Joseph Conrad got it right when he said that gossip was something we all profess to dislike, but secretly enjoy. Truman Capote said that all literature was gossip, and Hugh Leonard went further, saying that people prefer gossip to literature -- which explains why sales of 'Heat' magazine tend to be higher than, say, Booker-prize winning novels.
We have always been drawn to gossip. Back in 1728, Henry Fielding wrote that the best sweeteners of tea were love and scandal, and more recently Graham Norton declared that a problem shared is gossip. Or, as legendary 'New York Post' gossip columnist Liz Smith puts it: "Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress."
There are three kinds of gossip: positive, negative and industrial. The first kind is the stuff of tea-and-cake conversation: exchanging news about others, asking about their lives, passing on information, exchanging details about people you both know -- who has just had a baby, who has been promoted, who has gone where on holiday, that kind of thing.
This kind of positive gossip is the glue of human communication, and what separates us from robots and root vegetables. It is different from sharing confidences, in that you are not talking about yourselves, but about others who are not present. As in, "Have you met Auntie Madge's new toyboy yet?"
Negative gossip is the same conversation, but toxic: whose new baby looks like a frog, who screwed whom to get their promotion, whose holiday choice is vile and tacky. Negative gossip -- a polite way of saying 'bitching' -- is the twisted sister of schadenfreude in that it involves malicious pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, except it is opinion-based and created by you and your co-gossiper.
Sometimes it can be cathartic and bonding to let off steam about a third party, but it pays to be wary -- if someone is willing to gossip negatively about someone else with you, then what are they saying about YOU when you leave the room? Exactly. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The third kind of gossip is also the toxic variety, except it has been depersonalised, formatted, glossily packaged and sold back to us for profit. It is the celebrity magazine, the gossip website, the tabloid newspaper, the reality television show; it is humanity dehumanised, magnified ("Spot the cellulite!"), and forensically picked over with a hugely negative slant.
We are not talking the reverential gush of 'Hello!' magazine here, but the rapacious misogyny of the low-end gossip industry, kept afloat by our insatiable appetite for gawping at women too fat (Kerry Katona, Fern Britton) too thin (Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie), or too mad (Kerry Katona, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, the lot).
Even gorgeous, successful women such as Jennifer Aniston are pitied and infantilised ("Poor Jen") for not being in a long-term relationship, while their male counterparts are revered. (You never hear about "Poor George" Clooney, do you?)
Now, I had never really thought about any of this before. I had always consumed gossip mags and watched trash telly, the same as everyone else -- as you can see from the 'before' pictures illustrating this piece. The reason there are no 'after' pictures is because in January 2007, I had a sudden and irreversible epiphany, an internal anti-gossip moment. Watching 'Celebrity Big Brother', there was a sudden 'ping!' inside my head. It seemed to be the voice of my inner self saying 'enough already', and telling the rest of me it was time to stop passively watching other people being horrible to each other in the name of entertainment.
Now, before you start making gagging noises at how sanctimonious that must sound, remember that this was the Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty 'Celebrity Big Brother', which was exceptionally unpleasant and caused thousands of viewers to have similar reactions as they jammed Channel 4's switchboard to complain. I wasn't alone in my distaste.
What I found a bit weird about my own reaction, however, was that I kept reacting. When I turned the television off that evening, I didn't turn it back on again. Ever. It drives my kids mad that I have no clue about 'Glee' or 'The X Factor' or 'Strictly Come Dine With Me On Ice'.
This doesn't mean I have replaced television viewing with embroidery or bible studies -- I do box sets instead, such as 'The Wire', and love political satire and disaster movies -- but I have eliminated the junk, the reality shows and soap operas, because I can no longer bear watching people being hideous to each other, even if it's all made up and they're being paid a fortune for it.
Anyway, my epiphany didn't stop there. I was suddenly unable to stomach celebrity magazines either. Initially, I found this development quite disturbing, because I used to love lying in the bath reading 'Now' and the 'National Enquirer', getting my weekly fix of British and American celebrity bitchery as I flicked through the pages of cellulite, eating disorders, cleavages, toyboys, sack-the-stylist, breakdowns, messy divorces, kiss and tell affairs, 10-minute marriages, plastic surgery disasters and who was screwing who. But all of a sudden, I went off it. Couldn't bear it.
"Your bathroom is no fun anymore," complained a friend recently. "Where have all the gossip mags gone?" In their place is a giant stack of blokey 'Q' magazines, with the 'National Geographic' replacing the 'National Enquirer'. As well as the quality Sunday papers, I used to always buy a Sunday tabloid as well, to read like a comic. That habit also went by the wayside.
What was so strange was that it all happened so quickly. It was not a slow awakening as much as a swift slap in the chops -- the message, which came entirely from internal sources, seemed to be, "Stop polluting yourself!"
The only thing I can put it down to is that I had quite recently stopped drinking. I used to drink an awful lot, and subsequently spent many hungover hours grazing upon non-challenging visual popcorn, such as crap telly, celeb mags and the odd tabloid. I think my 'ping!' moment during 'Celebrity Big Brother' was the crystallisation of brain-fog clearance; it was a kind of internal shudder, followed by a wake-up moment. My inner feminist had woken up and was shouting at me to stop buying into the bitchfest. So I did. End of.
Not to over-analyse -- well, not too much anyway -- but what I think it must have been was that I was no longer physically toxic, which meant I was no longer able to blithely inhale the shiny, chatty venom of the celeb mags without giving myself brain damage. I suddenly saw them through what I imagine were clearer, less befuddled eyes, and realised that they were not the harmless comics I had thought they were, but were working on a not-so-subtle basis to harangue women to remain insecure, acquisitive and compliant, by shoving lurid pages of female body judgment in our faces, interspersed with adverts shouting at us to buy this or that or we will never be happy.
Did I want to drag that negativity into my smiley new life? Um, not really. Sorry. I know that probably sounds a bit evangelical, but I love women and womankind, and the gossip industry doesn't, even though the weird thing is we daily collude with it.
Anyway. Moving away from industrialised gossip was easy. I have no idea who anyone is any more (Kim Kardashian? No idea, not interested), and only hear about the private lives of others when the gossip goes over the top into mainstream media -- such as when sexually incontinent footballers make it from the Twittersphere to the front pages of newspapers. Which makes you wonder -- when does gossip become news? And what is gossip for? What function does it serve?
Quite a few, according to several academic studies on the subject. You might dismiss non-industrialised gossip -- that is, the human variety conducted on the phone, over coffee, during lunch, face to face -- as insignificant background noise, but, actually, it serves several purposes, in terms of boundaries and hierarchies, and has even been attributed to playing a part in human evolution. (More of which later).
Whether it's intimate or businesslike -- where it is called 'networking' -- gossip is society's bush telegraph, our informal way of exchanging information about the lives and deeds of others, often to our own advantage. The academic definition of gossip is straightforward: "Evaluative talk of others who are not present."
From cosy chat to toxic bitching, it has two simple rules: you cannot gossip about yourself, or about the person to whom you are talking -- gossip always involves a third party or parties -- even if you don't know them and are unlikely to ever meet them. You know, such as the people in 'Hello!' magazine in their gracious homes.
According to Dr Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, the functions of gossip are threefold. The first is networking, where you exchange information about others which may be beneficial to you and your co-gossipee in terms of maintaining or improving social status.
The second is influence, where small talk and shared confidences may change the way a person feels about you within the group, and the third function of gossip is forging alliances, where the intimacy resulting from 'remember, it's a secret' serves to form a bond between the information divulger and those to whom they are spilling the beans.
The most recent research into gossip, conducted by a team led by Eric Anderson from the psychology department of Northeastern University Boston, shows how gossip imprints on our brain. Not only do we better remember and recognise faces associated with negative gossip, but this recognition operates outside conscious awareness.
The details of the research, reported in May's 'Science' magazine, are horrifically dull, so I'll be brief. A visual effect known as binocular rivalry was used, with volunteers looking into a device that presented an image of a face to one eye and an image of a neutral object -- a house -- to the other eye. Visual information from one eye at a time reaches consciousness, with the brain alternating between bringing face and house images into the mind's eye for varying amounts of time.
Although each face was neutral, it was the face associated with negative gossip -- rather than positive or neutral gossip -- which remained longest in the mind's eye.
"Information acquired through gossip influences vision, so that what we know about someone influences not only how we feel and think about them, but also whether or not we see them in the first place," says the research team.
In other words, we remember the bad stuff. For example, my sole knowledge of Girls Aloud is that Cheryl Tweedy, before she became Mrs Cole, once thumped a loo attendant. The other members of Girls Aloud could have found a cure for cancer, but I only remember that single negative detail.
But there's more to it that that. "Gossip is a vital thread in human social interaction," say the study's authors. "As a type of instructed learning, gossip is a way to learn socially relevant information about other people's character or personality without having to directly experience their triumphs and misadventures. Whether delicious or destructive, gossip is functional. It provides human beings with information about others in the absence of direct experience, allowing us to live in very large groups.
"It is believed that gossip was important for social cohesion during the course of human evolution. Scientists speculate that instead of establishing and maintaining relationships by plucking fleas off of each other, we exchange and digest juicy titbits of chit-chat, hearsay and rumour." Gossip, therefore, has been around longer than 'Heat' magazine or TMZ.
While the atomisation of modern life means that these days we use things such as Twitter to gawp and gossip, the formal gossip-led publication has been around since 1709, when Della Manley launched 'Female Tatler'.
In his 2002 book 'Scandal: A Scurrilous History of Gossip', Roger Wilkes examines three centuries of gossip, from Elizabethan pamphleteers to Matt Drudge, although as one reviewer pointed out, a history of gossip is almost an oxymoron. "Gossip should bring something new to the party," wrote Sebastien Shakespeare in the 'New Statesman'. "History is about tidying up after the party is over."
Newspapers have always employed gossip columnists, from Hollywood's legendary Hedda Hopper, who played herself in 'Sunset Boulevard' before her death in 1966, to the 'New York Post's' infamous Page Six and the 'Mirror's' 3am Girls. Gossip keeps people in the news, unless they are so powerful that they no longer need to be; but, on the way up, gossip is essential to fame. Or, as Errol Flynn said, "It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper".
It must be emphasised that gossip -- either in print or in person -- is not, and never has been, a female thing, despite the Hilda Ogden/Sybil Fawlty stereotypes. It is a human trait, no matter how reluctant some men are about owning their fondness for it.
W H Auden, in a 1937 interview, spoke robustly in favour of gossip: "Who would rather learn the facts of Augustus's imperial policy than discover he had spots on his stomach? No one." Or as Bertrand Russell put it, "No one gossips about other people's secret virtues". Fast forward and dumb down to today, and you have an identical sentiment in Perez Hilton.
A survey published on June 12 for British Telecom, which has a vested interest in gossip, shows that men are more likely to gossip than women. Of the 1,033 adults surveyed, 20pc of men said they spent at least three hours a day gossiping, mostly at work about female colleagues or who might be promoted. And while 4pc of women admitted to bitching -- gossip's evil twin -- 10pc of men said they bitched and spread rumours.
Overall, 55pc of men gossiped about stuff such as family arguments, soap operas, friends, neighbours, and fashion (yes, fashion), compared with 46pc of women. And while women prefer to gossip with friends, 17pc of men like to gossip in bed rather than have sex, compared with 10pc of women.
New at your job? You won't find out who the workplace lech is from the staff handbook, or who is insanely petty, or who is the most competitive, the smarmiest, the most helpful, the least helpful, the most sincere, or the biggest backstabber in the place. You won't find out that your seemingly nice colleague is actually a bit of a racist or a homophobe, and you won't know who is likely to nick your ideas and pass them off as their own. None of this is official information. And yet for there to be cohesion in the workplace, gossip can be extremely useful -- providing it is not gratuitous.
"Gossip is the cement that holds organisations together," said Judith Doyle, author of a 2000 report by the Industrial Society which advocates gossip as a good thing.
Gossip clarifies and enforces social boundaries, as well as circulating crucial information about others: don't ask him out for a drink, he's spoken for; watch out for her, she always hits on new people.
But what about when gossip turns nasty within a group? A Yale study found that people tend to gossip negatively when they feel excluded. Did they really need a study to figure that one out? Secure happy people don't bitch. At least, not about each other.
I too have conducted a study in this area. It may not compare with Yale's in terms of empirical data, but the results are the same. I made a quick list of everyone I know, and discovered that -- amazingly -- the happier the friends, the less they gossip negatively. This does not mean good chats about third parties don't happen over tea and cake, but the boot is generally not put in, the knives are not drawn, the air does not turn toxic.
It's hard to imagine wanting to hang out with a bunch of people who are going to bitch about you the minute you leave the room, unless you are like that yourself.
The weirdest thing in all of this is that the word 'gossip' has pious origins. It comes from an Old English word, 'godsibb', or sponsor of a child at a baptism -- basically a godparent -- and was first recorded in 1034. Coming from this definition, a godsibb came to denote a woman's female friend at the birth of a child. Dr Samuel Johnson later went on to define a gossip as "one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in".
To dismiss gossip like this is to miss the point. I spend large chunks of my life in coffee shops gossiping with friends -- it's one of life's great pleasures. But it's the kind of gossip in which you indulge is the crucial bit -- gossiping neutrally or positively about third parties is very different from bitching about someone behind their back, or sending vicious comments to online forums about people you've never met, based solely on what you've read via industrial gossip. Bitching makes you feel bad, gossiping doesn't.
Being personable is all about reaching out to people, which involves the currency of gossip. As Barbara Walters once said: "Show me someone who never gossips, and I'll show you someone who isn't interested in people."
- Suzanne Harrington
Originally published in 
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