Is there a way to make jQuery use objects in a conditional statement as an object in a hierarchy. For Example, I want to validate that something exist then tell it to do something just using the this selector.

Like this

if ($(".tnImg").length) {

//i have to declare what object I am targeting here to get this to work

            $(this).animate({
            opacity: 0.5,   
            }, 200 );
  }

Is there a way to get jQuery to do this? I guess theres not a huge benefit but i still am curious