The Coercion Engine: How Explicit Romance Teaches the Reader to Mistake Control for Love

Abstract

The five companion documents trace what the genre does to attention, belief, the bond, and desire. The Immersion Engine builds the bond, The Voice in Your Ear amplifies it, The Persuasion Engine rewrites belief, The Persistence Engine makes the changes outlast the reading, and The Script Engine writes the reader's private template of desire. This document names what that template is most often made of.

A content profile of the analyzed corpus settles the question. Across 181 novels, the genre's center of gravity is not pleasure and tenderness but power and coercion: dominance and submission as the default relational engine, mafia and captivity settings pervasive, possessive "you belong to me" language as standard, and negotiated, withdrawable consent the minority case ¹. The genre's most-marketed, highest-intensity titles fuse explicit sex with control, surveillance, and force.

Explicit romance does not only engineer desire and attachment. It disproportionately engineers attachment to coercive power, training a script in which control, possession, and surveillance are read as love and protection.

This is a sharper and more consequential claim than an immersion machine alone. The genre takes behaviors that, named plainly, are the diagnostic criteria of an abusive relationship, jealousy, isolation, monitoring, intimidation, refusal to accept a no, and reassigns them as the marks of a love so intense it cannot be contained. It does this on a substrate of real predispositions, and then it trains those predispositions past where they would otherwise rest.

The evidence spans four domains, on one foundation:

1. Why the coercive script resonates: the predispositions the genre is built to exploit
2. Control as devotion: jealousy, possession, and intimate-partner abuse rewritten as love
3. The stalker as protector: surveillance and relentless pursuit rewritten as care
4. Eroticized violence and manufactured non-consent, and grooming rewritten as courtship

1Why It Resonates

The coercion engine works because it is not pushing against the reader. It is pulling on dispositions already there.

Start with the safest and best-supported mechanism: the control paradox. The appeal of a dark, coercive scenario in fiction is that the reader holds total control over a scenario about losing control. Force and ravishment fantasy is common in women and is experienced as arousing precisely because it is authored and bounded by the fantasizer; guided imagery of a realistic assault, by contrast, produces fear, disgust, and no arousal ². The reviews are consistent: erotic force fantasy is widespread, and it is a marker of sexual openness rather than pathology, with force-fantasizing readers scoring higher on erotophilia and self-esteem and lower on sexual guilt ^{3 4}. This is the first turn of the engine, not a caveat against it. Fantasy resonance is not a wish for real harm, and that gap is exactly what makes the coercive script safe enough to consume compulsively, for years, which is the condition under which its normalization accumulates.

The genre also fits the architecture of female arousal. Women's arousal is comparatively responsive and context-driven, and weakly coupled to conscious awareness, so an emotionally saturated narrative of being overwhelmingly, dangerously desired is a more efficient trigger than decontextualized stimulus ⁵. The possessive, obsessive hero is the maximal signal of being wanted: his jealousy reads as proof of value, his refusal to let go as proof of permanence. The genre concentrates that signal.

Underneath sits an evolved layer the genre exploits. Mate-preference research across dozens of cultures finds women place durable weight on a partner's dominance, status, and capacity to protect ⁶, and the protective-but-possessive alpha is a fantasy distillation of exactly that preference, a man dangerous to the world and devoted to her. The attachment neurochemistry the immersion engine runs on is the same machinery a coercive bond hijacks.

Here the engine turns. A predisposition is not a destiny, and the genre does not merely match it; it amplifies it. Sexual-script and cultivation theory both hold that repeated, immersive exposure narrows and entrenches a disposition into a default, and the reinforcing spiral means a mild initial pull is trained into a strong one ⁷. The genre's signature move is to dress this engineered escalation in the language of nature. The omegaverse "fated mate," the "bond" that overrides refusal, the hero who "can't help" his obsession: these devices manufacture inevitability and dissolve the question of consent into biology. "It's fate," "it's instinct," "he was made for you" is not romantic decoration. It is the persuasion device that converts a coercive arrangement into a destined one, and tells the reader her pull toward it is her nature rather than something the genre taught her.

2Control as Devotion

The most pervasive coercive script in the genre is the reassignment of intimate-partner abuse as love. The blockbuster case is documented. A systematic analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey against the established clinical definitions of intimate-partner violence found emotional abuse, stalking, intimidation, and isolation across nearly every interaction, and sexual coercion including the use of alcohol to compromise consent, with the heroine showing the recognized signs of an abused woman, all of it framed as romance ⁸. That novel began as Twilight fan fiction and inherited a template visible in the original: a content analysis of the Twilight saga found pervasive dating-violence indicators, intimidation, isolation, and control, packaged as devotion for a young-adult audience ⁹.

These are not isolated texts. They are the genre's modal relationship. Possessiveness is rendered as security, jealousy as the measure of love, isolation as the couple against the world, and the hero's control of the heroine's body, money, movements, and choices as the proof that she is cherished. The reframing lands. Among young women who read the Fifty Shades series, the books were associated with higher levels of ambivalent, benevolent, and hostile sexism ¹⁰. Read as romance, coercive control stops alarming the reader and starts registering as devotion. The same reframing appears developmentally. Adolescents who construe jealousy and constant monitoring as proof of love are more tolerant of dating violence, treating surveillance and possessiveness as care ¹¹.

The mechanism by which fiction installs this is the sexual script, and it is not speculative. Pornography use predicts sexually coercive attitudes and behavior, and the relationship is mediated by the coercive sexual scripts the media supplies, at the interpersonal and intrapsychic levels ¹²; the path runs from perceived realism of the content through risky scripts and acceptance of coercion to aggression ¹³. That these attitudes are learned, not fixed, is shown by the cleanest design available: an experimental intervention that targeted risky sexual scripts and acceptance of sexual coercion significantly reduced both ¹⁴. Attitudes that can be moved down by deliberate counter-messaging can be moved up by years of immersive pro-coercion narrative. At the population level, meta-analysis ties consumption of sexual media to actual sexual aggression, with violent and coercive content the aggravating factor ¹⁵. The genre is a sustained, pleasurable, first-person delivery system for exactly the scripts this literature warns about.

3The Stalker as Protector

The genre's second coercive script reassigns surveillance and relentless pursuit as care. The behaviors that define stalking, monitoring a person's movements, appearing uninvited, refusing to accept rejection, watching someone without their knowledge, are the genre's standard vocabulary of devotion. In Twilight the hero watches the heroine sleep without her knowledge and tracks her movements, framed throughout as protection ⁹; across the corpus the hidden-camera, the tracking, and the obsessive watch are recast as the hero's inability to bear any distance from her ¹.

The effect of this reframing is measured. In a controlled experiment, exposure to films that framed persistent pursuit as romantic increased stalking-supportive beliefs, the effect strongest for viewers who found the portrayal realistic or were transported by it ¹⁶. Content analysis confirms the supply: across mainstream films, stalking is depicted as more sexualized and more tied to romantic motive than real stalking, blurring the line between courtship and a crime and teaching that persistence pays and a no is not final ¹⁷. The attitudes this trains are real and measurable constructs: a "stalking is romantic" belief sits alongside "stalking isn't serious" and "the victim is to blame," and stronger endorsement predicts excusing a stalker in judgment ¹⁸. Pursuit by an ex or an acquaintance is judged less seriously and more acceptable than the same acts by a stranger, the relational frame licensing the intrusion ¹⁹.

The script has migrated from page to device. Partner location-tracking and monitoring are increasingly read by young people as a sign of care and trust rather than control, the surveillance marketed and experienced through a language of love ²⁰. A genre that has spent decades coding the watched, tracked, never-let-go heroine as the most loved woman in the room is training the same reading: that to be surveilled is to be cherished.

4Eroticized Violence, Manufactured Non-Consent, and Grooming

The genre's most extreme register fuses arousal directly with violence and the violation of consent, and its most loaded pattern rewrites grooming as courtship. Both must be read precisely.

Arousal welded to coercion

A substantial dark tier of the corpus presents coercion itself as the romance: kidnapping, captivity, drugging, and explicit consensual-non-consent with the absence of a safeword named as a feature, the resistance-to-acceptance arc standing in for any negotiation ¹. Consensual non-consent is no longer fringe; in a campus-representative survey a meaningful minority of students had engaged in it, and it co-occurred with a history of partner violence ²¹. The concern is not the existence of force fantasy, which is common and, as the opening section established, safely authored by the fantasizer. The concern is conditioning at scale. Sexual arousal is conditionable in humans: neutral cues paired with real sexual reward acquire arousing properties that persist ²², and the broader account places associative conditioning and dopamine at the center of how arousal attaches to its triggers ²³. Exposure to coercive sexual material also amplifies the content of fantasy directly: men shown a rape-themed depiction subsequently generated more violent sexual fantasies regardless of prior disposition ²⁴. A genre that pairs its most intense arousal with its most coercive scenes, hundreds of times across a reading career, is running exactly the conditioning paradigm this literature describes, welding wanting to violation. The same normalization is documented in the content's social ecosystem, where dark-romance communities are observed to desensitize young readers to explicit material and shift their stated views on consent and boundaries ²⁵.

Grooming rewritten as courtship

This is the genre's most ethically loaded pattern, and it requires care. The novels are written for and marketed to adults, and the analysis here is critical, not an endorsement. The pattern in question is the recurrent age-entry and power-asymmetry plot: the large age gap presented as fated, the guardian or mentor or teacher whose authority over a much younger woman is the engine of desire, and the storyline that defers sexual contact to exactly the eighteenth birthday while building the emotional and sexual relationship well before it. In the corpus these appear in named titles built on a seventeen-to-eighteen entry point and on guardianship over a near-minor subject ¹.

Read against the empirical literature, these plots track the documented stages of sexual grooming. Grooming is a characterized process, victim selection, gaining access and isolation, building trust and emotional dependency, then desensitization to sexual content and contact ²⁶, with a parallel model for adult targets in which control is reframed as care and isolation as intimacy ²⁷. The age-gap and mentor romance arc is that process narrated from the groomer's point of view and scored as love. The deferral of physical contact to the eighteenth birthday does not undo the preceding power violation; it launders it, using a legal milestone to convert an arc of emotional grooming into a permissible romance. This is not a marginal cultural accident. It sits on a documented substrate. Media broadly sexualizes and "adultifies" girls, dressing the underage to read as adult and the adult to read as underage, normalizing an age-ambiguous eroticism ^{28 29}, a bias that falls hardest on Black girls, who are perceived as older and less in need of protection from a very young age ³⁰. The cognitive footprint is measurable: exposure to "barely legal" material, in which adults are styled to appear younger, primes sexual associations with youthful depictions even when viewers do not consciously endorse them ³¹. And the script is exploitable in exactly the direction the genre rehearses: predators are documented to use the performance of an ideal, attentive heteronormative courtship as the grooming itself, the romance script blinding a partner and a community to the abuse beneath it ³². The genre supplies that script, polished and desirable, to an audience that includes its youngest and most impressionable readers.

5The Closed Loop

The coercion engine completes the series by naming what the other engines train.

1. The script resonates because it pulls on the control paradox, on responsive female arousal, and on an evolved preference for dominance and protection, dispositions the genre exploits and then amplifies past their origin.
2. Control is rewritten as devotion, so jealousy, isolation, monitoring, and intimidation are decoded as the marks of a love too intense to contain, and the reframing measurably tracks more coercion-accepting attitudes.
3. Surveillance and relentless pursuit are rewritten as protection, training the belief that to be watched and never released is to be cherished.
4. Arousal is welded to violation, and grooming is narrated as courtship, on a cultural substrate that already sexualizes youth and asymmetry.

Each move feeds the next, and the reinforcing spiral carries a mild initial pull into a trained default while the language of fate and biology tells the reader the pull is her nature. The immersion engine explains why she cannot put the book down, the persuasion engine what she comes to believe, the script engine what she comes to want, the persistence engine why none of it clears when she stops. The coercion engine explains the shape of the thing being built: a reader fluent in reading control as love, possession as devotion, and surveillance as care, trained by the most pleasurable teacher there is.

The genre's deepest lesson is not that love is intense. It is that the marks of being controlled are the marks of being loved, and it teaches that lesson one irresistible book at a time.

References

Footnotes

1. Content profile of the project's 181-novel romance corpus, derived from automated text sampling and analytical estimation rather than exact measurement. Across the corpus, dominance and submission is the default relational engine, mafia, captivity, and stalker dynamics are pervasive to common, negotiated and withdrawable consent (safewords, honored refusals) is the minority pattern, and the highest-intensity titles concentrate coercion; several authors ship explicit trigger warnings, indicating the extremity is deliberate and marketed. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Bond, Sandra B., and Donald L. Mosher. "Guided Imagery of Rape: Fantasy, Reality, and the Willing Victim Myth." Journal of Sex Research 22, no. 2 (1986): 162–183. Volitional erotic force fantasy produced arousal and positive affect, while guided imagery of a realistic assault produced fear and disgust and no arousal, the control of the fantasy being the operative difference. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498609551298 ↩

3. Critelli, Joseph W., and Jenny M. Bivona. "Women's Erotic Rape Fantasies: An Evaluation of Theory and Research." Journal of Sex Research 45, no. 1 (2008): 57–70. A review placing the prevalence of women's force/rape fantasy across studies and finding the best-supported account to be openness to sexuality, not pathology or blame-avoidance. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490701808191 ↩

4. Strassberg, Donald S., and Lisa K. Lockerd. "Force in Women's Sexual Fantasies." Archives of Sexual Behavior 27, no. 4 (1998): 403–414; and Bivona, Jenny M., Joseph W. Critelli, and Michael J. Clark, "Women's Rape Fantasies: An Empirical Evaluation of the Major Explanations," Archives of Sexual Behavior 41, no. 5 (2012): 1107–1119. Women with more frequent force fantasies scored higher on erotophilia and self-esteem and lower on sexual guilt, supporting an openness-to-sexuality explanation. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018740210472 ↩

5. Chivers, Meredith L., Michael C. Seto, Martin L. Lalumière, Ellen Laan, and Teresa Grimbos. "Agreement of Self-Reported and Genital Measures of Sexual Arousal in Men and Women: A Meta-Analysis." Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 1 (2010): 5–56. Women's genital and subjective arousal are weakly correlated (r = .26 vs. .66 for men), consistent with a more responsive, context-driven arousal system operating partly below conscious awareness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-009-9556-9 ↩

6. Buss, David M. "Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12, no. 1 (1989): 1–49. Across 37 cultures, women placed consistent weight on a prospective mate's status, resources, and capacity to protect and provide. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00023992 ↩

7. Slater, Michael D. "Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity." Communication Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 281–303. Selective exposure and media effects form a self-reinforcing loop, so a mild predisposition and the content that matches it amplify each other over time. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00296.x ↩

8. Bonomi, Amy E., Lauren E. Altenburger, and Nicole L. Walton. "'Double Crap!' Abuse and Harmed Identity in Fifty Shades of Grey." Journal of Women's Health 22, no. 9 (2013): 733–744. Systematic analysis against CDC definitions found pervasive emotional abuse, stalking, intimidation, isolation, and sexual coercion, framed throughout as romance. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2013.4344 ↩

9. Collins, Victoria E., and Dianne C. Carmody. "Deadly Love: Images of Dating Violence in the 'Twilight Saga.'" Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 26, no. 4 (2011): 382–394. A content analysis of the four novels found pervasive dating-violence indicators, intimidation, isolation, stalking, and control, romanticized for a young-adult audience. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109911428425 ↩ ↩²

10. Altenburger, Lauren E., Christin L. Carotta, Amy E. Bonomi, and Anastasia Snyder. "Sexist Attitudes Among Emerging Adult Women Readers of Fifty Shades Fiction." Archives of Sexual Behavior 46, no. 2 (2017): 455–464. Reading the series was associated with higher ambivalent, benevolent, and hostile sexism in emerging adult women. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0724-4 ↩

11. Lelaurain, Solveig, Agathe Faruci, Charlotte Pecqueux, and Léa Restivo. "'If She Isn't Jealous, That Means She Doesn't Love Me': Representations of Love Among French Early Adolescents and the Link with Perceptions of Dating Violence." Journal of Early Adolescence (2025). Adolescents who read jealousy and constant monitoring as proof of love were more tolerant of dating violence. https://doi.org/10.1177/02724316251360391 ↩

12. Marshall, Emily A., Holly A. Miller, and Jeffrey A. Bouffard. "Bridging the Theoretical Gap: Using Sexual Script Theory to Explain the Relationship Between Pornography Use and Sexual Coercion." Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36, no. 9–10 (2021): 5215–5238; replicated in Marshall and Miller, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 38, no. 7–8 (2023): 5519–5541. The link between consuming coercive sexual media and sexual coercion is mediated by acquired sexual scripts. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260518795170 ↩

13. Krahé, Barbara, Paulina Tomaszewska, and Isabell Schuster. "Links of Perceived Pornography Realism with Sexual Aggression via Sexual Scripts, Sexual Behavior, and Acceptance of Sexual Coercion." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 1 (2021): 63. A path model in which perceived realism of sexual media leads through risky scripts and acceptance of coercion to sexual aggression. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19010063 ↩

14. Schuster, Isabell, Paulina Tomaszewska, and Barbara Krahé. "Changing Cognitive Risk Factors for Sexual Aggression: Risky Sexual Scripts, Low Sexual Self-Esteem, Perception of Pornography, and Acceptance of Sexual Coercion." Journal of Interpersonal Violence 37, no. 3–4 (2022). An experimental, longitudinal intervention reduced risky sexual scripts and acceptance of sexual coercion, demonstrating these attitudes are learned and movable. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520922341 ↩

15. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. "A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies." Journal of Communication 66, no. 1 (2016): 183–205. Across 22 studies in seven countries, consumption was associated with sexual aggression, with violent content the aggravating factor. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201 ↩

16. Lippman, Julia R. "I Did It Because I Never Stopped Loving You: The Effects of Media Portrayals of Persistent Pursuit on Beliefs About Stalking." Communication Research 45, no. 3 (2018): 394–421. Exposure to films framing persistent pursuit as romantic raised stalking-supportive beliefs, most strongly for viewers high in perceived realism or narrative transportation. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650215570653 ↩

17. Schultz, Amy S., Jodi Moore, and Brian H. Spitzberg. "Once Upon a Midnight Stalker: A Content Analysis of Stalking in Films." Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 5 (2014): 612–635. Mainstream films depict stalking as more sexualized and more romantically motivated than real-world stalking, blurring the line between courtship and crime. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2013.809475 ↩

18. McKeon, Bronwyn, Troy E. McEwan, and Stefan Luebbers. "'It's Not Really Stalking If You Know the Person': Measuring Community Attitudes That Normalize, Justify and Minimise Stalking." Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 22, no. 2 (2015): 291–306. Stalking-supportive attitudes form measurable factors, including "stalking is romantic," and stronger endorsement predicted excusing a stalker in a mock case. https://doi.org/10.1080/13218719.2014.945637 ↩

19. Becker, Andréa, Thomas E. Ford, and Timothy J. Valshtein. "Confusing Stalking for Romance: Examining the Labeling and Acceptability of Men's (Cyber)Stalking of Women." Sex Roles 85, no. 1 (2021): 73–87. Stalking by an ex-partner or acquaintance was less likely to be labeled stalking and rated more acceptable than identical behavior by a stranger. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01205-2 ↩

20. Levy, Karen, and Bruce Schneier. "Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships." Journal of Cybersecurity 6, no. 1 (2020): tyaa006. Intimate surveillance is culturally marketed and experienced through narratives of care and safety, which masks its coercive function; partner monitoring is increasingly normalized among young people as a sign of love. https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyaa006 ↩

21. Herbenick, Debby, Tsung-Chieh Fu, Dan N. Carver, et al. "Prevalence and Correlates of Sexual Choking and Consensual Non-Consent (CNC) Among College Students." Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 51, no. 2 (2025): 224–242. A meaningful minority of students had engaged in consensual non-consent, which co-occurred with a history of partner violence. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2025.2458173 ↩

22. Hoffmann, Heather, Kathryn Peterson, and Hana Garner. "Field Conditioning of Sexual Arousal in Humans." Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2 (2012): 17336. A neutral cue paired with real sexual activity acquired arousal-eliciting properties that persisted, evidence that human sexual arousal is conditionable to initially neutral stimuli. https://doi.org/10.3402/snp.v2i0.17336 ↩

23. Brom, Mirte, Stephanie Both, Ellen Laan, Walter Everaerd, and Philip Spinhoven. "The Role of Conditioning, Learning and Dopamine in Sexual Behavior: A Narrative Review of Animal and Human Studies." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 38 (2014): 38–59. Sexual arousal acquires its triggers through associative learning, with dopamine central to the process. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.10.014 ↩

24. Malamuth, Neil M. "Rape Fantasies as a Function of Exposure to Violent Sexual Stimuli." Archives of Sexual Behavior 10, no. 1 (1981): 33–47. Men exposed to a rape-themed depiction subsequently produced more violent sexual fantasies, regardless of prior disposition. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542673 ↩

25. Fortune, Teagan Bailey. "Rape Beyond Fantasy: Exploring the Influence of BookTok's Erotica and Dark Romance Literature on Young Adult Perceptions of Consent and Boundaries." Master's thesis, University of Northern Colorado, 2024. A content analysis of BookTok posts and comments found the community desensitizing young readers to explicit material and shifting their stated views on consent and boundaries. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/theses/336 ↩

26. Winters, Georgia M., and Elizabeth L. Jeglic. "Stages of Sexual Grooming: Recognizing Potentially Predatory Behaviors of Child Molesters." Deviant Behavior 38, no. 6 (2017): 724–733. Grooming follows a characterized sequence: victim selection, gaining access and isolation, trust and dependency building, and desensitization to sexual content and contact. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2016.1197656 ↩

27. Sinnamon, Grant V. "The Psychology of Adult Sexual Grooming: Sinnamon's Seven-Stage Model of Adult Sexual Grooming." In The Psychology of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior, 459–487. Academic Press, 2017. A parallel grooming model for adult targets in which control is reframed as care and isolation as intimacy through a priming stage that builds emotional dependency. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809287-3.00016-X ↩

28. American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2007/2008); with Lamb and Koven, "Sexualization of Girls: Addressing Criticism of the APA Report, Presenting New Evidence," SAGE Open 9, no. 4 (2019). Media across virtually every form sexualizes girls and young women, with documented harms; the findings held on post-2007 review. https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report ↩

29. Gerding Speno, Ashton, and Jennifer Stevens Aubrey. "Sexualization, Youthification, and Adultification: A Content Analysis of Images of Girls and Women in Popular Magazines." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 95, no. 3 (2018): 625–646. Magazines both "adultify" girls and "youthify" women, and adultified girls were more likely to be provocatively dressed, normalizing an age-ambiguous eroticism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699017728918 ↩

30. Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls' Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017. Adults perceived Black girls as older, more knowledgeable about sex, and less in need of protection than white girls, beginning as young as age five. https://genderjusticeandopportunity.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/girlhood-interrupted.pdf ↩

31. Paul, Bryant, and Daniel G. Linz. "The Effects of Exposure to Virtual Child Pornography on Viewer Cognitions and Attitudes Toward Deviant Sexual Behavior." Communication Research 35, no. 1 (2008): 3–38. Exposure to "barely legal" material, in which adults are styled to appear younger, primed sexual associations with youthful depictions even absent explicit endorsement. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650207309359 ↩

32. Dominelli, Lena, and Nicole Hennum. "Adult Women Groomed by Child Molesters' Heteronormative Dating Scripts." Child Abuse & Neglect (2016). Perpetrators used the performance of an ideal heteronormative courtship as grooming, the romance script blinding partners and communities to the abuse beneath it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277539516000443 ↩