Why We Love Gossip So Much (& How It’s Actually Good For Us)
Heinously late to the party, I’m watching Mad Men for the first time. Masterful. Considering it’s a televisual portrait of 1960s America, it’s instinctively modern. The sexism, the sex with people you want (and people you shouldn’t), the self-destruction, bossy bosses, existential dread, the drama. There are shades of ourselves to be found in the characters (good, bad, sometimes ugly). One scene in season four, particularly, is so funny and familiar – the womanising creative director in the office announces his whirlwind engagement to his secretary; two colleagues have thoughts.
“Whatever could be on your mind?” Joan smiles as Peggy closes the door and reaches, exasperated, for a cigarette.
Peggy: “A pretty face comes along, and everything just goes out the window.”
Joan: “Well I learned a long time ago not to get all my satisfaction from this job.” [Pause]
Peggy: “That’s bulls**t!” [Both break out into a giggling fit]
You’ve likely shared versions of this exchange. Or perhaps you claim not to enjoy such chit-chat. Regardless, we’re all doing it: the average person is said to gossip about other people out of earshot, featuring judgements or not, for around 52 minutes a day. Which, quite frankly, is hardly surprising, considering how much this guilty pleasure pervades pop culture (from Kelsey McKinney’s podcast, Normal Gossip, unpicking why “juicy” and yet “utterly banal” second-hand truth is stranger than fiction, to the arguably more questionable end of the spectrum in the form of Instagram celebrity sleuth accounts such as @deuxmoi and TikTok’s latest absurd kink for lip reading).
Still, despite Oscar Wilde’s attempts to champion this seemingly idle chatter as ‘charming’, it’s more often cast as silly and salacious speak; a prohibited form of prying. In actuality, it’s not that simple (or, in fact, that bad). A recent study from Binghamton University in the US, for instance, explored the power of workplace gossip to help strengthen social bonds; another, published in the Social Psychological And Personality Science journal, argued that most gossip is rarely malicious or negative.
Stacy Torres, a sociology professor at the University of California, prefers a “bare bones” definition of gossip as simply “talk in the absence of a third party”. “It takes a bit of the negative connotations of gossip out of the equation,” she says. (Which is not to say it can’t be the latter: “I definitely do not advocate for nastiness. [If] you’re often tearing into someone’s character that’s something [you need] to examine.”)
In her research, one of the functions gossip served was “to give people a yard stick for things they were anxious about,” Torres explains. “I think there’s a kind of craving to situate ourselves [in relation to whoever we’re talking about].”
Why are other people’s romantic entanglements, I wonder, such a potent subject? “Relationships are perennially a source of confusion for people in general: I think talking about others helps you understand more about yours,” says Torres. Herein lies a peephole of sorts into our own fuzzy consciousness, enabling us to express feelings under the guise of, well, thoughts.
In other words, our desperation to observe and report how others – be it strangers on the internet, colleagues, friends, lovers – live their lives, on some level, helps us to make sense of how we feel about our own. Gossip is really just people-watching with the volume on full blast. It has the power to boost or bruise egos, trigger suspicion or solidarity. It’s like Zadie Smith once said: empathy and voyeurism are two sides of the same coin. “You have to like looking,” she says. “And when you’ve finished looking, you have to make an effort to understand.”
6 Fictional Gossips We Love
- Pamela Jones in Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) – Mothers may be the biggest gossips of them all. They live for the most mundane of dramas; every little (bit of information) helps. Bridget’s bossy and charmingly nosey mum is a prime example. Case in point: feeding her daughter the important crumb that Mark Darcy’s wife cheated on him with – crucially – “a total scoundrel”.
- Tom Wambsgans in Succession (2018-2023) – You’d hardly want to be friends with this guy. Still, his flippant critique of one party attendee’s “ludicrously capacious bag” is impossible to not find funny.
- Carrie Bradshaw in Sex And The City (1998-2004) – As Bradshaw jokingly advises on a group run in season two, episode four, “Let’s gossip to get our heart rates up.” The columnist ultimately made a career from the conversations she had with her friends, the men she dated and loved and lost and reconnected with, and from observing other people’s relationships.
- Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls (2004) – Her slightly perverse dedication to gossiping was summed up by Damian’s now-iconic line: “That’s why her hair is so big. It’s full of secrets.”
- Emma Wodehouse in Emma (1815) – Local second-hand ‘news’ travelling fast was an essential proponent in Jane Austen’s novels. One of Austen’s most iconic of heroines, Emma, is an amateur matchmaker with an intense love of gossip, speculation and judging others. For better or for worse.
- The Narrator in Gossip Girl (2007-2012) – The OG series, obviously. It could have been so easy for the plot stirring of this unseen blogger, AKA Gossip Girl, to become a little tiring over the course of six seasons. It never did. Often bonkers, but never boring. XOXO.
Emma Firth is a London-based essayist and writer exploring love, intimacy and joy for British Vogue, The Cut, ELLE UK, ES magazine, Rolling Stone, mixed feelings newsletter and more
