What does it mean to be “good” at gossip?

A good gossip doesn’t just tell you that Sally broke up with Joe, they tell you that Sally broke up with Joe just a week after posting a bunch of (now deleted) romantic international vacation pics to Instagram. They don’t simply say “Brittany’s a bad coworker,” they tell you that no one at the office likes Britt because she microwaves her asparagus-heavy meal preps. They don’t mention that Mary is having a tough time with her sister-in-law and then drop it, they explain that her brother’s wife is a Disney adult who arranged for the entire family to spend their next Thanksgiving at Epcot and already sent out Venmo requests for a couple thousand dollars worth of Mickey Mouse breakfasts.

According to stereotype, this is a skill men — particularly straight men — just don’t have.

Their supposed inability to spin a good yarn has been a point of internet mockery, with memes and gags usually coming from the women in their lives who are forced to parse through the driest, most unsatisfying stories ever told. Like a hungry person fighting their way through a well-done steak, these tea-seekers must suffer to find a semblance of sustenance.

It’s hard not to laugh at the tension these skits and jokes highlight between the person wanting the entire story and the person giving them absolutely nothing. But underneath the comedy are deeper questions about the ethics, the stigma, and the history of gossip, especially who gets to participate. The way that the women who poke fun at their partner’s reticence online seek (and are denied) connection speaks to larger concerns. What does dude’s inability to share secrets — especially with other bros — mean for the much discussed “loneliness crisis” among men?

Let’s be clear: Men gossip!

When people say that men are bad at gossiping, it might come with the assumption that men don’t gossip. They can’t be good at it, because they don’t or only rarely partake. But that train of thought is built on a fallacy.

That fallacy begins with how we define gossip. For a long time, it’s had a negative connotation, the act of talking poorly about someone behind their back. But more and more recently, researchers and social scientists like Megan Robbins have begun reassessing the term, broadening it to define all the ways we talk about other people, good, bad, and neutral.

Robbins and her team conducted a 2019 study that examined the rates at which men and women gossip and if men and women had any differences when it comes to positive (e.g., “John bought a pair of nice shoes!”), negative (“John bought a pair of ugly shoes!”) and neutral (“John bought a pair of shoes.”). They found that men and women gossip........

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