A reader wrote to me recently on the effect of gossip in her community. Gossip is dividing her friends, and she is rightly upset about it.
This could have been any dancer, from anywhere the world. The location may change, but the impact of gossip stays the same.
I hate gossip. I don’t give a crap about people’s personal lives, and neither should you. The following 10-point manifesto is intended to give you the strength to act as you should when it shows up in your social group.
Avoid gossip, embrace connection.
Gossip (noun):
1. casual or unconstrained reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true
2. a person who likes talking about other people’s private lives
GOSSIP HAPPENS. It’s not a matter of whether, but when. Spreading gossip is not a moral imperative, it’s a poorly thought out choice.
GOSSIP IS CANCEROUS. It spreads quickly. It suffocates friendships. It breeds suspicion and erodes the trust that keeps a community in balance.
GOSSIP IS A POOR WAY TO BOND with another person. What are some good ways? Shared activities, shared dreams, shared fears, shared values. These build friendships, community, and mutual support.
GOSSIPING GETS YOU ZERO RESPECT. It doesn’t get you any cool points, contrary to wishful thinking. It didn’t work in high school, and it doesn’t work when you’re an adult.
PRIVATE DETAILS SHOULD STAY PRIVATE. Private details that have become public should be ignored. Even if “everyone knows about it,” don’t talk about it. It can be hard to let other people deal with their own lives. You know what’s more difficult? Being the subject of gossip.
YOU GOSSIP BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT THINKING. Think, think, THINK about how the subject of your gossip would feel if they overheard the conversation. Toughen up, and keep your mouth shut.
GOSSIPING MAKES YOU A TARGET. The people you share gossip with are more likely to gossip about you one day. Why? Because they will lose trust in you. Everyone screws up sometimes, and the moment you do anything remotely shady, you will be the new target of rumors and speculation.
THE BEST WAY TO RESPOND TO GOSSIP is by changing the subject. Replace the gossipy conversation with a question: How did your day go? Read anything interesting lately? What do you think of this Prop 8 business? Build connections with people rather than tearing them down.
STAND UP TO DESTRUCTIVE GOSSIPERS. When appropriate, be direct. Say, “I don’t care who Jane slept with.” Worried about losing a gossiper as a friend? Don’t be. Friendships built on gossip lack depth and loyalty.
BUILD TRUST. If someones shares something personal with you, assume it’s private. Be a vault. Respect others’ privacy, forgive as often as you can, and you will be well-regarded in your community.
Are you one of the silent majority who secretly hates gossip? Share this and take a stand.
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{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Rebecca, you are wonderful. Gossip in all communities is cancerous and I personally feel the lindy hop community can be particularily susceptible to it. We all joke that lindy hoppers were not the homecoming king and queens in high school and sometimes in our social ineptness we turn to bonding over gossip. Something addictive happens when a few people know something that other people don’t. Secrets whispered over drinks at the Tin Table (“Hey, did you hear about so-n-so?”) or late night trash-talking fests about Herrang involving people I have never even met before….
There is absolutely a difference between having a much needed vent fest to your closest confidants and airing someone else’s dirty laundry all over the Century Ballroom. I’ll openly admit that there was a time that I got too caught up in wanting to be accepted in a new city and participated in some unneccesary and probably hurtful trash-talking. Forunately it wasn’t too long before I just felt icky in my own skin. Talking to a person out dancing and realizing I knew more about their personal life then they would probably like really grossed me out…. Watching an acquaintance butter up to a person that yesterday s/he verbally dissected over drinks… Walking into a dance and knowing that more than half of the people in the room know information about your personal life that wasn’t meant to be public forum and that 15% of those people “in the know” have never introduced themselves to you… I started feeling uncomfortable with myself and with many people around me.
I love your post, Rebecca. I’m certainly not immune to the lure of gossip. In the last year I’ve found something that’s really helped me prevent my tongue from forking. Before I share information with another person I ask myself, “What am I getting out of sharing this with another person?” Am I legitimately asking for an opinion on how to deal with a situation? Am I trying to look cool? Am I trying to make someone else look bad? What am I gaining by having this conversation and what am I hoping the outcome will be?
Much love to you and your blog, Rebecca!
Thanks for this great comment! It’s such a conflicting topic in a lot of ways. I can’t say I’m immune, but I’ve also felt icky the times I’ve talked about someone behind their back.
I’ve developed my non-gossip stance from being a massage therapist. I have to adhere to a high level of client confidentiality. However, I’ve seen some of the ways I can inadvertently cause pain by sharing things that seemed mundane to me.
Love ya too, Kara!
What are some things that are okay to ‘gossip’ about? For example, it seems that there are things that are useful and beneficial to know, e.g. if two people in the community are dating, so that you don’t make a fool of yourself or cause trouble by flirting with one of them.
Or what if someone is going through a rough time? Does it help if others know, or is that bad?
Ah, the gray areas. There are a lot of “what-ifs,” but a strong case can be made each time to err on the side of not sharing. The smallest thing can turn into a huge, nasty rumor with no warning.
The obvious caveat here is in the case of actual community-harming behavior. (We can debate the meanings of “actual” and “community-harming”.) That’s my stance.
I ask myself that “What am I gaining out of this?” question and that usually directs me as to whether or not I would consider it gossip. If my answer to myself is, “I know John & Jane are openly dating and my friend is making a fool of herself flirting with John, it’s probably better that I tell her”, it’s ok. If it’s “Everyone’s talking about John & Jane and I have a really funny story about how John’s ex got mad at her at a party last week and I want to share because it’ll be funny…” it’s probably best I keep my damn mouth shut. ;)
When in doubt I’m trying to just ask the source, even when *gulp* that means just manning up. If you know Jane is going through a rough time, you should probably ask Jane who she wants priivy to her personal life before spilling the beans to someone else. If you want to know if your ex is dating John, you should probably just ask your ex. Takes a lot of courage, but it’s worth it in the end.
I love all these “Janes” and “Johns.” It’s like we can’t use any other names in case they coincide with actual people, ha!
Yes. That.
It can be hard not to gossip. Conversation doesn’t necessarily come easily to the nerdier types (myself included), and gossip can be easy conversation, especially when scene-related news comes up (why that venue was changed, why that dance isn’t happening as often, etc.). It’s also easy for casual curiosity about a mutual friend to turn into gossip (“Jane didn’t show up tonight, I wonder why?”)
I definitely try my best to avoid it, and I often feel uncomfortable when it happens. It’s easy for indiscretion to make your life (and, especially, others’ lives) worse – I’ve been there. The dance community is built around trust – from the connection of an actual dance to allowing out-of-towners to sleep on your couch.
“The dance community is built around trust.”
That is SO important, and I’m glad you said it. Trust is a crucial element in keeping our community together.
Yeah it is. Think about how often we all leave our bags and valuables in an easily accessible place that can be stolen…but we don’t bat an eyelash about it because we somehow know nothing is going to get stolen.
I think that’s one of the wonderful things about our scene.
Yeah! That IS cool. And people are always shocked/horrified/deeply impressed when I explain to them how exchange hosting works (strangers come stay in your house for 3 days, but they are OK because they are dancers). How awesome is that?
Very awesome! It’s amazing how many dancers are willing to open their homes to other dancers.
All gossip is not evil. People will never stop talking about other people, and I don’t necessarily think we should even try. I don’t even think it’s inherently bad. It’s often not the talking about other peoples’ lives, but the harsh judgmental quality that goes with it that makes gossip so unsavory. Nasty gossip doesn’t just spread information, it passes judgement. That’s what makes the lindy scene so gross, sometimes, is all the judgement. Sometimes I can actually feel the judgement rays (or maybe that’s just my imagination).
So talk if you must, but don’t judge.
Another good way of looking at it. :-)
I definitely think it’s possible to make up perception of judgment when none exists (I can be ridiculously insecure sometimes, and I have definitely done that on numerous occasions, both in dance scenes and elsewhere in life).
But I also think that you’re spot-on with what you say about the problem not being talking about other people, but rather, having some sort of negative judgmental attitude towards other people.
When I was younger though, I really had trouble understanding what it meant when people talking about being “judgmental”. It was just a word and it didn’t really mean much to me. Don’t we all make judgments about people in our daily lives?
I think for me the clarifying realization was when I started thinking about respecting someone as a whole human being, and seeing them as a complex person with some flaws, rather than dismissing a person wholly because of a few isolated flaws. If we look at a person and assess their skill or competence, or some other aspect of them, this alone doesn’t make us judgmental, even if our observation is negative. We might notice that someone is an inexperienced dancer, we might notice that we feel uncomfortable with the way they smell, we might notice that they said or did something that we reacted negatively to. And it’s okay to share these things with other people, depending on how, where, and why we share it.
I think the key is what our overall picture is of the person. To use an example from this post, suppose someone is talking about others behind their backs in negative, hurtful ways. If we label them and we say: “Wow, this person is so gossipy. They’re really a jerk and they’re totally inconsiderate of other people’s feelings.” then we’ve just judged them as a whole person, we’ve dismissed them. Instead, a more respectful attitude would be to be like: “This person made some comments about so-and-so, and I thought that was inconsiderate.”
In the first case, we might be mean to the person, try to exclude them. This won’t help them at all, it will just make them feel worse. People often engage in destructive gossip behavior because they feel insecure, so they might actually gossip more if we’re mean to them, they might gossip about us and they might just be in a bad mood and gossip negatively more in general.
In the second case, we respect the person, and we might approach them later in private and say: “Hey, I heard you saying X earlier, and just wanted to let you know that I think it would be more respectful to keep this issue private, I want to make sure that everyone feels comfortable with you in our group, and I think this would help people to feel more comfy with you.”
This sort of approach is more likely to actually yield the desired results of changing the person’s behavior. And it’s less likely to elicit a negative reaction (and social retaliation, or negative actions taking out their frustrations on others) by them.
Am I making any sense here?
Gossip is actually a necessary part of human social interaction. The problem is that there are different forms of gossip. There is beneficial gossip (I hear that Jack is a great lead or I hear that X Studio is going to offer a Charleston class), malicious gossip (I hear that Jack sleeps around), self-aggrandizing gossip (I can’t believe she would try to do that move, she’s only a beginner…), etc. The trick is learning to know the difference. The bottom line is trash talk is trash talk. If you can’t or won’t say something to a person face to face, then you shouldn’t say it to anyone else.
“Think of how often you use your word to complain or to express envy. The idea is that every time we do that, we are more or less spreading poison into the world. Most importantly, we are poisoning ourselves. When we are backstabbing or gossiping, we may feel like we’re using our word against someone else, but it comes back around to us in the end.”
–Jose Miguel Ruiz
The book “The 4 Agreements” is one of my favorite sources on using words to benefit ourselves and others.
I really like what you say about not just talking in auto-pilot, and being more conscious about what you’re saying and why. I really like the spirit / core idea behind this post, but as you have presented it I think it would be hard for me, personally, to put into practice without some additional clarification. I’m not a typical “gossipy” person, I’m a guy and I tend to gravitate towards no-nonsense people who would normally not be described as “gossipy”. But I have definitely had times in my life where I’ve shared things that I’ve regretted, either negative things about other people, or things that were too personal, things that hurt feelings or alienated people.
In the end, “gossip” is just a subjective label. Words can hurt, but the way they do so is complex and varies hugely from one person to the next. I think most people (and certainly, most people who would be reading this post) don’t really want to be sucked into negative gossip. The problem is that it’s complex, hard to know where to draw the line.
Talking about people, I think, can be a good thing. People are fascinating, and I care about the people in my life a lot, so I’m going to talk about them a lot, with each other, when they’re present, and when they’re not present.
For me, I think a more empowering way of looking at this topic is to ask a few questions: some of them are:
(1) would I feel comfy saying this about X person if X person were present in this conversation?
(2) what am I communicating by what I’m sharing? what are my intentions?
(3) am I thinking about / feeling caring feelings towards all people involved? Am i speaking with compassion and love?
I think that if we are feeling caring feelings towards the people we are talking with, and the people we are talking about, and if we are conscious of what we’re communicating, we can freely talk about others. Things go wrong when we talk in ways that are not really showing regard for people as human beings, which often happens when we’re feeling uncomfortable, insecure, or angry, and when we talk without thinking.
It is probably best to just never speak, because someone, somewhere, will get offended!
First of all, thank you Rebecca. This post is truly fantastic.
As someone who has faced an insane amount of drama, with even more convoluted and twisted stories to go with it once someone catches wind of said drama and plays telephone — I can empathize with your writer. To whomever this person is, my best advice:
Ignore it.
I don’t mean to sound trite, but I was just thinking recently how my life was (thankfully) gossip-free. I don’t spend my time talking about others because frankly, I don’t care to (few things in life bore me at all, but gossip sure seems to do the trick). Anyone whose life I am concerned with is a friend, and should I have any questions considering personal/private matters, I know they can and will tell me — what’s more, is they know it’s locked away.
I’ve had many a close friend suggest I become a therapist — who needs a shrink when you have Biz? This always touched me in a wtf sort of way, but then again, it hasn’t phased me to act otherwise.
Gossip more often than not is a result of eavesdropping, assumptions, and games of telephone. Perfect example: the movie “White Christmas.” If it’s not true, then it’s certainly not worth giving any credence. Act as you normally would in light of the BS — be an individual, separate from whatever gossip flies hover over rotten pastimes, lest you risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone who is worth your time will be forthright in their fact-checking, and if you don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing information with said fact-checker in a *private* setting — by all means, don’t breathe a word.
I consider myself a pretty open book in my own personal matters — at least the ones that don’t involve other people, which very little in my life at this point does (and of course, it doesn’t get shared). If someone has a question for me on virtually any topic, I’m not sure there’s much that would or could offend me or that I couldn’t give a straight answer.
To that same end, I wouldn’t say that I have a ‘clique’ either. I spend my time with a wide variety of people, who oftentimes have close-knit social circles of their own that I don’t consider myself part of. This has been helpful for my sanity, because I really don’t care if my friend Rob is a part of Suzie and Tom’s social circle — I’m friends with Rob, and why would Rob feel inclined to say anything about Suzie and Tom when I don’t even know them that well? Rob and I are friends because we share interests and chemistry, not because we’re each other’s source on insider gossip.
Also of note: observations ≠ judgment. I know myself to be observational of the world around me, and I’ve finally learned to tell people that my statements are not in fact criticism (at which point, you can literally see one’s muscle tension relax — it’s almost amusing).
Frankly, I don’t know what’s going around about me in the dance scene, if anything at all. Same with my workplace and other social circles. People are people, and people will talk, but these days I have no clue if anything is even being said about me (positive or negative) at all, and it’s nice to not have that worry. While I would consider myself pretty down-to-earth, that’s one realm of the universe I’m happy to be in-the-clouds about.
Kevin Gerald (from Tacoma!) says “[o]ur sphere of concern is usually larger than our sphere of influence.” That is to say, most people enjoy talking about private stuff that has nothing to do with them.
His recommendation? “Don’t involve yourself in other people’s affairs unless you are invited.” Obviously this doesn’t need to be an explicit verbal invitation, but I think most of us know when we’re welcome in someone’s personal affairs.
My two cents on another great post, Rebecca. :)
Rebecca,
I am grateful that somebody trying to be a voice for those newer to our scene has decided to set a good example in regards to the things we say about each other.
As a person who had relationships in the public spotlight this year (a situation as uncomfortable as it was unnecessary) I can say that I was in awe of the information countless people in our scene would repeat, converse on, and think themselves entitled to. On a few occasions for instance, I had complete strangers walk up to me at the Century and start asking me a bunch of VERY personal questions about my relationship, with no second-thought as to whether that was information they were entitled to (from me or from whatever chain of idle lips they heard it from).
Let me tell you, when you know that total strangers are wondering about your business so badly that they can’t help but approach you to confirm versions of stories–not to mention the many friends and acquaintances who actually do know some information–it definitely makes you feel as though you’ve stepped into the court of public opinion: judgement, and over something that is personal, unrelated to dance/music or the business of it (I give people a little more latitude to talk, there). And whether you’re the sort that lets the silly judgments that people make in these situations roll off your back or not, it does change the feel of a room a few degrees in the “uncomfortable” direction.
I did have one positive outcome from all of that gossip, though: I discovered I had a lot more loyal friends than I thought. There were several occasions where friends or acquaintances came to me first having heard somebody saying something that sounded wrong, instead of just spreading it on. See, that’s the thing that the really chronic offenders don’t realize about gossip– it almost ALWAYS gets back to the subject through one friend or another, and it just makes you look like an asshole, to her, and to just about anyone who knows her as a human being. Perhaps that should be inducement enough to keep people from idle chatter, but I guess its in our nature.
One item in your list of little commandments, Rebecca, struck me as a particularly good tool, and it can save you from looking like a tool, as well: the question “what are my intentions?” If you ask yourself “what are my intentions” when you find yourself talking about the business of others, and find the answer is something stupid or selfish, then believe me, there is probably a good chance you look really stupid and selfish right now . . .DOH!
Hey Kelly, thanks for the supportive comment. It’s outrageous the things people will say to you based on gossip & rumors they’ve heard. I can’t imagine being in that situation, BUT I’m really glad at least one positive thing came out of it.
As ever, a subject that desperately needs to be addressed, and you nail it with precision and style.
My brief two cents, having been in the swing scene longer than most (not as long as others) and having seen (and been the subject of) an AWFUL lot of this stuff:
The classic: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.” I’d like to point out that this isn’t the same as being two-faced. It’s about basic societal civility and being respectful.
The second: An old proverb which is a riff on something you said yourself in the blog – “He who gossips TO you will gossip ABOUT you.”
Just walk away and let it go.
Thanks, as ever, for your amazing blog.
While changing the subject is a good suggestion, changing the subject to politics, particularly flashpoint issues associated with religion like Prop 8, is emphatically not a good suggestion unless you already know that person agrees with you.
Rebecca – Cool post.
Can you please try to reword this part though:
“I hate gossip. I don’t give a crap about people’s personal lives, and neither should you. ”
It runs the risk of coming across in the wrong way. I would hate to see that detract from an otherwise good message.
I get the impression that you do care about people’s personal lives, and you hope that other people do too. Just not indirectly – through gossip.
It’s true, I do care a lot about people’s lives. In the context of gossip, though, I don’t care what the personal details are. Who said or did what? I find that quite a bit less interesting than how the person deals with it.