This post is basically a reprint of my previous post on the topic, with some new propositions and corrected terminology. Initially I was intending to edit the original, but ended up thinking it’s best to have two versions to document some changes.

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. I introduced the concept “acts associated with paraphilias” (AAWP for short) several months ago, but it’s yet to catch on. Pay attention to this phrase – this abbreviation will be repeated in this text.

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 acts associated with 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 AAWPs, although no organized kind of contact discourse exists when it comes to topics of most other paraphilias.

Contact discourse is reserved for acts that are considered ethically controversial by discourse participants. Acts that are more universally recognized as harmless or harmful do not, as a rule, cause contact discourse.

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, inherently carry a really high risk of abuse, or just harmful 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.

Misconception: being anti contact means being against AAW all paraphilias.

Fact: an anti contact stance is specific and targeted. Someone may be anti contact in regards to youth age gap relationships while being pro contact for relationships with corpses. This way to use contact stances came first, the misconception did not exist till 2022, and it makes more sense to stick to the original definition, since it allows nuance and clarity.

Misconception: the stance is called “no contact” or “non contact”.

Fact: “no contact” and “non contact” terms were made up by antis misreading the “no” in “nomap” (“non offending minor attracted person”). These terms do not convey that being anti contact is an ideological position rather than a lifestyle choice and should not be used synonymously.

Misconception: being anti contact means never interacting with who you are attracted to.

Fact: anti contact is a position against harm, so it focuses on potentially traumatic intimate involvement, not on casually coexisting in the same space. The anti contact position also does not include any difference between paraphiliac and non-paraphiliac individuals in terms of what actions they are or aren’t supposed to do.

Misconception: being anti contact is related to medicalization of paraphilias and wanting people to recover from them.

Fact: a view of paraphilia as something one can recover from was imposed onto the para community by antis and has nothing to do with being anti contact.

Adjacent stances:

Anti practicing – similar to anti contact in meaning and purpose, somewhat more focused on building unity between those who reject AAWPs here and now, regardless of these people’s stance on advocacy related to the future. This term was coined and promoted by a para organization PACHE throughout 2024.

Contact selective – anti contact for sexual/romantic acts with children, animals, and corpses, with a potential to extend it to something else if necessary.

Hazard consent – anti contact for acts with children, animals, relatives, and any situation where consent was not expressed. The stance has a focus on harm reduction and rehabilitation.

Limited contact – anti contact for acts with children and animals.

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 inadvisable 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.

Misconception: being pro contact means being supportive of AAW all paraphilias.

Fact: just like with being anti contact, this stance is only meant to be applied to acts related to a specific paraphilia.

Misconception: there exists such a thing as “pro contact behavior”.

Fact: “pro contact” refers solely to the belief that acts are permissible. A behavior cannot be pro contact, it only can be abusive or predatory – and in many cases of something being labeled “pro contact behavior”, it’s not even these things.

Misconception: all contact stances that are not anti contact are actually pro contact.

Fact: while other contact stances may have pro contact elements, some of them also have anti contact elements or present a sort of a contact discourse meta – a stance about stances rather than about what acts you support.

Adjacent stances:

Agmap – standing for “anti grooming map”, this is a stance for pro contact maps that explicitly condemns grooming.

Freedom of choice – another pro contact stance that emphasizes willingness of the supposed child partner. Existence of this term has later led to some pro contacts trying to relabel as pro choice, which was a poor choice of terminology.

Pro reform – in context of pro contact views, this stance is used to denote the speaker supports changing laws related to legality of sex (such as age of consent laws). However, this term is vague and may be used by people of other contact stances to express something else.

Xenosatanism spectrum stances – xenosatanism is an ideology that includes a belief that consent is not inherently necessary. In addition to that, the coiner of this ideology has come up with a sliding scale of stances, from “s pro c” that only accepts sex acts with informed and willing participants to “h pro c” that accepts rape.

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. It can be regarded as a meta stance (a stance on the discourse itself).

Adjacent stances:

Contact void – rejection of contact stances. This is a meta stance that is connected to refusal to participate in contact discourse, rather than lack of opinions or lack of care about the topic.

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.

Misconception: having one contact stance for AAW one paraphilia, but a different contact stance for AAW another paraphilia makes you contact complex.

Fact: having different stances for different things is not complex. The contact complex label is reserved only for holding varying beliefs about one singular subject.

Pro consent

This is not a contact stance that conveys any kind of a message by itself. 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.

Adjacent stances:

Pro consensual contact – this stance has the same ambiguity as the pro consent stance itself, but is more likely to be used by pro contacts who want to emphasize their belief in consent (similar to agmap).

Other contact stances

More contacts stances were coined since. Some of them are contact discourse meta stances. Most of the stances are taken from the Radqueer Emoji carrd.

Anon contact – a term for when one prefers not to disclose their contact stance.

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).

Educontact – believing only in what you found through facts and research. This is a meta stance.

Fluid contact – changing the contact stance back and forth continuously.

Mirrored contact – mirroring the contact stance of another person.

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. This stance has two subtypes, selective, that excludes acts with children, animals, and corpses, and liberal, which includes them.

Restricted contact – in favor of romantic contact, against sexual. Later recoined as conbloom.

Personally, I maintain the view that most contact stances beyond anti c, pro c, c neutral, and c complex are unnecessary. A lot of them appeared after someone has spread the idea that a contact stance must cover the entirety of your views on romantic/sexual behavior, as opposed to a small fragment of them, they are very narrow niche terms for what could be easier conveyed with “I am pro c for this, but anti c for that”. Others are repetitive and almost synonymous.

I use contact stances as political terms that describe your views on how some AAWP should be approached. I see them similarly to terms “leftist”, “anti transmed”, “pro life”, or “conservative”. Some other discourse participants, however, push for seeing them as personal labels for your relationship with your own sexuality, and this also decreases the quality of discourse, because they interpret attempts to simplify or alter this terminology the same way one would interpret being offered to use a different sexuality label.

We do need terminology that’s simple, impersonal, nonjudgemental, and can convey what we think about this or that AAWP in the most general form, leaving room for nuance in the follow up discussion. I really wish the original contact discourse labels to be this terminology.