[cw: Ana Valens, CSA, violations of consent, masturbation, et al]

So, here& #39;s a thing.
I saw this take today, basically along the lines of,

"What she did was mostly & #39;fine,& #39;

"or at least kind of functionally & #39;harmless,& #39;

"because there& #39;s no way the other people playing could ever know what she was doing."
Like,

because the players in Fall Guys are fully anonymized,

even if they read her piece, there& #39;s no way they could ever know if she was in their game or not.
Which, to me, basically sounds like,

"Predatory behavior is fine, as long as the people you& #39;re preying on don& #39;t realize it& #39;s happening."
Like, let& #39;s lay it out.

Masturbating to a thought, or a memory, or a fantasy of another adult is probably at least mostly fine,

barring especially gross or predatory circumstances.
Like, it& #39;s definitely possible to do it in a shitty way,

or be shitty *about* it,

but the act itself is, in most reasonable cases, probably at least mostly harmless.
*But* non-consensually *tricking* someone into saying or doing things

*just* so you can masturbate *to* them is clearly manipulative and predatory.
Handing someone the control pad for a sex toy that is currently *inside* you

and telling them it& #39;s a cute, fun video game

is clearly a violation of consent.
It& #39;s a false pretense.

You& #39;re directly involving them in a sexual act that they did *not* knowingly opt into.
And, crucially,

even if they don& #39;t "figure it out," that fact is still true.

You still did that.

You did that *to* them.
In Ana& #39;s case, she did that to *dozens* of people,

all at the same time,

with reckless disregard for whether or not that group contained actual children.
And then she wrote a piece about it

where literally

her *own* fucking conclusion

is that it was creepy, and weird, and clearly unethical, and she& #39;s probably not going to do it again.
I don& #39;t know how you *do* that

and that act "surprised" when people say,

"Hey, that was creepy, and weird, and clearly unethical, and I don& #39;t feel safe right now."
Like, the number of people

who now can& #39;t touch the game

because, the same way you can& #39;t "know" she was there, you can& #39;t know that she wasn& #39;t.
Like, even if you want to be purely fucking consequentialist,

the consequence of her *writing*

is that a *lot* of people with sexual trauma got pretty fucking severely triggered.
Which is not a new thing for Ana.

Triggering people is what she does.

It seems to be the cornerstone of her entire online brand,
which includes harassing actual children *and* deliberately abusing adult survivors of CSA.

It never ends.
Is this the worst thing she& #39;s ever done?

No.

Is it literally the equivalent of actual rape?

Also no.
It& #39;s not the "equivalent" of anything.

It doesn& #39;t *have* to be.

It just *is*, on its own, deeply fucking shitty,

and also a small piece of a bigger, long-running, consistent pattern of shitty, selfish,

predatory, abusive behavior.
And I don& #39;t like watching people I used to respect fucking look at how things stand and say,

"It& #39;s okay because no one found out."
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