#people really really want Core Twentians to see their childhood as awful or abusive and not a way children should ever be raised

[echofromtheabyss]

This is something you all collectively need to understand about the trope of the Gen Xr who read Stephen King or VC Andrews despite not being allowed to, or "this is why we are the way we are," etc. Also, 70s-80s kid and young adult stuff goes HARD. The culture was legitimately different. This was normal reading for middle school. Everyone I knew was reading Stephen King at age 12. This isn't something that adults thought was abnormal, that kids did anyway, unless we're talking a religious family. No, it's just what we were reading. And the advanced readers moved on to classics and in general, adult work, relatively quickly and it was VERY hard to go from reading the hard-ass themes in Twain and Dickens and Dumas and Steinbeck to reading contemporary kids' work. (I graduated from classic lit to sci fi.) Also, much less stuff was written for a gender silo like it is now, even by the male writers. EVERYONE read Stephen King.

This was just normal. It was the culture. This was massively shared culture with other Gen Xrs and also with Jones and Boomers. No Gen Xr reading Stephen King was really doing anything ABNORMAL and we didn't think of ourselves as "sneaking" anything unless we were from *that* type of family. This was simply shared culture of the 80s.