Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  The guessing-game rituals allow us, eventually, to elicit this kind of rudimentary census-form information, but the English privacy rules ensure that any more interesting details about our lives and relationships are reserved for close friends and family. This is ‘privileged’ information, not to be bandied about indiscriminately. The English take a certain pride in this trait, and sneer at the stereotyped Americans who ‘tell you all about their divorce, their hysterectomy and their therapist within five minutes of meeting you’. This cliché, although not entirely without foundation, probably tells us more about the English and our privacy rules than it does about the Americans.

  Incidentally, the English privacy rules, especially the taboo on prying, can make life quite difficult for the social researcher whose life-blood data can only be obtained by constant prying. I ‘found’ many of the findings in this book the hard way, by pulling metaphorical teeth or, more often, desperately trying to find sneaky tricks and stratagems that would help me to get round the privacy rules. Still, the process of devising and experimenting with such tricks led me to the identification of some unexpected and interesting rules, such as the distance rule.

  The Distance Rule

  Among the English, gossip about one’s own private doings is generally reserved for intimates; gossip about the private lives of friends and family is shared with a slightly wider social circle; gossip about the personal affairs of acquaintances, colleagues and neighbours with a larger group; and gossip about the intimate details of public figures’ or celebrities’ lives with almost anyone. This is the distance rule. The more ‘distant’ from you the subject of gossip, the wider the circle of people with whom you may gossip about that person.

  The distance rule allows gossip to perform its vital social functions – social bonding; clarification of position and status; assessment and management of reputations; transmission of social skills, norms and values – without undue invasion of privacy. More importantly, it also allows nosy-parker anthropologists to formulate their prying questions in such a roundabout manner as to bypass the privacy rules.

  If, for example, you want to find out about an English person’s attitudes and feelings on a sensitive subject, such as, say, marriage, you do not ask about his or her own marriage: you talk about someone else’s marriage, preferably that of a remote public figure not personally known to either of you. When you are better acquainted with the person, you can discuss the domestic difficulties of a colleague or neighbour, or perhaps even a friend or relative. (If you do not happen to have colleagues or relatives with suitably dysfunctional marriages, you can always invent these people.)

  The Reciprocal-disclosure Strategy

  If you are determined to find out about your new English friend’s own marital relations, or any other ‘private’ matter, you will probably have to resort to the reciprocal-disclosure strategy. There is a more or less universal rule whereby people almost unconsciously try to achieve some degree of symmetry or balance in their conversations, such that if you tell someone something about your own ‘private’ life, the other person will feel obliged, if only out of reflex politeness, to reciprocate with a comparably personal disclosure. You can then gradually escalate the level of intimacy by making your next disclosure somewhat more revealing, in the hope of eliciting an equivalent response, and so on.

  Among the English, however, you would be advised to start with a very minor, trivial disclosure – something that barely counts as ‘private’ at all and can be dropped into the conversation casually – and work up, step by step, from this innocuous starting point. The reciprocal-disclosure strategy is a laborious, painstaking procedure, but it is often the only way of tricking the English into breaking their privacy taboos.

  You might find it quite an amusing experiment, though, to pick the most reserved, buttoned-up English people you can find and see just how far you can get them to unbend using this technique. Being English myself, I often found it easier to make up my ‘personal revelations’ than to disclose anything about my real private life. I am sorry to bring my profession into disrepute by admitting to such deceptions, but this would not be an honest account of my research if I neglected to mention all the lies I told.

  Exceptions to the Privacy Rules

  The Print Exception

  There is a curious exception to the privacy rules, which, although it applies mainly just to a certain rather privileged section of English society, is worth mentioning as it tells us something about Englishness. I call it the ‘print exception’: we may discuss in print (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.) private matters that we would be reluctant or embarrassed to talk about with, say, a new acquaintance at a party. It may seem strange or even perverse, but it is somehow more acceptable to divulge details of one’s personal life in a book, newspaper column or magazine article than to do so in the much less public arena of a small social gathering.

  Actually, this is one of those ‘exceptions that proves the rule’, in that what it really tells us is that the vogue for confessional journalism and other candid writing has not significantly affected the rules of behaviour in everyday English life. A newspaper or magazine columnist may tell millions of complete strangers about her messy divorce, her breast cancer, her eating disorder, her worries about cellulite, or whatever, but she will not take kindly to being asked personal questions about such matters by an individual stranger at a private social event. Her taboo-breaking is purely professional; in real life, she observes the English privacy and distance rules like everyone else, discussing private matters only with close friends, and regarding personal questions from anyone outside this inner circle as impertinent and intrusive. Just as you would not ask a professional topless model to take her top off at a family Sunday lunch, so you do not ask professional soul-barers to bare their souls over the canapés at a private party or pints at the pub.

  The print exception is sometimes extended to cover other media such as television or radio documentaries and chat-shows. Generally, however, English professional soul-barers disclose rather less in these contexts than in the printed word. One sometimes sees the bizarre phenomenon of an English soul-barer, who has written a highly revealing book or column, coming over all coy and embarrassed and taking refuge in nervous jokes and euphemisms when interviewed about it on a chat-show. This is not to say that all soul-barers are more restrained in such contexts, but there does seem to be a subtle yet noticeable difference in degree of disinhibition between the written and the spoken word. And even those who do not observe this fine distinction, and talk freely about their private affairs in documentaries and chat-shows, will still subscribe to the privacy rules when they are not on air.

  There are, of course, in England, as elsewhere, some people who will do or say or reveal almost anything, anywhere, to achieve their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, or to score points off someone, or to make money. And in England as elsewhere, there are those who make a living providing outlets for them to do this; currently, The Jeremy Kyle Show (our rather tame imitation of Jerry Springer) seems to be the favoured television programme for this purpose, along with so-called ‘reality’ shows, such as Big Brother. But those who break the privacy rules – and these are clearly breaches, not exceptions – in this blatant manner are a very tiny minority, and their antics are generally reviled and ridiculed by the rest of the population, indicating that observance of these rules is still the norm.

  The Internet Exception

  Over the past decade or so, the ‘print exception’ has been extended to cover writing on the internet – blogs, online forums, chatrooms and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Both public figures and ordinary people regularly – and sometimes regrettably – reveal intimate details in their Tweets, Facebook posts and other online chatter that they would be highly reluctant to divulge to a new acquaintance in a face-to-face encounter. The print exception has thus effectively been democratised: it now applies not only to privileged authors, journalists and celebrities, whos
e soul-baring words are published in traditional print media, such as books and newspapers, but to everyone with access to the internet.

  The etiquette governing the print exception applies equally to the internet: just because your English Facebook, Twitter or forum ‘friends’ plaster intimate revelations about their private lives all over the internet does not mean that they will be happy to discuss these matters when you meet them face to face. In fact, they may take great offence if you so much as mention them. The English are by no means alone in finding cyberspace a disinhibiting place, and this disconnect between online and ‘real life’ communication applies in other cultures as well.26 But the difference is perhaps more marked here: we may, if anything, be even more gleefully and giddily uninhibited in our online disclosures, but in face-to-face conversation, the normal English privacy rules apply.

  Sex Differences in English Gossip Rules

  Contrary to popular belief, researchers27 have found that men gossip just as much as women. In one English study, both sexes devoted the same amount of conversation time (about 65 per cent) to social topics such as personal relationships; in another, the difference was found to be quite small, with gossip accounting for 55 per cent of male conversation time and 67 per cent of female time. As sport and leisure have been shown to occupy about 10 per cent of conversation time, discussion of football could well account for the difference.

  Men were certainly found to be no more likely than women to discuss ‘important’ or ‘highbrow’ subjects, such as politics, work, art and cultural matters – except (and this was a striking difference) when women were present. On their own, men gossip, with no more than five per cent of conversation time devoted to non-social subjects, such as work or politics. It is only in mixed-sex groups, where there are women to impress, that the proportion of male conversation time devoted to these more ‘highbrow’ subjects increases dramatically, to between 15 and 20 per cent.

  In fact, research has revealed only one significant difference, in terms of content, between male and female gossip: men spend much more time talking about themselves. Of the total time devoted to conversation about social relationships, men spend two-thirds talking about their own relationships, while women talk about themselves just one-third of the time.

  Despite these findings, the myth is still widely believed, particularly among males, that men spend their conversations ‘solving the world’s problems’, while the womenfolk gossip in the kitchen. In my discussion groups and interviews, most English males initially claimed that they did not gossip, while most of the females readily admitted that they did. 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’.

  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. Perhaps even more important: it should sound like something else. In my gossip research, I found that the main difference between male and female gossip is that female gossip actually sounds like gossip. There seem to be three principal factors involved: the tone rule, the detail rule and the feedback rule.

  The Tone Rule

  The English women I interviewed all agreed that a particular tone of voice was considered appropriate for gossip. The gossip-tone should be high and quick, or sometimes a stage whisper, but always highly animated. ‘Gossip’s got to start with something like [quick, high-pitched, excited tone] “Ooh – guess what? Guess what?”’ explained one woman, ‘or “Hey, listen, listen [quick, urgent stage-whisper] – you know what I heard?”’ Another told me: ‘You have to make it sound surprising or scandalous, even when it isn’t really. You’ll go, “Well, don’t tell anyone, but . . .” even when it’s not really that big of a secret.’

  Many of the women complained that men failed to adopt the correct tone of voice, recounting items of gossip in the same flat, unemotional manner as any other piece of information, such that, as one woman sniffed, ‘You can’t even tell it’s gossip.’ Which, of course, is exactly the impression the males wish to give.

  The Detail Rule

  Females also stressed the importance of detail in the telling of gossip, and again bemoaned the shortcomings of males in this matter, claiming that men ‘never know the details’. ‘Men just don’t do the he-said-she-said thing,’ one informant told me, ‘and it’s no good unless you actually know what people said.’ Another said: ‘Women tend to speculate more . . . They’ll talk about why someone did something, give a history to the situation.’ For women, this detailed speculation about possible motives and causes, requiring an exhaustive raking over ‘history’, is a crucial element of gossip, as is detailed speculation about possible outcomes. English males find all this detail boring, irrelevant and unmanly.

  The Feedback Rule

  Among English women, it is understood that to be a ‘good gossip’ requires more than a lively tone and attention to detail: you also need a good audience, by which they mean appreciative listeners who give plenty of appropriate feedback. The feedback rule of female gossip requires that listeners be at least as animated and enthusiastic as speakers. The reasoning seems to be that this is only polite: the speaker has gone to the trouble of making the information sound surprising and scandalous, so the least one can do is to reciprocate by sounding suitably shocked. English men, according to my female informants, just don’t seem to have grasped this rule. They do not understand that ‘You are supposed to say “NO! Really?” and “Oh, my GOD!”’

  My female informants agreed, however, that a man who did respond in the approved female manner would sound inappropriately girly, or even disturbingly effeminate. Even the gay males I interviewed felt that the ‘NO! Really?’ kind of response would be regarded as decidedly ‘camp’. The unwritten rules of English gossip etiquette do allow men to express shock or surprise when they hear a particularly juicy bit of gossip, but it is understood that a suitable expletive conveys such surprise in a more acceptably masculine fashion.

  English Males, Animation and the Three-emotions Rule

  It is possible that these sex differences in gossip rules may account for the persistence of the ‘gossip is female’ myth. If popular perceptions equate high-pitched, quick, animated speech, and frequent use of expressions such as ‘Guess what? Guess what?’ and ‘NO! Really?’ with gossip, then male conversations, at least in England, will very rarely sound like gossip, although their content may be identifiable as such. Gossiping English males sound as though they are talking about ‘important issues’ (or cars, or football) – which is, of course, precisely their intention.

  Some of these rules and sex differences may not be peculiarly English. The detail rule, for example, may even be a universal female trait, it being well established that females tend to be more verbally skilled than males. I would also expect similar research in America and perhaps Australia to find significantly higher levels of animation in female gossip than male, both in the telling and in the response. But these are countries influenced at least to some extent by English culture, and my admittedly more limited research in other European cultures indicates that males in these societies are much less restrained, and considerably more animated, in their discussions of social matters. ‘NON! C’est pas vrai? Ah, mon Dieu!’ is certainly a perfectly normal and acceptable male response to a scandalous bit of gossip in France, for example, and I have heard similarly animated male gossip in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Lebanon, Albania, Greece, Switzerland and Russia.

  It is not that men in these cultures are any less concerned than English males about appearing effeminate. Fear of being seen as unmanly is undoubtedly a male cross-cultural universal. It is just that only the English (and some English-speaking former colonies) seem to regard animated tones and expressive responses as effeminate.

  Nor am I saying that English conversation codes do not allow men to e
xpress emotion. English males are allowed to express emotion. Well, they are allowed to express some emotions. Three, to be precise: surprise, providing it is conveyed by expletives; anger, generally communicated in the same manner; and elation/triumph, which again often involves shouting and swearing. It can thus sometimes be rather hard to tell exactly which of the three permitted emotions an Englishman is attempting to express.

  BONDING-TALK

  English bonding-talk, another form of grooming-talk, is also largely sex-specific: male bonding-talk looks and sounds very different from female bonding-talk – although some of the underlying rules turn out to reflect the same basic values, which may qualify as ‘defining characteristics’ of Englishness.

  Female Bonding: the Counter-compliment Rules

  English female bonding-talk often starts with a ritual exchange of compliments. In fact, this ritual can be observed at almost every social gathering of two or more female friends. I have eavesdropped on female complimenting rituals in pubs, restaurants, coffee shops and night-clubs; at race-meetings and other sports events; at theatres, concerts, Women’s Institute meetings and biker rallies; in shopping centres and on street corners; on buses and trains; in school playgrounds, university cafeterias and office canteens. I found that when women are accompanied by men, they tend to conduct a somewhat truncated version of the complimenting ritual, although they often retreat to the ladies’ loos to complete the exchange (yes, I followed them); in all-female groups, the full version will be performed in public.

  Observing the many variations of this ritual, and often participating as well, I noticed that the compliments are not exchanged at random, but often in a distinctive pattern, in accordance with what I came to call the ‘counter-compliment rule’. The pattern is as follows. The opening line may be either a straight compliment, such as ‘Oh, I like your new haircut!’ or a combination of a compliment and a self-critical remark: ‘Your hair looks great. I wish I had gorgeous hair like you – mine’s so boring and mousy.’ The counter-compliment rule requires that the response to either version contain a self-deprecating denial, and a ‘counter-compliment’, as in ‘Oh, no! My hair’s terrible. It gets so frizzy – I wish I could have it short like you, but I just don’t have the bone structure. You’ve got such good cheekbones.’ This must be countered with another self-critical denial, and a further compliment, which prompts yet another self-deprecating denial and yet another counter-compliment, and so the ritual continues. There are social ‘points’ to be gained by making amusing, witty, self-critical remarks – some English women have turned this kind of humorous self-deprecation into an art form, and there can almost be an element of competitiveness in their one-downmanship.