Pro-contact

“Pro-contact”, often abbreviated as "pro-c", is an ideological stance in contact discourse. It can be summed up as a belief that sexual and romantic relationships between children or young adolescents and significantly older people do not carry any inherent risks and are permissible.

Possible Variations

Just like the anti-contact ideology, pro-contact beliefs are a spectrum. Some people who identify as pro-contact believe in a total abolition of the age of consent and the possibility of moral and consensual sexual relationships with babies. Some identify as pro-contact with only young teenagers in mind. Some believe youth age gap relationships are okay to participate in right now, some believe they should be avoided till a more equal and safe society is built.

People who have questions and doubts about the fairness of existing laws are often pushed to identify as pro-contact by mapmisiacs, as well as by radicals of the anti-contact movement.

Common Misconceptions

“Pro Abuse”

“Pro contact is pro abuse” was a popular radical anti-contact slogan in 2020. It conveyed the anti-contact view of youth age gap relationships correctly, but created a wrong impression that pro-contact people as a whole do not care about boundaries or health of children. In reality, both sides in contact discourse describe themselves as caring about children.

Predatory Behavior

It is believed that all or most pro-contact individuals are actively seeking CSAM/CSEM or relationships with young people. In reality, most separate their ideology and what they believe to be a reasonable course of action. J. Michael Bailey, a researcher of sexuality, reports that "permissive attitudes regarding child-adult sex and frequent indulgence in sexual fantasies about children were not significantly related to offending".

"SOMAP"

SOMAP, an abbreviation standing for "semi-offending MAP," is a troll term coined by a confirmed anti who ran the fake MAP blog pinkpetal-pedo. It was implied that the term denotes a MAP that has sex with consenting children. However, real pro-contact MAPs either do not use the term "offending" to denote youth age gap relationships at all, or embrace all criminal terminology fully as a part of anti-law rebellion.

Criticism

Normalization And Bigotry

Pro-contact people, more than anti-contact people, are generally more likely to regard their attractions as lying within the norm. This leads to bigotry towards other paraphilias, such as biastophilia (attraction to rape) or erotophonophilia (attraction to murder) that largely mirrors the arguments mapmisiacs have against mapness.

Some pro-contact people also easily adopt amatonormativity and oppose alternative forms of relationships, such as loveless or non-monogamous relationships.

Renaming Attempts

Some activists tried change the core word of contact discourse (i.e. “contact”) and claim “pro c” and “anti c” does not stand for “pro-contact” and “anti-contact”.

The most known case refers to the word pro-consent, a neologism made up by antis and adopted by a pro-contact activist in 2020.
Another slightly older occasion (as early as 2008) is "pro-choice". On the rise of abortion debates in USA (late 2021/early 2022) pro-contact activists from Newgon have picked it up again.

On both occasions, this renaming resulted in some people referring to anti-contact people as “anti-consent” and “anti-choice”, which is why these terms are controversial. The controversy could have been avoided by using a term that cannot be abbreviated as "pro c", such as "freedom of choice", coined in the 4th issue of the AliceLovers Magazine.

Prominent Groups

Besides Newgon, Open Map Community is a group, popular among pro-contacts. Older MAP platforms, such as BoyChat and GirlChat, as well as Visions of Alice also tend to have a pro-contact majority. It's worth to note that exclusively pro-contact groups and forums are rare.