Damn. This meme has been sitting on my desktop for so long that I have to either get rid of it or use it.

Good one, eh?

I remember, back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, sitting around a table with my newly “feminist” friends, probably smoking weed. Perhaps others would have labeled our intense revelatory discussions as “gossip,” but we knew that what we were doing was putting teeth and roots into gossip — “talk about others in their absence” — not to criticize, but to empathize; to recognize what we had in common; to feel ourselves into whatever they were going through, sensing their inner turmoil as also ours.

Yes. Over just a few years, we had opened up to the squirming, pulsing reality hidden behind the “roles” we had been playing: good girl, good wife, good mother, and so on.

In other words, we had rescued “gossip” from what it had gradually, over the centuries, transmogrified into, nasty talk about others, to signify its original meaning and purpose: authentic intimacy between familiars.

Here’s Gemini’s AI on the etymology of the word.

 

 

I’m curious how young women speak of others among themselves now. It seems to me that over the last half century our culture has devolved, simultaneously, into both hive mind tyranny of the One, and toxic narcissism of the Many.

Yuck.

These, thanks, in large measure, to both screens and the internet, where anything and everything can spread, like lightning, and with no accountability, no concern for authenticity. “Fake it ’til you make it.” Or don’t even bother making it, when faking it will do.

So yes, say whatever you wish about me. Why not? I’m still here, underneath all your projections . . . Especially at the “ripe old” age of 83; I’ve heard it all, I’ve seen it all, and likely, I’ve been through it all, too.