When did written pornography become the norm for indie authors? I remember when Amazon was first taking off for indie authors and, yes, there was a lot of smut, a lot of Christian romance, but also a ton of cyberpunk, crime, and even some literary fiction. Now, every time I see an indie author on Threads or X, they exclusively write porn.
And if there was ever a problem with porn feeding into rape culture, then these books are rape culture on steroids. Nearly all of them think “enemies to lovers” should be “if a man holds you captive against your will, fuck his brains out and marry him”. There’s even a TikTok/Insta trend of “indie fans on a first date” and saying stuff like “you can burn me, you can beat me, you can choke me” etc.
And published authors are also getting in on it Sarah J Mass (a best selling author aimed at teenagers) is light fantasy tropes mixed in with graphic sex scenes, kidnap fantasy, and rape fantasy.
When did this become the norm? It feels like OnlyFans, but aimed at children and exclusively rapey…
Maybe you keep viewing it and so you get more of it recommended to you because platforms crave user interaction so they can show you ads.
Perhaps it’s also the other side… Authors see more engagement from one topic. So they focus only on that.
Yup, my wife gets ads for unhinged bullshit from Amazon, and she keeps getting them because she clicks on every one.
The entire discourse is like this. Seriously, there was a great threads where someone asked to spend money on anything that was literary and indie. Crickets, despite indie authors attacking her a few days earlier for not reading indie.
I’m not searching this out, I’m searching out indie authors. On instagram yesterday, I checked out the indie author hashtags and every single one was porn.
And then I checked out a competition for unpublished authors looking to break into self publishing.
Seven judges. ONE wasn’t porn.
I can remember a few years ago I was browsing through the genre categories on my kindle and the romance category was filled with books where a woman is held against her will or something similar. I didn’t search specifically and i wasn’t looking at recommendations, I was browsing a genre and a large chunk out in 5 pages was extreme erotica. So I get where op is coming from.