aug 8- "my opinion on booktok and exposing sexual content to pre teens"

hey everyone!

i'm helena, and today i feel really inspired to talk about booktok. as a writer myself, i have no problem with book genres, and everyone should write or read whatever they want in peace...

..but.

it really gets to a point guys...

i never read any smut or books recommended on booktok in general (it's not my genre, plus i don't even have tiktok), but i've seen a lot of people get interested in this topic. there are girls in my class who bring these books at school and read a few pages when they can, which i think it's nice. i also used to bring my books to school at the start of the school year to kill time during breaks. well, i had the chance to ask them what these books were about, and i was pretty thrilled to know that one of these girls was reading about a young girl getting spanked while doing her maths homework. my gym teacher heard everything and even googled the book (i can't remember the title)...and he was more than terrified. for a bit of context, this happened in 9th grade. that girl is 14/15 idk, i'm not that close to her...and i've seen even younger people (starting AT LEAST from the age of 10) get interested in reading about this stuff. i actually know some of them in real life, and they're all way younger than me (i'm 14!)

in my opinion, this seriously needs to stop being normalized. smut in literature isn't really the biggest problem (even though some writers really rely on smut to make a story), the problem here is how normalized it is to let children, especially pre teens, get away with getting to know about literal porn. in most of these books, sex is completely uncensored and the scenes are rough, same for the dialogues where everything gets sexualized. in this way, i think children will prioritize "having a sex life", because it's seen as nice and normal. THESE are the pieces of media that need to be restricted, not fucking spacehey in the uk...
the problem is that the parents seem to not care: my parents are pretty strict, and they check everything that i create ties with, especially stuff that i buy. if i ever bought a smut book and brang it home, my parents would've freaked out. parents should monitorate their children more, instead of blaming it all on the internet that THEY gave them access to. i litterally have family link and so many apps and websites are blocked. if parents really care about their children, they should take action. they shouldn't let them be.

booktok is partially the reason why so many teens already had their first experience, and it bugs me to see that most of these books are actually targeted to such a young audience. it needs to change! your priority as a pre teen/teenager shouldn't be imitating adults.

thanks for reading, this is a little bit rough lol. see y'all!

-helena