In defence of gossip

Women love hearing about other women’s misfortunes, and this week we were given a treat. “This story starts in a bathroom in Venice,” wrote  the former TV presenter and author Liz Fraser, recounting how a gossip website ruined her life.

Already exhausted by years of vicious online remarks about every aspect of her existence, Fraser described how she had retreated from the world, and was even avoiding socialising in case fellow school mums wrote about it afterwards. And now some unknown foe had spotted her having “a quiet coffee and gelato” with her daughter in the Italian city, and made an acerbic comment about it on the Tattle Life website. Soaking in the bath that night and feeling horribly hunted, she says she reached her “rock bottom”.

Celebrities and influencers have been complaining about Tattle Life’s existence for years, and Fraser’s dramatic new tale of persecution only adds more energy to the growing campaign against it. In February, a group of Labour MPs  wrote to  Ofcom implying that posts on the site were responsible for the suicide of a 16-year-old girl called Princess Bliss Dickson. Ofcom has since  said  it is “moving quickly” to examine if there are grounds to take action, while the Information Commission said it is also investigating.

On one hand, then, we have the framing of the famous and semi-famous women who say they have been deeply hurt by Tattle Life: a place of unalloyed evil, seething with inexplicable hatred and contempt. But there are other stories too, and to my mind they complicate matters. One such story is also narrated by Fraser, and it starts well before that fateful night in the bath.

It can be found over on her Instagram account, where she visually depicts a life that appears to be heading towards perfection in an ever-ascending arc. Row after row of artfully composed photographs display her gorgeous existence for the admiration of passers-by. There are morning espressos in Venice, where she seems to spend much of the year; shots of her beautiful children and handsome man; selfie after selfie of her own toned body and immensely photogenic face.

Here is Liz flushed after another marathon; here she is drinking champagne and toasting the camera; here she stands on a mountain peak. Here is a picture of her brunch in Salzburg; here she is in the bath again, muscled legs stretched out glistening before her. The accompanying captions try to convey humility and likeableness, and her wish to “make a small difference to some part of the universe”, but the pictures themselves scream success, money, desirability, winning at life.

Viewers are obviously supposed to covet what this woman has, for there would be little point in the laborious display otherwise. What they are not supposed to do, presumably, is imagine Fraser taking a photo of her own legs in the bath: tucking her chin, craning her neck awkwardly back and perching the phone on her chest as she tries to get the angle right, wiping the lens intermittently with a flannel to stop it getting fogged up. The anonymous posters on Tattle Life imagine all this sort of thing and more, providing a brutally deflating commentary to the curated exhibition that is often as funny as it is biting. Egging each other on, they virtually gather to dissect, mock, speculate, bitch, and generally have a lovely time at Fraser’s expense. And they are particularly scathing about the way she likes to photograph her own legs.

“Rather than a simple story of inexplicable internet harassment, what we have is a cautionary tale, featuring a co-dependent relationship between two parties”

So rather than a simple story of inexplicable internet harassment, what we have is a cautionary tale, featuring a co-dependent relationship between two parties: on the one hand, the influencer whose aim is to evoke a feeling of envy in others, and on the other, groups of anonymous posters who readily oblige. Of course, most influencers will furiously deny the charge, partly because being a thoroughly nice person without any rapacious superego whatsoever is a standard part of the female influencer schtick. Or as one Tattle Life commentator summed up the contradiction, as it manifests in Fraser specifically: she want us to know she is both “#hot and #humble”.

Equally, the anonymous posters on gossip sites will presumably deny they are really envious of the women they criticise. It is easy to pretend these places are just an extension of having a good gossip with friends, but there’s an obvious difference which betrays the spiteful edge. Namely, your targets can read what you are saying; and indeed, many posters on Tattle Life seem positively to want them to. As Fraser says, she is often addressed directly by posters. There is no doubt things can get out of hand in such places, with reputations seriously trashed as a result. Anonymity means tempting disinhibition, and envy doesn’t tend to know when to stop.

In her article, Fraser says she used investigators to find ou…