All The Reasons Gossiping Can Actually Be Good For Your Health

BABE!!! GOT SOME GREAT GOSS!

There is a little more likely to make me reply to a message with speed than the promise of a hit of delicious, class-A tattle. I wouldn’t say it’s my most virtuous trait, but nor am I sufficiently self-flagellating to think that I’m alone in that admission – on the contrary. Whether or not you actually want to admit to your fondness for great goss? Well, that is another question entirely.

Many of us love to be party to a bit of breaking ‘news’ (heavy on the quote marks). It entertains and excites, serving morsels of intrigue and sprinklings of flavour atop the stodge of daily life. ‘Gossip’s just another form of storytelling,’ says Sophie Jewes, founder of the London PR agency Raven. ‘If you have a public profile, or you’re trying to be “known”, you want people talking about you. The trick is not to take it personally. Being impervious to gossip is quite fabulous… and a survival skill in fashion.’

Yes, indeed. Fashion is, and always has been, a hotbed of gossip. All that time on set, or waiting for a catwalk show to start, means time to fill somehow. Like it or not, it is an industry full of players whose relevance, like trends, constantly ebbs and flows. It’s a self-feeding ecosystem, where who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ makes for interesting chat – whether innocuously observed or deliberately barbed and bitchy. The recent movement of creative directors at design houses – Matthieu Blazy to Chanel, Demna out of Balenciaga and in at Gucci, Hedi Slimane and John Galliano currently nowhere (but hopefully going somewhere) – saw the gossip economy hit overdrive. When Jonathan Anderson was appointed creative director of Dior earlier this year, although the move was thrilling, the news didn’t feel much like news at all – it had been the subject of chatter for months.

And yet I can’t help thinking that, despite the fact that we are living in a golden age of gossip, thanks in no small part to the internet, it might be better, even a little radical, for us to try to let go of it. In June, the UK-based anonymous gossip site Tattle Life (which reportedly attracts 12 million monthly users and has been embroiled in several online abuse scandals) faced a landmark defamation ruling in Northern Ireland in which the identity of its operator, Sebastian Bond (a fortysomething former fitness influencer), was revealed.

But gossiping is a tale as old as time. Writer Roger Wilkes, author of Scandal, traced it back to 1500 BC and cuneiform tablets detailing a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. The Bible contains a number of verses and proverbs condemning ‘lying lips’; in the Torah it is lashon hara (evil speech). In his 17th-century diaries chronicling London life, Samuel Pepys reveals himself to be a prototype DeuxMoi. In Regency England, so-called ‘scandal sheets’ would chronicle the indiscretions of the upper classes. Gossip peppers the plots of Jane Austen novels and Shakespeare plays as much as it does Real Housewives franchises.

Fashion Is, And Always Has Been, A Hotbed Of Gossip

And what do we actually mean when we say ‘gossip’? Collins dictionary describes it as ‘informal conversation, often about other people’s private affairs’. Sometimes described as ‘idle chatter’, it usually involves examining something that is definitely absolutely none of your business. There are undoubtedly negative connotations: it being a vehicle of misinformation, lies or exaggeration is implicit in our understanding of gossip. While there is a difference between gossip and bitching (the former does not necessarily set out to be mean – although this is often a consequence; the latter is nastiness), the overlap is huge. Perhaps that is why, with gossip, there is an important distinction to be made between verb and noun. While we will, gladly or reluctantly (self-delusion levels depending), admit to gossiping, nobody likes to be described as a gossip.

Dr Audrey Tang, chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society and author of The Leader’s Guide to Wellbeing, says there are very valid reasons why we gossip. ‘There is an argument that at some points in evolution it was healthy: “Don’t touch that!” “Don’t eat that!” That word of mouth is heuristic,’ she says. It is also, she adds, a type of bonding. ‘We can feel very powerful when we have a secret. And almost even more powerful when telling other people about it,’ she explains. ‘There’s quite a lot to do with our ego in there.’ Certainly, ‘keep this between us’ is an intimate contract of bonding – even if there is an implicit understanding that it might be broken.

Appearing on an episode of Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast this spring, the designer Susie Cave talked about setting an intention not to talk negatively about others – even when it’s true. She found it directly impacts how she thinks, comparing it to ‘Botox in my brain’, erasing negativity. On this topic Freud makes an important distinction between good and bad chat: ‘It’s actually much more stimulating to heap praise on something, but it feels more adrenalised to rip things apart.’

There is logic in this, says Tang: ‘We get good at what we practise. We haven’t all suddenly become addicted to fast food, it’s just because society allows us to engage with it more that we act that way. There’s not some magic switch, but if you frequently talk negatively about people you’re going to think negatively, because that’s what you’re going to look for. The neuroplasticity of the brain [means that] whatever we practise, those new pathways get formed.’

And what about the subject of the gossip? Harming ourselves is one thing, but even the most enthusiastic gossiper would be advised to think about the potential damage to others. Ideally, all gossip should come with a fistful of salt and reams of small print. Lies, repeated often enough, particularly now powered by the internet, can quickly calcify into false ‘fact’. It’s a fate that has befallen an unfortunate number of women throughout history, known and unknown (Marie Antoinette never said, ‘let them eat cake’; those cuneiform tablets are open to interpretation, meaning some poor Mesopotamian woman has possibly been erroneously condemned as an adulterer for, oh, a mere 3,500 years). ‘The court of public opinion has had more impact on how we view historical events than any official statement or report. As with social media today, if a rumour is repeated often enough, it hardens into fact in the public consciousness,’ says historian Hayley Nolan, author of Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies.

Even the cold waters of logic and decorum do little to dampen the wildfire of gossip. Consider how last year the 24-year-old footballer Callum Hudson-Odoi had to quash the absolutely bonkers rumour that he had been on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane (he would have been a child). Or see how the Princess of Wales was backed into a corner by rampant speculation over her whereabouts and forced into revealing her cancer diagnosis.

One of the problems with gossip is that there are no hard and fast rules; the boundaries are invisible and ever shifting. For example, news of a pregnancy might seem either boring or salacious, happy or concerning, depending on the circumstances. There is also the issue that you don’t know what can be shrugged off and what can cause damage. On my first week of secondary school someone scrawled ‘Laura Jordan is a fat slag’ on the wall of a toilet stall. As a timid tween, the ‘slag’ bit I found funny, perversely flattering even (boys didn’t even look at me!) – but ‘fat’ exacerbated my pre-existing body insecurity. And although it’s easy to dismiss chatter with a ‘it’s better to be talked about than not’, not everybody has the capacity, or will, to think that way. Some 12-step meetings finish with a reminder to leave what you hear in the meeting behind the room because ‘gossip can kill’.

It doesn’t have to be bad news though.

‘In my opinion, gossip is healthy if it is not mean-spirited, and makes you relax, have fun, be yourself and let your guard down. I don’t advise being cruel by telling stories about who slept with who and who had what work done to their face, but as a bit of fun it cannot cause too much harm if it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands,’ says Belma Gaudio, the founder and creative director of the London-based boutique Koibird. ‘Maybe the negative connotation came about as another way to put women down’.

Absolutely. Part of the issue with gossip is that it is seen as a primarily female pursuit (wrong! Anyone who thinks that has clearly never been on a Reddit forum or paid attention to the football transfer window; Tang points to a 2019 study in the Journal of Social, Psychological and Personality Science, which found that although women might gossip more than men, they do so more neutrally). But that is to dismiss the uplifting power it can have. It is gossip that helps us findout that we’re not being paid fairly, or warns us about that guy, or alerts us to a new career opportunity. Besides, is the ‘trivial’ tattle shared over garden walls really in essence different from the Machiavellian plotting and leaking, the supposedly important gossip, taking place in the world’s political arenas?

Maybe what gossip needs is a rebrand. Why must we think of it as cruel, false and unconstructive when it can be harmless, useful and reveal interest in the world and people around us?And on the occasion we do find ourselves on the receiving end of incorrect, mean gossip? Remember there is a privilege in being noticed – and to know that if you’re irking people, you’re doing something right. But keep that between us, yeah?

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