Why gossip is essential (and why men love it just as much as women)

A interview with the Normal Gossip co-host on her new book, You Didn't Hear It From Me

In 2020, journalists Kelsey McKinney and Alex Sujong Laughlin decided to launch a podcast, Normal Gossip. Stuck in the barren goss lands of the first lockdown, without any tasty water cooler gossip to snack on, they yearned for a shared space where they could dissect the outrageous, the petty and the truly banal. The podcast was an instant hit — and a cultural phenomenon.

A whopping 45 million downloads later and McKinney has written a book, You Didn’t Hear It From Me: Notes on the Art of Gossip, that asks: Why do we gossip? Is gossip good or bad? And do women really do it more than men? From the whispers that keep us safe to the rumours that break the internet, Bel speaks to McKinney about why hearsay isn’t the problem — it’s the point.

Kelsey, congratulations on the book. Let’s start with the basics. Why do we love a good goss?

It feels great to gossip! I think it's innate to love it. You can always tell when two people are gossiping in public; you see them across a bar and think, those two — they're sharing secrets. It's a physical act. Gossip gives you a little window into what other people are doing secretly. It feels fizzy. One of my favourite studies is on workplaces and how employees are happier if they have one common enemy. So, if there's someone in the workplace that everyone hates, your employee base is happier across the board because they all feel bonded to each other against whoever this enemy is. A huge part of gossiping is saying, are we on the same team?

If you take gossip as its true definition — which is just two people talking about anyone who's not there — that’s the majority of conversation that's happening in the world. It also reflects so much about what a society is thinking. For example, if you and I decide that we hate the way someone we know is dressed, that tells us a lot about what our morals of dressing are and what we think is good and bad. We have a lot of context that we are bringing to these judgements — they may be terrible judgments, but they're still coming from a place of knowledge. But when you talk about the spread of gossip on social media — or any kind of spread of information on social media — not only do you not know exactly where it's coming from, but you can't trace who told it to who. [The lack of context means] it gets complex. It becomes a whole other level of interesting.

If we all do it, why does gossip have such a bad rep?

Gossip’s bad reputation comes from a couple of things. The first is that people often use the word ‘gossip’ when they don't mean gossip, they mean slander or libel. The word ‘gossip’ does not mean lie. So, if I'm talking about you and just making things up, that's not gossiping. That's me slandering you. Gossip can [also] become a rumour if it's spreading rapidly through a lot of sources without any clarification. So, usually, when we’re gossiping, it's one-on-one. You gossip to someone. You don’t intentionally plant it — you talk about it. Whereas a rumour exists in the ether. No one really knows exactly where it came from. A rumour can be deployed.

The second [thing] is that gossip is historically and consistently used by people who don't have power to talk about people with power. So that's women talking about men, employees talking about their bosses — it's anyone trying to grab a little bit of power where they don't have it.

Is gossip gendered? There’s that great quote in Lili Anolik’s book, Didion and Babitz, where Eve Babitz writes to author Joseph Heller:

“One of the things I’m starting to think about is that serious people just don’t think that gossip… is serious... Only how are people like me — women they’re called — supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room?”

Yes! Even etymologically, there's something patriarchal in it. The word ‘gossip’ comes from an old English word, ‘godsib’, which was a word that was used to describe a godparent or someone who was not related to you but who was like family. And over time, ‘godsib’ started to mean women who would be in the birthing room. So your mum's friends, essentially. And then that word began to mean the conversation that happened within that birthing room. So, it is innately associated with women's talk.

Even in that quote, [Babitz] says, “Serious people don't gossip”. Except they do. If you take the stereotype of a finance man, he's gossiping about which companies are doing well, who's selling what, who they trust and who they don't trust. That's all gossip. The joke I always make is that men say to me, I hate gossip. I don't care about it. And then I'll say, Oh my god, did you hear that this major pro athlete has gotten traded? Suddenly, they are extremely interested in gossip! There’s also that silly internet trend, which is people showing their male partners reality television and getting them worked up about a housewife or The Bachelor or whatever, and proving to them, See, this is something that you're actually interested in, too! You've just been told not to like it!

Lest we forget, Dan Humphrey was Gossip Girl. And Chuck Bass was such a gossip! In his own words: “I am a bitch when I want to be”. Speaking of GG, we have to talk about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest trials (if not the biggest?) showbiz has ever seen. Goss gone wrong?

Yeah, they could have done me a real favour and had this scandal before my book came out! What's complicated about [this case] is that we are being encouraged to take one story wholesale — which I think is really dangerous. In all likelihood, parts of both of their stories are true. With Blake Lively, for a long time [there have] been rumours. There have been people who have disliked her for her whole career, and she's been in the public eye for a really long time. And in a lot of this conversation, you're seeing people glad for a reason to dislike her.

There is [also] the Regina George of it all, where you want to knock someone down from their really high pedestal. We’re like, you can't be up there getting everything you've ever wanted! Now [Baldoni and Lively’s] lawyers and publicists have gotten involved, it's become this meta version of all these lawyers fighting for all these subplots of this main plot — the irony of it all being within the context of a film. It's like gameplay.

In your book you explore how gossip can be a way for women to safeguard each other, which reminded me of Miriam Towes’s book (recently adapted to film), Women Talking, which explores the depressing connection between gossip and sexual assault.

I think Women Talking is a really interesting book in particular because it’s presented through the lens of just women talking to each other, saying, here is my experience, is that your experience with this person? and realising, that by putting these pieces together, they're actually in an incredibly abusive environment that they can then escape, together.

That is a huge part of gossip. When we say ‘women's talk’, we're talking about the fact that women use it to protect themselves. You tell your colleague if you think a boss is creepy. You tell your friend if a guy you went on a date with was uncouth. You’re spreading information in an attempt to keep your community safe. And people have always done that. Even at a tribal level, we know that people were telling each other, this person is the strongest one, or watch out for that guy.

In the book, I talk about watching ‘The Shitty Media Men list’ [an open Google doc created by journalist Moira Donegan, where people could add names of men in the media industry who’d behaved inappropriately]. It was so cathartic to watch that list fill out and to see a bunch of names that you knew should be on there.

Another example of this in action is the West Elm Caleb saga, where Caleb quickly became a Main Character. Main Characters blow up and blow over very quickly, but thanks to the internet, it’s kind of impossible to ever shed the rep…

In the almost two decades that I have spent with my eyes glued to whichever social media website is hot at the moment, I have seen dozens of Main Characters get run off of platforms and into hiding. I remember when a PR director tweeted something offensive about AIDS [in 2015], got on a plane, and by the time she landed, she’d become the Main Character.¹

To be honest, I think we are in a place right now that makes it very hard for people to make mistakes. And when I say mistakes, I'm not talking about sexual assault. That's a mistake that I do think should hang over your head for a very long time. I'm talking about things like word choice or being a brat in one of your relationships — stuff that is small and can be corrected.

Gossip is used historically everywhere as a form of social sanctioning — teaching people how we want them to behave. But it's hard to do because it is a question of whether you think people can change or not. Something I am trying to work out in the book is that grey space. Can we sit inside a space that feels much more uncomfortable than saying, this person is evil, and this person is right?

So how does our natural inclination towards celebrity gossip feed into this? Especially in the context of the industrial celebrity gossip complex, where minor celebrities are yearning for fame (when they get really famous, they no longer really want it) and media businesses are rampant for catchy headlines — is this what fuels our obsession?

People have always been interested in celebrities. [The reason why] we have tonnes of information about rulers and figures in ancient communities [is] because people are fascinated by people who are popular. They want to know what they're up to. The Bible itself says very little about gossiping. Of the 31,102 verses in the Bible, only 8 are about gossip and only 2 of them are in the New Testament. Both of those verses were written by the apostle Paul, which is somewhat ironic since Paul himself was not present for any of the events of the Gospels, and he must have heard the details somewhere.

Paul, the original gossip.

In comparison, the Bible has almost 2,000 verses about helping the needy. Despite this, I heard far more about gossip during my time in church than about greed! What is new is our access to celebrities. You and I look at our Instagram, and we see our friend's birthday, our sister's baby, and someone else we know. And then we see Taylor Swift and her stories, or we see Kate Middleton and her stories, and the problem is that it's really hard for your brain to distinguish between, this is a person I know, and this is a person I don't know. Parasocial relationships create gossip on this whole other level. And that feeds the industry.

How do you think gossip has changed in a post-truth world where facts are being replaced by feelings/ opinions?

It's interesting you bring up post-truth because I think that gossip is a search for truth — you're trying to figure out what you believe and which parts you think are true. I think what’s changed is that people are now less critical of what they are receiving. They are more likely to accept something they hear as truth wholesale, which is how we get into this land of misinformation. And we have science to prove that you can't delete misinformation out of your brain. You never delete an original fact.

So, part of the problem in this post-truth society of gossip is that you can't ever delete the original gossip. All you can hope for is that people can remember that it was wrong. It's really concerning because when we gossip, that is the power. If I get to you first with my version of the story, that's the one you'll remember forever. You can only retain corrections to that story.

Can gossip be a form of rebellion? You write about your childhood growing up evangelical, where gossip was very forbidden. Did it feel like an act of defiance?

There is always something that feels a little bit defiant about gossip in general. For me, in high school especially, it felt extremely defiant to do it because I was taught that to do it was a sin and showed something evil about me as a person. I think it's really easy for me right now, with how bad things are here in America, to get lulled into this space where you feel not real. You feel just like a face that looks at a screen all day, and gossip forces you out of that. It is a bodily experience. You feel alive, which I think is part of why we like it. It's dangerous.

There’s that great quote by The New York Times journalist Gail Collins in her book, Scorpion Tongues, where she describes gossip as “moral inquiry.” Do you agree with her?

I really agree with her. Especially when you think about the way we talk about politicians, which tells us a lot about a society. If we say it's not okay for you to curse as a politician, that [reveals] that we, as a society, hold not swearing and using appropriate language, as a moral value. And so when we're talking, you see that on an even smaller level. I think that often, gossiping tells you more about yourself than anything else. [To quote] Phyllis Rose in her prologue to Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages:

“Gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding. We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.”

Speaking of politics, you have a chapter that hones in on gossip’s role in American politics, particularly JFK and Clinton. You write:

“Rumours are always based in something, and if they aren’t based in actual reality, they’re often based in anxiety.”

Talk to me about the anxiety revealed by Hillary Clinton and the lamp.

So, there's a rumour that's gone around forever that Hillary Clinton threw a lamp at Bill Clinton. She was asked about it in so many interviews and she consistently said, “I have good aim, I wouldn't have missed. So no, if I had thrown a lamp at him, you'd know”. It's so fun as a rumour because it's pretty innocuous. It's not life or death in any manner, but it tells us a lot about the country and even about global perceptions of people.

In America, when I was growing up during the Clinton administration, the national anxiety around Hillary Clinton (especially in Republican states) was extremely high, because people thought she was actually leading the country. They were anxious about the idea that this girl boss woman was in The White House, maybe having some say in political decisions. And it's ironic because most people talk to their spouses about their work; so in theory, spouses have always had some say in political decisions. But the anxiety around Hillary Clinton was one around the anxiety of women's work in America in general and women becoming more professional globally.

And so when you hear this rumour about the lamp — is it possible that it’s completely fabricated? Yes. But what it tells us is that people were afraid of Hillary Clinton having power and they were afraid that she was going to dominate Bill in some way. It's also simpler than that. There are often rumours about presidents having affairs or rumours about presidents doing all sorts of weird things. And often, that anxiety is a fear of the way that they're ruling. The anxiety is that they are morally compromised in some way.

I could go deep on this forever, but alas, I must let you go. Kelsey, thank you, it’s been such a joy chatting to you.

Thanks so much for having me. This has been really fun.

1. Ed’s note: Jon Ronson wrote a good piece about getting embroiled in the Justine Sacco story in 2015