You're right, this is the problem. Irresponsible use of “romanticizing” and “glorifying” and the like to describe stories that deviate from your Hayes Code ass expectations.
If someone wrote a manifesto about how sexual assault is Good Actually and sold it to teenage girls, yeah, I'd think they were doing something wrong. But if a grown woman writes erotica about sexual assault because she likes exploring dark themes, and then sells it as explicitly labeled dark erotica for adult readers that involves themes of sexual assault, that is not “glorifying” SA.
Yes, in a dark romance story, dark elements are romanticized. And in a dark erotica story, dark elements are eroticized. It's the core element of the genres: exploring certain themes through the lens of love and desire. Two very powerful emotional & physical experience which makes them very fertile ground for compelling storytelling.
There's this thing in communication studies called the magic bullet theory. It's the idea that the media we consume will immediately make us desire certain things or think certain thoughts, with no ability from the audience to do anything about this. It was popular in the 1930s/40s. It's thesis is that the audience is not active in the media they consume, but instead are passive and will believe whatever message is presented to them, willingly or not.
This is a overgeneralized and outdated model of mass media. We know that this is not how audiences work; we do engage critically with the messages we consume, or at least we all can when we are taught to cultivate critical thinking skills. Herta Herzog developed uses & gratification theory by interviewing housewife fans of soap operas, and found that they were an active audience who sought out the media they engaged with to meet specific needs, much like fans of erotica.
There's a lot of possible motivations to write dark erotica. Maybe the author thinks it's a good way to make money. Maybe they are interested in exploring fucked up situations and their effects on people. Maybe to explore their own trauma and anxieties. Maybe they just think it's hot.
What I am certain is not a motivation, however, is Secretly Convincing The Youth Of America That Underage Incest Is A Good and Noble Pursuit. Which is why these books are not advertised by the authors as such. They are advertised as dark erotica written for the entertainment of adults. Who the author assumes has the critical thinking skills to decide whether they want to engage in the story, and to understand why the story is being told. And if a teenager did happen to read a dark erotica book (because teenagers have interests and kinks, too), they are also not mindless robots who believe anything you tell them. I have faith that a properly educated teenage girl is capable of recognizing that she finds something hot in fiction but would be bad in real life.
It's an act of moral laziness to place all the blame on the existence of these stories. It's certainly easier to ban certain stories on the premise that they are immoral, because they are objects. It's much more challenging to say that human beings have a moral responsibility to engage critically with art and with each other. But that's what we have to do.
Sometimes bad things happen in a fictional book and no one will turn to the camera and explain that these events are very very bad and you shouldn't do them in real life. This is because the book is not an instruction manual and you are not a robot who needs your moral programming delivered via fiction.
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