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

by Kelsey McKinney

What I crave is a phone call that starts with “You’re never going to believe this,” or a four-minute-long voice memo sent with no context, or the electric current that seems to appear in the air when the person across from you at the table leans in and lowers their voice.

At its most basic, gossip is just one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present. That means, definitionally, that prayer requests are gossip. Speculation in the media about which baseball team Shohei Ohtani is going to sign with is gossip. A doctor conferring with a colleague over an X-ray is gossiping about their patient just like two friends sending each other Taylor Swift’s posts on IG are gossiping. In modern parlance, we also say “gossip” when we mean slander, libel, or hate speech. We call celebrity news, calls from our mom, and whisper networks gossip. Even in scientific research, there is no consensus on what “gossip” means. We say we love to gossip, and in the same breath we say that gossip is dangerous.

Just as one chimpanzee might pick bugs out of the hair of another to signify closeness and allyship to others in their community, so might a teenage girl lean over to tell her friend a secret or a colleague bring you a piece of important information.

The people who are afraid of the Gossip Trap (or Cancel Culture, Woke Mobs, the Media, or whatever you want to call the kind of social pressure that can create change) are the ones who have reason to be: they have outsized power in our society, and they want to hold on to it.

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,”

What is a person if not their collection of experiences in the world and the unique ability to process them? What is art if not a reminder that we are not alone here on this earth with our emotions? What is gossip if not a way to decipher the world around us?

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.

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.

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.

In the disciples’ response to the women, we see the true heart of both gossip and religion: belief. The disciples did not believe that the gossip was true. They did not believe the story. The problem wasn’t the story itself but their response to it. It was unbelievable, and therefore easy to dismiss.

Anyone who has ever been a teen knows that the scariest thing about the gossip of teens is that it is almost always true. Your pants are too skinny. Your part is wrong.

Teens know innately that gossip doesn’t come from nowhere. It always, always comes from somewhere. So even if you deny a rumor to the high heavens, that doesn’t mean that people will believe you. There’s a morsel of truth sometimes that even the most adamant denials cannot destroy.

But the gossiping that the teens are doing is more than immature hate; it’s part of how they build their communities. 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. If the popular girls carry Stanley cups, you will, too.

In the 1970s, Henri Tajfel and John Turner proposed Social Identity Theory, which argued that people derive belonging, purpose, self-worth, and identity from the social groups they belong to. Your identity can, in fact, be based on carrying a Stanley cup, wearing pink on Wednesdays, or wearing the right athletic shorts.

while women gossip more than men, most of that gossip is neutral, information-sharing gossip.

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.

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.

“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.

Of course, teenagers are obsessed with whom they have crushes on and what the gossip around love is, but that is not unique to teenagers; adults also gossip about affairs and relationships.

Even the most mundane gossip can later turn out to be important. While gossip can be toxic, it can also be a way of keeping one another safe.

That is the problem with Wiseman and Mean Girls’ uniform dismissal of gossip as a social necessity. As Resnick wrote, “A young person indoctrinated never to ‘talk about people behind their backs’ (Cady’s definition of gossip), will not report a case of drug-dealing or vandalism in the school or (if one wants to exempt illegal activities from the gossip rule—itself the exercise of judgment) a friend’s bulimic vomiting or depression.”

“Harassment is always a sexual demand, but it also carries a more sinister and pathetic injunction: ‘You will think about me,’”

As irrelevant as he was to my position in the world and my understanding of myself, here he still is occupying space in my mind.

an incorrect version of the story shared by people who had done wrong, it is perhaps more apt to call it propaganda. One inherent danger of the storytelling of gossip, though, is that it can convince people that something they already believed anyway is true.

Because whisper networks are not codified and require someone with knowledge to seek you out in particular and share it with you, they replicate the same kinds of racist, classist, and gender biases that exist in every aspect of our society.

What is clear is that there is no justice in the Barbie movie. The Kens do not achieve anything close to citizenship nor are they asked to answer for the abuses they rained upon the Barbies. In Barbieland, there are no consequences. The raising of your consciousness is enough to save you. It felt dated to claim that the problems with womanhood lie buried and unspoken when The Feminine Mystique had been in print for more than fifty years.

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.

We love information from anonymous sources. We love to gobble it up unverified and spit it back out. We love not knowing who is telling us something because then we don’t have to question it, don’t have to worry about the morality of its consumption, or who might be grabbing power by sharing this information. Under the beautiful shadow of anonymity, the author gains protection, but we, the consumer, do, too.

When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it.

in the long run, the end of that anonymity is the end of a question that we love to ruminate on. In exchange for knowledge, we trade wonder, which feels like an unfair trade when entertainment is concerned.

The “halo effect,” a term coined in the early twentieth century to describe our unconscious tendency to make giant assumptions about people after only one impression, is in play with celebrities. This is the fan’s fallacy: to believe that you literally know a famous person just because you consume their art, and follow them on social media, and care about them so much.

Entitlement gossip is predicated on an assumption that you know more than you do, that the parasocial relationship that exists in your head between you and a celebrity is real. It’s projecting the expectations you have for the real friends in your real life onto a public figure.

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.

Groupthink is when members of a small group accept a perceived consensus. So even if many members do not think that Nicky is a Traitor simply because she didn’t raise her glass to toast, if they notice that the majority of others seem to be leaning that way, they will follow the herd in order to reach a consensus.

Reality television’s most important reminder is that no matter how much gossip you obtain and how well you deploy it, you are still just human. All it takes is one person to lie effectively to you for all of your social gathering to come to naught, your torch to get snuffed, your name to be written down, or your contract to fail to be renewed for the next season. All the receipts, proof, screenshots, timeline, fucking everything that you gather and present cannot give you complete control, because each of us is not the center of reality. Reality exists without us, which is a comforting reminder.

Maybe the reason we love reality television gossip so much is that it is more concise than the narrative arcs in our lives. We can see what matters to us as a society in a neat little diorama. In a couple of hours of bingeing, we can see the decision-making process, the action, the ramifications of that action, and the fallout. The story-lines complete themselves in front of us. And with that knowledge we return to the actual real world to try to build alliances and trust for ourselves.

caused almost as much commotion as the quizzes we took before Valentine’s Day (we had to pay money to find out who we were most compatible with). Those were acceptable forms of horoscope for an early-aughts Republican district. The compatible crushes were all of the opposite sex, and my career test said that I would do well in the military.

CONSPIR. A conspiracy theory is contradictory (C) because conspiracy theorists can simultaneously believe two things in direct opposition to each other. To a conspiracy theorist, Princess Diana could have either faked her death or been murdered. The belief system must also contain overriding (O) suspicion: the official account must always be wrong, and anything that does not fit into the predetermined belief must be ignored. Importantly, the disregarding of those accounts is because of their nefarious (N) intent. The people behind the conspiracy are never acting with goodwill. And even if part of the theory is proven incorrect, theorists persist in the deep feeling that something (S) must be wrong. They themselves are the brave individual willing to fight on behalf of whatever persecuted (P) victim exists, and this aim is completely immune (I) to evidence. Conspiracy theorists believe that very little happens by accident; all random events can be reinterpreted (R) as part of a greater whole.

“Truth and fact-checking travel along the same paths that conspiracies do. But the truth is often complicated, shaded, and demanding, and there’s no denying that it often lacks the powerful, emotional, gut-level appeal of a conspiracy,

the Washington Post counted more than 30,500 false or misleading claims that the president managed to tell in his four years in office. So why should a statement from his White House mean anything?

At their most sinister, conspiracy theories can be a way to justify hatred against a specific group of people. They can show us at our ugliest, becoming vehicles for racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism.

That’s how a legend is born, after all: imbue a little gossip with magnitude and enough time, give it a moral that rings true to people, and watch it grow.

Once gossip becomes so big that it has a purpose, be it in the haunting of an urban legend or the ugliness of a conspiracy theory, it becomes a mirror. The truths inside a gossip that big aren’t in the details. Urban legends and conspiracy theories tell us who we are, the good and the bad. They show us our values, whether honesty and helping others or hate. It is easy to dismiss a story that has spread so far, a gossip that has grown so large, by saying that it must be untrue and made up. But if we can see beyond the haze of our skepticism, inside such stories, whatever you want to call them, are the truths that make us who we are, just waiting to be found.