I've started to think English really loses something by not really having a concept of "public face" and "private face" as eg Chinese and Japanese do.

In English, if I hang out with some friends and smile at everyone, and then go home and rant to my family about That One Dude

Who's dating my friend and I can't stand him, I'm lying. I'm being "two-faced" (which is understood to be bad and manipulative).

But I don't think this makes much sense, because humans walk around having contradictory opinions all the time.

If I rant to my family about how my boss is so unreasonable, he said mean things to me in a meeting today, God this job sucks - then okay, maybe I'm just pasting on a smile at work.

But maybe I actually like my job, and usually think my boss is okay but still a boss.

I can be both satisfied and dissatisfied with my job at the same time, maybe to different degrees at different times, and neither of those are lies but only one of those is appropriate or helpful to actually *tell people at work*. Obviously.

But the thing is, twitter is a bit weird with public and private faces, and no one that I've read has said this because it's hard to talk about in English.

I can rant about some private face stuff on here - but I can do that because no one actually knows who I am?

If I rant about my horrible boss or my friend's boyfriend that I don't like, that is me showing my private face, but it works okay because no one knows the context: they can sympathise without mess. But.

If I share private-face opinions where people *do* have context...

It gets messy. Because then that looks like my public face. It looks, not like an opinion or a casual comment that I've shared with my family, but like my public opinion. And those can get political (in the loose definition).

Say, for example, I have an opinion about something another trans person said. I don't like it, I think it's bad/harmful etc.

Well, twitter being what it is, people might start dogpiling them. Is that what I really wanted? Obviously not! Maybe I just had a passing thought!

But that's a private face opinion, and it has to stay there because if you bring it out, it becomes part if public opinion and warrants discussion if not action. And I probably don't want that! I just want to go "whew, I really don't like how [trans creator] handled [theme]"

And move on.

But this is my own error, because I've (metaphorically) gone to work and ranted to everyone at my lunch table about how mad I am at my boss right now and started a huge fuss.

It isn't lying to be thoughtful about audience.

This ties into Staying In Your Own Damn Lane.

I might, for example, have some opinions about MXTX, but I'm not going to share them (don't guess, please, you'll be wrong).

Because they're personal, private face opinions. I don't want to debate them! I don't want discourse!

I also think it isn't my lane remotely whatsoever to have *public* opinions about a woman writing danmei novels in under an authoritarian government that aggressively censors LGBT content.

Twitter has been full of this stuff this week, and I've been trying to articulate to myself why "maybe you could just... Not share your crappy opinions" reads to so many (white, western) people like "you're not allowed to have opinions".

It's bc we don't have a "private face".

An opinion you're not supposed to share is an opinion you're not supposed to HAVE, because having one opinion and saying you have another is lying and manipulative. Which... No. Somehow we all manage not to tell our Aunt Janet her new haircut sucks.

Anyway, I'm not in a position to tell anyone what to do but thinking about it in these terms really helps me to delineate exactly what I will and will not share in this public space, what stays in DMs and private conversations.

And it's also helping me stay in my lane, which previously was a really woolly and confusing concept to me. Of course I have opinions about e.g. anti-blackness in the queer community! They just shouldn't be public face opinions most of the time.

I'm pretty sure this is what's actually frustrating a lot of people about Discourse: they want a space to have private opinions, casual off-the-cuff discussions with a group of friends, but then suddenly on this platform they've become public opinions.

And people want to refute them and talk about them - maybe reasonably! There are some things which, said in private, are just some opinion, but the very act of sharing them changes how they hit because they hit in context with a lot of other public opinions and so on.

Anyway my public face opinion about MXTX is that she's an excellent author who has brought a lot of people (me included) a lot of joy, I hope she's doing okay
& getting good royalty cheques, and my private face opinion you're never going to hear bc even typing it out changes it.

And the thing is, that's true. That is my actual opinion. I might also think other things, but that doesn't undermine the thing I have just said. And it's rude to even imply that you have additional private opinions, in English, so I wish we had that tacit understanding.