awareness needs to be brought to that fact
when did people stop being embarrassed…
these are grown women who clearly never stayed up till 6am going through ao3 tags at age 13
bro how did you know I did that-
This comment fucking choked me. Just say my bloody name when you call me out why don’t you
Ok, I did not need that callout 💀
I did NOT need to get called out so much tonight.
I did NOT need to get called out so much tonight.
That child is literally my son's age. Looking at those profile pictures, those women were way too grown to mess with anyone under 30. What in THE world is wrong with them?
The world is pretty messed up imo. The age of consent is so low in some places, of course people act like this, right? We can't expect people to do better than what they are taught to be okay with. I'm 32 and can't even tolerate 18 year olds on dates let alone go for someone with even less life experience, and they do hit me up too, some lying about their age to be on the dating app, but that's the thing you gotta realize as the good person in the situation: you know better, they don't or are choosing not to 🤷🏾♂️ hopefully your dude is just obsessed with video games or sumn more manageable, cuz the stuff I've seen on snapchat alone is so twisted, the internet is the wild west nowadays.
@@nailinthefashion ye bro its sad, also it is not like you have even any choice, because most of the women on dating apps are often 18-22. What are you gonna do after you are 30+? Or 40? I guess just unalive myself because older women are hard to even get close to or get some contact because they are not so active on social media or straight up no going out anywhere from home. And if you decide to date anyway, well enjoy now being called pedo because "it looks weird".
Oh, how about we make it like, illegal then? And if not, just let people date and have some fun in life without stressing about slightest possibility of tiny mistake and getting lynched for that automatically. And women get away because yes, they just can, noone is trying to even make them think if it is appropriate so ofc they gonna "joke" I dont even think most of them do it on purpose. We live in society...of morons
As a 16 year old (almost 17 now but still a minor) and an avid reader, the situation with Jesse makes me so angry. Not only were they being weird and “UwU such a baby” over him reading Hunger Games and Maze Runner (both great books, esp for a teenager) but they had the gall to suggest this MINOR read a book about SA and child abduction. Like actually wtf is wrong with people! I hate it when I have to say this, but it is true in cases like this; imagine if this happened with a 16 year old girl and a bunch of adult men. SUPER creepy. Ugh just makes me angry for that kid.
PS: everyone I know says “school”. I’ve never heard a highschooler call school “class,” so you’re probably right about the school-class thing. I think it’s just because of how differently highschool and college are structured.
I'm 32 and not only read all those when they first released but actually just watched all of the HG movies again for the new prequel. They're so good wtf. Some of the best storytelling ever. And, on top of that, when watching the behind the scenes for it there was a school who has an optional school wide read, for which they chose the Hunger Games.
It was written with everyone in mind: the young girls it would inspire, the adults it would enchant, and the future we should be trying to keep as clean as possible.
Of course it's a great introduction to deeper works, but, on its own, Hunger Games has the power to not just entertain anyone, but educate them too.
i find older millennial women rlly exploit the fact that young boys being harassed by women is different than with girls. it’s fucked. any decent person cares WHEN ANYYY CHILD IS BEING HARASSED!!! scary honestly. i’m glad more people are talking about it because we need to treat people the way we want to be treated. gross. i’m sooo angry for him
Women dont seem to understand that theyre equally capable of committing sexual harassment, and dont realize that thats exactly what theyre doing when they say stuff like this to men
I utterly agree that when men do this, theyre torn to shreds (as they should be). We need to be better at calling women out as well. Too many think theyre immune
Women just do it in a different way. As a service worker ive been straight up assaulted by middle aged women grabbing my arse and stuff.
Obviously its not as big of a threat as when a women gets harassed by a man. But its fucking degrading as shit. And if you get angry at them they turn on the waterworks and make themselves out to be a victim. At least i know i could knock them out if they tried something violent so its not as scary as if i was a woman. But its a helpless and degrading feeling.
they always say it's okay because it's a man but it's like.
Hopefully things will balance out in a couple years, maybe it will take decades. Since women have only fairly recently in history been able to express basically anything, it feels like not everything has caught up to it. Women and men are equal in the amounts of bad we can commit, with the freedom we have. There needs to be more awareness that women should be as equally punished as men for being creepy. It isn't always in our biology to be "loving and caring" and "motherly". Men too, need to stop pushing the idea that gender determines who you are and what you are "meant for". I'm afraid I'd accidently drop a baby if I had one. Natural selection does include that any children of unfit parents usually die to prevent further spread of the poor genes. Which is sad for the children.
exactly. and of course, many women are intentionally predatory, but i think a lot of women just think it's okay because they're not a man. but just like making men aware of how their actions affect people is important, we need to put the same effort into women's awareness of their actions.
On the other hand you have hordes of men online attacking women for no reason. Remember when women on Twitch were a big video topic? Like jeez if you want to criticize women so bad at least go after the ones who are actually doing bad things
Oh this creeps me out deeply. Very very much. Those messages about keeping him “innocent”? As a woman who is not interested in men and has been infantilized by men for being “short” and “cute”: NO. No no no NO.
Right i find it gross that theyre calling this 16 year old boy, who is 2 years away from being a grown adult an “innocent baby” because he didn’t know what booktok was and doesnt read smut..
Edit: i know he wont suddenly be like super mature and knowledgeable when he turns 18, im just saying he will literally become an adult and not some baby who needs to be protected😭
@@lovely2wice He is two years away from graduating high school, not being a grown adult. When he's 18 he will still be a teen, but with more rights. When I turned 18 it's not like I immediately became an independent adult, or like I immediately became capable of consenting to grown ass adults who would have an age and power imbalance with me. Yes, he's no longer a child but he would still be vulnerable. However, I agree with you that its creepy they're infantilizing him, and it gives very "pdf file" vibes.
@@ettaetta439 As somebody who is in the same age range as this guy, I agree with *both* of your comments here. Don’t infantilize, but definitely don’t also treat things like we’ll be 100% emotionally & mentally mature the moment we’re 18. The brain’s still not done developing for a hot second, and there is a shitload of things to learn about the world that we’ve largely not even come close to experiencing yet.
@@lovely2wice imma be fr he is a baby he's 16. we are fetuses.
@@Azeathe Yep. The fact that they're infantilizing a literal teen even more than his actual age is disgusting. 16 is very young, but it doesn't mean that he's "innocent". It doesn't mean he's oblivious to anything sexual. Not being able to consent to adults isn't the same thing as not having sexual knowledge or expertise, since a fair amount of teens are having sex and watch/read smut.
It's obvious they're infantilizing him because they're into the idea of an innocent kid they can "corrupt" (which is often a rhetoric that dark romance books push). Trying to get him to read their smutty abuse books is a form of grooming, since pdf files often get their victims to read/watch CSAM or similar types of material to make them think that it's okay. Why these women think it's okay to do this is beyond me.
"guys he's a baby, we have to protect his innocence" BRO that's because he's a LITERAL CHILD
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who absolutely HATES being told things like "oh you're so innocent 🥺must protec." or when I ask what something means and they're like "you don't know? I won't tell you because that would corrupt your pure mind." it boils my blood but I always feel like I can't say anything about it. in middle school I didn't swear and it was especially bad. it felt like no one even saw me as a person.
it’s so infantilizing. also as an asexual i can’t really understand why some people only equate sexual content as being adult / mature
@@skysirensixfeetlmfao i kinda get mad at that bc it’s from a song of ice and fire and ik most people using the phrase havent read the books or even watched game of thrones 😂
those comments get on my last nerve. just because someone doesn't have sex on their mind 24/7 or doesn't understand something does NOT make them a "cute wittle innocent babie!!"
watch hours of corn per day 2000. "this guy is probably not normal"
refuses to watch corn because it is bad for health 2024 " this guy is probably not normal"
I started swearing like a sailor in middle school, and no one could believe how dirty of a mouth I had lmao
16 is a child, full stop. I’m 32 and I remember guys saying disgusting things about waiting for me to turn 18 etc. I feel so bad for this kid. I really hope he doesn’t get traumatized by all of this.
The internet is so fucking gross with kids bro I relate to you. are we ever gonna stop this shit
as an asexual i've never felt welcome on booktok. its so sexual on there.
Tbh as an asexual dude who likes dudes, it just feels really weird to be on that side. Just… weird vibes..
i lovee smutty and romatic books- but its going wayyyy too far, especially with all these mafia and stalker crap. like please i uust want some smutty fluff 😭
@@OliverStarfall yeah... that. that's understandable.
@@OliverStarfall 🤝
Same! I really don't mind romance as long as it's not sexual. Like I'm obsessed with the Hunger Games currently and I LOVE Peeta's and Katniss' romance story, because it's not the main point of the series and they're just so cute and sweet and the most sexual thing is a kiss. I haven't found a single book like that on booktok..
this reminds me of people being creepy towards cosplayers. cosplay doesn’t equal consent and just because you’re turned on by x character doesn’t mean i want to be apart of that. had a dude grab my ass at a con because of that. don’t touch people and don’t sexualize them!
I’m sorry man, that guy is disgusting
The best part about going to a con is interacting with people imo... I had a lot of fun flirting with all the shirtless dudes and asking for a flex or a pic or whatever. It can be sssooooo mutually fun.
People used to ask if they could feel my hair back when it was long and never just touched it so i can't understand why that doesn't get respected more. Maybe its the fun, casual environment but personal space is personal 😭
@@nailinthefashion i used to mostly cosplay as Samus Aran from the Metroid franchise. she wears this skin tight blue suit outside of the huge one she typically dawns in, the Zero Suit. idk if the dude thought it was an okay idea because the character he was also cosplaying as has had history with Samus but regardless, don’t touch people’s asses when they ask for a photo. me being in a skin tight suit doesn’t equal consent. people are weird man 😭😭
@@chozolady nah don't even try to rationalize his logic, he thought you were hot and wanted a cheap feel. It's disrespectful. The way to do it for me would be "I know how creepy this is but can I pretend to grab your butt for a tiktok, youre really cute mind a hug, that looks great on you can we do a little photoshoot" a tap on the shoulder, a little exchange, then you might actually be into it.. I don't just walk up to big arms and squeeze em lmao. I hope you do see the silver lining though, and can shrug it off knowing you're hot. I would be super creeped out but lowkey look forward to next convention even more with a lil secret validation
Seriously. Years ago I cosplayed as Sebastian from Black Butler for a local con and lost track of the amount of times I was groped or tackled, by other women no less! It was treated as completely harmless at the time. I should also point out that these women were grown adults and I was only sixteen.
As someone who has read all types of books, before even watching this I think that the amount of books with these weird immortal creatures getting into relationships with teenagers (especially girls) is just gross. Oh and the amount of unhealthy relationships that are showed in a positive way. It's just really odd and really unconfutable.
This.
It's creepy how common this type of books are.
As someone at 150+ books the last 5 years I have to say, I don't even consider those books. Yep I'm the elitist gatekeeper
It really does lead people to think in a strange dichotomy. Like, they assume a loving relatively healthy relationship = boring/not kinky. Why would a happy couple be incapable of roleplaying/kinks/etc? It's bizarre.
Same
Yes! it has always creeped me out because these immortal beings who are hundreds of years old may look like teens, but they arent. They are old men in a teen skin suit. So for them to hook up with teenagers is just gross frankly.
As an indie writer I genuinely hate that I have to interact with booktok in any capacity to have even a smidge of a chance of getting copies sold 😭
what’s your book called? i’d love to pick it up. i need something to read haha
how many times do you get the comment “is it spicy?” per video 😭
@@mallarieluvsgirlsme too ! : ) (replying so ill get a notif if they answer u)
what's the book's name dude, don't leave us hanging :']
please share the sauce with us
Something that has always bothered me is the "dark" romance genre. Like, it's not "dark" as in finding love in a misunderstood beast or less-than-ideal situation... it's an immortal guy masquerading as an 18-year-old to prey on an explicitly-written-to-be-naive, barely-an-adult girl, in a relationship that exhibits every toxic trait whatsoever; being a straight up asshole, refusing to communicate, lying, purposefully isolating her from social circles. Like, there are situations where I understand immortal x mortal, for example, a mortal that is a mature adult and an immortal that acts like a mature adult, and that isn't that hard to write (I've done it myself), and yet, for some reason, they just INSIST on a repeat of Edward and Bella every time. Another thing: authors have been known to write toxic relationships to illustrate how and why they're bad, but its the fact that booktok is chalk-full of toxic relationships presented as GOOD ONES is fucking crazy to me.
Yep, I'll read practically anything as long as the toxicity doesn't happen with the main ship I'm rooting for. I just can't stomach that
I'm a survivor of domestic violence stalking online gr00ming/pdf-philia and emotional incest I swear I can't go anywhere in a fandom space without encountering this shit and ripping old wounds open and having a psychotic episode istg no one tags shit properly either so any media or content filter tools are still basically useless I hate it here
And the immortal one is ALWAYS a man. It's just the older man and younger woman heteronormative dynamic repackaged.
The problem is how it's framed not the actual content. Elements of "dark romance" have become more and more normalized in regular romance books for a while now (blame Twilight I guess), and are often presented uncritically. There lies the problem. If you write a dark romance with the understanding that "yes, this is messed up and wrong," I don't necessarily see a problem. People have dark fantasies and finding fictional catharsis for them is okay.
Yes. Just give me some healthy gay relationships like Sope or Johnlock. ❤
as a kid who also thought sexual comments towards myself were fine as long as they were jokes- they weren't
they come back to make you feel uncomfortable years later
you try to reason with the adult who did it, but you can't figure out WHY an adult would do something like that, and you're just left feeling a bit gross
exactly this. this right here. all of it. had no idea how damaging it would be in the long run. I thought it was fine, and that I was so mature to be unbothered... over a decade later and I am VERY BOTHERED, to say the least. and that was just a handful of adults. I can't imagine getting bombarded on socials like he is. christ.
exactly, you really can't fathom how creepy it is until you grow up and are on the other side of the age gap
I'm sorry that happened. ❤️
The part I hate is rationalizing how creepy it is. Kids have daddy/mommy kinks fer sure sometimes but that doesn't mean enable it lmao it's supposed to stay a theory, a fantasy
I thought when people were calling out creepy guys on social media it was gonna lessen the creep, not just get the other gender involved 🤢
Middle aged women are wild bro. Work in the service industry as a man and youll get fucking groped and everything. Lady once smacked my arse and slipped me a 20 like a whore lol.
We love seeing women break into male-dominated industries 🤪
Gurl why u make me honk
@@alinashirinian2485🤣🤣💀
Hey there! As a 16-year-old boy, I'm glad to hear someone with such a large platform talk about this predatory section of TikTok, and how young boys are also affected by it.
Thanks for this video, it makes me feel safer knowing not everyone is gonna accept those adults' behavior. ❤
what’s worse about the kraken situation is that after the wife asked booktok to stop sexually harassing her husband, rather than doing that, they decided to harass her instead. they would leave the nastiest comments on her instagram saying she was jealous her husband was getting attention and that he was probably cheating on her. these people are absolutely insane and delusional.
Over the years, I have gone from being an active member in the BookTok community to abandoning and shunning it all together. I would get called "vanilla" and "precious/innocent" (as a minor) whenever I would discuss how romance wasn't my go-to genre. (I prefer high fantasy/fiction and mystery with romance only being a subplot.) Hell, I've even been teased by an old friend of mine for not wanting to read ACOTAR. BookTok has many, many problems; there are too many to list here. I'm glad that some of the shady parts are finally being exposed.
ive also had a similar experience i was only 13 at the time getting told agggtm and shatter me was too innocent and i needed to get introduced to haunting adeline i really hope you and others are ok and can recover from stuff like this
ACOTAR??
@@sadpotato3386is the portuguese name for sarah j. maas popular court book series
OMG mee too! I LOVE action/sci-fi/fantasy stuff! Especially if the main characters are animals instead of humans. I don't know why, reading about the adventures of say, a young lion are just infinitely more interesting than reading about some bitchy little teenage girl.🙄 And I get called a FURRY for it, as if liking animal characters is an insult!
@@sadpotato3386A court of throns of roses aka the abuse shit
booktok really does anything but read 😭😭😭😭
pls 😭
I promise its not all of booktok, there's this weirddddd smuttok side to it that most of us don't claim😭😭
They're reading with one hand wtf 😭
@@nailinthefashionLMAO HELP
@@mallarieluvsgirls same I had no idea they were this down bad sos smoke signals road flare h e l p
All of the videos like this just make me even happier that I'm not on TikTok. I'll read my books in peace and not bother anyone. As a queer asexual person, I am trying to find queer stories or literally anything other than romance. But BookTok doesn't give much of a shit of anything outside of straight sex
Edit: tysm for all the new additions to my reading list!!
LOVELESS BY ALICE OSEMAN
Agreed, I love reading books but the romance aspect always takes it out of me. Especially when the book isn’t a rom com yet people only talk about the two “lovers” in the novel.
If you're open to recommendations, I really enjoyed the Simon Snow series by rainbow rowell. There's like two 'sex' scenes that are only a page or two long, but not in great detail, just as warning in case you'd rather not read those!
Yeah, it’s honestly rly annoying to me that there’s not much of a space on tiktok for people who enjoy books that arent about romance or sex
As an asexual person I usually buy cookbooks and history books. Historic graphic novels are interesting to read.
honestly i really hate the term "spicy" 😭😭 i feel like if you can only say "spicy" you are not old enough to be reading porn
I say it just because I can
While I understand what you mean, people say "spicy" as a substitute word to get around restricted words on platforms . Big yikes if you're using "spicy" out in the wild when you don't have to. 😂
I want to scream every time I see someone asking "but is it spicy??" in the comments of literally any book video. Like.. is that genuinely all you care about???
@@l.t.7590 It's fine if that's all they care about, the problem is they're not honest about it. They're interested in erotica, but want to pretend they're interested in romance or fantasy, infecting these genres with erotica. You'll ask for a fantasy suggestion and you'll be recommended ACOTAR or Fourth Wing, which are both written for erotic gratification.
@@l.t.7590 it doesnt matter if they only enjoy smutty books imo, idk why that's the issue you have with booktok
i feel so bad for that kid man :( these women actually need to be behind bars. they're way too open and proud about their predatory behavior. its disgusting. i hope jesse is alright :(
also so unnerved by the infantilization. it may not be romantic or sexual in nature but its so gross to belittle ANYONE for not reading smut. like,, youre not special for reading that kind of thing. stop treating others like they're inferior for not also doing so
@@finncubedagreed that shit is weird
I'm 18 and even tho I'm legal, I would be so uncomfortable if I was in his situation. This reminds me of grown women sipping over Kit Connor when Heartstopper first came out, calling him "hot" and "daddy"... he was 18/19. As a girl, I genuinely feel so bad for young boys especially if they're in the public eye and being sexualized by older women bc of their fantasies.
Though seriously, as a 31 year old woman, most "adults" don't even know those boundaries. They're essentially children who grew up without consiouness and are just doing whatever. It sucks. It really is one of those things that makes you go spiral down. But just kids teaching kids essentially.
Sorry, just grew up in a very not so good environment 😮💨😔
There definitely is something to unpack about how boundaries being crossed is unfortunately all too common in our society
A lot of people just don't respect boundaries and it's kinda concerning. I literally need to tell my mother not to cross people's boundaries sometimes 😭
@@MoodyMickey oh man, this hits home but with my father. My lord. But the more, abusive kind of boundaries lol
@@CalliNightmare yeah, my mom isn't too bad, but if I told her I didn't want a hug, she'd force me to hug her. You ask her not to do something, and she does it right after telling her not to. It's mostly small stuff
@@MoodyMickey ah man. God damn. Smh. This is JUST a theory, but I thought about it alot, but I feel like most (not all) people who have kids are narssasists (big label I know). I just feel that people who KNOW they have problems (big ones) or deny them but have kids anyways, just aren't suited to have kids. And we're sorta the outcome. If they can't get past the instinct to breed, then they are no better than animals. I dunno. BUT like I said not all. I know some really amazing parents that just parent like.. Jesus. I tell them so often I wish they were my parents haha.
The only thing that booktok and boundaries have in common is that they share the same two first letters other than that booktoks don't have boundaries
Maybe I'm just too ace but you could not WATERBOARD ME to thirst over a real, living person on main
I miss when this stuff stuck to forums and private groups because people knew it made other people uncomfortable.
that aint even an ace thing that's just awareness of the consequences of your statements
As someone who used to ID as a girl and had grown men saying creepy stuff to me while I was underage, I only laughed or smiled because I knew I wasn't safe. This poor kid is likely trying to justify it as jokes for his own mental health so he doesn't have to grapple with how CREEPY these women are until his brain is fully grown in ten years
Wtf 💀 he's 16, a literal CHILD. Why can't these grown women stick to the bikers who are actually playing along with this dynamic and are obviously okay with it. Not random people or minors. I'm 24 and I could literally never 💀💀
Say booktok i heard you like them young
@@Vsevolodbochkov You better not ever go to cell block one
im a legal adult and still disturbed by comments like those, its especially disturbing to say to a minor
You are right. As someone in college, I use "school" and "class" interchangeably mostly using "class" in most cases. When I was in high school, I just used "school". So its just weird that people cant pick up on context clues and just ignore that this person is clearly a minor 😬
I was about to comment the same thing. I mainly use class when I’m talking about it but I remember only saying school when I was in high school. I didn’t even notice that but thinking on it it’s definitely super noticeable in terms of context clues and especially when you can normally just click on someone’s profile to see their age
College student here, I do the same... I might say that I'm going to be on Campus for however long, too.
Tbh, I can’t pick up on those nuances as I still refer to University (or any education system) as school.
But a simple info check can easily tell you wether or not someone is a goddamn child.
@@sadpotato3386 right. I use the word campus a lot too
as someone in both high school AND college rn, i do the same. when im going to the school campus (high school + college campus) i say im going to school, and when i say im going to a college class, i say im going to class,,,, most of the time
Shoutout to my high school friend who, after watching a live performance of "I See the Light" from Tangled by a guy and girl cosplaying as Rapunzel and Flynn at our school talent show, said to me, "If they weren't siblings, I'd totally ship them." I had no words for him to convey how creepy that was. And the straights accuse us queers as being predatory 🙃
aren't they not siblings anyway? Flynn is Eugene right? Flynn Rider?? the thief that Rapunzel falls in love with because he frees her?
@@chocomelo454I think they're talking about the cosplayers being siblings???
@@chocomelo454 No, the REAL PEOPLE dressed as the characters were siblings. And we didn't know each other at all
@@thefaceofchlo5390 OH MU GLD NO
@@chocomelo454 YEAH
When I was 15, I had a major crush on a Starbucks barista. I went every day for a whole fucking summer. He was 19 and a saint. Was essentially borderline rude to me in an effort to tell me to fuck off while being trapped at work. I cringe now at how awful I must have made work for him. And that was a much, much smaller age gap than these women. I was barely 17 when I realized how inappropriate it would have been if he reciprocated. I went to college a little late, so I was 25 around 18 year olds and they were infants to me. I agree completely with you. The very fact that he doesn't yet (no blame!!) comprehend that this is predatory is proof that he isn't yet at a stage to meaningfully consent. Shameful behavior. And shout out once again to Nick, the angel of a barista for doing literally the bare minimum.
At least you learned and he probably legit thought about going to the cops
I'm a writer of VERY problematic fanfiction, and there are two rules in problematic fic communities that don't seem to be followed here.
1. Leave real people out of it.
2. Make sure people know what they're getting into before reading.
You can write whatever you want as long as nothing is real, that's the beauty of fiction. You also don't have to baby the reader through knowing that a bad thing is bad as long as you're writing for a mature audience. However, what is expected in fanfiction communities is that you appropriately tag the content and that real people aren't dragged into it. Even live action is a sensitive topic with a lot of debate on the ethicality of certain things to the point where a lot of people(including me) don't touch it. It's generally agreed that you shouldn't sexualize characters played by underage actors though, and in general, sexualizing a real person who doesn't want to be regardless of age is unacceptable. Even in the corner of the internet where writing whatever in fiction is considered fine, sexualizing an actual teenager or someone who doesn't want it will get you rightfully called out.
I just got to the point where a dark fantasy book was recommended to a 16yo, and that would also NEVER slide. If you have anything NSFW on your profile, you're expected to make it 18+ only. If someone is caught sharing NSFW to someone underage when they're an adult, they will be considered a creep, and for problematic content, It's generally accepted that you only recommend it to someone who you know also likes the content as even adults have boundaries.
This is exactly what I was thinking.
I read very problematic fanfiction sometimes.
No real people, no blurring that line either in any shady way l, and label it correctly.
Some people never had a lemonfic phase and it shows 😔😔
(lemons or lack thereof aside, what the ACTUAL fuck is wrong with grown-ass adults who thirst over internet teens like, please, straight to jail --> )
you dont understand boundries.
The Fandom and Stan behavior with real people as you mentioned is so out of hand with so many fandoms. One of the reasons I stopped going on Twitter was because it was filled with grown women constantly fighting eachother about a metal band I like (which consists of grown men, half of them are fathers by the way) and I was getting sick of it. It's the type if behavior I had at 13 years old over the Jonas Brothers. I thought once we got to adulthood we realized celebrities and people on the internet are just people. But it's seemingly gotten worse and worse w over sexualizing and roping these people into fantasies and drama and everything else.
......is it Bad Omens?
@the_goddess_1859 no....but their fandom is just as bad. I was referring to Motionless In Whites fan base. I love them as a band. Love them as dudes, but damn do their fans take things wayyy too far. They are just dudes.
@@taylordenton6253 oh my god you gave me 'Nam flashbacks to twenty one pilots stan culture girl help 😭
@S3lkie-Gutz it's gotten so bad girl I had to leave beyonce's twitter
@@taylordenton6253 no kidding its so bad I'd be terrified to be a moderately popular musician with my face out there it's so toxic and icky
ive always found it weird when people project their romantic/sexual desires onto real, living breathing people. it's one thing with fictional characters, but with idols, youtubers, actors/actresses, etc? it's creepy to me. aside from the fact they could possibly see what youve written about them, it's just such a violation of boundaries and basic respect imo. and the fact that some people dont see a problem with it makes it even worse 😭
I’m on booktok but I didn’t know this was happening. That’s NUTS. I’m horrified that these are GROWN ADULTS acting like this.
Same, I knew that booktok and bikers overlapped but that was all. What side of booktok are you on? Would love creator recommendations that are not smut oriented (nothing wrong with that, just not my thing).
@@thatrandomchick3607I really enjoy Tim Blackett, @/mynameismarines, bridgetish, nicolereads98, and schizophrenicreads
Some of them are even older than me at 32 lol. Maturity does not know an age, some of these comments the kid is half my age and knows not to go poking that kinda bear. So comforting
A few years ago, I thought it was icky that people wrote smutty fanfiction about real celebrities... This is taking it to a new level.
Right now they just make movies about it
stg booktok is just a way for some people to talk about their barely masked 9orn addictions 😭😭😭 you can’t go into the comments of any online author nowadays without people asking “but is there spice?” like bestie chill…
omg exactly what i was thinking.
like omg 😭😭 i once saw someone give a book -- categorized as young adult -- a bad review because it focused more on lyricism than romance. they assume that because a book is for an older audience it must have "spice."
Fandom/stan culture too, I've existed adjacent to the mha fandom since like 2018-2019 and good lord the amount of shit I've seen over the years as a minor.... I should be eligible for a veterans discount for the amount of groddy shit I've seen from stans. Let me tell ya that this shit absolutely is not new it goes back to tumblr fandom culture and even back to the 60's with the star trek fanbase. Oh also god forbid you were anywhere on the ace spectrum have childhood trauma or s3xual trauma or are a person of colour your existence and boundaries would be deliberately denied from the get go. God don't even get me started on the reader-chan debocle some cishet white girl who I'm going to assume is a minor who doesn't know any better to keep my sanity intact, got their panties in a twist because how dare you headcanon their husbando as asexual or ship them with another fictional character that's satanic! (I'm not exaggerating those were things reader-Chan said) good lord I hope they grew up at least if they were a minor at the time because that shits embarrassing
Fr!!! While it’s not all of booktok the loud minority are the ones in the forefront. I swear these woman who only consume adult material have brainrot and simply refuse to admit it’s an addiction.
But who cares if they ask? Some really like s3x scenes, some will only read it if there’s s3x, which is absolutely fine.
You’re doing a great job with Sinmas so far! May you continue to be the chronically online crusader we deserve 👏🏽
A lot of these booktokers just have absolutely no concept of consent!! It’s not just asking someone to have sex, it’s not using someone’s photos or videos for your smut/fetish writing, it’s not being sexually charged on a public platform where that isn’t expected aka instagram and tiktok. Sexualizing a stranger and making posts/content about it is doing so without said stranger’s consent and yes it makes you a bad person.
Yiiikes, I’m actually shocked by those grown ass women. I never seen grooming in such a collective way. It’s actually terrifying and that’s not a joke. I’m at least glad some people realized how creepy it is and replied by calling them out.
i’ll never forget the booktok i saw that was a writer advertising her smut books with a quote from her book that read something along the lines of “he stabbed the knife into the bed and told me to ride it” EXCUSE ME???
he WHAT
What????
WHAT?!
lol, i'd be into it.
One booktok mafia book has the main character fucked with a gun 😭
What is it with 200+ year old men (who look 16) and 16 year old girl as couples + them being written by middle aged women???
They are trying to relive their youth because they hate their lives 🤷🏽♀️
Yeaah, its ugh
weird fetishes? also present in noncon
@@kayenjeefrrr
As a hockey fan and a (very quiet) member of booktok, that Kraken thing was……..wow.
Oh my god I remember hearing about that and thinking just how weird it was. Hopefully theyre doing good now and aren’t getting as much harassment.
@@keelinmacken9552 the team deleted all the booktok content from their page and unfollowed the creator that they had flown out to the game. people are still thirsting after the players a little too openly, but it’s definitely calmed down a LOT
I just hope theyre ok
I remember hearing about this 😭 although they did play into the hype at first, they have every right to not do it anymore if they don’t want to. And to harass the players was just insane to me.
i keep getting booktok stuff recommended to me because i had a huge tumblr/ao3 fanfic phase the algorithm needs to stop exposing me and bringing up my past trauma lmao
Pushing boundaries in fandom spaces has been a problem since FOREVER- like you mentioned with 1D very briefly. Being in anime/anime-adjacent fandom spaces makes my head hurt. People have zero boundaries with voice actors 😭 more than one VA had to make a public announcement to stop sending them porn of their own characters because people were just dming them crazy shit.
I would love to know to sociological/psychological reason people are like this. I know it’s not new per se, but the internet makes everything so much worse.
It’s such a win for feminism that now women also get the chance to be predators in public!!! (/sarcasm)
I’m so suprised people found this out NOW. Booktok always was weird, and mainly the ‘dark romance’ section of it (which can literally be considered the whole thing, but I have hope it isn’t). They have been calling r-pists, stalkers, murders, and just shit people ‘daddy’ for so long, but im happy people are talking about it now.
As a person who eats menus, I see this as an absolute win
Not to be rude, this video was very informative about this situation, however I think it’s very funny that some people don’t already know about weird behavior surrounding irl people with in fandoms (and this is a fandom even though it is about books all of the books share a similar story between all of them) and I believe that there is a larger topic to discuss, as in a full discussion about predatory behavior with in fandoms that consist mostly of women when it comes to men and vice versa of course
and what makes you think we dont find it weird? what makes you think were not correcting it when it happens?
not rude at all, and i totally agree!
@@gamechimp869You tone comes across a bit defensive but I’m not sure if that’s what you meant. Either way, their point isn’t that people don’t try to fight the creepiness. Just that there are groups of people who weren’t involved in this before things like TikTok and aren’t aware of these portioms of the internet were this creepy shit already happened.
@@gamechimp869 I completely understand, however the fact that sexual objectification with in fandoms still happens frequently, it makes it important to talk about this from a larger and less confined perspective, IE what Annamarie is doing with in this video, as she said before she is not part of “book tok” however it is valiant (imo) to still decide to talk about it with in this video, thus I think that it is important to talk about lesser known and if I’m being honest, un respected fandoms such as the cosplay community and furry fandom. It’s not that I think that the common people don’t find it weird, I think that it should be discussed on a larger scale and about more fandoms that frequently have a majority of one gender, I apologize for how long this is if you even cared to read, I’m just very passionate about this issue.
as someone who has grown up in the biker community and who likes to read young adult romance books (i just turned 18) this is creepy af people should not be thirsty to strangers like that especially to a minor like wtf, some people need to check themself
I started haunting Adeline, but I dnfed it at about like 30% because like what, the main stalker was trying to put an end to human trafficking, S@s the protagonist and then they end up together 😟
This one hit a bit too personal, because when I was a young teen I had a lot of adults online act very inappropriate with me and talk about smut and sexual shit with me, while being fully aware that I was 15. At the time, I saw no problems with it at all, it made me feel validated and grown up, I was in a really bad position irl too so I was very vulnerable to creepy adults who wanted to take advantage of that. Now I can look back on it and be absolutely disgusted. Even if I was ok with it at the time, it REALLY messed up my sense of boundaries and relationships and sexuality which still affects me and is smth I'm still working through many years later.
So yeah adults please have some braincells and be careful with how you talk to minors online
Honestly it's not even just booktok tiktok in general has a major issue of people oversharing their fantasies about people or even fictional characters and it's honestly just disgusting
HONESTLY. Like, I don't think there is anything wrong with reading dark or erotic romance or whatever as long as its handled well and is read critically. (NOT TO MENTION KEPT STRICTLY WITHIN FICTION.) But why would you admit to reading it, like you couldn't water board that out of me. Soooo many booktok videos are just, so horny and cringe. Like bro keep that shit to ur selff. And the book they recommend are, honestly just, bad. (COUGH, COLLEN HOOVER COUGHH)
i've legit been waiting for more people to talk about this. i'm someone who's moderately active in biketok (only moderately cause i dont make content yet) and watching this unfold was absolutely insane. i've followed jessie for a while bc i find him funny and we're around the same age so it was kinda shocking to see spicy dark romance booktok women in the comments objectifying and/or infantilizing him. i remember being shocked and horrified when i looked up what haunting adeline was bc of the comments recommending it to him.
it's happened to ALL of the creators i follow and since almost of them are adults, it's like "oh. ok. get those views dude. pop off" cause they definitely play into it. and like get that bag all the more power to you. however, i've had conversations with people i know who want to make mask/motorcycle content (booktok has been doing similar things to the masktok and masked cosplay tiktok accs but from what i've seen it hasn't been as extreme iirc) and they've all expressed how they're super uncomfortable with starting cause they don't want to be treated the same way just for showing their interests (i 100% agree with this tbh).
on the bright side tho, i've noticed the comments on jessie's videos have leaned more to his target audience (other biketokers and motorcycle enthusiasts) and less of the weird comments. (after quickly looking thru his last few vids to double check, it's like 50/50 for booktok comments on a video or not but i think that shows it's calmed down a bit)
i just hope this eventually dies down so people stop getting objectified in every video they post (i've kinda already accepted this side of booktok probably most definitely won't face any consequences for their actions and comments)
I think the difference between masktok and biketok is specifically that a lot of creators on masktok do make rather suggestive content and they’ve gained their own audience, but I don’t necessarily think that’s what these women are looking for.
saying "fundamental" and "it's not drama it's dangerous" along with you like i'm doing audience participation at a pantomime. happy holidays!
booktoks is so painfully straight coded 😭😭😭😭😭😭
True
booktok also has a huge problem with romanticizing abuse (cough cough colleen hoover)
im so glad i havent read any of her books
I swear not all us book girls are like this! I just want to sit in the corner with my fantasy books and dragons, we're not all this creepy
I can confirm. I'm not on TikTok but I dip my toes into the fandoms on RUclips, maybe Instagram, of Wings of Fire and Warrior Cats, and it's chill there. Mostly, lol, back when I was young, people argued about the colour of a cat's collar. And then there were shipping wars. Kinda like how people argued about Mangle's gender in FNAF and shipped Chica with either Bonnie or Foxy, which led to many debates.
Edit: But I do also enjoy more humanoid fiction too- I'm not entirely a furry or something. I watch shows like The Owl House and The Dragon Prince too. Fantasy with humans! And TDP has a book version for each season so I'll be reading those. Already read two graphic novels.
@lil_lol7691 this, but instead of reading it, I want to write it 😂
@@iclynnxso like the anime catgirl stuff?
Annamarie you NEED to talk about booktok more. Booktok and booktwitter are insaneee. There was an author who faked her death for money and attention only to reveal she was actually alive, all the Reylo books and fanfics, the George and Ginny incest fanfic that inspired the City of Bones series, don't even get me started on the whole Corrain drama (withcindy did a great video on it), every day it feels like someone is losing their mind and it's so hard to be a reader or author online anymore because all I wanna do is talk about books I like and share my short stories and all of a sudden some male author dedicated an extremely dark romance smut novel to a reviewer who gave him a bad review (Long story, withcindy did another amazing video on the situation) and that's all people talk about for weeks until the next idiot does something stupid for attention.
Oh dear… I am going to regret this. But the what the f…. do you mean by City of bones was inspired by Ginny and George fanfic… what??? God no what???
@Minxable24 the author originally wrote that incest fanfic and when deciding to write city of bones pulled stuff from that fanfic to use. Makes the whole incest thing in the books even weirder
I’m on biketok because I’ve always found motorcycles interesting and I remember one day I checked the comments on a video and they were so foul 😭 guys not all bikers are dark romance protagonists they are real people with real lives
i saw a booktok person doing a roleplay of someone asking for a book with no romance or sex and the person and most comments were almost horrified? like?? some of us dont wantthat in every story
The whole thing is so gross to me. When I was in 6-8th grade I was groomed by an older man in my parent's religious group. One of his tactics was to recommend me books with adult themes he knew my parents were not familiar with, then question me about those themes after I read the book.
The part where grown women were recommending a book with themes of child trafficking to a.. child!? hit too true to me.
Especially the part where he said he was ok as long as its jokes. Its always "jokes" until it isnt anymore and then you gaslight yourself into not getting help.
And here I thought that passionflix was the deepest level of hell in romance book fandom.
3:02 “I’m not like other girls: I read classy smut written in Ancient Greek.”
If people wanna read REAL romance try the great gatsby🔥 and no, not daisy and gatsby, nick and gatsby
youre so real.
I'm honestly so thankful that you decided to talk about this. Booktok has been giving me some major icks recently, the thristing is getting out of hand and people are reading actual crime and romanticizing it, I've seen PLENTY of minors read 'Haunting Adeline' because Booktok recommended it as a romance when it clearly is not.
it's just like when grown women, well into adulthood, read the twilight series and were horny for edward and/or jacob, then projected that horniness onto the actors when the movies came out, even though taylor lautner was still a minor. they terrorized him with their extreme levels of horniness. always felt so bad for the kid. he's been so open about how damaging it was to him longterm
I love and write queer kinky fiction (I don’t use the terms spicy or romance to deflect from that), and yes sometimes it’s very smutty. But as I said, it’s all queer because I have no idea what to do with straight smut/romance. It doesn’t represent me or anything I align with. I do have some reservations about the type of comments people have been leaving under other user’s videos. Some of that is very much unwanted sexual attention.
Yet another banger for me to listen to while I draw
bro same lmao.
I clicked as fast as you can say gay. ✨
Edit: these replies are amazing I swear-
Woo gays, gay it up (Smosh reference)
Google says gay people are faster than cars
@@AmyStrikesBackI laughed at this.
@@AmyStrikesBackI can confirm. We walk on the rainbows our gayness summons.
GAY!!!!
tw grieving, parent loss
hi annamarie,
I've been a silent follower of yours. two years ago (in december) my mom passed away from ALS. since then, winter holidays have been difficult to deal with because of grieving. thanks to the 12 days of sinmas, holidays have become less stressful and taxing. thank you so much for what you do on youtube. love youuuuuuu :)
The second I heard smut I was like "I thought you were talking booktok not AO3" since I never hear it outside of fandom spaces. We also tend to read much darker stuff than dark romance. So it's interesting to see how what's dark for people who read books vs people who read fanfiction. Unless someone is asking for certain fic recommendations you don't recommend lemon, heavy angst, dead dove: do not eat, non-con, ect. it should be the same for actual books. If a bunch of teens and young adults can do it, older women should definitely know how. (I am a teen if I can do it so can you) I also think Booktok could use a nice dose of don't like don't read.
Edit: Yeah I think in general real people fanfiction (Unless it's Y/N) is really uncomfortable for most people
I'm glad I'm on the correct side of book TikTok. I saw about this situation after the fact and wanted to vomit. I will never understand why people are comfy talking to minors like this. It's disgusting.
Side not 3:45
The deal is an AMAZING book for people who have been SAed… when I tell you it opened my eyes to a whole new thought process and I did cry. It’s awesome.
The idea of men being objectified and sexualized by women is something that's often "bragged" about but I think you really nailed it in saying that any adult is responsible for the boundaries they cross with a minor (no matter the gender). It never matters if the kid says they don't mind, they don't have the mind to understand consent. I wish more women were held responsible for this kind of injustice.
As a former high school teacher And current middle school teacher. This is so gross. Are these women the ones that assault their students because they sexualized them. As far as I'm aware, I haven't worked with a teacher guilty of this but did know about a teacher moving away with a classmate and they eloped once he graduated. He was younger than me.
you're so right about the school and class thing. high schoolers are in school all day going to multiple classes so they wouldn't refer to going to school as going to "class" bc there's not just one. but in college you typically only have one class at a time so it makes sense to refer to it as going to class. I know it's a small thing but I wanted to affirm you and explain for someone who may not understand!
I love reading, but my god, I’m a little scared of this side of booktok. Luckily I’m not on it
did we learn nothing from growing up on tumblr?
No, I don't think they did.
In fact I think a lot of these women missed very important canon events that taught tasteful shame, like fanfic and the like.
a lot of these are MOTHERS, with kids HIS AGE.
its giving boy-moms...
I will never understand how people feel entitled to the lives of famous people. It's like when Chris Evans got married and women were harrasing him and his new wife. It's just crazy to me. Just because you are a fan doesn't mean they owe you anything.
As a woman who LOVES romance and the fictional men that come with it, it seriously MAKES ME SO MAD when other romance readers sexualize evveerrryyything. It's a double standard that I need to die because wtf is wrong with half of them. It disgusts me so much bro. This is so horrible that this kid went through this!!
I think it's very important to never blame the underage people who are playing into the booktok stuff because they're children getting positive attention from adults and they're being groomed into believing it's okay. they're the victims who even if they know better they're still children and will make childish decisions because adults are approving them
here to say that there are normal people on booktok and the vast majority of us aren’t thirsting over 16 year olds
Sure, but there's still a population regularly committing sexual harassment to non-minors as well. It is a valid issue people are upset about. No one is implicating all of BookTok, just trying to address the issue.
@@the_goddess_1859 i know that, i’m just pointing out that most (at least the people i follow and talk to) are very normal and just obsess over the characters.
13:10 while I totally agree that the women on booktok are being inappropriate, the scenario you describe (men commenting weird stuff on minors pages) happens CONSTANTLY
It does, and that's obviously still unacceptable, but it would not be even slightly as well-received
Thats what i was gonna say, and there isn’t always outrage like she suggests…so many girls suffer in silence with people complicit in it, girls like me, girls im friends with. Nothing happened to the men
As a 19 year old technical adult, I don’t even know where that boundary line is. If people said stuff like this to me I don’t think I’d pick up any sexual intent. I can’t even watching this video so if Annamarie wast saying “this is weird and wrong” I would have 0 clue.
Edit: I mean the comments on the 16 year olds page. Not the outright sexual ones but the “let’s protect him” ones.
Those statements are ambiguous because it gives the commenter plausible deniability. The protecting the child from sexual harassment because he's pure/innocent implies that it would be tolerable or appropriate if he wasn't.
Identifying this stuff gets easier with time and experience so as you get further into adulthood it should get clearer. For where you are in life right now at 19, you're doing great.
Hope this helps!
@@saraschu2735 Oh dang. I never even considered that it would imply that it would be tolerable if they didn’t consider him pure or innocent. That is creepy
@@Ahahahahstayingalivealso 19 and same, I thought it was weird but I never considered "protect him from sexual harrassment because pure and innocent" had the implication of "if he wasn't pure and innocent the sexual harrassment of a TEENAGER, a NON-ADULT, would be fine if he wasn't so pure" 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
i'm a big seattle kraken fan and i remember being SO confused when booktok started showing up on my fyp. turns out it's because they were openly harassing one of our players and couldn't take it when the wennbergs spoke out to say enough is enough 🙄 i honestly have no idea how the kraken social team thought that engaging with the booktok community would do anything but encourage them to take it WAY too far
Engagement=money, they probably felt pressure from the team manager to accept it until the public was on their side enough for them to be able to speak up
Booktoks scary honestly. The author of haunting Adeline was even in Jesse’s comment section asking people to stop recommending their book to him
3:40 WithCindy has the best SJM discourse. It’s hilarious and educational.
Also Caleb Joseph about CoHo (miss Colleen even had beef with teenager Caleb who critiqued her awful books)
I am so happy you covered this topic. I'm not a booktoker but I am a bookstagrammer and some of the things I've seen have made me uncomfortable.
I… was not expecting this video to go this direction this is horrifying!
I’m a high school teacher, sixteen year olds are kids.
As much as I care for my students and love working with them, they can’t think actions through to consequences.
I absolutely agree that him saying it’s okay doesn’t really matter, the onus is entirely on the adults in the situation to be appropriate.
It’s so deeply upsetting that grown women would be so openly predatory in a corner of the internet which is supposedly based on a love of reading.
I'm 21, and both book series that he showed would get me excited to talk about those books because they're my favorite series. I only follow a few book tok creators because they don't act like creeps and give very genuine thoughts about a lot of books that book tok idolizes despite how horrid they can be. I'm horrified that grown adults we're being so predatory towards a child while it was very obvious he is a child.