A short history of lads in (British) English

Back when universities were still teaching face-to-face, the Times Higher reported on a research project which found that on some courses lecturing had been abandoned because of the ‘laddish’ behaviour of certain students, who disrupted the proceedings by heckling and interrupting. I found I had some questions about this. One was why universities were dealing with this problem by changing their teaching methods, rather than warning the offenders that if they persisted they’d be kicked out. Another, however, was about the language we use to discuss this kind of behaviour.

The Higher called it ‘laddish’, as did the researchers whose work was being reported. In Britain, the word ‘lad’ and its derivatives (e.g. ‘laddish’, ‘laddism’ and ‘lad culture’) are now well-established labels for what a 2012 report on sexual violence in universities described as ‘a group or “pack” mentality’ among young men, expressed in practices like heavy alcohol consumption and our old friend ‘banter’ (much of it, according to the report, sexist, misogynist and homophobic). But are these ‘lad’ terms helpful from a feminist point of view? Where do they come from and what do they imply?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the English noun ‘lad’ has been in use since the 14th century. Originally it had two main senses: the first, now obsolete, was ‘serving man or attendant, man of low birth’, while the second was ‘boy, youth, young man’. In some regional varieties of English (and Scots) ‘lad’ is still a straightforward synonym for ‘boy/young man’. But in the standard language it’s now more commonly used in another way: ‘familiarly’, to or about a male of any age, as either a term of endearment or a marker of solidarity among men who share ‘common working, recreational, or other interests’.

This non-age-specific usage is something ‘lad’ has in common with ‘girl’. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the argument that calling an adult woman a girl automatically demeans her by reducing her to the status of a child doesn’t work for all cases and contexts. ‘Girl’ can certainly be demeaning when it’s used by a person of higher status (e.g. by a boss about his secretary or a mistress about her servant), but among equals what it expresses is solidarity or camaraderie. It can also be a way of metaphorically attributing the positive qualities we associate with youth–like being carefree, fun-loving and sexually attractive–to someone who isn’t literally young. No doubt that reflects our culture’s ageism, but it isn’t necessarily an insult.

‘Lad’ works in a similar way. The plural form ‘lads’ most often appears in contexts where the emphasis is on solidarity and male bonding: ‘the lads’ may refer to the male friends a man goes out drinking with, the teammates he plays sport with, or—as the OED’s 20th century examples reminded me—his brothers in a union where the trade is working-class and male (‘I’ll have to take this offer back to the lads’). Like ‘girls’, ‘lads’ also turns up in expressions like ‘a night out with the ___’, where the implication is that those involved are temporarily putting adult cares aside and recapturing the pleasures of youth.

But there are also some differences between ‘lad’ and ‘girl’, reflecting the differing norms of masculinity and femininity. One of the senses listed for ‘lad’ in the OED is ‘a man of spirit and vigour’, as in ‘Jack the lad’ and ‘a bit of a lad’. These idioms suggest a general propensity for mischief or bad behaviour, but they can also take on a more specifically sexual meaning. One of the OED’s examples, from a text published in 1960, is ‘A bit of a lad, Mr Alan Clark, going around fancy-free for years’.

If you’re thinking, ‘but don’t girls also misbehave, sexually and otherwise?’, the short answer is yes, of course–but that isn’t part of the meaning of the word ‘girl’, nor indeed of ‘lass’, the female-specific term that directly parallels ‘lad’: we wouldn’t refer to a woman as ‘Jill the lass’ or ‘a bit of a lass’. So what do we call women who behave like ‘Jack’? Historically, they have also been ‘lads’: the OED notes that in the past ‘lad’ was sometimes used to mean ‘a spirited girl’ (the example it offers is dated 1935). More recently, young women who engage in ‘laddish’ behaviour–being loud and disruptive, getting drunk and having sex–have been referred to, belittlingly, as ‘ladettes’. This language suggests that female lad(ette)s are seen as gender-deviant: they’re assumed to be aping the boys rather than expressing their own authentic ‘spirit’.

The ‘lad’ of ‘lad culture’ is clearly a descendant of the ‘man of spirit and vigour’, and in 2001 the OED acknowledged this development by adding a new draft section to the ‘lad’ entry. In contemporary British usage, it explains, a ‘lad’ is

a young man characterized by his enjoyment of social drinking, sport, and other activities considered to be male-oriented, his engagement in casual sexual relationships, and often by attitudes or behaviour regarded as irresponsible, sexist, or boorish; (usually) one belonging to a close-knit social group’.

The first illustrative example for this sense comes from a 1986 article in The Face by Julie Burchill:

Remarried after more than a decade on the rampage, at 47 in true Lad style to a girl of 22.

The capitalization of ‘Lad’ here suggests that Burchill is referencing what she regards as a recognisable social type. It’s that type which the section is concerned with–though the  reference to ‘a young man’ does not acknowledge what the example clearly implies, that the Lad is defined less by his age in and of itself than by his attitudes and behaviour. In Burchill’s terms 55-year old Boris Johnson, with his long string of well-publicised affairs and his famously indeterminate number of children, would surely count as a Lad.

Johnson was also what we might now describe as a lad when he was young: at university in the early 1980s he belonged to the hard-drinking, restaurant-trashing Bullingdon Club. But as boorish and irresponsible as their behaviour undoubtedly was, it was not yet described as ‘laddish’. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the ‘lad’—or as he was sometimes called at the time, the ‘New Lad’–became a familiar cultural figure, his laddish enthusiasms both codified and celebrated in a clutch of popular ‘lad mags’ like Loaded and FHM.

What, you might wonder, was ‘new’ about the New Lad? In many ways he wasn’t new at all: he was an amalgam of all the earlier ‘lads’, simultaneously engaged in male homosocial bonding, disruptive mischief-making and aggressive heterosexuality. Some high-profile New Lads were middle-class men adopting a working-class style of masculinity (their sport was football, their drink was beer), but that wasn’t unprecedented either. The real point of the ‘new’ label was to contrast the emerging ‘New Lad’ with the already-established ‘New Man’, who was ‘sensitive, charming, considerate…he’d do the housework and not be afraid to shed a tear’. After a decade when pop culture had been dominated by foppish New Romantics and androgynous synthpop types, the ‘New Lad’ represented the return of the repressed: he gave men permission to be men again.

‘New lads’ were uninterested in feminism, but to begin with, at least, they were keen not to come across as unreconstructed misogynists. The message of Loaded, according to one of its founders, was

Don’t take us too seriously, we’re blokes and we’re useless. . .We like football, but that doesn’t mean we’re hooligans. . .We like looking at pictures of fancy ladies sometimes but that doesn’t mean we want to rape them.

Feminists were not impressed, however, and there was also concern in other quarters. The examples illustrating ‘lad culture’ in the OED show that by the end of the 1990s it was widely regarded as a problem. This quote, for instance, is taken from the Glasgow Herald:

Boys seem to have an extreme amount of pressure on them and it’s very hard for them to resist the lad culture.

What prompted this anxiety wasn’t the sexism of lad culture, but rather the contribution it was thought to be making to the much-discussed problem of boys’ academic underachievement. Research confirmed that one of the hallmarks of laddism among school-age boys was the belief that studying was uncool. No one wanted to be what Boris Johnson once called his slightly less laddish contemporary David Cameron–a ‘girly swot’. The worry was that lad culture was leading boys—especially the middle-class white boys who had embraced it so enthusiastically—to neglect their schoolwork and undermine their future prospects.

In hindsight this anxiety seems misplaced: far from ending up unemployed, the lads of the 1980s and 1990s have become the new Establishment. Whether they’re posh Tory boys like Boris Johnson and Toby Young, or leftists like Owen Jones (and yes, I know he’s gay, but he’s also a classic lad), they are well-represented among Britain’s most powerful and influential people. And it’s not just at the top that laddism rules. The lad mags are long gone, but the culture they promoted lives on. The current pandemic has given us countless examples of irresponsible, boorish and sexist male behaviour, whether it’s students ‘zoombombing’ online classes with offensive messages and/or pornography (which is generally having, as the Economist put it, ‘a good pandemic’), ‘covidiots’ flouting lockdown rules (in Britain 80% of those fined for this have been men, the majority young), or middle-aged professional men expressing outrage because they’ve been told to wear a mask or expected to look after their own children.

Of course this has not gone uncriticised. Nor has the sexual harassment and sexual violence associated with lad culture in educational settings. The effect of ‘lad’ masculinity on women students gets far more attention today than it did in the 1990s. But I do sometimes wonder if the vocabulary of ‘laddism’ does feminists any favours.

As this blog has pointed out before, words carry baggage from their history of being used. ‘Lad’ is arguably a case where that historical baggage is largely positive, and thus in tension with the feminist analysis of ‘laddism’ as a serious problem. The ‘lad’ has long been associated with youthful exuberance, vigour, rebelliousness, hedonism and humour–qualities which many people find attractive, and whose less appealing manifestations they are willing to shrug off as ‘only natural’. Familiar excuses for irresponsible, boorish and sexist behaviour—‘boys will be boys’, ‘it’s just banter’, ‘we’re blokes and we’re useless’—are more or less baked into the discourse. (See also: ‘classic Dom’, and ‘it’s just Boris being Boris’.)

What words could we use instead? For some forms of ‘laddish’ behaviour (like disrupting lectures, or partying in large groups in the middle of a pandemic) I’d be happier with a term like ‘anti-social’; for ‘lad culture’ I’m tempted to suggest substituting ‘toxic masculinity’. (For the Boris Johnson/Toby Young variant there’s also ‘posh boy misogyny’, but not all misogynists are posh.) It’s not that I think this language would have a deterrent effect (a true ‘lad’ would presumably delight in the disapproval of feminist killjoys); but it would send the message that no, we don’t think this is harmless, or funny, or something we must put up with because that’s just the way men are.

Of course it could be argued that changing culture is more important than changing labels, and that efforts to change culture have to start from where people are. That’s the view of the Good Lad Initiative, which works with men and boys to rethink ideas about manhood. They want to reclaim the ‘lad’, not demonise him. But while ‘lad’—like ‘girl’–has some uses which I agree are innocuous, there might still be a case for calling ‘lad culture’ or ‘laddism’ by a name that doesn’t trivialise it or make excuses for it.

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The battle of the big girl’s blouse

During Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Boris Johnson accused the Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn of being scared to fight an early General Election (the government would like to call one, but they have so far failed to get the votes they need to do it). As Corbyn charged the prime minister with being ‘desperate’, Johnson was heard to shout, ‘Call an election, you great big girl’s blouse!’

‘Big girl’s blouse’ is an expression of contempt for weak and wimpy men. The OED’s first citation for it (i.e., the first written record they could find—I can testify from personal experience that it was used in everyday speech in Britain before 1969) comes from a TV sitcom called Nearest and Dearest, where it was used by the main female character Nellie (a middle-aged working class northerner played by Lancashire actress Hylda Baker) to berate her useless brother Eli, with whom she ran the family pickle factory.

An entry for the phrase on Wordhistories.net suggests that its meaning derives from an analogy between a ‘feeble, cowardly man “in a flap”…and an oversized garment hanging loose’. I don’t find that entirely convincing, though, because it doesn’t explain the gendered nature of the insult. Its target is always male, and the point is to deride him as unmanly. You see this very clearly in one of the examples the entry reproduces, from a 1986 sports report in the Guardian:

The last time Liverpool lost in a home league match against Chelsea was in 1935. The following year scientists isolated the principal female hormone and there are those at Anfield who will tell you that Chelsea have been playing like big girls’ blouses ever since.

The reference to female hormones suggests to me that what the writer wants to conjure up isn’t a mental picture of an outsize garment flapping around. Something is being made here of what’s inside a ‘big girl’s blouse’ when its owner wears it. A ‘big girl’s blouse’ is a man who’s soft when he should be hard: metaphorically he has breasts instead of balls.

As Declan Kavanagh observed on Twitter, this is a classic example of an ‘effeminophobic’ insult, and Boris Johnson’s use of it prompted some debate about whether he was guilty of sexism or homophobia. The answer is surely that any insult whose core meaning is ‘effeminate/emasculated man’ is both homophobic (insofar as popular homophobia conflates being gay with being effeminate) and sexist. Its sexism is slightly less straightforward than the sexism of, say, ‘bitch’, or ‘slut’, because unlike those two epithets it’s used to insult men rather than women. But that should not prevent us from noticing that its force depends on a sexist presupposition. It follows the rule I alluded to in my last post, that one reliable way to insult a man (of any sexuality) is to attribute female or feminine qualities to him.

Why is the attribution of femininity insulting to men? Not only because it implies gender nonconformity (though that’s part of the story), but also because it demotes the target from a dominant to a subordinate position. It exploits, in other words, the tacit understanding that gender isn’t just a difference, it’s a hierarchy. That’s why, although it’s possible to insult a woman by attributing masculine qualities to her (especially if you’re talking about how she looks), it’s also possible for that gesture to be a compliment (‘you think like a man’ is a classic example: we’re supposed to be flattered by this ‘promotion’ to the ranks of the superior thinkers). Attributing femininity to a man, by contrast, pretty much always implies a downgrading of his status.

Feminists were in no doubt that ‘big girl’s blouse’ is a sexist expression, and some quickly set about ‘reclaiming’ it, composing tweets which recontextualised the insult as part of a positive message of resistance to sexism. Sophie Walker, the former leader of the Women’s Equality Party, tweeted:

Today at Young Women’s Trust we are all wearing our #BigGirl’sBlouse to fight the gendered job roles and sex discrimination that’s holding back the brilliant young women we need in all our workplaces and decision-making spaces

Another feminist photographed a pink shirt on a washing line, explaining that

This is the #BigGirlsBlouse I wore yesterday, when I went to talk to an employer about how they can protect their staff from #sexualharassment. They’re especially keen to tackle the everyday, ‘low-level’ sexism that erodes people’s status at work. The gov’t could learn from them!

There were also tweets like this one, thanking Johnson for inspiring the writer to take action:

Well this Big Girls Blouse has just contacted her local Labour CLP and offered to campaign for the first time ever. I’m 52 and a 40 E cup in case it’s of interest to Boris. And me and my assets will now be doing all we can to bury him. Thanks for the inspiration. #BigGirlsBlouse

Whether sexist insults can be ‘reclaimed’ is one of the questions I’m asked most frequently: to my mind it’s a complicated issue, and the reaction to ‘big girl’s blouse’ is quite a good illustration of its complexity.

The way #BigGirl’sBlouse has been taken up on Twitter exemplifies what might be called ‘opportunistic’ reclaiming–intervening in a specific context to get a specific, and usually limited, effect. It’s the same thing feminists did with ‘[such a] nasty woman’ after Donald Trump used the phrase to describe Hillary Clinton. I call it ‘opportunistic’ (which I don’t mean to imply a negative judgment—being able to seize the moment is an important political skill) because you’re essentially exploiting a political opportunity created by your opponent, using his own insulting words to criticise and/or ridicule him. The goal isn’t really to reclaim ‘nasty woman’ or ‘big girl’s blouse’ by turning them into terms of feminist approbation; on the contrary, in fact, it’s to make these expressions less acceptable in future.

Another well-known example of this type is the use of the term ‘slut walk’ to name a protest against rape culture which was organised in response to a police officer’s comment that if women didn’t want to be raped they shouldn’t dress like sluts. Opinions on this one differ: mine is that the original slut walk was a great example of seizing the moment–taking the opportunity to call out an egregious piece of public slut-shaming–but that’s where it should really have stopped. Now that most onlookers can no longer connect the concept of a slut walk to the context in which it originally emerged, the political message has become less clear, and it’s been accused of uncritically celebrating an inherently sexist concept (though in fairness, the founder of the slut walks, Amber Rose, has said herself that she’d like the word ‘slut’ to become obsolete.)

A different type of reclamation involves repurposing a term that was historically an insult as a positive marker of group identity and solidarity, though its use as such is usually restricted to group members and trusted allies. Examples include ‘crip’ (as used by some disability activists) ‘dyke’ and ‘queer’, as well as, some would argue, ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ (which are used by some female speakers as terms of endearment, though that doesn’t mean they’d accept them from non-intimates). ‘Big girl’s blouse’ is not a good candidate for this kind of reclamation, because although it expresses contempt for women, it is not used directly to insult them. It’s not obvious in this case who would want to reclaim it as an identity marker: its targets, allegedly ‘effeminate’ or wimpy men, do not form a coherent political community.

Even where there is such a community, though, the reclamation of insults as positive identity labels tends to generate internal dissent. ‘Queer’ is a case in point: you increasingly see it being used positively, but surveys have found that a lot of LGBT community members, especially gay men, do not find this in-group use acceptable. Some say they will never be willing to call themselves by a word their experience has led them to associate with being verbally abused, threatened and even assaulted. While words continue to be used as slurs, some of the people targeted by them will find proposals to reclaim them insensitive and insulting.

With ‘queer’, the aim of the pro-reclamation camp is not just to make the word positive for in-group members, but also to make it more generally usable as a neutral, descriptive term. The idea is that ‘queer’ should be as widely accepted as ‘gay’ has become in recent decades. Similarly, there have been regular proposals to reclaim ‘cunt’ as simply a non-clinical descriptive term for the female genitals (though as I’ve explained elsewhere, I doubt that will ever happen).

One word that women did succeed in reclaiming as a neutral descriptive term is the word ‘woman’ itself. ‘Woman’ was not a strongly pejorative term like ‘cunt’ or ‘queer’, but it was often felt to be ‘impolite’ and therefore avoided or replaced. Historically the politeness issue had been about class distinctions: it was insulting to call female people of a certain social status ‘women’ rather than ‘ladies’. But even after that distinction had been lost, the idea lingered on that ‘lady’ was polite while ‘woman’ was disrespectful. Feminists were critical of what they saw as the squeamish avoidance of ‘woman’, and they made a concerted effort to establish it as simply the unmarked or default way to refer to an adult female. Broadly speaking that effort was successful (though ‘woman’ has since become contentious for other reasons, and the baggage that made people uncomfortable with it in the past remains visible in, for instance, the dictionary and thesaurus entries that recently inspired a petition complaining about their sexism).

In some cases it’s pointless to try to reclaim a word, because social change has made its use as an insult, and sometimes its use for any purpose, a non-issue. An example is ‘old maid’, a derogatory label for a no-longer young woman who, as people used to say, has been ‘left on the shelf’. In a world where unmarried women are no longer social outcasts or freaks, this term has lost its sting, and much of its currency: in the unlikely event that someone did call you an old maid, you’d probably assume they meant it as a joke.

If you’d asked me before this week, I’d have put ‘big girl’s blouse’ in the same category of archaic joke-insults. I hadn’t heard it in years; to hear it being uttered in the House of Commons, especially by someone who’s younger than I am, was more of a surprise than an affront. Though I don’t dispute that it’s a sexist expression, what it connotes, at least to me (perhaps because I first encountered it in the school playground 50 years ago), is an old-fashioned and particularly puerile kind of sexism. In short, I thought Boris Johnson sounded silly and childish calling Jeremy Corbyn a ‘great big girl’s blouse’.

It has since turned out that this is not the only occasion on which Johnson has resorted to the language of the playground. Last month, as he and his advisers planned to sideline Parliament in the crucial run-up to Brexit, he wrote a note in which he referred to fellow-Old Etonian David Cameron as a ‘girly swot’. Critics have been quick to diagnose arrested development, and to blame it on the British upper-class habit of sending impressionable children to single-sex boarding schools. But in fact this isn’t just a British problem: all over the world (in the US, the Philippines, Brazil) we are seeing the rise of middle-aged, misogynist man-children whose political rhetoric leans heavily on crude and puerile insults. When we criticise Boris Johnson’s language we need to see it in that context–as an outward and visible symptom of a deeper political malaise.

The header image shows a detail from one of Ronald Searle’s illustrations for Willans and Searle’s series of  Molesworth books

Deeper and down: verbal hygiene for men

Like every other feminist in recorded history, I sometimes get asked, ‘But what about the men? Why do you only write about the linguistic injustices suffered by women?’

The short answer is that we live in a world that treats men as the default humans, and that is reflected both in our use of language and in our public conversations about it. Of course men’s speech may attract negative judgments if they belong to a group that’s a perennial target for this kind of criticism (like ‘young people’ or ‘foreigners’ or ‘speakers with working-class accents’), but they are rarely targeted specifically because they’re men. We don’t, for instance, see men’s employers sending them on courses to learn to speak more like women. And when did you last read an opinion piece in a newspaper criticizing some irritating male ‘verbal tic’?

But while men’s language doesn’t attract the same relentless scrutiny as women’s, that doesn’t mean it isn’t policed at all. Masculinity in general is pretty heavily policed, as any man or boy will tell you who’s ever been bullied for his failure to measure up to its exacting standards. But what those standards embody is the same sexist and misogynist belief-system that oppresses women. They police the boundary between the dominant and the dominated, with a view to maintaining the patriarchal status quo. Hence the Prime Directive of masculinity, from which no self-respecting male may deviate: ‘don’t be like a woman’. Don’t throw/run/play like a girl. Don’t like girly things. Don’t cry, or show weakness, or talk about your feelings. Don’t be a sissy, a pussy, or anybody’s bitch.

There are forms of language policing which are clearly related to the Prime Directive. For instance, while researching my last post, about the woman who allegedly faked a ‘deep baritone voice’, I stumbled into a part of the internet where men seek advice, or offer other men advice, on how to make their voices deeper. This quest is based on a simple assumption: the deeper the voice, the more masculine the man. Going lower is desirable, not only because it underscores the all-important difference between men and women, but also because it enables men to claim a higher status among their peers.

As I explored this subgenre of verbal hygiene, I found two things particularly striking. First, it seems to be an all-male affair, a case of men policing other men. Though I can’t claim to have made an exhaustive survey, I didn’t come across a single case where the advice-giver or self-proclaimed expert was a woman. Second, a surprisingly high proportion of it is undisguised quackery, a mixture of old-fashioned snake-oil cures (‘why not buy my patent voice-deepening vitamin supplement?’) and Viz Comic-style top tips, some predictable (‘breathe deeply and speak from the diaphragm’) and others less so (‘use a mentholated chest-rub when you go to bed and your voice will be lower in the morning’).

Of all the top tips I read, I think my favourite was probably this one:

How to Instantly Get a Deeper Voice

Step 1: Tilt your head back as far as you can.
Step 2: Recite the sentence “Bing, Bong. Ding, Dong. King Kong.” slowly, stretching/elongating the “ng” sound for each.
Step 3: Repeat step 2 but at a deeper pitch
Step 4: Repeat again, this time at your deepest possible pitch.

Congratulations, you now have a deeper, manlier and sexier voice. At least for the next day or so. Enjoy.

Reader, I laughed: it’s difficult not to laugh at the picture this conjures up, of men around the world throwing their heads back and intoning ‘Bing bong, ding dong, king kong’. But while the activity itself may seem harmless (if absurd), what’s behind it is arguably not so funny. What I haven’t told you yet is where I found this top tip: it was posted on a forum for followers of the pick-up artist Roosh V. Like other denizens of the manosphere—incels, MGTOWs, crusading men’s rights activists—PUAs buy into a toxic ideology of masculinity and male power, and their obsession with deep voices is clearly part of that. As the giver of the ‘bing-bong’ advice explains,

A deep voice is an inherently masculine strait [sic], being a symptom of both size and testosterone levels. Deep voices elicit attraction from women and respect from men.

Other sources clarify that these two benefits are linked: what really commands the respect of your peers is the ability to attract the ‘right’ women, the ones men regard as trophies (which is also to say, not as people. In this video, for instance, the presenter promises men who follow his voice-deepening instructions that ‘you’ll have your pick of the litter to sleep with’.) What PUAs call ‘game’, meaning ‘manipulating women for sex’, is a contest that pits men against both women and each other: the gratification it provides is at least as much about power and status as it is about sex per se.

But though the game by definition produces winners and losers, a recurring theme in all the advice I looked at is that everyone can be a winner: alpha-male status is not reserved for a few men who’ve won the genetic lottery, but can be achieved by any man who’s willing to make the effort. This classic self-improvement message makes a lot of voice-deepening advice seem very old-school, reminiscent of those 1950s ads where some former teenage wimp who’d had sand kicked in his face once too often explains how, with the help of Charles Atlas, he turned himself into the Incredible Hulk. Along those lines, the PUA prefaces his ‘bing bong’ advice with some personal testimony:

I was born…with a typical, merely average pitched voice. I was also born with a perfectionist streak which when met with discovering game and self-improvement meant maximizing all my attributes as best I possibly could, so having a merely average pitch voice was no longer good enough.

Mr Bing Bong represents the amateur end of the spectrum; at the other end is the slicker, more professional approach adopted by entrepreneurs like Dr Sam Robbins, the purveyor of a formula designed to deepen men’s voices permanently by increasing their testosterone levels ‘naturally’. As he explains in this promotional video, what he’s offering is a more expensive option than chanting or breathing deeply, but it’s also far more effective. And if you do buy the product, you won’t just be rewarded with the respect of your peers and the attentions of attractive women. Your investment will be repaid in actual money. Like the actor James Earl Jones, who was once paid a million dollars just for uttering the words ‘This is CNN’, you will benefit from the scientifically-proven fact that deeper-voiced men earn more than their higher-pitched peers.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered the claim that lower-voiced men earn more, and I was starting to wonder where it came from. So I did a bit of digging, and eventually concluded that in this case the source was probably an article published in 2013 under the title ‘Voice Pitch Predicts Labor Market Success among Male Chief Executive Officers’. This article reports on a study that examined the relationship between the pitch of a male CEO’s voice and the size of the company he worked for. Analysis revealed, as the researchers had predicted, that larger companies typically had lower-pitched CEOs. These deep-voiced men did earn more than their higher-voiced counterparts, but the income differential was not directly linked to voice-pitch. Rather it was a by-product of the link to company size, reflecting the fact that big companies generally pay their executives more.

There are a number of problems with this study which I won’t dwell on, because for the purposes of this discussion they’re a side-issue; but even if we took the findings at face value, they still wouldn’t license the conclusion implied by Sam Robbins’s sales-pitch–that men can increase their earnings by lowering their voice-pitch. Apart from anything else, the study only makes claims about one particular group of men, namely CEOs of public companies. Why would we expect a deep voice to confer the same financial benefits on Joe the Plumber or Jon the IT guy? Yet I’d guess it’s mostly the Joes and the Jons who are keeping Sam the Snake-Oil Seller in business.

Clearly, Sam’s business model works because so many men share his enthusiasm for the deep male voice. In America it would be fair to say that this enthusiasm is the cultural norm. But there are a few dissenters, one notable example being Dr Morton Cooper, a practising speech pathologist who is also the author of a best-selling self-help book called Change Your Voice, Change Your Life. Cooper is a controversial figure in his profession, not only because of his celebrity clients and his popular writing, but also because he is seen as a crank. One reason for this is his forcefully-expressed belief that a cultural bias towards deep voices is leading millions of Americans to damage their vocal apparatus by speaking at an unnaturally low pitch.

Not being a speech pathologist, I can’t say whether the preference for lower-pitched voices is having the harmful effects Cooper suggests, but I don’t think he’s wrong to say this preference exists. Apart from the ideological evidence provided by verbal hygiene advice (in both its male and female-directed forms), empirical investigations in a number of countries suggest that the average pitch of the female voice has fallen over time, to a degree which can’t be explained in purely physiological terms (e.g. as a side-effect of better nutrition or increased use of oral contraceptives). If, as some researchers think, it’s a response to social changes which have brought women into more direct competition with men, that could also be a factor driving the popularity of voice-deepening advice among men themselves.

But to judge from the items I reviewed while writing this post, the main reason voice-deepening advice is popular is not that it promises men increased earnings or higher social status; in most cases its central message is that going lower will improve your sex-life. The proposition that deeper-voiced men are more attractive to women is generally presented as a truism: why else, after all, would this form of sexual dimorphism have evolved? As it turns out, though, this is one of the many mysteries of human evolution about which scientists do not agree. There are competing theories, and the evidence is not clear-cut.

One frequently-cited piece of research on this subject is a 2007 study conducted with the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania, which found that deeper-voiced male members of the group (where according to the researchers no one used any kind of contraception) fathered more children than those with average voice-pitch. This is compatible with the theory that women prefer lower-voiced men as mates, but as one of the researchers pointed out, it could also be explained in other ways—it’s possible, for instance, that men with lower voices (which implies higher testosterone levels) begin having children earlier.

The same researcher, Coren Apicella, went on to investigate Hadza women’s preferences directly, by playing them recordings of male voices and asking them whether they thought each speaker (a) was a good hunter, and (b) would make a good husband. Low-voiced speakers were generally judged to be better hunters, but there was no clear preference for them as husbands. In fact, when Apicella divided the women into two subgroups, those who were currently nursing infants and those who were not, she found that the nursing mothers actually preferred men with less deep voices. This was puzzling, because women do less foraging while they’re breastfeeding, and are consequently more dependent on the food provided by men. Why wouldn’t women in this position prefer the low-pitched good hunters? Apicella speculates that less deep male voices might be associated with ‘pro-social behaviour’—there’s no advantage in marrying a good hunter if he’s not committed to sharing.

Some scientists believe that the low-pitched male voice did not evolve to make men more attractive to women, but rather to make them more intimidating to other men; a super-low voice suggests high levels of testosterone, which are potentially associated with high levels of aggression. Evolutionary scientists often assume that women are attracted to aggressive men, but feminists might think there are reasons to question that assumption.

Clearly the evolution question has not yet been definitively answered; but whatever the answer turns out to be, it’s unlikely to change my belief that voice-deepening advice for modern men is bullshit. Not only because the advice itself is bullshit (though I’m certainly sceptical about herbal formulas and mentholated rubs), but also because, like verbal hygiene for women, it exploits and magnifies insecurities which are themselves a product of sexism. The response I recommend to men is the same one I’ve spent three decades recommending to women: don’t buy it, either literally or metaphorically. Don’t let a bunch of quacks, conmen and PUAs tell you what’s ‘manly’. Their ideas on that subject belong in a museum, and their advice belongs in the bin.

A memo to my co-workers

To: All staff

From: Jane Demure

Here at Words, Inc.—an acknowledged global leader in the verbal communication industry—we value diversity and strive to be inclusive. That goes without saying, which is why we say it so often. But some of us feel excluded by a left-leaning culture which only values certain points of view, while deeming others illegitimate. Important issues are not being addressed because people are afraid to speak openly about them. We should not be intimidated or shamed into silence by groupthink and political correctness. Honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.

In the field of verbal communication we are regularly told that men have not achieved parity with women because of bias, stereotyping and rigid gender norms. I’m willing to believe there’s some truth in that, but it is far from being the whole story.

On average, men and women differ biologically in numerous ways. These differences are not just socially constructed: they are universal across human cultures, can often be related to the effects of prenatal testosterone, and are exactly what we would predict from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.

Of course, we must remember we’re dealing with averages here. I’m not suggesting that all male individuals exhibit the same characteristics, or denying there’s overlap between men and women.  But at the level of whole populations, their preferences and abilities do differ, in part due to biological causes, and these differences may explain why men are basically rubbish at verbal communication under-represented at Words, Inc.

On average, women are more verbal than men: they talk more, and attach more importance to talking. This is exactly what an evolutionary psychologist would expect, since it reflects what must have been the case while our species was evolving many thousands of years ago. Early human females had plenty of time to gossip with each other as they foraged, whereas men, the hunters, needed to stalk their prey in silence. We modern humans have inherited our prehistoric ancestors’ genes: our lifestyles may be different from theirs, but human nature doesn’t change.

Women favour (on average, of course) a co-operative, rapport-building style of verbal interaction, one which puts group consensus and conflict-avoidance above the pursuit of individual advantage.  Men’s preferred style is more aggressive, competitive and status oriented. This is why a lot of men are not very good at listening, and why they enjoy shouty arguments more than women.

All employees at Words, Inc. have highly developed verbal skills—this world-leading company does not hire the merely average—but we still need to recognise that women have a natural advantage. A large body of research confirms that girls and women on average outperform boys and men on a range of measures of verbal ability. The difference may only be very slight (some experts suggest it’s equivalent to about one tenth of one standard deviation), but when you’re a world-leading verbal communication company you can’t afford to overlook anything that might give you a competitive edge. Lowering the bar so we can hire or promote more men is bad for business, and also demoralising for the company’s female majority.

If we take proper account of all the relevant data, we will surely have to acknowledge that the marginal position occupied by men at Words, Inc. has very little, if anything, to do with anti-male bias. Apart from the fact that more women than men meet the company’s exacting standards, there’s also the question of their differing preferences and life-goals.  A lot of men just don’t want to work with words all day: it’s not where their talents and their interests lie. Of course there are some men who are capable communicators, but even they might well think that it’s easier and less stressful to do something more traditionally male, be it writing computer code or biting the heads off chickens.

Unfortunately, we as a community have allowed our left-leaning biases to cloud our thinking on this issue. In addition to the affinity we feel for underdogs in general, there’s a strong tendency among humans (especially female ones, whose brains tend to be wired more for empathy than logical thinking) to defer to men’s wishes, protect their feelings and overestimate their accomplishments. This tendency most likely evolved because men have a lot of testosterone in their system, and they’re apt to beat the shit out of anyone they think is disrespecting them.

I know some of you will find these observations distasteful or even shocking, but I’m not going to apologise for using the B-word, nor for paying attention to what research has revealed about the unalterable biological differences between the sexes. On average, men just aren’t as good as women at the kinds of things we do here—nor as passionate about the work. Maybe the reason they’re not getting ahead is because they aren’t driven to put in the long hours and the unstinting effort which success at this company requires. No one should blame men for having other priorities—that’s only natural—but nor should the rest of us be blamed for discriminating against them when it’s actually all about their own aptitudes and choices.

Another thing I’m not going to apologise for is circulating this memo to thousands of my co-workers, some of whom will inevitably be men. If you’re a man reading this, I’d just like to remind you that you shouldn’t take it personally, because that would be completely unreasonable. I recognise that some of you may have experienced discrimination in the past: ten years ago, the women who worked at Words, Inc. didn’t even pretend to think that most men were anything but inarticulate gibbons. But today we are far more enlightened. We even force everyone to spend at least two hours a year examining their unconscious biases in diversity training workshops.

That’s a good thing, of course (I value diversity, did I mention that?) but it’s possible to take it too far. Valuing diversity shouldn’t mean abandoning the principles of meritocracy, free speech and common sense. And it certainly shouldn’t mean ignoring the insights offered by science, which deals in objective facts rather than prejudices or feelings. Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we want to solve problems.

I know a lot of people here at Words, Inc., agree with me, they just don’t dare to say so. I too have felt the fear, but I’ve decided to do it anyway. If it all goes pear-shaped, at least I’ll be remembered as someone who broke out of the ideological echo-chamber and had the courage to stand up for her unfashionable beliefs. [Presses Send and thinks of Galileo]

_________________________________________________

Note: this post was inspired by (and in places is directly lifted from) a memo sent to his co-workers by the (now ex-) Google employee James Damore, the text of which is available here.  All the claims made in the post about sex-differences in linguistic behaviour are taken from the published (and sometimes peer-reviewed) work of real scientists, though the phrasing is my own. However, the fact that I repeat certain claims for the purposes of satire should not be taken to mean that I endorse them. (If you want to know what I really think about this body of work, this article lays it out: it also contains references for the sources I’ve used here without attribution. There’s also a (shorter and less ‘academic’) discussion in my book The Myth of Mars and Venus.)

The Google memo has prompted many non-satirical responses: among those I’ve read, the ones I’ve found most enlightening are this piece by the physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and this one by the computer scientist Cynthia Lee.

Lekkers and losers

It will not be news to readers of this blog that I take a keen interest in popular literature on the subject of gender and communication. In my house there’s a whole shelf of old books I can’t keep in my office because they’re too embarrassing: they include Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and several examples of vintage neurobollocks. Fortunately, the internet now allows me to sample this kind of material more discreetly (and usually for free). Really, I’ve no excuse not to stay current.

Yet until two days ago I’d never heard of Dan Bacon, a self-described ‘dating and relationship expert’ and the proprietor of a website called The Modern Man (‘if you have a problem with women, I have the perfect solution for you’). Dan has recently become infamous for writing a piece entitled ‘How to talk to a woman who is wearing headphones’. Or, put another way, ‘how to make a woman take her headphones off and pay attention while you try to pick her up’.

From what I could see on Twitter, the general consensus was that the premise wasn’t just sexist, it was creepy and borderline rapey. I don’t disagree. According to Fiona Vera-Grey, who has done research on women’s experiences of being harassed by men in public places, wearing headphones is one of several tactics women use specifically to protect themselves from unwanted male attention. Like looking down at your phone to avoid eye contact and sitting near the door on the tube, it’s a form of everyday ‘safety work’.

But to men like Dan it is a truism that a woman’s apparent lack of interest in you is not to be taken at face value. It’s a challenge. Reading his piece reminded me of when I was in my early 20s (before anyone had a mobile phone or routinely wore headphones when out and about), backpacking around Spain with my then-girlfriend. After days of being hassled by men, we went into a bookshop and bought large badges adorned with lesbian symbols and the sentence (in Spanish) ‘we want to walk in peace’. Which we soon stopped wearing, because they proved to be the opposite of a deterrent. The more clearly we broadcast the message WE’RE NOT INTERESTED IN YOU, the more of a challenge we were, and the more persistent the men became.

In those days we had no idea how men rationalised this kind of behaviour to themselves. Today we have the benefit of websites like Dan’s, where practical tips on picking up women are often padded out with more philosophical reflections on masculinity and gender difference.

Dan’s views are perhaps most clearly summarised in his concluding paragraph.

As you may have noticed, women don’t usually go around approaching men. Women know that it’s the man’s role to be confident enough to walk over and talk to women he finds attractive. Women, on the other hand, have to look their best and try to attract the attention of the confident alpha males who approach.

From this we learn that in Dan’s imagination, nothing is what it seems. Deliberately ignoring a woman’s ‘leave me alone’ signals isn’t proof that you’re a jerk, it’s proof that you’re an ‘alpha male’. The woman’s headphones aren’t saying ‘I’m not available to talk’, they’re a test she’s set for the men who cross her path, and the losers who take her literally will fail. The man she’s actually attracted to is the one who disregards what she appears to want–who knows that her resistance is token, only there to be overcome. In this Mills & Boon theory of male-female relationships, no woman wants her man to be a wimp, or indeed an equal: he needs to make his dominance felt.

In an earlier post about lists of ‘things not to say’ to the opposite sex, I pointed out that women are told not to say things that men might perceive as criticisms or demands, whereas men are told not to say things that women might perceive as concessions or indications of weakness.  Dan Bacon observes this convention: his piece includes a list of mistakes men make which includes ‘allowing her to take control of the interaction’.

No matter how confident or challenging a woman might behave, she still dreams of meeting a guy who is more confident than her. A woman doesn’t want to be forced to control an interaction with a guy.

He goes on to point out that just getting the woman to take her headphones off is only the first step: now you’ve got her attention, you need to deliver on the promise of having something to say.

Engaging conversation skills are essential in keeping a woman’s attention at the best of times and even more so when she can switch herself off with a click of the “play” button.

Obvious? Banal? Well, yes, but it’s also an illustration of something that’s puzzled me for quite a while. Advice on communicating with the opposite sex presents men in two distinct and apparently contradictory ways. When the subject is dating, men—or at least, the alpha males the reader is encouraged to emulate—are depicted as articulate, smooth-talking charmers who ‘take control’ of interactions and use their ‘engaging conversation skills’ to keep women hanging on their every word.  But when the subject is marital relationships, men are most often presented as verbally-challenged idiots who can barely string a sentence together. They are said to prefer action to words, to be incapable of expressing their feelings, and to have great difficulty understanding what women say to them.

What unites these two accounts at a more abstract level is that each contains an inbuilt justification for problematic male behaviour. In the first case it’s ‘women want men to dominate them’, and in the second it’s ‘men care about women really, they’re just Martians with poor communication skills’. But it still seems odd that they can exist side by side. Maybe it’s a case of telling the target audience what it wants to hear: the smooth-talking charmer appears mainly in dating advice addressed to men, whereas the idiot appears in advice for heterosexual couples which is probably read more often by women.

The same two characters also turn up in scientific discussions of the evolution of language. Here there’s more explicit awareness of the contradiction: it’s a topic of debate among evolutionary scientists with an interest in how and why the human language faculty evolved. The question that’s relevant here is the ‘why’ one: our linguistic abilities are costly (because they require such a big brain), and other primates have done fine without them, so what survival advantage did they confer on us?  One early theory about this was that language enabled humans to co-ordinate joint activities that contributed to survival, like hunting. But more recently attention has turned to two other stories.

I’ll call the first one the ‘social networking’ theory. It says that the essential advantage conferred on humans by their ability to speak was to do with forging social bonds and transmitting social knowledge: talking helps individuals keep track of what’s going on in the group and maintain social relationships with other members. This produces a more cohesive (and therefore more successful) group. One prominent advocate of this theory, Robin Dunbar, argues that gossip—by which he means everyday talk about what’s happening and who’s doing what with whom—has a similar function in human groups to physical grooming among non-human primates. Dunbar thinks early human females would have been central in the development of language. Females play a key role in the organisation of primate groups, and females caring for infants would have had a particular interest in building networks of mutual co-operation.

Supporters of this theory often claim that it’s in line with contemporary observations about sex-differences in linguistic behaviour. Everyone agrees that women are the ‘more verbal’ sex, more talkative and more verbally skilled than the action-oriented male. What’s happening here is that the verbally-challenged idiot who appears in books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (and the unspeakable neurobollocks classic Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps) is being projected back into pre-history.

But as you’ll know if you read another of my early posts, it isn’t actually true that women talk more than men: most evidence points in the opposite direction. And while women do, on average, do slightly better on certain tests of verbal ability, the abilities being tested are not things that would have helped our preliterate ancestors as they foraged on the African savannah. These points have been seized on by supporters of the second story about what language did for humans, which I’ll call the ‘lekking theory’.

A ‘lek’ is what students of animal behaviour call a type of courtship ritual seen among, for instance, peacocks, where males display themselves in groups to an audience of females, and the females make judgments on their reproductive fitness. The peacock’s tail is the example famously given by Darwin to illustrate the concept of ‘sexual selection’, where a trait that may confer no practical advantage is selected because it makes its carrier more attractive as a mate. Some evolutionary scientists suggest that the human capacity for language was selected in the same way and for much the same reason: speaking offered an excellent way for early human males to show off to females, and for females to judge the males’ fitness, given that verbal behaviour is a clue to both intellectual abilities and social skills.

Supporters of this theory, like the behavioural scientist John Locke, also claim that it receives support from contemporary observations about sex-differences in linguistic behaviour. Women may have the edge in lab tests of verbal skill, but who dominates—in virtually all the cultures where the question has been studied—the oral performance genres that display most skill and creativity? Who are the most accomplished orators, debaters, poets, rappers, preachers, stand-up comedians? Who fights verbal duels to assert their superiority over their rivals?

In this account it’s the smooth-tongued charmer who gets projected back into prehistory—conveniently ignoring the more recent evidence (by which I mean evidence from the past thousand years or so) that women’s non-participation in various kinds of oral performance reflected neither lack of skill nor lack of interest, but had more to do with men’s strenuous efforts to exclude them. (Which have not entirely ceased, but they’re becoming steadily less effective.)

I’ve got nothing good to say about either of these competing accounts of gendered linguistic behaviour: both are thoroughly sexist, as well as being unconvincing for other reasons. They also illustrate that sex-difference science and folk-wisdom aren’t always as far apart as we might think. Sometimes one is just a scienced-up version of the other. It’s possible Dan Bacon got his ideas from a book about evolutionary psychology, but it’s more likely he’s just channelling the wisdom of the ages. Either way, the effect is to reinforce the belief that women have no right to withhold their favours from men. Sorry, Dan, but the headphones stay on. If you don’t like it, lek off.