Half a year ago I made a post titled “Contact discourse basics”, which was meant to provide a reference for how I understand contact stances and how I believe they should be used. I mentioned briefly that these terms have a completely different usage on contemporary Tumblr.
I clashed with a cluster of Tumblr users who believe in some combination of the following things:
1) Contact discourse refers to all types of contact, including just completely casual interactions, rather than sex/romance.
2) Contact stances describe your personal lifestyle choices rather than what you believe is best practice as a whole.
3) Contact stances apply only to behavior of paraphiliacs.
4) A singular contact stance is meant to cover your attitude towards acting on all sexual interest, e.g. if you’re against youth age gap relationships, but supportive of dating inanimate objects, you are contact-complex rather than anti contact for one and pro contact for the other.
These views only gained popularity in the second half of 2022, this is not how this terminology is used by most people across the para community, and it legitimately makes discourse harder to navigate. So I made a survey aiming to track how exactly people view contact stances. The survey received 133 responses total, with a couple of people skipping some questions.
I asked a question about what site respondents use to connect to the para community, and in hindsight, it should have been a multiple choice question.
These are the general results versus Tumblr only results:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
As you can see, the majority agrees that:
1) Contact discourse deals only with sexual and romantic interactions, with a possibility for something additional, but not literally all.
2) Contact stances are applied to everyone’s behavior, not just the holder of the stance.
3) Contact stances are applied to behavior of non-paraphiliacs too.
4) A singular contact stance describes one’s attitude to some acts, not all.
It seems like there isn’t much difference between Tumblr and non-Tumblr paras, and in many cases Tumblr results show even a more reasonable lean. I am not sure to what degree these results are affected by me not providing a multiple choice option for the question about site usage. I’m ready to admit that my own grudge against para Tumblr, caused by my nostalgia over its pre purge era, is leading me to pin this problem onto it unreasonably.
After arriving at that conclusion, I started looking for other possible correlations. I took the answers I previously noticed among that cluster of bloggers (answers to the first 4 questions of the survey “Any kind”, “Only one’s own behavior”, “Only paraphiliacs”, and “All”) and I found some weak correlations between all of them except 2 and 4.
22 people have responded “Any kind” to the question “What kind of interactions does contact discourse cover?”.
5 out of them, which is 22.7%, have responded “Only one’s own behavior” to the question “Is a contact stance something one applies only to oneself and one’s own behavior, or also to others?”, and that is 5.3% bigger than the general sample.
2 out of them, which is 9%, have responded “Only paraphiliacs” to the question “Do contact stances regulate only acts done by paraphiliacs, or everyone else as well?”, and that is equal to the general sample.
5 out of 21, which is 23.8%, have responded “All” to the question “If someone has a certain contact stance, is it supposed to describe their views on acts, associated with all paraphilias, or only several (e.g. map, zoo)?”, and that is 8.5% bigger than the general sample.
23 people have responded “Only one’s own behavior” to the question “Is a contact stance something one applies only to oneself and one’s own behavior, or also to others?”.
5 out of them, which is 21.7%, have responded “Any kind” to the question “What kind of interactions does contact discourse cover?”, and that is 5.2% bigger than the general sample.
4 out of them, which is 18.4%, have responded “Only paraphiliacs” to the question “Do contact stances regulate only acts done by paraphiliacs, or everyone else as well?”, and that is 9.4% bigger than the general sample.
3 out of 22, which is 13.6%, have responded “All” to the question “If someone has a certain contact stance, is it supposed to describe their views on acts, associated with all paraphilias, or only several (e.g. map, zoo)?”, and that is 1.7% smaller than the general sample.
12 people have responded “Only paraphiliacs” to the question “Do contact stances regulate only acts done by paraphiliacs, or everyone else as well?”.
2 of them, which is 16.7%, have responded “Any kind” to the question “What kind of interactions does contact discourse cover?”, and that is 0.2% bigger than the general sample.
4 of them, which is 33.3%, have responded “Only one’s own behavior” to the question “Is a contact stance something one applies only to oneself and one’s own behavior, or also to others?”, and that is 15.9% bigger than the general sample.
3 of them, which is 25%, have responded “All” to the question “If someone has a certain contact stance, is it supposed to describe their views on acts, associated with all paraphilias, or only several (e.g. map, zoo)?”, and that is 9.7% bigger than the general sample.
20 people have responded “All” to the question “If someone has a certain contact stance, is it supposed to describe their views on acts, associated with all paraphilias, or only several (e.g. map, zoo)?”.
5 of them, which is 25%, have responded “Any kind” to the question “What kind of interactions does contact discourse cover?”, and that is 8.5% bigger than the general sample.
3 of them, which is 15%, have responded “Only one’s own behavior” to the question “Is a contact stance something one applies only to oneself and one’s own behavior, or also to others?”, and that is 2.4% smaller than the general sample.
3 of them, which is 15%, have responded “Only paraphiliacs” to the question “Do contact stances regulate only acts done by paraphiliacs, or everyone else as well?”, and that is 6% bigger than the general sample.
I’d need a bigger sample to say anything certain, so these calculations were mostly for fun.
What can say, however, is why I am happy to know that these views make up only a loud minority and why they alarm me to begin with.
I do not believe in contact discourse as a component of para discourse, and I do not wish to frame contact stances as guidelines for paraphiliacs to interact with objects of their attraction. Yes, contact discourse was born out of the para community – but not because contact stances shouldn’t apply to non-paras. Rather, because we needed to say that defense of a certain type of a sexual or romantic act (“acting on a paraphilia”) is not an inherent part of being a para. The principles we should follow are all the same, no matter what our attractions are, and the society has a lot to answer for.
Most positions I criticized in this post are something I first heard from antis. It is in antis’ best interest to tie contact discourse to having a paraphilia and to equate the anti contact position to more and more restricting demands placed onto paraphiliacs. As a long-standing anti contact, over and over I heard from them “I want you to admit being pro c and get caught abusing someone”. The same antis overlook and excuse grooming and abuse committed by other antis.
The way I see contact discourse, it is a discussion about harmless versus harmful acts and their separation from orientation terms like “pedophilia” or “zoophilia”. No specific actions should be forced onto a person or assumed about them because they have a paraphilia. For the longest time, the idea of being against child sexual abuse was bastardized into “anti pedophilia”, and being anti contact allows me to deconstruct it, to say I am against it in a way that does not imply that I judge anyone for their attractions or that I only protest acts that are done with excessive pain and violence.
I don’t want antis, or anyone else, to take that away.
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