Repost of something I wrote recently, but have been planning to for over two years. I've got that perfectionism in my brain telling me to shape my words certain ways and put things off for The Time that often never comes, but it can sometimes actually be so easy to say even everything I've wanted to say once I let go of it and go literally low effort.
On the youth age gap contact discourse and mostly the fediverse but relevant to other environments too, from someone who has in the past spent a while not being anti-contact and being around pro-contacts.
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NNIAns becoming pro-c & the other way around being less visible did not mean pro-cs were right. I leaned pro/complex-c basically based on vibes. I became anti-c from witnessing the behavior of pro-cs, the way lots of those who positioned themselves as very youthlib kept being adultist and age essentialist, and my thoughts were like jesus, you folx certainly shouldn't be let anywhere fucking near someone with a social/neurological position of a child/young teen, and if that's so for self-professed youthlibs how it's fucking got to be for the general population.
There also has always been so fucking little contact-discourse from anti-cs on NNIA, self-censorship, meanwhile pro-cs were forbidden to pro-c on NNIA but did lots of that on the other instances. So users saw little anti-c argumentation but lots of pro-c both argumentation and just "anti-cs suck" things.
And also I saw so little of pro-cs criticizing other pro-cs despite supposedly having different positions.
I was not "radicalized into pro-contactism". I radicalized into anti-contactism.
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The last sentence is a reference/response to another anti-c using the phrase "radicalizing into pro-contactism" about former anti-cs going pro-c
