Where Do Celebrity Feuds Come From—and Why Do We Keep Clicking?

glamour.com:

—are very real and something to be taken very seriously. Never mind that the people involved often go to great lengths to dispel the gossip—we still tend to devour it.

Where does that instinct come from?Maybe from the same place that made us pay attention to the , Selena vs. Hailey, Gaga vs.

Madonna, and Britney vs. Christina storylines; that have always pitted women against each other. The idea that there can only be one woman at the top of any given pyramid is something that's been borne out for as long as women have been alive, but now that we're able to just look down at our phones and get real-time “news” about female celebrities feuding, it feels not only insidious but dangerous.“Before the internet, you had a couple of TV shows about celebrities and you had some monthly magazines," says Sophie Gilbert, author of , out April 29. "And then, at the beginning of the decade, you had all these gossip blogs and infinite posts that could theoretically be written,” she says.

Which is how we wound up here, watching an entire economy be built on real-time celebrity “news” that's often made up of unsubstantiated claims about women in the spotlight hating each other.But who does it really serve to fuel this content-creation machine with rumored feuds between women, and why do we keep clicking?