Dear girls, be intensely wary of men considerably older than you obsessed with “mentoring” you. They’re most likely trying to groom you. Speaking from experience.
I want to make it clear I’m not just speaking to underage/teen girls. Any younger girl, and this can happen to not that young women as well.
Just because the guy isn’t technically a pedophile, doesn’t make him any less predatory. When you’re in your 20s you may not be a kid anymore, but you’re not fully developed as an adult either. You’re still vulnerable to predators who have the advantage of more experience and thus tools you don’t yet have, in addition to the other advantage of power imbalance due to gendered relations.
A man who wants to be your mentor, especially if he says he wants to “shape” you or anything similar, is a man who’s trying to turn you into his puppet, to make you “develop” (be molded) into the girl/woman that serves his pleasure, even if not directly sexual.
There’s predators who get off on the intellectual performance of the younger female objects of their obsessions. There’s predators who get off on your social development fitting their not-necessarily sexual fantasies. There’s predators who get off on the idea of taking a depressed girl and becoming her “savior”.
There’s people who get off to feet and fucking statues, you best believe there’s predators who get immense satisfaction from mental games against vulnerable girls/women even if they’re not (directly) sexual. And even if those things aren’t sexual at all to you, it will fuck you up. Because you’ll know or feel that you’re being used against your will, that you’re not being treated as a human, you’ll feel trapped, you’ll feel controlled, you’ll feel hopeless and disgusted with what he’s turning you into.
It’s about control, it’s about possession, it’s about ownership of who you are, it’s about having the perfect doll to play with.
It’s about you becoming mentally, emotionally, intellectually, socially dependent on them. It’s about a boost of their egos.
Regardless of your age, but especially if you’re considerably younger than him, and you see signs of him being fixated on this, RUN AS SOON AS YOU CAN.
Can people reblog this version? Because I’m tired of people who supposedly care about abuse victims dropping any concern and compassion for female victims of grooming as soon as a girl turns 18 like she wasn’t a literal kid five minutes ago.
I don’t normally contribute to posts outside of tags, but I want to share that I am in my early 20s and had this happen to me with a supervisor at work. Dude even went so far as straight up admitting to me that he’s a “narcissist who preys on younger women,” and I still fell for it because I was extremely emotionally compromised at the time. He treated me differently based on how much attention I paid to him and how I responded to his sexual advances. For the sake of my job comfort, all I was concerned about was doing what I thought would earn his favor, and it caused my mental health to continue to spiral without me even realizing that it was the cause at first.
It’s called quid pro sexual harassment when a supervisor behaves that way toward those in lower positions, by the way. It’s illegal, and you can take action against an employer for not dealing with it appropriately. After a good few months of doing everything I possibly could to please him, including in a sexual way on a couple of instances, I finally got sick of it and started breaking out of his grasp, and his behavior toward me lowkey became overly critical and antagonistic. I blocked his number and finally reported him for sexual harassment. It turned out that others had been affected by him too and came forward after I reported, and he got fired. I have been very careful not to let anyone else know that it was me who reported him first out of fear, but I’m so proud that I started that chain reaction that was necessary to get him out of there.
This happened to me at my last job. He wanted to "coach" and "mentor" me, turn me into "something with actual promise". He got off on controlling my work social life first, cutting me off from the other departments. Then started on my food/weight/exercise and manipulated me into basically doing whatever he wanted and could have done so much fucking damage to my body, because he said my disabilities were an emotional response that I was creating and he could cure me from. I questioned that and like a true narrsicist, he turned on me and abused the fuck out of me and there was nothing I could do because suddenly I was alone. I ended up quitting before he got me fired. He literally tanked my Year review and made it out that I wasn't able to do my job, even tho I had already gotten my year raise the month before because my work was great. He could have killed me with the physical stuff he was pushing me to do, literally. He tried/did the same thing with about 7 people. He finally left over a year later and moved away because all of the bridges were finally burnt. I'm still recovering.
