Daily Inspiration Quote by Erica Jong

Gossip isn’t just idle chatter here; it’s a pressure valve. By calling it “the opiate of the oppressed,” Erica Jong borrows Marx’s most loaded metaphor and flips it into the domestic key: when formal power is withheld, talk becomes a substitute currency. The line works because it’s accusatory in two directions at once. It indicts the systems that produce oppression and, with a wry sting, the coping mechanisms that keep people afloat without changing the conditions.

“Opiate” signals pleasure and anesthesia. Gossip dulls pain, offers a quick hit of agency, and creates solidarity through shared information. It’s a small, portable power: naming, ranking, exposing, deciding who’s in and who’s out. For people excluded from institutions that distribute real leverage (money, titles, legal authority), narrative control becomes a parallel economy. The subtext is feminist and class-conscious without needing to announce itself: think of women’s social worlds historically policed as “catty,” when they were also networks for warning, organizing, and surviving.

But Jong’s phrasing won’t let gossip off the hook. Like opiates, it can soothe and sedate. It may convert outrage into entertainment, turning structural injustice into interpersonal drama. It can keep attention locked on the scandal of the neighbor instead of the violence of the landlord, the boss, the state. The line lands because it captures that uneasy duality: gossip as both mutual aid and misdirection, a tool of the powerless that can still serve power by keeping the powerless busy.