Helen Huynh
Women talk.
Or, at least, such goes the saying.
From the dawn of their adolescence, girls are urged by their parents, teachers and guiding adults alike to resist the temptation of idle chatter. “Do not talk behind anyone’s back,” we are told. “Do not speak if you have nothing nice to say.” Each refrain aims to reinforce the guiding philosophy: to succumb to the tantalizing desire to gossip is deeply shameful, and an indictment of one’s poor character.
Yet, friendships between girls have always been, and continue to be, shaped by this condemned exchange of information. Clandestine whispers yield to trust, unity and mutual understanding. Such is evident in the simple origins of the term. “Gossip,” though originally denoting godparent, came to allude to women friends in the early 1500s in England.
Today, however, gossip has evolved to bear its negative connotations. Though this moral disapproval is sometimes warranted — when exchanges prove to be overtly malicious in their intent and execution — oftentimes discussion is harmless, and a mere modus for becoming known.
Girls, after all, talk about everything: their counterparts, their families, their lives. Such chatter is neither frivolous nor necessarily disparaging, but born of curiosity.
Notably, one topic in particular receives frequent and ardent attention.
Men.
It’s not something that, as a woman, you readily want to admit. Modern feminism impels us to live our lives independent of the men around us. Popular phenomena like the Bechdel test, for instance, propel the notion: your female relationships should focus on more than just men. Colloquial terms like “boy-crazy” to describe a woman who fails to decenter the opposing sex similarly aim to provoke feelings of mortification. It seems that nowadays to speak ceaselessly or exclusively of men is a failure to both oneself and womanhood as a whole.
However, to me, it seems that to outright deny discussion of men, is a far greater embarrassment.
Gossip, after all, was ascribed its modern meaning — shifting from its previous definition for female friendship — when English women in the 1600s began to congregate in taverns to discuss their marriages beyond their husbands’ earshot. “Their conversation runs first on the goodness of the wines, and next on the behaviour of their husbands, with whom they are all dissatisfied,” writes Thomas Wright, for example, in “A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages.”
Men, aggrieved by this social behaviour, sought to condemn the activity as an immoral vice. Women chattering away in the dark — of matters which they would not be allowed to know, and those that often pertained to them — was potentially harmful, and therefore, reprehensible. Gossip was prescribed a negative parlance, and women were encouraged to be quiet.
Today, women who continue this talk frequently face accusations of frivolity and nefarious intent in doing so.
However, to discourage our conversation about the opposing sex is to silence a significant part of the female experience. Our interactions with men — whether romantic, sexual, platonic or otherwise — innately inform our understanding of ourselves and our placement in the inherently patriarchal system within which we live.
Gossip is often thus the only mechanism by which we coordinate and collectively navigate our shared reality of being the “other” sex to that which bears the most power within our status quo. And, of course, it is the only mechanism by which we may unite to identify and protect ourselves from the poor behavior of some men.
So, while girls by no means should only speak of men, perhaps it’s not as shameful to speak of them as once thought. Perhaps, it’s crucial to navigating the experience of womanhood, which, unfortunately, will always include men.