If you’re reading this, chances are close to 100 percent that you love to gossip — about celebrities, and maybe also about your neighbors, friends and coworkers, and their neighbors, friends and coworkers, too. But do you feel bad about it? Reject that guilt and shame, because the pastime has benefits for your health and can effect lasting positive societal change, urges Kelsey McKinney, creator and former host of the popular podcast “Normal Gossip” and author of a new book of essays, You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on the Art of Gossip.
“We are in a moment where gossip is maybe less maligned than it was even five years ago,” McKinney told Us Weekly exclusively in a new interview. “People are pretty open about loving gossip. More than ever, people are coming up to me personally and are like, ‘have you heard this thing?’ And so I do think there’s a little bit more of a positive swing happening. That said, it’s so deep within our culture to malign gossip that I think that’s a really hard thing to overcome.”
As McKinney writes in You Didn’t Hear This From Me, gossip has long been vilified, often in sexist terms, as a mortal sin (as she was taught in her childhood church), as superficial, anti-intellectual, toxic and bad mojo. But the act of dishing it out can be downright healthy.
“Physically, we know that gossiping lowers your heart rate, which seems counterintuitive — like in a bar, you get all worked up and excited,” she explained. “Scientists don’t know exactly why yet, but they think it’s because you feel more comfortable.”
Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift. Johnny Nunez/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Which gets to the social benefit of dishing about your favorite CW alum or your passive aggressive officemate. “Gossip, culturally, is a sign of trust,” McKinney said. “You don’t gossip with someone you hate. Ever.”
And the circle-of-trust moment can strengthen our cognitive and analytical skills, too. “Gossip is how we make sense of the world,” McKinney explained. “So it’s not just that we’re talking about our friend or our co-worker, it’s that we’re using data that we can gather from other places from all of these little gossips to figure out how to behave.”
While the “Normal Gossip” podcast focuses on the foibles of anonymous non-famous people — think delicious drama at an elite dog grooming salon or a bachelorette party gone seriously awry — McKinney is just like Us. “I love celebrity gossip! I’m the first one to say that I can’t judge anyone for doing it. I read you guys. I read the Daily Mail. I read People. I’m reading everything from the blind items to legacy magazines, and then I also listen to Who Weekly.”
The Texas native is a lifelong devotee of Britney Spears and Taylor Swift (“I saw her on her second tour!) and a rabid reality TV watcher whose absolute favorite entry in the genre is The Traitors — a show where, she points out, gossip drives the action, and is how contestants survive (or are manipulated).
“As someone who consumes both competitive shows and unscripted reality, I feel like I’m working as a translator right now,” McKinney said, “where I’m having to explain to my friends who watch the Real Housewives that Boston Rob was really hot and everyone loved him and he was America’s sweetheart 20 years ago, before all of this, and then I’m having to explain to the Survivor people the dynamics of Selling Sunset, which is just kind of crazy.”
Back in the real world, with much more serious stakes, as McKinney writes, another form of gossip is the whisper network — in which information is shared privately to potentially expose corrupt individuals or systems of power. In recent years, we’ve seen whisper networks take down powerful celebrities and other figures in the #MeToo movement and beyond. “We’re talking about two things here,” McKinney said. “The first is a whisper network which exists amongst people who do not have power talking to each other and warning each other about someone who’s dangerous. So that’s everything from women in a bar saying, ‘Don’t talk to that guy,’ to the lowest level of employees talking about which bosses are bad and which ones aren’t.”
“When we talk about the #MeToo movement,” she continued, “what’s so interesting about it is that that is the publicizing of a whisper network. So it’s taking what was already a pretty open secret and making it public knowledge. So when we think about the biggest cases to come out of the #MeToo movement, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, those cases, I read the blind items for years. People have known, that information has been out there. People have been talking about it for decades.”
The author isn’t completely optimistic that all whisper network campaigns will be that revolutionary. “I’m interested to see how much that continues going forward because of the fallout,” McKinney said. “We haven’t seen a ton of actual justice be served. But the whisper networks have always been there, and they’ll continue to always be there, because that is how we keep each other safe, even if you aren’t publishing it in the New York Times.”
You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on the Art of Gossip is on sale now.
