Gossip (23 page)

Some of the men she wrote about felt much less at ease with public embarrassment than she, and at least one, who argued that he was readily identifiable in her blog, sued her for invasion of privacy, claiming "severe emotional distress, humiliation, embarrassment, and anguish." Hard cheese on him, as the English say. The young woman, whose name is Jessica Cutler, flourished, at least as we understand flourishing in contemporary life. She was interviewed and photographed naked by
Playboy;
she wrote a novel called
Washingtonienne
(the name of her blog), for which she is said to have been given a $300,000 advance; and she eventually married a bankruptcy lawyer with whom she has had a daughter. No business like blog business, at least for some.

I am glad to have ceased teaching in a university before the Internet culture got going in a big-time way—before, that is, students had blogs in which, under proper disguise, they could say cruel things about one's teaching or dress or character. Let them think cruel things, or anything else for that matter, but to have it online, as part of the permanent public record, is not so much daunting as saddening—at least it would have been to me.

Two incidents: In a writing course I taught many years ago, a student, a young woman suffering from depression, on the last day of the course launched into an attack on me for favoring the would-be fiction writers in the class over the would-be poets, of whom she was one. I had no notion of doing so, and in fact hadn't a very clear idea which students wanted to be novelists and which poets. The young woman's tirade spoiled the final day of the class, and when it was over a number of students in the course came to apologize for her and to thank me for my efforts over the quarter, which touched me. This, as I say, was before the era of blogs. Today, with a blog at her disposal, the depressed young woman could have done my reputation as a teacher real damage, by posting her delusional views of me on her blog.

In another course I taught, this one on Willa Cather, a young woman told a friend who was going out with a graduate student with whom I was friendly that I favored male over female students in the class. She based this on my calling on more male than female students during discussion sessions. In truth, I would have been delighted to call on a hermaphroditic armadillo if I thought it had an intelligent contribution to make to class discussion. (It depressed me to think of a young woman, whose parents were spending more than $40,000 a year on her education, sitting there counting the number of males and females on whom her teacher was calling.) Again, I am thankful that this occurred before the age of the blog, or I would also have been saddled with the reputation of a misogynist. The combination of the Internet and political correctness is a powerful force for ... I am not sure what, but am fairly certain it isn't the truth.

Malice, as we have seen, is also too often an element of gossip, and the Internet, in this connection, can be a powerful aid to malice, by spreading falsehoods—or even harmful truths—with a speed undreamed of by small-town over-the-back-fence gossips. Sometimes not even malice is required for the Internet to do its job as an engine for gossip. Things are mentioned on one blog, picked up by another, linked by a third to two others, and soon something meant to be strictly intramural becomes global.

Professor Solove tells of a college student, pressed for time, who asked someone who specialized in a certain subject to write a class paper for her. The man, feeling her request morally objectionable, nonetheless agreed to do so, putting into the paper all sorts of obvious errors, thinking it would bring down her grade, and then he sent an e-mail to the dean of her college informing him of what he had done. While at it, he posted on his blog that the student, whom he named, was a plagiarist. More people picked up on his blog posting than he expected, and soon the student was the subject of wide interest on the Internet, with lots of strangers writing condemnatory responses about her behavior. Suddenly people began calling her school and home, to go on record about what a wretched person she was. Meanwhile, the man who started it all wanted to call a halt; things, he felt, had got well out of hand. He wanted the young woman exposed, but not publicly pilloried. "I was faced with all of you people looking for blood," he wrote on his blog. "I didn't want blood. What I wanted was irony." The young woman was of course wrong, but did she deserve so widespread a shaming as the blogosphere here provided?

Earlier I wrote about the wide-ranging effects of gossip, its good qualities in supplying important information not available in any other form and its destructive ones when motivated by meanness and the intent to bring a person down. But on the harmful side, the Internet has quickened, and much intensified, the harm that gossip can do to its victims. Sometimes this harm is impersonal, or nearly so. The Internet, it turns out, also has a vigilante, or posse, function that is an arm of gossip. In this respect, you not only accuse a person of wrongdoing, but also join forces with others to round him up, as in the cases of the poor dog-poop girl or the student who asked someone else to write her paper.

Blogs exist, among other things, to shame people who fall below what are thought to be proper standards of behavior, in which the people who do so are named for anyone to see. I learned from Professor Solove's book that there is a blog called Bitterwaitress, which names poor tippers on what it calls the Shitty Tipper Database, or anyone who leaves tips of under fifteen, or in some cases twenty, percent of the check. The best-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell found himself named on this blog, though he claims not to recollect ever undertipping. But once his name appeared on the list, his claims counted for nothing.

Another such blog is called Don't Date Him Girl, which lists men, and their profiles, who in their relationships with women have been disloyal, sexually aggressive, liars, mama's boys, and any other information that is useful in condemning these men. All this information may be quite true—men, as I am fond of telling my granddaughter, are brutes—but what if some of it isn't? What if some of the names are placed there because a woman feels falsely betrayed or is herself psychologically off kilter or is seeking revenge for a man's not finding her attractive? In Don't Date Him Girl and other such blogs, the old question arises: Who is guarding the guardians?

Reading about these blogs, I couldn't help but wonder about taking things a step further: What about a waitress blog exposing people with atrocious table manners who eat sloppily or—worse in our era—unhealthily? Or how about adding an item to Don't Date Him Girl that comments on a man's performance in bed? Or, for that matter, establishing a Don't Date Her Guy blog that would do the same thing from the standpoint of the opposite sex?

Blogs already exist that are meaner than this. A website called Revenge World allows the aggrieved party of a former couple to attack his or her former mate, including, in some instances, showing embarrassing photographs. People will say on the Internet things they would never say to another person face to face or over a phone. The blog, with its absence of face-to-face contact, provides something very like whiskey courage—cyber courage, let us call it—and it cannot be a good thing.

In its destructive aspect, gossip is about two things: the ruination of reputation and the invasion of privacy. No institution does these two things more efficiently than the Internet, where it can be menacing, and will remain menacing until the time when laws come into being to guard against its many excesses. Difficult even to think about the complexity of such laws, which would require guaranteeing both freedom of speech and protection of reputation and privacy. But the need for them is becoming more and more acute, as became evident when, in 2010, an eighteen-year-old student at Rutgers University, after two classmates photographed him with a webcam having sex with another male student and then put the result on Twitter, took his own life. Webcams, Twitter, the Internet, who knew such things, at the service of gossip, could be deadly instruments?

As far as I know, I have never been directly gossiped about on the Internet. I live, after all, a dullish life that does not provide much fodder for exotic gossip. But I have been insulted innumerable times online, as has anyone who writes for the general public, and insults not made to your face but with the capacity to be instantly widespread are an indirect form of gossip. I have been called a lousy writer, a reactionary, and once, honor of honors, "blowhard of the month" (December 2008, in case you missed it). Another time, someone fiddled with my Wikipedia entry, slanting my interests and the character of my career, and only through the persistent efforts of the friend who told me about it was the entry set right. But that's the Internet, where one can say anything about anyone and probably not be contradicted, even by the truth.

Stendhal said that to write a book is to risk being shot at in public. But until the Internet, one didn't know all the tender places in which one could be shot. And there is no redress, not really, not likely, not ever, not so long as the Internet remains the playground of the too often pathological and the Valhalla of the unvalorous, where the unqualified and the outright foolish can say what they please about whom they please, which in the end amounts, as Molly Haskell has it, to "democracy's revenge on democracy."

Meanwhile, until such time as laws governing behavior in cyberspace are made, or at least an etiquette for Internet behavior is developed, we are all potentially Internet victims. So clean up after your dog, never leave less than a twenty percent tip, be more than attentive and courtly on dates, do not divorce or break up with a partner ... In fact, maybe you'd do better never to leave your apartment, what with all those little Big Brothers and Sisters out there watching you.

I have no recollection of gossip playing any part in the household in which I grew up. My parents were both intelligent, and my mother a cool and subtle judge of character, but neither seemed to hear or pass on any gossip. They might say between themselves that an acquaintance was "cheap," by which they meant unsporting in his spending; or a "four-flusher," by which they meant false in her pretensions. But there were no stories of secret drinking or adultery or truly egregious conduct. Possibly people in that time—the 1940s and early 1950s—were better at hiding their flaws. Possibly to speak ill of another person without having some foundation in fact was less tolerated. I do recall my parents scoring off an acquaintance or two for being a "busybody," but otherwise things along the gossip front were quiet.

I hope I am not making my parents sound prim, for they were not. They laughed a lot, and cut other people a fairly wide swath in their behavior. They were amused by other people's foibles and were comical about their own. But my parents, as were many of the adults of their generation, were pre-psychological; they did not attempt to explain behavior, other people's or their own, by recourse to labels put into the world by psychoanalysis and psychology. They would never say that someone behaved the way he did because he was insecure, or suffered an inferiority complex, or was paranoid, let alone that he had anything so arcane as an unresolved Oedipus complex. They looked out at the world and saw only admirable or less than admirable behavior; and under the category of unadmirable came behavior that was cowardly, dishonorable, thoughtless, ungenerous, foolish, cruel, and selfish.

As part of this pre-psychological condition, my parents were reticent, certainly about themselves. In her late seventies, my mother had liver cancer that she knew was going to end in her death. Even though her oncologist fought on against the disease, my mother, a very realistic person, in her certainty about the end of her life, was depressed, not wretchedly so, or in a way that made people around her sad, but she became less than her usual ebullient self. I happened to mention my mother's condition to a woman I know, who suggested that there were wonderful "support groups" for people suffering terminal diseases, and wondered if such a group wouldn't help my mother.

I would not for a nanosecond have thought of suggesting any such thing. Had I done so, my mother would, I have no doubt, have replied: "Let me see. You are suggesting that I go into a room full of strangers and we each tell one another our troubles and this will make me feel better. Is this what you are suggesting? Is this the kind of son I've raised, one who would suggest anything so idiotic?"

My mother's father died when she was in her adolescence. Her mother was the great matriarch of the family, loved and highly regarded by her four children. My mother rarely spoke about her father. When I quizzed her about him, which I did occasionally, and always gently, she was less than forthcoming. "He was a nice man," she would say, "a kind man." As for what he did for a living, she said that he worked in Chicago, in the garment trade. Plainly she preferred not to talk much about her father, and she, a formidable woman, was just as plainly not to be pushed to do so, even by her son.

One evening toward the end of her life, when my mother was in the hospital and my father and I were at dinner together after visiting her there, I asked him what he knew about his wife's father, whom, of course, he never met.

"He committed suicide," said my father, "but your mother doesn't know that I know. Years ago her sister Florence told me."

Now you have to understand that my mother and father were two people who, married fifty-seven years, loved each other, and without complication; each was, without the least doubt, the other's dearest and closest friend. Yet my mother felt no need to inform her husband that her father had committed suicide (I assume my grandfather must have done so out of depression, and not because of scandal of any kind), and he, my father, having come into this knowledge, never felt he ought to let her know that he knew, if only because she might not want to talk about it and the deep sadness it had to have cost her.