History

I think she's using it in the same sense as the Oxford dictionary "conversation about other people and their private lives" which is certainly closer to how people around me use it. Like a normal greeting to my friends would be "what's the goss?" and they would tell me how their lives are going.

Specifically my experience is gossip is when femme presenting people discuss people. Before I transitioned doing the same things in a masculine context would be "shooting the shit" or "having a yarn". Potentially some local regional variation.

Certainly calling someone a gossip has extremely negative connotations here, more in line with your perception. A gossip would be a femme presenting person (always) who has a reputation for spreading unkind information, often fictional, about people.

Social grooming is the name of a behaviour among apes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_grooming e.g. my wife adjusting my hair is social grooming. It's just an academic term.

Hmm, I can't say I agree. As she points out historically gossip has been one of the only ways for disprivliged people to defend themselves. Certainly in my own life, gossip has been the means through which people were warned away from predators in the kink community who couldn't safely be confronted.

It can definitely be a tool for evil, as the pain you write with highlights quite well. Although so can direct confrontations, violence, even gift giving but can also be forces for good. I think we should be cautious about universal condemnations of human social behaviours, but I do want to say that I see your hurt and you're not wrong for feeling wary/angry.

I do find it interesting how she highlights the strongly gendered lines around gossip, even when in the case she cites men are doing the same thing the legal/religious interpretation is very different.

WDYM she seems like a lovely person...

Well guess what sweaty, you can discuss the idea of gossip and it turns out that at least in the global north people weren’t always so uptight about it.

But a lot of others wanted to talk about the sex lives of the people in their community, which, damn girl same???

To me, every bit of anonymous gossip is my own private soap opera, and I simply love to hear it.

But here’s the thing: if we can see an up-tick in the condemnation of gossip it means that there was a point in time when it was also considered both chill and also cool because, actually it does the exact opposite of pushing people out – it brings people together.