Online bullies have taken gossip to a far darker place A couple of weeks ago I discovered, lurking in a friend's Facebook photo gallery, a picture of our school class of 1974. We were 15, and the first thing you notice is how uncompromisingly plain we are - not a scrap of make-up between us. One girl is strikingly pretty, and another has a luscious bosom, over which the buttons of her regulation white blouse strain alarmingly. The rest of us look like the "before" pictures in a YouTube makeover video. The contrast with today's young women is amazing. When my son was at school, I used to marvel at the beauty of his female classmates. So terrifying was their sophistication, so immaculate their turn-out, that it was hard to imagine how the boys kept their minds on their work at all. Though, oddly enough, the teenage boys of my son's generation looked pretty much the same as the ones I remembered from 1975 - noisy, grimy and hopelessly scruffy. It is perplexing to think that we may have produced a generation of daughters whose sexual competitiveness spoils their pleasure in female friendship. But there is another aspect to this research, which has perhaps escaped the high seriousness of the Ottawa academics. Before the easy anonymity of the internet corrupted it into a convenient bullying technique, gossip was one of the most delicious of human activities. The 19th-century novel is entirely predicated on it. "The ladies of Cranford," as it says in the opening pages of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, "know all each other's proceedings." You have only to look at Jane Austen's letters to realise what an essential social lubricant it can be. Gossip is traditionally supposed to be a female weakness (when men do it, it is "networking") but Austen's letters to her sister, Cassandra - sharp enough to make your eyes water - are both a way of nurturing their intimacy and a charm against boredom. "My adventures," she writes on May 12 1801, "have not been very numerous, but such as they are, they are much at your service..." and with that, she is off to a ball at Bath, where "I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for I fixed upon the right one from the first... [Miss Twisleton] is not so pretty as I expected... she was highly rouged, & looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else." Talk about Mean Girls. But in the end, what harm was done? Sexy Miss Twisleton was none the wiser, Jane and Cassandra were amused, and so are we, two centuries later. Gossip may be the plain girl's revenge on her prettier rival, but it doesn't have to do real harm.