Gossip Guys

From cocktail parties to family reunions; from internet chat rooms to personal blogs; from showbiz TV talk shows to the AM radio morning broadcasts; from the office water cooler to the hallowed halls of the senate; we all enjoy the guilty pleasure of talking about other people.

Women, admittedly, are born with a gossip chip embedded in their brains. It has been our evolutionary role, since the beginning of time: while our hunter-gatherer men folk searched for food, we gathered round tending hearth and cave, passing time through idle chatter. We breathe gossip, we live it, we search for it, we spread it, we create it, we invent it, and we deny it. We love it, and yet abhor it at the same it.

What about men; do they gossip? Every single male will deny it but I am convinced that they do and at the same rate and frequency as women, except they don’t call it that; they call it networking. There are basic differences, of course, in how they do it, which is why, when we do see or hear them gossiping it may not initially seem so.

Women gossip in animated tones supplemented by emotion-fueled facial expressions and the attendant, wild arm gestures. They pay strict attention to detail and rabidly overuse the play-replay buttons of narration. While men do it in Amish fashion: sparse, unadorned, and miserly—one truncated statement at a time. Consider this: “Hey, have you heard that Jack got Jill pregnant?” “Really? Wow!” That’s it; nothing more. Such is a classic example of two men gossiping. Or this: “Remember that babe at the bar last night, the one with the gynormous boobs and that dang short skirt? Well, I got her digits!” To which the other one answers: “No Shit!” End of conversation.

Women would have hacked that other person to death with a blunt sickle if the conversation ended there. We want the juice—every single sordid detail of what had transpired. And not just that, we also want every detail of what the other’s succeeding plans, plus the projected fictional scenarios of what might happen according to such plans. How short was the skirt, was it denim or cotton? How big were the boobs, C cup or D cup? What did she look like, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, or Pokwang? How did you get her number? Did you buy her a flute of Cristal, put a gun to her head, or slip Rohipnol into her drink? Are you going to call her, when, where, how? What did she say and how did she say it? Did you kiss her, pinch her, smell her, or barf on her? That sort.

Men, on the other hand, gossip with one-liners but it doesn’t mean they dish out impotent, benign information. Look at what happened when Chavit Singson and Jun Lozada spoke. Men don’t really bother with juicy details—that’s just not their nature, that’s why a senate inquest was necessary to extract details from them. Men only spit out details when they are under grave threat.

I blame women for this reluctance to speak freely. Weren’t we the ones who coined the term “kiss and tell” so that men learned (did they?) to keep tight-lipped about their private affairs in order to protect their women from public judgment of conduct unbecoming? But look what happens when we, ourselves, interrogate our partners for suspicious behavior; if he remains mum, we needle him to death, employing all the ancient torture methods we know—tears, emotional outbreaks, hurling objects, maxing out his credit card, crashing his brand new car into the neighbor’s fence—just to get a word out. “Do you love her? What’s she like? Did you give her presents? Is she pretty? Is she fat?” Crap like that.

What exactly is gossip? According to researcher, Karen Fox, in Old English, gossip—or god-sibb—originally meant a person related to one in God, specifically referring to a woman’s close female friends at the birth of a child (those she would choose to be godparents to her child). The word later came to mean more generally, a close (female) friend or companion, and the kind of talk characteristic of intimate friends, i.e. chatty talk about the details of personal matters and relationships, the sharing of secrets—more or less what we currently mean by gossip.

“Gossip involves a good amount of evaluation but it doesn’t mean that all of it involves criticizing or disparaging others. One recent study showed that criticism and negative evaluations account for only five percent of gossip-time, with another five percent devoted to asking for or giving advice on how to handle social situations, but the bulk of the conversations focus on who’s doing what with whom and personal social experiences”.

Gossip generally involves more than the sharing of information about people’s lives and relationships: it usually includes the expression of opinions or feelings about this information.
Men do gossip. In fact, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), a nonprofit think tank in England , recently interviewed 1,000 cell phone users about how they use their phones for gossip and how gossip affects their lives. All the women in the survey admitted that 'gossips' are a part of their lives, but many male participants initially denied that they gossip. However the study found that 33 percent of men indulge in gossip almost every day, compared with 26 percent of women. Here, according to Sharon Supriya of Oneindia.com is what men gossip about:

*Men gossip as much as women about colleagues they would like to go to bed with
*They are interested in talking about potential mates and sexual rivals even those who already have a girlfriend or partner.
*Men also spend more time talking about themselves than women. They name the conversation 'Networking'.
*Men mostly gossip with work colleagues, love partners and female friends; women prefer to dish primarily with female friends and relatives.
*Other things men gossip about are work, politics or other highbrow topics less than 5 percent of the time, unless women are present.
*Men and women love to read, watch and talk about celebrity gossip that not only talk about controversies but also talk about their romance, weddings, pregnancies and babies.
*Men love to watch gossip shows. If you deny then have you watched ESPN lately. It is the gossip heaven for men.

Nigel Nicholson in Psychology Today says that men gossip for networking, while women do it for alliance. Men gossip to network because as social animals they are status conscious and since social rank is unstable, multidimensional, and highly mobile, men go through different measures to ensure their stability in the social hierarchy. Male gossip, according to Nicholson, “is a way of advancing a good opinion of themselves to those who can help them. It is a kind of self-promotion, which may or may not be a conscious strategy.” In an ever-shifting matrix of alliances, people will always be looking for an advantage. In this age, a handle on information is definitely one of them.

Women, on the other hand gossip for alliance or bonding. It is a one-on-one pleasure wherein they supply information to whom they want to align themselves and to those whom they are drawn to. It is said that women gossip more than men do. Perhaps they only do it better.
Nicholson says that what does tend to differ by gender is the content of gossip. “Men are much more interested in who is up and who is down (hence sports-page obsession), as befits their predilection for competitive game-playing. Women tend to gossip more about social inclusion and moral alignment-who's in and who has merit”.

Gossip is a social skill, not a character flaw. It doesn’t have anything to do with gender. It is an individual personality trait. I know of men who are each equal to three women in terms of gossiping ability. One male acquaintance has made it his business to keep close tabs on other people’s private lives, like how many millions his neighbor spends on New Year’s Eve fireworks alone, or how some families are squabbling over their patriarch’s millions, or the intimate fights of a married couple he knows very well, and makes no bones about broadcasting it to everyone else. Such people may derive pleasure from this exercise and may think that others to whom they give the information feel the same way. They ought to know that it is downright offensive to be told of disparaging matters.

This is the dark side of gossip. Haven’t all of us, at some point or other, been victims of vicious gossip, something so vile that even while completely erroneous, seems all too real to be fabricated? And so we end up believing. But we all know how it feels; no matter who spread it, no matter our gender, malicious gossip strikes at our very core and it takes considerable time to recover from. The problem is, true or not, the havoc it wreaks cannot be undone. The victim’s most logical recourse is to wait it out and count on the public’s short memory as his final absolution because other, more aggressive reactions like verbally defending oneself or worse, filing a libel suit, is immediately perceived as an indication of guilt.

Often, people maliciously gossip about others to boost their sense of selves. Oftentimes, we do it simply for entertainment, oblivious if not uncaring about its effects on the subject. It is curious how studies have shown that economic standing have much to do with how people view and handle gossip. People from third world cultures like to gossip about the misfortunes of more prosperous to bring them down—the crab mentality at work, if you will. It makes them feel that those who have the means can be as miserable as they are. People from first world cultures, on the other hand, like to gossip about lifestyles of the richer and more famous—their money, properties, vacations, families—to get a grip of what they aspire to and to have a window into the more affluent lives that they covet.

Negative gossip about third parties, who of course have no opportunity to defend themselves, is a dangerous game that can rebound on the gossiper. To be good at malicious gossip requires a high degree of subtlety and skill. The trick is to appear to be sympathetic to the victim while holding him below the waterline with implicit denigration.

“Most people find this distasteful. Much malicious gossip is conducted unconsciously, an act that requires self-deception. But humans are especially adept at it; it helps us to maintain consistent social performance,” according to Robert Trivers, Ph.D., one of the originators of evolutionary psychology. “In the world of gossip, self-deception often takes the form of genuinely believing one is on the high moral ground of charitable sympathy, looking down on one's slowly sinking victim.”

We all gossip. We all enjoy it. We all suffer because of it. Shame on us!