I've got juicy gossip...
about gossip.
"I don't like to gossip, but…"
Music. To. My. Ears.
I'm an excellent gossip receiver; I sing for my supper. Eyes wide, slack jaw, peppering my awed silence with a breathy 'Nooooooo!' from time to time. Gold-star service I bestow upon anyone serving good tea. I drink it up, sippy sippy! Then I remember I’m supposed to be above all that.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people
- Eleanor Roosevelt.
Yes, we should all be using our glorious grey matter for more important things like solving the climate crises or spreading the good word that Allspice is a singular spice, not a collection of 'all the spice' but alas. The Jone's divorce and Jane's secret facelift are usually far too tempting to bypass.
Every so often, I get the urge to give myself a spiritual glow-up. Summer of Less Complaining, Soft Girl Cruising (no road rage), Gossip Free March. I never get very far. Not because I'm a terrible human. It's my finely tuned social justice radar that's to blame. I complain, gossip and road rage in the noble pursuit of change. For the greater good. As I wrote this, I wondered if that was true, and it turns out I'm right. As a collective, we gossip about undesirable behaviour in the hope of eradicating that undesirable behaviour. Expressing your displeasure at the person who queue jumped at the bar on Saturday night or the hoon who swooped in for a dangerous overtake on the highway yesterday. We say, 'This person did a terrible thing!' hopefully, the listener will think, 'Wow, that IS terrible!' and refrain from engaging in said terrible behaviour. Or at least that's the subconscious idea.
It's a universal delusion that gossip is bad. Obviously, talking shit about people behind their backs is generally considered a social no-no, but there are other factors involved. Michael Stefanone, a professor at the University of Buffalo, says "Gossiping, although it has a negative context, has lots of pro-social benefits."
It's widely accepted among evolved social scientists that gossip is an ancient artefact we've carried through from Yesteryear to The Present. It's crucial to weed out dud procreators if you want to survive and pass along your luscious genes. To do this, we gossip. We want to find out which potential mates have huts in high places, intergenerational wealth in their Neanderthal bloodlines, which cave babes have limited resources and which ones might crack you over the head with a primitive mallet if you tried to borrow their mammoth hide. This information is essential if you want your superior genes to be successfully carried through to 2024 so your ancestors can do confusing things like avoid lighting fires and wilfully not eat meat.
It's a common trope that the largest demographic of gossipers tend to be female, uneducated and of lower social class. Basic bitches if you will. It’s a big fat lie. Similar to the ludicrous grift of women being worse drivers than men. Insurance companies charge men more because they’re statistically more likely to have an accident. There are decades of statistical proof that women are better drivers, yet that unhinged fib won't die. Perhaps the nasty gossipy women cliche is just as far-fetched? Spoiler alert. It is.
Here's a study that shows some very enlightening trends. The researcher Megan L. Robbins and Alexander Karan in this study fitted four hundred and sixty-seven people with recording devices and monitored them for 2 to 5 days. They combed the sound files for different gossip styles, subjects of gossip and whether said gossip was positive, negative or neutral. Here's what they found.
Frequent gossipers tended to be more extroverted. (Thanks Captain Obvious.)
Women engaged in more neutral gossip than men but did not exceed men in any other category. (This is not surprising as women generally have much higher family and social, mental loads than men. If you consider 'Oh hey, send your kid to