You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

Unintentionally, ChatGPT reinforces through its diction that gossip is a tool of the less privileged.

In the beginning were the words, and the words were gossip, and the gossip was words. While other species can communicate with one another, none can weave tales the way we can. Researchers estimate that people developed the ability to speak at least 200,000 years ago, and as previously noted, Robin Dunbar in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language argues that language is a human substitute for grooming one another. Dunbar’s position is that language evolved in the first place to enable humans to socially bond through gossiping, which allows us to maintain social coherence in large groups and to create connections with one another while also being productive in other ways. Gossiping also has the advantage of being a group activity: you can tell a story to several people at once, therefore bonding yourself to all of them.

“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,” Phyllis Rose wrote in the prologue to Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Parallel Lives is an extremely gossipy book, but it is not “gossip” in the strictest definition of the word; it is the story of five Victorian partnerships.

If gossip is the beginning of moral inquiry and if gossiping is a form of good citizenship, then the way we gossip and the quality of the story we are able to shape around the initial information matter.

That is, after all, what storytelling is built of: taking the truth and telling it slant.

Theory of mind is the ability to know that someone else thinks something.

tell one another stories. And we always have. Some of the earliest stories we know about have been discovered inside caves, painted on the walls. The drawings in the Lascaux Caves are believed to be seventeen thousand years old. Many of our earliest stories, though, have no written record.

Harvard professor Milman Parry was one of the first to convincingly demonstrate that Homer did not write The Iliad and The Odyssey because they were not written at all; they were transcriptions of an oral tradition that changed and evolved over generations of anonymous bards.

Knowing this, I began to wonder whether The Epic of Gilgamesh might be gossip after all. It felt like gossip when I read it, and if it felt like gossip, maybe it really was. It didn’t feel impossible to me that this legend could have emerged from something smaller, something real.

To gossip well and to tell a story well, the teller must occupy a real presence in space and time and tell the story from there, as a combination of their experiences.

There are only two practices Dunbar pointed to as being uniquely human: storytelling and religion. Both of those, he wrote, require us “to be able to imagine that another world exists.” The Qur’an existed for some years as a written and oral text, until the written words were standardized under the third Rashidun caliph. Ibn Mas’ud said in Sahih al-Bukhari, “I heard a person reciting a (Quranic) Verse in a certain way, and I had heard the Prophet reciting the same verse in a different way. So I took him to the Prophet and informed him of that but I noticed the sign of disapproval on his face, and then he said, ‘Both of you are correct, so don’t differ, for the nations before you differed, so they were destroyed.’” In an oral tradition, every version of the story has some truth to it, even if they differ in material. The truth is ours to find.

We gossip and we tell stories because that is how we each make sense of the world, with ourselves at the center reaching outward trying to connect with others, to prove to ourselves that we are real, that if anything is true, it is us.

was taught growing up that everyone had a thorn shoved deep into their side, impossible to dig out on their own. The thorn couldn’t be ripped out with pliers or cut out with a scalpel because it was inside of you from birth, a kind of predetermined bodily failure created just for you. The thorn was a metaphor, of course, but it was a metaphor that would ruin your life if you let it, because the thorn was the thing that kept you from holiness, from goodness, from the shining pearly gates of Heaven. For some, the thorn was greed or pride or wrath or lust or gluttony. But I learned quickly that my thorn was made of whispers and cupped hands and wide eyes. The thorn I thought I needed God to rid me of was the one thing I loved most in the world: gossip. For years, I prayed that God would take away my desire to gossip.

But gossiping was not a sin with a scale. There was no allowable amount of it. Gossip, the way I was taught, was unequivocally, absolutely an affront against God, closer to murder or adultery than dancing. It said so right there in the Bible. And because I believed in those words and that culture and that God, I agreed. Gossiping was wrong, I repeated to myself over and over and over again, never really believing it.

Shame is a big feeling for a child to hold, too large and unwieldy to carry. I didn’t want sin to be the reason I focused on God. I wanted to be perfect: no shame, no sin, no thorn. And so instead of feeling shame, I did what every person hell-bent on making a choice they feel is wrong does: I tried to find a way to rationalize it. But the Bible did not pull punches about how it felt about gossip. In Proverbs it read, “A perverse person stirs up conflict, and a gossip separates close friends.” In the Book of Romans (written by the apostle Paul) gossips are listed along with “God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents,” as the types of people filled with “every kind of wickedness.” I didn’t want to be that kind of person. And so over and over again, for years, I begged God to help me. Before bed, I prayed that He would make me unable to gossip, and then in the morning, I would go to school, hear something, and forget about my self-betterment

Almost all major religions comment on the power of the tongue. The Buddha named four types of speech to abstain from: false speech, divisive speech, hateful speech, and idle chatter. Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, an eighth-century Shia Muslim scholar, jurist, and theologian, wrote that “murderers, habitual drunkards and those who go to and fro bearing tales will not enter paradise.” Jewish scholars quote the Torah injunction against rekhilut, which reads, “Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbour in secret.” Even Greek mythology has that divide. Deities are usually somewhat omniscient. They don’t need gossip, but we do, and in that way, gossiping is always a reminder that we are mortal, that our lives are short and delicate. So Pheme wasn’t considered a full goddess. Pheme (Fama in the Roman world) was a daimon, the personified spirit of rumor and report and gossip. She was said to have countless tongues and ears, not to care about whether the rumors spread by her were good or evil, and never to be overcome by sleep. She may or may not have been immortal, but she was absolutely trapped between Heaven and Hell. In The Odyssey, Emily Wilson translated Homer as saying, “Meanwhile, swift Rumor spread the news all through / the city, of the suitor’s dreadful murder.” She dwelled with mortals, among us, as gossip always does.

Gossip and religion are braided together in our history as a species, so it makes sense that our belief systems have created rules around how we gossip and when.

Our sense of self is tied up in the stories we tell. In gossip and in religion, we can build for ourselves a placebo net so strong and so fortified that it can catch us when we fall by promising a different, better world.

It makes sense that religions, which are primarily concerned with morality and holiness, would condemn things like slander and libel. To slander someone is to lie about them, and lying is unholy. To slander someone is also to cause them harm, and causing harm is unholy. Belief systems, in their least corrupt, most pure state, are mostly about trying to make the world we live in a better place by being kind to the people around you. I wanted that, too. I still do. But I also wanted to gossip, and the kind of gossip I wanted to do wasn’t slanderous. If every word uttered about a third party was gossip, I would have to sign a vow of silence and then I would simply have to die to avoid my terrible quiet future. So I did what every teen does: I tried to find the grayest space I could exist in before it was undeniable that I was sinning.

I determined that whining was probably fine. When you were whining, you were only talking about yourself and your feelings. That wasn’t gossip.

Dave Ramsey, a prominent Christian financial guru, defines gossip for his company as “discussing anything negative with someone who can’t help solve the problem.” Practically, that means that any complaint or criticism by employees should go straight to leadership. It also means that the company maintains complete control over what is said about it.

But that is exactly why most church leaders demonize gossip so strongly from the pulpit, because gossip seeks to hold people to account for their actions. It fights against secrecy, and while that can be dangerous when used against people without power, it targets anyone in leadership of any church who has an immense amount of power. Women who brought forth credible allegations of sexual misconduct against Willow Creek Community Church founder Bill Hybels were accused of using false allegations to collude and divide the church. Hundreds of similar stories in various churches emerged in late 2017 during the #MeToo movement after poet Emily Joy Allison tweeted about how she had been groomed by a youth leader in her Evangelical megachurch. Her report about how the church had protected the man in his thirties who had romantically pursued her as a sixteen-year-old and kept his offenses quiet spurred an outpouring of other stories that Allison encouraged people to hashtag #ChurchToo.

In high school, I could not at first see how deeply the demonization of gossip was intertwined with the church’s calls for women to submit. When the head pastor of the church I grew up in had an affair, the shutdown of the gossip mill was even more explicit. We were encouraged to speak to a pastor if we had questions, thus maintaining the power dynamic of the organization even as a power vacuum emerged at the top. I began to notice that these blanket renunciations of gossip as “negative” never defined who exactly the negativity was directed toward. Negativity is a value judgment. Gossip about the affair, for example, had forced a corrupting sin into the light, which is a biblical action.

is ironic, in the end, that all of the pastors were right. The thorn was supposed to remind me that I needed God, but once I rejected the idea that it was a thorn, my faith faded gradually and painfully, like a bruise. The scales fell from my eyes, as they had from the apostle Paul’s, and suddenly all I could see in front of me bright and shining was gossip. I stopped praying for God to take away my desire to gossip, and eventually I stopped praying altogether. Without the fear of sin, I was able to stop policing my engagement with gossip, which in turn let me gossip more. I was so good at it. I loved buffing up the details of something that had happened with one group of friends and relaying it to another. I loved learning about the nuances of history where gossip had been written out. Because it is easy for me to believe in some kind of innate characteristics and predestination, because I was brought up to do so, I do think that maybe this thorn inside me really was there from the beginning. Maybe being a gossip is simply part of my identity and personality, unremovable and consistent. But I don’t know that to love to gossip I had to reject my faith. Now, much later, I can see that there is plenty of room within Christianity for a gossip like me. Not only would a just God forgive you, but the Bible itself does not speak out that strongly against the behavior.

To be a teen is to live in a sense of superiority that envelops you whole. You believe you’ll never be more beautiful, never more attractive, never more interesting. None of it is true, of course, but the pressure of it can eat you alive. The standards to be a woman in the world are always high, but when you are a teen, the standards are set by your peers.

The technical term for this is social sanctioning. When we gossip about how someone is wearing the wrong thing, or dating the wrong person, or sitting at the wrong lunch table, we are communicating to the people around us that we don’t approve of those behaviors.

We are teaching our peer group how we want to behave and how we want them to behave.

There is evidence that women gossip more than men. And there are differences in their subjects. Men, research has found, are more likely to gossip about larger systems and famous people (sports, politics, and so on), and women are more likely to gossip about others in their social group. A study out of the University of California, Riverside, found that while women gossip more than men, most of that gossip is neutral, information-sharing gossip. A study of five teenage girls (granted, a limited study) whose conversations were recorded over a twelve-month period found that 65 percent of their conversations were gossip segments. “The girls were able to manage gossip topics in a way that is similar to older adults. However, one noticeable difference is that the girls appeared to be less certain about their beliefs regarding some of the issues discussed,” the study noted. The teenage years are a liminal period of learning. You feel like an adult, or at least I did, and it is only after you become an actual adult that you realize how young you really were. The gossiping that teens do, then, is constructive learning; they are trying to understand how to communicate about the world around them so that they might become adults.

By 1767, American papers noted “male gossip” in order to differentiate their talk from plain old gossip, which was something only women could do.

But as Louise Collins wrote in her article “Gossip: A Feminist Defense,” “Is gossip trivial because its subject matter, the personal, particular, and domestic, is trivial? Traditionally these aspects of life have been regarded as both ‘feminine’ and unimportant to what we are, qua moral beings.” If all talk about our lives and how we live them is gossip and trivial, what a sparse, sad realm of thought we are forced to occupy. The choices we make in our lives may not be the ivory tower ideals of existentialist thought, but that does not make them valueless.

The Champion doesn’t care about status. She doesn’t exclude “losers.” She is friends with lots of people. She is the idealized version of a daughter, a jewel of a girl who stands up for others. She is the type of teen girl you are supposed to want to be. Maybe, if you parent well enough, you can transform your demon daughter who won’t stop texting friends about who is dating whom into one.

Sometime in the 1940s, the idea of the American teenager was born. Adolescents obviously existed before the 1940s, but they were busy getting married or (if poor) working. As Thomas Hine wrote in The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, “During most of the nineteenth century, fourteen-year-olds were viewed as inexperienced adults.” But once marketing executives realized that young people had their own money and could be a target, they started marketing to them. Would teens like to buy a pink typewriter? You bet your ass they would. “To some extent, the teenage market—and, in fact, the very notion of the teenager—has been created by the businessmen who exploit it,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in the New Yorker in 1958.

In doing this, it incorrectly frames refraining from gossip as a personal virtue. The adults in Mean Girls want the same thing for their societies that the people in power at large seem to want for ours: for the people in charge to remain in charge and for peace to reign. A truly civic public, one that is engaged with the needs of its community members and whose members seek to help one another, necessarily requires gossip. “A civic public is neither an association among friends nor can it be limited to a… religious or ethnic group,” the educational theorist Thomas F. Green wrote in Voices: The Educational Formation of Conscience. Nor, he added, is the civic public akin to “religious-like associations” or “athletic clubs, whose members have achieved a rare sense of their mutuality and joint identity.” And nowhere is meant to be more of a perfect civic public than a public high school.

In Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple is asked what she thinks of the “inestimable harm… done by the foolish wagging of tongues in ill-natured gossip.” She responds brutally. “You are so unworldly,” she says. “I daresay idle tittle-tattle is very wrong and unkind, but it is so often true, isn’t it?” I love the use of the word unworldly here, as if to be able to think only of ideas is a privilege that robs you of the ability to see the world around you realistically. In my experience, calling the kind of whisper network information sharing that keeps people safe from abusers “gossip” instigates some kickback. Gossip, people say, is frivolous, and that’s not frivolous. Rather, gossip is always information.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have named this kind of gossiping prosocial gossip because it is used to warn others, which in turn can lower the overall exploitation of groups. As Evette Dionne, the former editor-in-chief of Bitch Media, said at a Clayman Institute for Gender Research event about the feminist use of rumor, people “reduce a credible allegation, an accusation against someone who has harmed someone else” to gossip as a way to “delegitimize it and undermine it, and make it seem as if it’s simply a rumor with no weight and no teeth to it.” Calling this form of cautionary tale “gossip” demeans its credibility and injects the stories with a pebble of doubt.

As every teen girl knows well, you cannot gossip with just anyone. Gossip requires a kind of mutual vulnerability, an innate trust. When we gossip with someone, we bring them information in the hope that they will trust it, while knowing that they will judge us based on its quality and verifiability. Whisper networks, prosocial gossip, and gossiping in general about people directly connected to us enable us to create a web of information that can keep us safe. It can help us identify abusers, avoid people who are mean, and know which of our crushes doesn’t like us at all. Gossip can’t always save us from harm, but it can teach us whom to trust.

The greatest mistake Gossip Girl ever made was revealing that Dan Humphrey had been the anonymous writer behind the blog all along. All good stories have an engine, and that’s what Gossip Girl forgot. The reductive way to understand a story engine is to conflate it with plot. You have to set up dominoes, writing teachers say, in order to knock them down. But you can set up a line of dominoes that falls perfectly in a straight line and doesn’t make anyone feel anything at all. You can set them up poorly, the edge of one barely clipping the edge of another, and they will fall, sure. But to what end? Making a perfect plot does not guarantee that your story won’t be boring. What makes a story engine isn’t events within the context of the story; it is the cadence of questions and reveals. Dominoes are too simple; what you want is to juggle a half dozen balls, the questions rising into the air only to fall back down again, being caught just when the reader thinks they won’t be.

The funny thing is that the show did not need to answer the question that hovered over the whole series, because who Gossip Girl really was doesn’t really matter to the plot. Her purpose, to strip a little bit of power from these insanely rich and powerful teens, is fulfilled regardless of who posts the blogs of their bad behaviors. And by revealing anyone as Gossip Girl, the show lost the premise that made it glimmer: that we would never know who Gossip Girl was because it didn’t matter. The point all along was her anonymity, and we loved it.

When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it. Anonymity gives people without power an opportunity to grab a little bit as their own. In the early years of women’s novel writing, the stigma of publishing as a woman was so great that in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that many anonymous figures were women. More accurately, Anonymous is anyone subjected, anyone trying to find a way to claw back a little bit of what has been taken from them.

Anyone who cares about celebrities also cares about the people who report on them. But the reason people care who she is isn’t just abject curiosity; it’s because we know that anonymity gives you power. Information that goes unpublished can be, and has been in our history, used to blackmail or extort people. We want to know who the person behind Gossip Girl is because without knowing who is spreading the gossip, we cannot be sure whether to trust it, much less know that person’s biases. Even though gossip from anonymous sources can reveal more about our world and the people in it than bylined gossip does, it feels dangerous to trust in gossip without a source. Because who really knows if any of it is true? That question that reverberates through the Gossip Girl intro—“Who am I?”—is always going to be present when anonymity is in play.

When researchers model the way gossip spreads, they can use the same distributed algorithms that model the propagation of infectious disease. Patient Zero for a true gossip story, in my experience, is almost always the subject or someone close to them. For a lie, though, the source could be anyone. With gossip it is less important to me that I know exactly who began a story and how it started than that I understand how many degrees of separation exist between me and the person who experienced it. The more bodies between me and Patient Zero, the less I trust the information I’m being given. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, of course, just that I start off with more skepticism.

Psychologists have also found that if we hear something and understand it, we will believe it and remember it. It does not matter whether that information is true or not. In a meta-analysis that used results from thirty-two studies with 6,500 participants, academics found that even when falsehoods are corrected, it does not eliminate misinformation. We just also retain the correction. The scientists also found that corrections were less effective when they came from a different source than the one that had spouted the lies to begin with. Once we’ve read one of these posts, then, we believe it and we remember it, and we repeat it over drinks, and it can spread that way forever.

Without clarity about who is writing the blog, and who is submitting the gossip, there is plenty of room to abuse the system. This use of anonymity to spread lies is part of the reason that people are so uncomfortable with anonymous authorship and gossip from anonymous sources. Anonymity prevents people from taking any kind of accountability for their actions. In some ways, the power gained by being anonymous can stay unchecked.

Anonymous writers can use their power however they want. In that way they replicate the same systems that anonymity itself can attempt to dismantle. With every post, they gain more and more attention, and in this economy, attention is money. There are rarely consequences for a creator like Raichik who used her anonymity to create a hate cycle and continues to wield the power of her privilege to oppress other people.

Part of the problem with the teachers functioning as Gossip Girl is that they are adults, and we expect adults to behave better than children. But the real issue is that when information comes from an anonymous source, we the consumers are able to imagine that our actions in response to it do not matter.

While the rational part of our mind, the prefrontal cortex, knows that fiction is, well, fiction, and that we should be skeptical of anonymous sources and writing in general, the other parts of our brain do not. Horror movies induce real physiological responses. You can get goose bumps from a ghost story, after all, even without any visuals. In the 2023 movie Anatomy of a Fall, a prosecutor reads the protagonist’s autofiction to her on the stand as evidence that she may have wanted to kill her husband. How, he asks, could she have had those thoughts and written those words if she had not really felt them?

If our curiosity is preserved, we do not have to question whether or not we are morally culpable in our consumption of anonymously provided gossip. If we don’t know for sure where the information came from, how can we be held accountable for any ramifications it might have? There is safety as a gossip in getting information from anonymous sources that disintegrates the minute you know where the information comes from.

Anonymous gossip is about escape, entertainment, and wonder. It’s about uncertainty and fear. It’s about seeing things in the world that we would never see otherwise, and it’s about who got fillers. We love anonymity because we love the chase, because we always want to know what’s happening on the other side.

And while fandoms are not new in any sense of the word, the access that fans have to their beloveds has increased drastically with the rise of social media. Instead of having to wait to see John Lennon or Michael Jackson perform live, hordes of fans have access to celebrities all the time via their Instagrams and their TikToks. It doesn’t matter that most of those accounts are managed by professionals, carefully timed to optimize performance, or contain photos from months ago. It feels like you, as an individual, have access to this person. You can even DM them if you want.

Under the model, there are three levels of worship a fan can engage in. At the lowest level is entertainment-social celebrity worship. These are people who are fans simply because they like the art created by the celebrity. At the middle level, intense-personal, fans engage more with the celebrity but still keep an appropriate distance. Those in the final group— borderline pathological—overidentify with the person they follow. Their moods, responses, and interests can be swayed by the celebrity’s behavior. Some people have said that they would genuinely commit a crime if asked to by their object of worship. At the height of my fandom, I was probably intense-personal with Britney Spears. Now, I register only at entertainment-social, which is either progress or regression, depending on your perspective.