I. Warming up

Identify which of the following features generally apply to men, and which to women.

Work in pairs and decide who is speaking.

1. The Company will lose money if it does this. (m)

2. Will the Company lose money if we do like that? (w)

3. The lesson is terribly interesting, isn’t it? (w)

4. Well, maybe, but I’m Chinese as well. I don’t think I’ll be accepted as a presenter on a British TV programme. (w)

5. Well, I shouldn’t have asked it. After all, he’s an expert! (w)

6. You must have the proposal ready by Friday. (m)

II. Text analysis

1. Theme/Author:

This is from the best-selling 2008, Watching the English by Kate Fox, who is a social anthropologist and director of the Social Research Centrer at the University of Oxford. The book is a cultural description of English ways of communicating (on topics like the weather or when using mobile phones) and behaving (at home or in the workplace, when eating, and in pubs). She observes people’s behaviors, but also, as a social scientist, interviews people and conducts social experiments to reveal the social rules or underlying codes and customs. Other topics in the book include dress codes, ways of shopping, queuing, and — the extract here — social gossip.

The extract here is about gossip. To gossip is a social way to talk about other people and their private lives or about things that are not important. The writer and other researchers have found that when people gossip there are social partners in the choice of topic and the way of talking about it. The phrases in the title, gossip rules, refers to the rules or patterns that are found in how people gossip, but it is ambiguous and might mean that gossip rules or governs our lives.

Style:

• style of writing

The passage uses a style which popularizes academic findings, but this could be written by either a male or female writer – you can’t really tell which here.

• attitude

The general attitude shows that gossip is an interesting thing to study. Any social scientist might study this, but it seems more likely that a woman would do so because of popular ideas about gossip (which is exactly the topic of the study here).

• vocabulary

Some of the vocabulary seems more feminine, but this is mostly quoted from other people and is not the writer’s own words.

2. Structure

Text Organization:

Discussion:

1. Do you gossip? If so, what do you gossip about?

For women:

1. Other women

2. News

3. Relationship problems

4. Other people’s relationships

5. Sexual relationships

6. Friend’s weight gain

7. Soap operas

8. Other women’s boyfriends/ husbands

9. The mother-in-law

10. Celebrities

For men：

1. Drunken friends

2. News

3. Old school friends

4. Female colleagues at work

5. The sexiest girl at work

6. Spreading rumours

7. Promotions

8. Sexual relationships

9. Salaries

10. The boss

2. Does gossip harm people?

It depends on the content of what is said. On the one hand, it helps people by strengthening their reputation. On the other hands, damage the reputation of the person who is being gossiped about.

3. Discuss and think about the writer’s theory

The writer seems to have two main ideas here. The first is the underlying idea that gossip is a topic worthy of research. The second is to draw conclusions in the form of three factors or “rules” that characterize female gossip and make it sound like gossip. Any social scientist could find “gossip” interesting as a research topic and could have formulated the three rules (there are many male linguists or anthropologists who do this kind of research as well as female social scientists). However, you could think about the method of investigation. If you look at what the passage says about the interviews and focus groups, and when you look carefully at what the female informants are reported as saying, you can guess that women might be unlikely to share these comments with a male researcher. The writer quotes women reporting men’s behaviour, but does not seem to quote men talking about women, and therefore seems (at least in this extract) to pay a lot more attention to the women. For these reasons you can deduce that the writer is a woman – which is the case.

Paraphrase:

1. On further questioning, however, the difference turned out to be more a matter of semantics than practice: What the women were happy to call “gossip”, the men defined as “exchanging information”.

The sentence means that there was not any difference between men and women in practice, but there was a difference in how men and women used word meanings because they had different terms – “gossip” for women was the same as “exchanging information” for men.

2. Clearly, there is a stigma attached to gossip among English males, an unwritten rule to the effect that, even if what one is doing is gossiping, it should be called something else.

English men feel it is somehow wrong or embarrassing to gossip so when they gossip, they give it another name. The expression unwritten rule refers to a rule or custom which is not written down. People will recognize it, but may not be fully conscious of such a rule until someone draws attention to it.

3. For women, this detailed speculation about possible motives and causes, requiring an exhaustive raking over “history”, is a crucial element of gossip.

Women speculate about the reasons why people have done things and what caused them to do things. This requires them to go over the history of an event or talk in detail about something unpleasant that some people no longer want to talk about. For women, this is a key part of gossip.

4. … it is understood that a suitable expletive conveys such surprise in a more acceptably masculine fashion. (Para 10)

Everyone knows that in response to a particularly interesting bit of gossip, a listener can say dirty words to show their surprise. This way is more favored by men.

Summary:

Researchers have found that men gossip as much as women and men spend much more time 1) __________________________. However, men don’t admit they gossip, instead they define it as 2) ______________________.The reason why female gossip actually sounds like gossip is that there seem to be three principal factors involved. Firstly, the tone rule. Women adopt a tone which is 3) ______________, or sometimes 4) ________________, but always 5) __________________, while men gossip in the same 6) ______________________________ as any other piece of information. Secondly, the detail rule. For women, a detailed speculation about 7) _______________________________ is crucial. However, men find all this detail 8) ________________________________. Thirdly, the feedback rule. Female listeners are required to be at least as 9) ___________________________ as speakers. However, men who respond in such a manner would be considered inappropriately 10) ____________, or even disturbingly effeminate. For them, 11)_________ is better to convey their surprise.

Keys: 1. talking about themselves; 2. “exchanging information”; 3. high and quick; 4. a stage whisper; 5. highly animated; 6. flat, unemotional manner; 7. possible motives, causes and outcomes; 8. boring, irrelevant and unmanly; 9. animated and enthusiastic; 10. girly; 11. a suitable expletive

III. Reinforcement:

Discussion

(1) Are there any stereotypes about gender?

Yes, different social groups may have different stereotypes about differences between men and women, for example, how they should behave and what roles they should adopt at home or at work. People in some societies in Africa believe that women should work in the fields or in the market but not men. In fact, many women are in business and some men are farmers there. In some Middle Eastern groups, there are stereotypes that girls do not need to be literate or educated because they will remain at home looking after a family, but in other social groups in this region this idea is old-fashioned and many women are graduate professionals, like university teachers.

(2) Do you think people believe in those stereotypes? Why / Why not?

It is rather difficult to say. Clearly many people believed in them in the past and it was a slow process to change their ideas. Generally, many stereotypes about gender have changed: Men cook and look after children, women can be in the army and can be engineers and doctors, and so on. Other stereotypes about women may remain and be supported by men because they keep men in strong positions. For instance, in some places men might say that women can’t be good managers or leaders because they do not have the education or experience to do so. This prevents women from getting the education and experience, so it can be a vicious circle which keeps men in the top jobs. But in other places women can be excellent managers and leaders. One tricky aspect of this is “political correctness”: People know that they are not supposed to talk about men or women in stereotyped terms, so they avoid that kind of talk, but maybe they are still stereotyped in their actual behavior, even if they know this is wrong.

(3) How useful is the sort of research presented in the passage?

Well, it seems very useful because it gives us a better idea of what actually happens with men and women, in this case how they talk and how and why they gossip. However, we need to understand the idea of a social rule: It is not necessarily something that we should do, but just a description of what happens – sometimes such rules should really be changed to make a better society. For instance, talking negatively about a person and sharing wrong information can give a bad impression to others. A social scientist could make a rule about how people do this, but this does not make such gossip good behavior.

(4) Would such research lead to similar findings in China?

Yes, there could be similar results, but I am inclined to think that gossip in China might be different. To be sure of what the differences are I would need to keep these research results clearly in mind and then listen to gossip in China among different groups, make notes afterwards, and then interview people to test out any conclusions about what I observed. I’d need to do this with different social groups. I think as students we know what student gossip is like, but that may be different to workers’ gossip, market gossip or parents’ gossip and other kinds which we don’t hear so much. In other words, we have some impressions about gossip, but we need to actually investigate it to see what happens in China.