People often have traits you aren't aware of

Some experiences are very common, but many people who have them don’t talk about them:

• Having a chronic illness or an invisible disability.

• Having a mental illness.

• Experiencing bullying, harassment, rape, or abuse.

• Having someone very close to you die.

• Being turned on by something weird or gross.

• Having interests or liking media that other people think is weird, bad, inappropriate, or cringe.

• Being a virgin, never having had a romantic partner, or never having been kissed at a relatively old age.

• Having unusual trouble dating.

• Being in a bad marriage.

• Regretting having kids.

• Sometimes having very strong negative feelings about your kids.

• Having a close friend or family member who has had any of these experiences.

Other experiences are hidden in some situations but not others. For example, in some subcultures queer, trans, or poly people will keep this fact to themselves, while in other subcultures they tend to be open about it. In heavily religious areas, people might hide being atheists.¹ Some parents won’t tell anyone that they let their toddler play on the tablet so they can cook dinner; others won’t tell anyone that their elementary schooler refuses to eat any vegetable other than tomato sauce; still others won’t say that they yell at or lecture their children. In every subculture or friend group where people talk about politics, some people feel reluctant to state their political views, but it depends on the particular group whether the group that keeps quiet is Communists, MAGAs, social conservatives, or Slow Boring readers.

We know, from pretty reliable data, that 1 in 4 women in America have had someone attempt to or succeed at making them have sex against their will through physical force or physical threats or when they were so drunk or high that they were unable to resist. Probably, if you think of all the women you know to have been raped according to this definition, it will amount to much fewer than 1 in 4 of the women you talk to sometimes. To be sure, your female friends aren’t a random sample of women; maybe they’re less likely to be raped than average. But even if women you know are half as likely, or a tenth as likely, to be raped as the average American woman, simple math shows that most rape survivors you talk to haven’t told you.

This isn’t (necessarily) because of anything you did, either. Maybe the rape happened in college twenty years ago and they’re over it and don’t think about it much. Maybe the rape feels private and they’d rather only talk about it with people they’re close to. Maybe it just never came up! People don’t walk around with a sign explaining all of their most stigmatized traits.

Sometimes people assume that, if they don’t know for sure that someone is a rape survivor, they can safely assume they’re not. But that’s not true at all! You will never know that the vast majority of rape survivors you talk to are rape survivors.

So that means that if something would be a dick thing to say to someone whom you know to be a rape survivor, it is a dick thing to say to anyone, unless you’re really damn sure they’re not a rape survivor.

Same thing for chronic illness, bad marriages, political disagreements, parenting strategies, weird sex interests, and everything else people sometimes don’t want to talk about.

I’m not here intending to say that any specific thing is a dick thing to say. That’s between you and your sense of etiquette. If you’re part of an edgelordy group of friends where you actually would make rape jokes in front of rape survivors, then knock yourself out.

But I think people often casually say things they don’t really mean. You might confidently spout off whatever half-remembered and quarter-understood Substack post about chronic pain you read most recently, while actually endorsing the humble and curious approach you’d take talking to someone who actually has chronic pain. You might get into a fun self-congratulatory back-patting circle about how everyone who disagrees with you politically is both stupid and evil, while actually believing the more diplomatic thing you’d say to someone who (gasp!) voted for your preferred candidate for somewhat different reasons than you did. You might enjoy dunking on furries but actually think furries are a completely unobjectionable subculture.

But if someone secretly has chronic pain or disagrees with you politically or is a furry, they don’t know that you’d have been nicer if you’d known. All they know is the dick stuff you actually said. And they don’t know whether, if they actually told you their secret, you’d blanch and go “oh my god I’m so sorry” or double down.

Again, I’m not suggesting constant paranoid self-monitoring. I’m just recommending being mindful of the possibility that people you talk to—especially people you don’t know well—might have traits you don’t know about. Try speaking with a little more care than you would by default.

1. This tends not to go both ways because most religions think you should tell people you’re a member of that religion even if it is inconvenient to do so.