Why Gossip Girl is Killing Us All

As a former bookseller, I have long been an opponent of the "Gossip Girl" series. (Yes, I have actually read some of them.) The books are poorly written, send a terrible message, and achieve characterization mainly through brand name-dropping.

For all of you right now thinking, "But they're a wonderful satire on today's materialistic sex-obsessed society" I think you're overcompensating. Jane Austen is satire-- intelligent and beautifully written, with a sharp wit. Gossip Girl is the antithesis. However, the show's fan base is not limited to teenagers. (See http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/46225/) Women who aren't getting their fill of Sex and the City (or perhaps they just aren't in the target age bracket) are getting sucked into the brainless void that is Gossip Girl and, feeling guilty, calling it satire. Because as we all know, women love to watch other women destroy each other.

As a television show (forgetting the feminist critique), it's not even a very good one. Josh Schwartz hasn't gone out of his way to produce anything original about this show: the characters are straight out of the O.C. (Yes, I admit I was morbidly drawn to the O.C. in the first season.) You have the distant, beautiful blonde with a bad-girl past (Serena, Marissa) who has a terrible relationship with her mother (who, incidentally, sleeps around). There's the boy from the wrong side of the tracks (Dan, Ryan) who is the blonde's ticket to redemption. Meanwhile, there's the scheming brunette (Blair, Summer) who looks out only for herself. You of course need the "cool dad" (Rufus Humphrey, Sandy Cohen) and the useless pretty boyfriend (Nate, Luke). And, to officially make it a satire, you need the loser (Jenny, Seth) who is on the outside looking in.

Now, Schwartz (creator of both shows) just took this "Magnetic Poetry: Teen Soap" kit and shuffled it around on his refrigerator to the following effect. The loser (female) really wants to be a part of the in crowd. The scheming brunette now has the useless boyfriend. The outsider has the cool dad (oh wait, that already happened). The blonde and the brunette have a burning hatred that only comes from years of friendship. (Remember the fury of the woman scorned? Goes for women too.) Add one new thing such as a drunken lecher of a friend (Chuck) and you've just earned your million dollars. Except for the fact that someone already wrote it. Oops.

What he has really done with this show is create an omniscient character for the viewer to befriend, the titular "Gossip Girl" who awkwardly intrudes on scenes via voice-over or even text message: plot is interrupted by quick shots of the character-less groupies who pull out their phones and sqwak over text messages regarding the people we (the viewer) were just following. The O.C. was a pure soap opera. This is like watching a video of your eighth birthday party that you didn't realize was being taken at the time.

Although the character alliances are crucial in the subversive anti-feminism of the show-- girls love watching other girls destroy each other, female friendships are flighty and superficial, all girls just want to be popular, guys are pigs even if they put a "sensitive" spin on it-- it is this third character which really hits the point home. You (girl/woman) are being watched all the time, so act like it. And don't forget to do your fair share of the watching too. Because females love to a) know everyone's business, and b) have everyone know their business. Anytime you have more than one female in a room, it's endless drama.

This show wouldn't be so popular if it weren't true. Gossip mags like US Weekly and Star are extremely pervasive, to the extent that even "legitimate" newspapers such as the New York Times are following celebrity news stories. Watching the specific class of "those who are watched" has been around for decades, in every form of media, and seems to be growing every day. There are those who claim that the power of the gossip mags is falling, but if you've never had to pick up pile after pile of nothing but gossip mags from the bookstore floor, you don't really understand. Gossip mags may be declining in circulation, but their readership is certainly not falling.

If gossip weren't endorsed by mainstream female culture-- if women didn't love to watch other women destroy each other-- then perhaps it wouldn't be so easy to capitalize on. But for some reason, women really do love to be catty. This might be due to evolution, or maybe we just never got the chance to settle in to the ERA-era before legal gains were co-opted by marketing. Whatever the reason, gossip and its attributes will be the death of feminism.