Male Gossip (continued)

In the blog posted yesterday, I began to look at the topic of male gossip. I argued that men are guilty of engaging in destructive gossip but frequently it involves subjects that we do not traditionally link to gossip; subject like business and religion. Of course, men are not immune to the pleasures of a juicy tidbit. It’s just that men frequently label it with by different words, giving it the aura of greater legitimacy.

Witness the sports page. Certainly, part of that section is devoted to a recitation of yesterday’s game, but a great deal of it is made up of endless speculation about who is in, who may be pitching, replacing the star, who will sign with what team, who might be injured, who is using steroids. Studies have shown that men are very interested in gossip that involves status; who is “in,” and who is “out,” who has authority, whether formal or informal. While celebrity driven-magazines aimed at women have exploded in recent years, so have specialized sporting magazines aimed at men that revel in insider information and “scoops.”

Two other related areas of great interest to men, one traditional and one cutting-edge, also traffic heavily in gossip: Politics and blogging, with its frequently accompanying medium, podcasting. And as any veteran of the Armed Services can attest to, the male-dominated military inspires endless speculation – i.e. gossip – about most everything.

And obviously, the financial industry on Wall Street thrives on gossip and rumor, from hints of lower-than-expected-earnings at a given company to what the Fed is planning to do with interest rates. In the business world, men like to call gossip by the oh-so-respectable sobriquet “networking.”