Author: Olivia Schlamp, Southlake Carroll Senior High, '22
Growing up I wasn’t one to gossip mainly because I wasn’t viewed as “popular” enough to partake in the deep secret-telling routine, and goodness knows, I definitely wasn’t “popular” enough to be the subject of the rumors themselves. In my high school, gossiping was the norm, and even if you didn’t partake in it, you wanted to. Yeah, I’ll admit it: I wanted to be part of the circle that gossiped not because I wanted to spread rumors that were false or sometimes hurtful but because I wanted to fit in, and fitting in comes with the social pressure to gossip.
See, I never got into the popular kid gang, but now as I’m older, I notice something about the idea of gossip that went hidden in my young eyes. The idea of gossip is a sexist notion, and that’s the hard truth---no lies, no fallacies, no gossip. See, in my high school, everyone gossiped or at least wanted to, but yet the sharing secret habit was always directed as a way to shame women. I constantly heard boys demand their female friends to “stop being such a gossip.” Now, you may not have noticed this directly, but I would bet a well-kept secret that you have heard one of the many phrases: “girls can’t keep secrets,” “She’s known for talking behind other girls’ backs,” and my personal favorite--- “I can’t be friends with other girls, there is too much drama and gossip.” Yep, that’s right. Not just Men push the sword of the gossip stigma toward women; other women do it too.
How many times has a teacher told the boys to “stop talking” and the girls to “stop gossiping?” The literal act of gossiping is recognized as a female issue because we as a society correlate gossiping to pettiness and immaturity--- attributes the American society uses to insult girls and not boys. We have all heard the saying: “girls mature faster than boys,” so our sharing secret habits are automatically immature while boys’ are just viewed as simply conversational when they are in fact the same.
An article entitled, “Women vs Men: Who Gossips More?” on the website everydayhealth.com written by Myra Turner, comes to the fundamental conclusion that both genders gossip, but what causes society to view it as a female issue is the fact that many men consider their conversations about others as plain banter. To say it simply, “Many [men]...do not consider their locker room banter [as] gossip” because men believe gossiping is only done by females. This brings us to the root of what gossip is. The dictionary definition of gossip is a “chatty talk” or a “report of intimate nature.” Nowhere does Merriam Webster say anything about this being a gendered issue, but we as a society correlate gossiping with a negative connotation that society has taken to apply to women and women alone.
In fact, another article by Chris Matyszczyk with Incorporated revealed that both genders gossip in the workplace to the point that it is ingrained in the stereotypes of the American work culture, but the article goes on to explain that in a study done by the University of California, researchers discovered that in and out of the workplace, “women engaged in more neutral gossip than men,” meaning gossip that wasn’t as targeted or hateful to others. In fact, the majority of the conversations included in the study had disclaimers because many researchers of the study argued that what many declared as “gossip” for women was just light conversation while for men, the conversation was only called gossip if it was hateful. We as a society have declared any female-to-female conversation as gossip, whether having good intentions or not.
Gossip and girls are not intertwined or undeniably connected. The gush about gossip is that everyone has done it or at least thought about it, and only once we remove blaming gossip on girls do we discover the truths about communication--- gossip isn’t a girl thing, and that’s written by me with no lies, no fallacies, no gossip, as this has been confirmed.
Graphic by Premanshi Agarwalla
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