I am with you; calling bullshit on this post. My wife worked in an office about 95% women, and it was a toxic space with gossip and lies making life hell for her and others. She has worked in a number of offices, and not all were bad; just that a few nasty folks can take 'coffee talk' or 'water cooler scuttlebutt' and turn it into 'Mean Girls'. This was in predominantly female work spaces. Where she worked in predominantly male groups, this NEVER occurred.

Yup. It's pretty devastating as a married woman to go to the bathroom & have the lady in the next stall ask you about the rumor going around that "somebody" saw you having sex with [specific guy who is NOT your husband] in the parking lot, when you've been happily & faithfully married for almost 20 years. I don't know why some women feel the need to do such vicious things, but they do, & it's horrible to be the one they're lying about to everyone around you. Some women deserve a scold's bridle, & I'm not hesitant to say it.

I agree with you. I work in retail, and they surely didn't make a survey in my store. In there gossip is 99% malicious. So many lies, misinformation and false accusations. It also creates an alternative hierarchy within the company, where some lazy outsider, that works for may be a month, can have more influence than hard working person, only by being "nice" with the right person.

Engineer here, I totally agree. I work in an office where men are the majority. The men I work with are pretty catty and vicious. This not a women's issue, it's a workplace issue esp with promotions and bonuses are at stake.

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(3) What it brings to my mind is how in traditional Aboriginal culture, they had their general language. (Word.) Men and women could communicate. (Preach!) They could maybe even communicate a little or without too much difficulty with other tribes - not sure what they'd be saying to each other. Maybe something like: "Eyyy brudda. Find any sticks tuhday bruh?" "Nah, not tuhday, bruh. Found some good ones yestaday, tho." "Yeh, bruz? Where at?" "Lah, o'dere up lah boondie 'eh cuz." "F**k oath?! Fucken dedly bruh." "Fuh'kyeah, brah." And they had their rituals - men had men's business, women had women's business. Both are done in secret. Men's business: no women allowed. Women's business: no men allowed. They'd go off and make a little fire and have a sing-song-story-dance. Men would teach the boys sing-song-story-dances about the hurts-when-it-hits-ya world and the can't-touch-it-plasticene world and what to expect and what to do, and how, when they become a man: I suppose important things like stick chuckin', how to score a root and what their grandad's grandad's grandad's grandad's...father's only son did that pissed off old Cook-eyes Villain-eyebrows Neck-bird when she turned him into a shrub; and the women would do the same with the girls - substituting man for woman, grandad for grandma, father for mother, son for daughter, shrub for emu, old Cook-eyes for dry old Scraggy-beard Skinny-legs Scratch-bush, and scoring a root and chuckin' methodology for squirting out little noongars and cute hair tips. The other interesting part is that they both had their own distinct vocabularies for these things, basically different languages that only members of that sex were allowed to utter. Also interesting, they both respected that the other group had their own business and language and that they had no place crossing these boundaries. Just not on. Just don't do it. Not acceptable. Law. You break the rules, boss man will spear ya in tha leg, brah. Who'd have imagined that skinny old black fellas running around naked chucking spears at each other and carrying on tradition of a neolithic culture involving banging sticks, burning sticks, bending sticks, straightening sticks, throwing sticks, blowing through sticks, and claiming descent from garden features and yesterday's dinner, a culture that had barely changed in ten or fifteen thousand years or more, might have been behaving more civilised than we are being today? In regard to the language, I think that's kind of what we're doing, though, but naive to it. These flaky big brain mages and sorceresses in full cosplay have changed their language so drastically that when we all try to talk no one understands each other because we're essentially speaking two distinctly different languages. Everyone's confused because words are carrying distinctly differing meanings though the morphemes remain the same, while some point at the pictures in the book they're holding a la Gee Dubbya sitting with his knees around his ears - not at all out of place in a kindergarten classroom - thinking it a perfectly natural posture and perspective. We need to come back to a common language, or else we just keep going in circles, struggling to keep pace with the never progressing tribes of a neolithic culture.

(2) The people that are getting people excited with these things that people have never, ever cared about for... basically ever are not doing this out of a place of understanding. They're show-pony tricksters, drunk on spite and lavishing the limelight, who are also not clever enough to see what they are doing every time. In this case, we have some big brain standing up and saying "Look here. ->>" *woman* "This poor insolent creature. I can fix this." (wasn't broken) "I'll just turn this....and...There!" *ugwom* ("*Gasp!*") "Isn't that better, everybody?" ("i-") "Nobody asked you." ("b-") "i aM veRy SMarT! Now, if I just put these next to each other..." *ugwom ugw* "...can you even tell the difference?" ("ye-") "THAT'S right... They're the same! The sAAaame." ("Oooh!") ("fff-") "And now, for my final act. I'll put this under this cup... and this under this cup... Watch the cups closely. Don't take your eye off the cups. Where they'll end up, no one knows. Now. You ready? Voila!" *ugw ugwom* "TADAAAA!" ("-ck me...") And every eager fanboy and groupie in the front three rows lurch up and slap their hands together under an elastic stream of drool like the town idiot at a puppet show, convinced that this person really did just take that woman apart and teleport it back together in the place of its identical twin, which they couldn't tell it apart from at any point whatsoever, in its change of clothes, by the power of an inverted cup. Just like magic. And that that was somehow significant... The impression from the point of view of the cameraman is that the whole crowd is in ecstatic awe and clapping maddly, flinging elastic streamers into a woven mesh and cheering "i aM vERy SmarT!" But if any of those who could be seen on camera, those in the front three rows, were to look over their shoulder they'd see that not far back, obscured in darkness, foreheads are wrinkling and people are scratching skulls. A few heads swing solemnly left and right, lips puckered, cheeks puffed out, eyebrows reaching for their hairlines, fingers plunged heavily into locks... As, alarmingly, seats empty. Like a hidden fire drill, undetected under cover of shadow and durrr.

(1) There's also this: this is not an attempt to demonstrate difference, more based in a similarity I think something of a majority of people share (or hope they do), which is that I don't think that most people are really that concerned with what ultimately absurd and ridiculous thing the next person spends their life doing on a daily basis in order to survive. And there's an irony: I don't think that most men do focus that much on either who does what every day (or most women) who earns how much or even who has what. Men who did that have long been ridiculed as materialistic and insecure. But today, women that make an issue about who is doing what and how much this person earns and what that person has are more likely portrayed as empowered and inspirational. Bit of a double standard. Why? How did this happen? What this discussion is is "Keeping Up With the Jones' 2 - Double Hunger (Ultimate Edition)". We now have these things that interrupt us and chirp in our ear irrelevant things just because someone had a thought - brain was sprawled out on the couch with drink in its hand and burped - and someone is having a thought around 7 billion times every instant. Which of these thoughts that gets chirped is determined by the outcome of a machine algorithm based on which one will predictably make people think less - the "TAKE MY MONEY!!!" reflex. So, this being a discussion... it's artificial. It's not real. I think I get what you're trying to say, which is essentially that if you stick people in the same situation they'll more or less start behaving similarly in many superficial ways, but that, too, is artificial. It requires in this scenario that someone be babbling arbitrary nonsense into the ears of a large enough number of people, and from an early enough age to convince a significant portion of them to voluntarily force themselves into areas where they would not have naturally gone. Men and women, left to their own device, when given the -most- freedom, actually do diverge more distinctly. There is always the range in these populations that will have some inevitable overlap, but the mean of each do not sit together on a graph, and their curves spread differently. Whether it's behaviour and temperament, choice and opinion. Jocks or knickers. There is going to be some distinctive separation, naturally. We really don't all care much about this stuff as the hype would imply. But we're all similar in that we're none of us clever enough - our conscious minds simply don't have access to the majority of what is going on subconsciously - to always be able to see when we are being driven externally, in these cases by some symbol of what they call cult of personality, flocking behaviour, fear of the unknown, or albeit a more profound, deeply instinctual bias.

(0) "Kitties are puppies. How do I know? I saw a puppy dog one day and it had a waggy tail. That it wagged. Kittie cats have tails. I draw with numbers sentences. I aM vEry SmARt." Yep. Men who sit staring intensely at computers all day and sometimes plugging a few numbers into predetermined formulae and call it work, while being in constant close proximity to women who are also bored and boring and who also funnily enough call that work, and so who they already share a certain worldview with, and so begin to further share their attributes through process of empathy, definitely represent not just a small minority in special circumstances or even most but simply men. I've worked in multiple vastly different industries and I can guarantee that, while within each of these fields men -F*****G EYE-GOUGINGLY OBVIOUSLY- vary in personality and behaviour, they vary more greatly from business to business, and even more starkly they differ from field to field. Guys who sweat their arses off expertly picking up and putting down heavy things and riding hydro-liftinators and vacuum-driven road-loadsters all day long have more in common with guys who run around in chaos and heat 12 ungodly hours of the day singeing themselves and making twigs and leaves and bits of moo-moos hot than with the more sophisticated variety that walk around on leashes and spend hours in the two-legs puppy-refineries getting floofs when they're not begging, barking at or shaking hands with other floofs, but less than they have in common with men who cut things up and poke holes with murderous machines in a stinking hot shed, and they all differ in temperament, character and behaviour from guys who spend their days convincing other people to do swaps with their collections of little rectangular things and shiny things with pictures on them and numbers, who differ also from guys who sit motionless under a box of breeze squinting while they repeatedly try to prod an erratic, pedantic, unfathomable box of lifeless wires and bits into action (*poke* "Do the thing." *poke*) for years on end where the most excitement they have to look forward to all year round is lunch and the coffee shop soap opera. So, no. Guys do not gossip just as much as women if only for the reason that guys do not sit in sterile motionless luxury as much as women. More so, guys in America and now younger guys in places like Australia and Britain (i.e. metro city people) tend to talk a lot, whereas older guys in places like Australia and Britain and guys in places like Russia or Thailand (i.e. authentic, traditional people) barely talk at all unless they have something to actually say. And those things rarely have anything to do with any specific individual. Guys, in general, just don't really think much about people. Guys like things. Guys like how things work. People aren't things and no one's figured out yet how to get them started again when you've opened them up to take all their bits out and blow on them and put them back together after you've forgotten where which part went or which way around. If there's a reset switch, a chip you have to re-initiate, a fuse, one of those little buttons in a tiny hole that you have to push with a pin that guys never have handy so you spend 15 minutes hunting for something small then when you find it it keeps slipping out of your fingers and you just don't have the dexterity to get the thing in the hole to push the button... We just don't know! So guys generally just don't bother understanding people. They're all pretty much the same, anyway, and guys know all they generally need to - people stand up and do things, lay down and don't do things, and that's an opportunity, they make amusingly comforting smells and noises when you squeeze them in the middle, and don't like having holes poked in them. And the people who have their squishy bits on their chests make babies and sammiches better than they expertly pick up and put down heavy things, and for most part seem quite content with this arrangement of convenience. Also, hard work tends to give the reward of contentedness. Most guys do hard work. Big, hard, long, sweaty work that makes you thirsty. So, most guys feel content. And rightly so, plenty of gals do, too. They have no reason to gossip. That's also why "life is easier for men" - because they have the reward of a hard day's work, but also the reward of a friendly reminder in the form of being dropped on their a**e when they get themselves all charged up and act like too much of a f*****t. You really wanna be like men? Go for it! Knock yourself out.

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Everyone man does a bit and some do a lot, but on average not as much I think. A lot more male conversations center on events and things that are technical in nature.

If you think men don't do that, you're dreaming. I've worked in mostly-male companies all my life and they definitely backstab and gossip just as much as or more than women do.

I was a bartender for years when I was younger it's a male dominated profession and I guarantee you the nasty gossip was always the men never the women I worked with but the men call it "joking" and "locker room talk"

1. I don't blame men and 2. this is about the origins of the stigma against gossip and 3. men gossip like crazy and say sh*t, too, so go yell at them. FYI, dunno what omen you're around, but it sounds like preschoolers.

If you paid attention to the article you would know that is not the original meaning but a meaning assigned when women threatened male power

Discussing people is important for developing a community, something we lack in this modern age. The fact that we are told not to means that "nice" people stopped doing it (because they were asked to stop), where as "nasty" people still do it (because they don't care what they were asked to do). So if only nasty people gossip, then gossip will always be nasty.

It was for both nagging and gossip. It was a way for men to violently control women's speech.

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Sounds like 4th Wave Feminism, so yeah

Guess which gender got to wear them? It is right on point because it is all about controlling women's speech

I would encourage you to read the stories and discriptions of the behavior of the people who are called "Karen" or "Kevin" (the male counterpart). This should show that there is a significant difference between people stating an opinion and using their voice, and the entitlement and disproportionate elitist sociale interactions they have with others (e.g. treating others as servents/tools that should devote their time only to them).

@Nikki, to some people, no gossip was or *is* "harmless". There are men in the world whose women must obey every single command, and that includes not even whispering to other women. It's within individual homes, within societies, within subcultures, within *families*. My dad was one.

You forgot to write 'notallmen' and 'libtard' I think? You're only stirring the pot half-heartedly today ^-^ uwu

Not all men are smart

Um, what now?