The Natural Excuse

Celebrity trivia is only natural, some would have us believe. Humans have an innate urge to gossip and there’s no better subject than the great and good. Hello! and OK! are the modern woman’s way of gossiping within a mass society, just as her ancestors did in their smaller hunter-gatherer groups.

In fact a good deal of respectable opinion does support this view, at least at root. Gossip is seen by many evolutionary theorists as an adaptation, a feature of the human condition. As social beings our lives are built on trust. Reputation is vital and there are few better ways to assess the reputation of others than by discussing them in their absence. Gossip serves us by keeping us abreast of who is and who isn’t trustworthy.

But of course gossip often exceeds the useful and fair, and veers into the gratuitous. This can also have informational benefits. Excessive gossiping indicates lack of integrity. It’s a fair bet that anyone who always has muck to rake does so behind the back of supposed confidants. People who win the shabby name of ‘gossip’ send a signal to others not to trust them.

In other respects however gratuitous gossip is clearly a vice. Dishing dirt for its own sake is degrading to all concerned. That dished out by the women’s weeklies certainly falls into this category – pure tittle-tattle. Celebrities are venerated and spat upon in rotation, often within the same editions – build them up just to knock them down.

Even if there was a trace of honesty or sincerity in these ‘stories’ their use in the evolutionary sense would be nil. There is no social connection between the subject of the gossip and the audience, bar the gossip itself. The average office worker of London or Los Angeles will never meet Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. There is nothing to be gained from a deeper understanding of their relationship or their sincerity as individuals. This is not beneficial gossip, the sort that might help us better understand those we actually encounter.

While the readership of OK! And Hello! is almost exclusively female, a similar case can be found in such men’s magazines as Penthouse and Asian Babes. Once again criticism is frequently deflected using the ‘natural’ excuse. I recall one of Britain’s leading pornographers justifying his products along these lines: Sex is natural, people want sex, and porn is just sex.

As with gossip there is some truth here. It’s certainly true that sexual desire is something natural and that this natural desire creates the market for porn. However, desire is pretty much the limit of the connection. The alluring gaze of a naked woman really isn’t the same on a page as in the flesh. It might send similar signals and provoke similar reactions in the viewer, but that’s the end of it. It is not the prelude to love or sex or procreation, it’s just a wind-up.

While human nature is undeniable the reflexive use of ‘natural’ is usually just a means of excusing a behaviour. The key is to cherry-pick those aspects that suit your argument and ignore everything else. Pete Stringfellow once justified his legendary womanising in this way. It was, he explained, simply a man’s nature to stroll casually from female to female, like a male lion servicing the savannah.

But of all animals, why did he pick the lion? There are a multitude of different reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom. Some species pair bond, some lead solitary lives, some have multiple partners. Some of our closest relatives live perpetually two minutes from an orgy. To varying degrees all of these behaviours can be found in different humans – so who can say which is our nature?

Like pornographers and gossip magazine publishers (interestingly enough, one and the same in the Daily Express owner Richard Desmond) Stringfellow was only interested in those aspects of nature that suited his argument. He simply picked the animal he wanted to be. He didn’t fancy the monogamy of a swan but even he would blanch at the promiscuousness of the bonobo. Lions were the goldilocks option, appropriately enough.

The diversity of nature provides a wide spectrum of behaviours which we can transform into our own ‘nature’ should it suit our view of humanity. Warring chimps and rapist dolphins for the pessimists, vegetarian gorillas and meerkat cooperatives for the hopeful. Whatever your view of human nature there will always be some analogue in the natural world. Whether the comparison is an appropriate one is quite another matter.