From Louis XVI’s monitored coffeehouses to the whisper networks of #MeToo, gossip is often dismissed as trivial or malicious. But philosopher Karen Adkins argues that gossip functions as a vital moral tool that enables those with less power to protect one another when formal justice systems fail. Though imperfect and sometimes exclusionary, these informal communications persist not as ideal solutions, but as necessary responses to a world that still privileges certain voices over others.

#MeToo has returned to the news with the release of some of the US Department of Justice’s Jeffrey Epstein files, and the accompanying repercussions for some associates outside the US. One of the more disturbing patterns of the Epstein files tracks with the Harvey Weinstein episode from #MeToo’s last iteration. That is the open secret nature of this predatory behavior. Neither Epstein nor Weinstein were particularly discreet about their predatoriness, and they both engaged in predation for well more than a decade. But both of them had enough social and economic power that far too many people went along with it, used dishonest euphemisms to minimize damage (“problematic,” “flirty”), or—most revoltingly—made cutesy jokes to demonstrate their insider status and celebrate predation as thrillingly rebellious (see Peter Attia). Philosopher Kate Manne has written about why abuse persists as an open secret (it’s the patriarchy, stupid), but it’s also worth thinking about our reliance—still—on whisper networks as the best available resistance for bad actors. What do whisper networks tell us about ourselves and the limitations of how we decide who is believable?

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Via whispers to trusted friends, you can share information, warn people, plan things, while being less in danger of punishment because there isn’t a documented record.

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Whisper networks tend to get a bad rap because they are a form of gossip—talking about someone who is not present. Both gossip and whisper networks rely on intimacy and trust; when you are sharing secret information with someone, you have to count on them to keep confidences (or at least disguise their sources). Because these networks of trust are often anonymous, it means that people can speak with less fear of negative repercussions. Calling whisper networks “gossip” seems to trivialize them, because gossip is so often associated with the trivial, if not false or malicious (to such an extent that headlines about shows with gossip in their name are apologetic, reassuring readers that there’s truth mixed in with the juicy scuttlebutt). But whether we are calling it gossip or whisper networks, they are both forms of oral knowledge. Before the development of writing, all knowledge was transmitted, assessed and catalogued orally. Walter Ong wrote insightfully about how our standards for knowledge were different (more cautious and communal) because of this way of transmission. This may seem counterintuitive when we think about our contemporary experiences with digital gossip instantly impacting reputations, but there’s continuity here. Gossip can function both to buttress or reassure traditionalists whose ways of life are coming under critique, and serve as a safe outlet for those seeking to critique or challenge norms.

With the emergence of literacy, our standards for knowledge shifted. Ideas could be more tightly connected to individual authors, arguments could be assessed according to standards of logic and evidence, and the emergence of commercial and legal structures like the printing press, the trademark, plagiarism, and copyright meant that the spread of ideas could become both global and commodified. These are valuable developments, to be sure. But none of this means that oral knowledge disappears or loses all value. In particular, the advent of literacy has been uneven, and even in countries where literacy is widespread, one’s ability to share ideas and thinking is deeply connected with social power and access. Thus, oral knowledge persists and is a vital tool, particularly for people who are closed off from systems of power. Via whispers to trusted friends, you can share information, warn people, plan things, while being less in danger of punishment because there isn’t a documented record. In cases where spoken languages are different, the whispering can happen under the unsuspecting ears of those targeted by the whispers. This makes gossip particularly valuable, especially when the topic is as fraught and hazardous as sexual violence.

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Whisper networks are clearly better than nothing. They’ve been impactful, and they are a way to counter dangerous behavior by warning others while minimizing (not eliminating) the risks to survivors.

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What the Epstein and Weinstein scandals remind me of, though, is the reality of sexual violence. Old myths of stranger rape die hard. The majority of perpetrators and survivors know one another, and are often in relationships of power disparities, even if they are less money-infused and mediagenic than Hollywood, the Ivy League, or New York real estate and finance communities. Given those power gaps and the reputational smearing of way too many survivors, the best available feminist response to open-secret oppression is whisper networks. If you do not have social power, if your family, teachers, the police, or prosecutors are less likely to believe you than the more credible person who abused you, you can at least talk to other people. Because they are oral, they possess the advantage of being harder to trace, which is why they have a long history as secret resistance (though Louis XVI’s secret police spent a lot of time in coffeehouses trying to track peasant gossip). While media coverage of whisper networks focuses more on the relatively infrequent occurrence of false or disputed allegations of sexual assault, the fact remains that whisper networks can be a relatively safe way for survivors to warn other folks to try to protect themselves.

But whisper networks rely on trust. You have to be able to count on the person to whom you are whispering to share the dangerous talk with the right people. Thus, they are dependent on pre-existing social networks to flourish (whether for good or ill). So as a tool for resistance, they reflect underlying social connections. In dispersed populations, they are all but useless.

This difference is plain when we think about the two scandals that have had widespread media coverage in the last decade. With Weinstein, articles have come out about whisper networks among actors who’d already achieved success. But we know that many of his targets were newcomers to the industry; it seems doubtful that they heard those whispers. Whisper networks can also reflect our racial and class segregation. Jenna Wortham describes the poignant experience of talking with a half dozen other journalists of color shortly after the #ShittyMediaMen spreadsheet was published in 2017, and their shared recognition that most of these names were unknown to them as harassers despite their shared decades of experience in New York media, including working with some of these men. This was Wortham’s first “whisper” in 10 years of media experience, and she describes this realization that whisper networks could be exclusive as “almost as hurtful as reading the acts [on the list]”.

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Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell targeted very young women, who were often from troubled or isolated backgrounds, who were seeking escape. Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir makes clear the helplessness she felt long after the abuse, because of this credibility gap. She describes an unwelcome 2007 phone call from one of Epstein’s lawyers that, while glibly phrased, had a “not-so-subtle point: the accusers had no credibility, and anyone who turned against Epstein was a skank who would be discredited.”  The Epstein survivors are more like the survivors in widespread scandals that receive far less media attention and resources: foster youth, minors in religious camps, night shift or undocumented workers, survivors assaulted by police officers, etc. They are often isolated, and live in a world that discredits them in lieu of those with more social power. To whom can these people whisper? Who is going to take their words over the guy who hobnobbed with Ivy League professors and billionaires, the trusted camp counselor, the brave police officer, or the experienced manager? And most tellingly, why do we continue to ignore widespread open secrets of abuse that occur in far too many neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces?

Whisper networks are clearly better than nothing. They’ve been impactful, and they are a way to counter dangerous behavior by warning others while minimizing (not eliminating) the risks to survivors. But they are an emergency ripcord solution for a crisis, and this problem is not an emergency crisis. It is a chronic scandalous feature of our social world. Whisper networks are a patchwork way for some survivors to try to protect some others, but they do nothing to make the broader public aware of how banal sexual assault really is, how likely it is that the perpetrators are in fact the nice, trusted guys next door or in the big office down the hall, and the ways in which our legal, social, and educational structures work to discredit people who report sexual assault, and to protect those who deny it. These structures are changeable. It is long past time to change them.