There exists a lot of misinformation about what contact discourse is, so I thought I should try to explain it in the simplest way possible.
Contact discourse itself is a discussion of ethics of sexual and romantic acts, associated with certain paraphilias. Referring to it as “acting on a paraphilia” is also common, although this is an oversimplified approach – not everyone who commits CSA is a map, and so on. But alternative language for most of such actions did not form yet, and sometimes saying “acting on a paraphilia” is unavoidable.
The words “contact discourse” and some specific contact stances appeared in the map community sometime in late 00s-early 10s. For a long time contact discourse terminology did not leave the map community. The Tumblr map community, consisting heavily of multipara people, applied contact discourse to zoophilia and necrophilia. In 2018 this resulted in multiple clashes with the Twitter zeta community, who objected to existence of anti contact zoophiles, but the idea stuck. Since then contact stances occasionally apply to more paraphilias, although no organized kind of discourse exists around those.
An important point I will probably repeat several times throughout is that contact stances are meant to be used per paraphilia. E.g. if someone is simultaneously an anti contact map and a pro contact zoo, this is not supposed to be smashed together into one singular contact stance. You just say “anti contact map, pro contact zoo”.
Anti contact
This contact stance denotes that you believe engaging in a certain type of a romantic/sexual action (youth age gap, human/animal, etc) to be unethical and/or inadvisable. An anti contact may believe these acts are inherently abusive, carry a really high risk of abuse inherently, or just in the contemporary society. They may also draw the line in different places, for example, at different ages, if we are talking about youth age gap relationships.
What being anti contact does not mean is believing it’s unethical to act on literally all paraphilias – this is a later Tumblr radqueer discourse invention that doesn’t make a lot of sense, since very few genuinely hold this stance. Antis popularized saying “no contact” and “non contact” in place of “anti contact” as a way of erasing the fact that this is an ideological stance and not a lifestyle.
Being anti contact also does not equal being pro recovery, and the pro recovery stance is not a radical variant of being anti contact.
Pro contact
This is a stance in favor of a certain type of romantic/sexual acts. This may concern both endorsement in the present day and a belief that these acts can be permissible in the future, while being unadvisable now (which means that, technically, the same person could have called themself anti contact or pro contact, without changing anything about what they support in practice). Very few of these people actually proclaim they do not care about consent, most genuinely believe the actions they support are consensual.
Pro contacts have often been referred to as “contact” (e.g. “he’s a contact map”) by antis as a part of the same attempt to equate opinions to lifestyle. What being pro contact also does not mean is believing it’s acceptable to commit literally any sexual or romantic acts – this contact stance applies solely to the type of acts being discussed – as in, only youth age gap relationships, or only human/animal relationships, and so on.
It is also worth a note that certain pro contact groups, such as Newgon, are periodically trying to rebrand to “pro choice” or something similar.
Xenosatanism as a subset of the pro contact ideology
Xenosatanism (more fully covered in one of my old posts) is specific branch of pro contact ideology that does question importance of consent for sex overall. Some other adjacent terms include lsdqueer and basedqueer.
Contact neutral
This is the third oldest contact stance, originating in 2019 or around it. It describes either a lack of strong opinions on the ethics of romantic/sexual acts that are being discussed, or refusal to take a stance, dictated by some other reasons.
Contact complex
This contact stance describes a combination of views that separately could have been attributed to some contradicting stances. For example, believing that adults cannot ethically pursue relationships with children, but seeking and spreading CSEM is acceptable.
What being contact complex does not mean is having one contact stance for acting on one paraphilia, and another contact stance for another.
Pro consent
This is not a contact stance that conveys any kind of a message by itself (if we discount just separating from xenosatanism). For two different people it can mean either “pro children consenting” and “pro only having relationships with people old enough to consent”, and you would need bigger context to guess which one it is. This term gained popularity after a Twitter anti misunderstood “pro c” in someone’s bio that way. Both pro cs and anti cs started using it to avoid being branded “anti consent” by someone. As such, this is neither inherently a pro c or an anti c term.
Other contact stances
More contacts stances were coined since, although, much like “pro consent”, not all of them describe what you actually believe in.
Contact content – having a contact stance that applies only to your own actions, without having a general ethical stance.
Contact liberal – pro contact for everything, but with a lot of “buts” (e.g. pro c for human/animal relationships, but only for therians).
Contact selective – anti c for map, zoophilia, necrophilia, and other paraphilias where contact may be harmful (no further clarification provided), pro c for most other paraphilias.
Educontact – believing only in what you found through facts and research.
Fluid contact – changing the contact stance back and forth continuously.
Null contact – believing that nobody is inherently capable of consent without wider context being taken into consideration.
Numevros contact – believing in consent on a case by case basis.
Psychocontact – contact stances concerning fantasies and other ways to fulfill one’s feelings that don’t directly involve another being.
Pro consensual contact – a possible branch off of “pro consent”, self explanatory.
Restricted contact – in favor of romantic contact, against sexual.
These stances are sourced from the Radqueer Emojis carrd. If your follow the links provided there, you can see that quite a bit of them were initially coined by briarthekiddo, also formerly known as Vexia, who believes that teenagers who think they cannot consent should also not speak on discourse issues.
As was already mentioned above, the Tumblr radqueer community specifically has a tendency to present a contact stance as something that applies to literally all possible acts – with children, with animals, with toys, and so on and so forth. This results in numerous people repeating some variant of “I am only pro c for everything consensual” without specifying what exactly they include in their list of consensual – and that carries very little information.
Leave a Reply