Girly voices

[ritaxis]

Every so often someone will go on a rampage about femininity. Well, daily, probably. There's always too much of it and there's always too little of it. Women aren't feminine enough if they choose their own clothing or occupations or make any demands for equality (that's being "strident" which is a crime against femininity). Men here lately are effeminate if they aren't mean enough.

But women's femininity is a target for this kind of derogation too. Lately it's complaints about women's voices that keep cropping up. It's not the first time. I remember about fifty years ago, when columnists in the newspaper (and not just the odious misogynist troll Count Marco that the San Francisco Chronicle kept on their payroll for eons) would insist that the world would recoil in horror if women were allowed to use their screechy little voices on the radio. I was a little girl at the time, and there were very few women announcers on the radio, and no news readers on either radio or television that I could recall. So it was a thing. Women wanted in on those jobs, and some people wanted to hear women's voices in public like it was a normal thing. So now it's pretty normal that women have voices on the radio and television, though they get treated differently and all.

This time around there's a line that's being repeated about how terrible it is that young women today are adopting "little girl voices." Never mind that the targeted speech characteristics -- rising inflection at the ends of sentences, "creaky voice," and using a higher pitch in one's natural range -- are all both characteristics that have been around in various regional dialects forever, and characteristics that men also use. It's a precious opportunity to get mad at women for being women! Not only that, but you can do it from a superficially feminist-sounding position!

I was baffled by these remarks and inarticulately annoyed by them, but of course, Language Log's Mark Liberman explained it all. You should read what he says about it.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

If you haven't already seen it, Mary Beard's blog post on how the voice of women is suppressed and how that has its roots in classical antiquity is a long but interesting read.

She's not just addressing "girly" sounding voices, though it is part of the discussion. She mentions that some women take the androgenous route to gaining more equality saying, "That was what Margaret Thatcher did when she took voice training specifically to lower her voice, to add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked. And that’s fine, in a way, if it works, but all tactics of that type tend to leave women still feeling on the outside, impersonators of rhetorical roles that they don’t feel they own. Putting it bluntly, having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem."

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I hadn't seen it, and I'm glad to have the link.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

while a lot of the cultural "girly" cues in voices make my teeth itch, the thing is that it's the role that women are rewarded for following in most cases. (as you know, bob.)

[frogs_of_war]

I remember hearing an article several years ago which said that young women in the northwest have creaky voices. This was just after an ad for some Microsoft something or other was narrated by a woman and the internet had freaked out. The article said that that way of speaking had been used in a different region for a long time, but mostly by men. Their example was Bill Clinton.

I guess it was only weird when a woman uses it. (like I do and at least half the women I know)

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Another irony / hypocritical bit of this is that there have been many men with high-pitched voices who still wielded serious authority. George S. Patton comes to mind. His voice wasn't deep and gravelly like George C. Scott's; the recordings I've heard of Patton make him sound like a tenor. But you didn't dare question him regardless.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I am still baffled at the "sexy" part of the descriptor, tbh.

Up-talking -- the rising "questioning" pitch at the end of phrases -- tends to annoy me (there was a young woman on the bus just this week that I found myself internally eye-rolling at), but I recognize my own learned bias here.