Contact-neutral

Contact-neutral or contact neutral (alternatively neutral contact, neu c) is an identity in contact discourse. Contact-neutral people do not consider themselves either pro-contact or anti-contact and typically oppose being grouped with either.

Meaning

Being contact-neutral can mean not having strong opinions on the ethics of youth age gap relationships or refusing to express opinions and pick a side. Those who hold this label agree that they don't identify as neither pro-, complex- nor anti-contact, and usually do not associate their personal stances with those listed. The underlying reasons are highly individual. Very often contact-neutral people dislike contact discourse and consider it counterproductive and irrelevant, and sometimes this label is adopted by those who used to align with either pro or anti-contact positions, but ended up no longer wanting to engage with this discourse. Some contact-neutral people actively invest in other spheres of activism, such as creating support networks for maps or educating people about youth liberation, and simply avoid political statements on the topic of relationships between adults and children as way less important. Some choose to exist in the map community apolitically.

Subjective interpretations

Contrary to popular belief, contact-neutrality does not necessarily denote apoliticality. One may consider oneself contact-neutral, but support one or more, sometimes even all of the other sides of contact discourse, their concepts or ideas, yet refrain from directly campaigning for any of them or spreading as objectively true. For example, many contact-neutral people put map unity first, preach tolerance of all maps, and view contact labels and radical representatives of either stance as a potential threat.>

This fully applies to those who believe that contact discourse is the cause of disputation between maps, and therefore seek to prevent aggressive contact discourse in order to avoid the separation of one side or the other, as well as any kind of social polarization within the community. At times this implies the use of any means, and thus the possibility of political agitation for unity regardless of the contact label, rather than for the ideas of acceptability or unacceptability, healthiness or unhealthiness of relationships with youth.

Misconceptions

Pro-contact and anti-contact radicals both falsely accuse contact-neutral people of secretly belonging to the opposite side. Being contact-neutral is also different from being contact-complex, because the latter implies a system of complicated and sometimes rather detailed views

Difference from contact-complex

As noted above, a person who positions themselves as a contact-neutral may at the same time support or adhere to any other already existing position, so there can possibly be an overlap between contact neutrality and the views that fall under the definition of contact-complex or any other ideology in some instances, which does not create any contradictions with the lexical and sociological definitions of the contact neutrality concept. However, these terms per se are not identical.