/ 25 February 2011

Idle tittle-tattle not so idle

“Gossip,” the grande dame of rumourmongers, Liz Smith, once noted, “is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.” It was Smith’s words that came to my mind recently, while watching The Children’s Hour, Ian Rickson’s exceptional production of Lillian Helman’s 1934 play, currently showing in London’s West End. It stars Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss as two teachers in a girls’ boarding school in New England who, through a spot of malicious scuttlebutting by a disgruntled student, find themselves accused of having a lesbian affair.

The play is a cautionary tale of the harmful impact of gossip, of the lingering effects of idle tittle-tattle, and there seemed no small irony in the fact that its stars are two young women who frequently find their professional achievements obscured by our collective obsession with the private lives of the rich and famous. Much of the coverage of the play, rather than discussing their stunning performances or the work in question, has predictably focused on Knightley’s recent split from fellow actor Rupert Friend, and the fact that Moss, recently divorced from the comedian Fred Armisen, is a Scientologist.

Few of us are immune to the lure of celebrity gossip. Like many women I know, I find even a casual visit to a celebrity website is akin to falling down a rabbit hole — hours lost in the trials and tribulations of the Kardashian sisters, or the wardrobe choices of Kelly Brook, or in riveting accounts of Britney Spears paying an afternoon visit to Starbucks. And my conclusion is that the mud does stick: I can tell you with some accuracy, for example, the romantic history of Shia LaBoeuf, or the fitness regime of weather girl Claire Nasir, and I have a working knowledge of the American television series, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, without ever having seen it.

Gossip has always been deemed a largely female preserve and there have been many studies of women’s relationships with hearsay and tattle, of the way it builds our social networks, cements our relationships, of the way we revel in its endless narrative — the weight gained, lost and gained once again, the bikini shots, the red-carpet outfits, the marriages, the births, the infidelities — in much the same way that many men (and, yes, women too) relish the rise and fall of a football team and its players.

But these days gossip seems to have outdone itself — its magazines (chiefly aimed at a female audience) flourish in a flagging market, and websites such as TMZ broadcast endless videos of Lindsey Lohan buying shoes or Justin Bieber inspecting his nails. With this increased exposure we have come to believe these are things we have a right to know.

‘Burying millions of American women alive’
Regardless of whether there was any truth in the allegation that David Beckham paid prostitute Irma Nici for £2 000-a-night liaisons, the footballer’s libel claim against In Touch, the magazine that published Nici’s story, was thrown out of court this week, with the judge ruling that Beckham was a public figure and as a result there was a public interest in his private life. Additionally, his legal team had failed to find any evidence of malice in In Touch’s decision to publish the story.

Perhaps Beckham, as a man who has at times courted the media’s infatuation with his personal life, needs to take the rough with the smooth sometimes.

But I find it hard to believe there was no malice. And this is what I fear we are in danger of forgetting — that gossip is harmful. And it is harmful not just to those who are gossiped about — it is harmful, too, to those of us who relentlessly consume it.

Nearly 50 years ago Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, in which she spoke of the widespread unhappiness and lack of fulfilment of women in the 1950s and 1960s. “The problem that has no name” was what she called it, and she defined it as “simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities”. It was, she said, “taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease”.

Times are different now. Women have greater access to education, careers and intellectual fulfilment than ever before. Yet now we choose to dumb ourselves down, to subdue our own minds by sedating ourselves with online visits to the showbiz sites and buying gossip weeklies at the newsstand.

“The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive,” Friedan wrote in 1963 and there are times when I fear we are doing no better — burying ourselves alive in a mire of half-true tales about Sienna Miller. We need to nourish our minds, we need to recognise that if we continue to feed ourselves with this bilge, this drivel, then we are imprisoning ourselves. Isn’t it time we became less about the red satin dress and more about the news? —