I donât label myself with a contact stance because I donât care if a minor has the ability to give informed consent or not. My personal boundary is that I wonât romantically or sexually engage with a minor no matter what. Anything else is just pure hypothetical to me.
I feel that there is too much focus on contact stance in the MAP/AAM community and not enough on what people are actually doing.
If a minor says they can give informed consent to sexual activity, it is not my place to argue with them, especially considering how many people are treated as if they donât know themselves or their abilities/needs purely based on their age. I do not know them as intimately as they do themselves. As someone who genuinely loves teenagers and children, it is important to me that they are treated like full people.
And also, at the same time, informed consent is a conversation and not a yes/no question.
I have had kinky sex with an adult partner under the assumption that he understood what was happening and as a result of my assumptions and lack of both check-ins and failure to explicitly tell him that my attempts at aftercare were in fact, aftercare and not just casual chatter/food runs, I ended up causing a traumatic experience for him (complete with flashbacks).
It is soul-crushing to unintentionally harm someone you love, and as a result, I am now very uptight about my pre-sex negotiations to the point of requiring my subs to fill out literal paperwork on their issues, preferences, and limits. (Not to mention never domming our adult partner again! While he doesnât hate us nor has he broken up with us, I donât want to risk harming him again)
So, I suppose in a way, my refusal to engage with minors is a way of protecting them from myself and myself from both the law and someone deciding on a whim that they donât want me anymore. I believe that true love is patient, so people willing to wait for me make me swoon in an odd sort of way.
Regardless, I consider minor/nonminor relationships with an age gap greater than 3-4 years to be high risk and I worry about people in said relationships having said risks leveraged against them. I donât think that theyâre inherently unhealthy, but they require a level of work to remain healthy that most people cannot put in