TL;DR-Not saying you can’t have your opinions, but I find you tend to have the most accurate ones when you look deeper into a situation. Our society too easily regurgitates ideas simply because it feels good to spread information, regardless of whether or not it is presenting that information accurately.

Look as a former 16 year old who managed to sweet talk a few older women into sending me nudes, that kind of situation isn’t guaranteed to be entirely on her.

I don’t know any of the details, so if it was like a transactional kind of thing that’s a little messed up. But still she was 20 when it happened. We act like once people turn 18 then suddenly they become privy to all this secret adult knowledge and you just suddenly know what to do and what not to do. She was four years older than the kid she sent a nude to? That’s honestly not that much.

I convinced a 37 year old that I was mature enough to handle a lot more than I really should have. My point being that even with such a large age difference I was never “preyed” upon. If anything I was the manipulator. She was a sad person, and I told myself that making her feel attractive and good about herself was a nice thing. It wasn’t really, I was just a horny teenager who’d say anything to see a naked woman, rationalizing it after the fact doesn’t change that. I preyed on a sad older women who had nobody to turn to, and yet somehow because I was 16 I’m the victim in that scenario?

Life is a lot more complicated than people want to see, so we use things like group think and biases to keep us from stopping and looking at all the details. You can look at all the the people saying she sent nudes to a minor, and just decide to ignore details like context, motivation, even psychological state. I’m not saying once you look at all those you’ll see she’s really not that bad, you’re absolutely within your right to look at those and still think what she did was a terrible thing and she’s a terrible person, but what I am saying is that without doing that you let your reality drift just a little bit away from the actual truth of things.

We’re where we are in the world is precisely because too many people have allowed themselves to drift, we put too much faith in some kind of system, believed that as long we we follow that, as long we we follow our social norms, and everyone lives honestly then things should be good for everyone. The only way to break out of that lie is to look at the details and then decide for yourself. The closest you’re ever going to get to actual free will is that, because most everything else is just cause and effect. But at least we’re free to choose what we think about something, and to me it seems like a waste of that freedom to just repeat what others are saying without providing some new kind of information or perspective.