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.

Imperfect pitch

Until last week I had never heard of Elizabeth Holmes, the 35-year old former CEO of a company called Theranos which claimed to have developed a revolutionary new blood-testing technology. Investors poured in money, and by 2015 Holmes was America’s youngest self-made female billionaire. But then it all unravelled: the technology was revealed to be a fraud. Last year Holmes and her partner were charged with a number of criminal offences. But what brought her to my attention was a different kind of deception: she’s been accused of faking her much-remarked on ‘deep baritone voice’.

Holmes’s speaking voice was one of her trademarks, mentioned regularly in articles and profiles, and ‘baritone’ became the standard description. Parenthetically, I have to say I don’t find that term particularly apt. Is her voice-pitch noticeably low for a woman of her age? Yes. Does she sound like what ‘baritone’ implies—a man? In my opinion, no. (If you want to make up your own mind, here’s a clip of her being interviewed in 2015). But when the shit hit the fan, it began to be suggested that her baritone was as dodgy as her blood-testing device. Former employees reported that her real voice was much higher, and that sometimes, especially when she’d been drinking, she couldn’t keep up the pretence.

Some commentators seemed to find this vocal deception almost more culpable than the crimes she’d been indicted for. One popular view presented the adoption of a fake voice as a clear sign that Holmes was ‘sociopathic’. Others saw it more as a sign that she was insecure and narcissistic: as Katie Heaney commented in a piece entitled ‘What Kind of Person Fakes Their Voice?’

faking one’s voice is just weird, and embarrassing, in much the same way that bad toupees are: they place one’s bodily insecurities center stage.

But a lot of this commentary is linguistically naïve, overlooking the point that we all ‘fake’–or in less loaded language, modify–our voices for different purposes and occasions. Though many of the adjustments we make are automatic and unconscious (a matter of what social psychologists call ‘accommodation’, or what sociolinguists call ‘style shifting’), some are more deliberate, and may involve consciously controlling our pitch, loudness and voice quality. There are jobs that require this kind of performance (working in a call centre, for instance, may demand the kind of warm, smiley customer service voice I talked about in a recent post), and social situations where it’s conventional to adopt a ‘special’ voice (when playing with a baby, for example, or flirting with a potential lover). Of course, we don’t think of this as ‘faking’, which implies the intention to deceive; but it illustrates the point that people don’t have only one ‘authentic’ way of speaking.

In a case like Elizabeth Holmes’s, though, there’s another possible answer to the question ‘why would she fake a deeper voice’. Women in business, politics and the professions are constantly told that their high-pitched voices are a problem, undermining their authority and making them sound like silly girls. They are explicitly encouraged, and sometimes coached (as Margaret Thatcher famously was) to lower their pitch so that people will take them more seriously. I’m sure Holmes was familiar with this advice–if you’re a woman in business it’s pretty difficult to avoid. But as her story suggests, actually taking it can have a downside.

That was the message of the Financial Times article which belatedly introduced me to Holmes’s story. Titled ‘Pitch Perfect: How To Speak With Authority’, it proposed that ‘women can change the way they sound for more impact, but authenticity is crucial’. Ah yes, the classic mixed message so beloved of advice-givers everywhere: change yourself while also staying true to yourself. How are women supposed to balance these contradictory demands?

Later we hear from an expert, Casey Klofstad, who says that women are ‘trapped’ (his word) between a rock and a hard place. Klofstad has studied the relationship between authority and voice-pitch: readers with long memories might remember me describing some research he was involved in, where judges were presented with two recordings of men or women saying ‘I urge you to vote for me this November’ and then asked which one they’d be inclined to vote for. They showed a clear preference for the speaker whose voice was lower. The conclusion might seem to be obvious: ambitious women should adjust their voice-pitch downwards. But Klofstad explains that it’s not quite that simple. It’s true that ‘lower is better for obtaining positions of leadership’. But at the same time,

the human ear likes averageness, prototypy ‘normal sounding’ voices… We do not like people deviating from their natural voice, particularly in a way that is ‘sex atypical’ (meaning higher for men, lower for women).

How can women extricate themselves from this double bind? Klofstad doesn’t say: his use of the word ‘trapped’ suggests he doesn’t think there’s an easy answer. But there is no scientific finding so unpromising that the advice industry can’t turn it into a business opportunity. The article goes on to inform us that

Research like Prof Klofstad’s has informed a new approach to voice coaching. …Most coaches are now focused on helping people sound like themselves.

Sorry, what? Don’t people who go to voice coaches already ‘sound like themselves’?

OK, you’re right, I’m being disingenuous: I’m pretty sure I know what the writer means by ‘helping people sound like themselves’, because the idea is familiar from another branch of the woman-fixing industry. I made this analogy four years ago, when I published my first post on this general theme:

This endless policing of women’s language—their voices, their intonation patterns, the words they use, their syntax—is uncomfortably similar to the way our culture polices women’s bodily appearance. Just as the media and the beauty industry continually invent new reasons for women to be self-conscious about their bodies, so magazine articles and radio programmes like the ones I’ve mentioned encourage a similar self-consciousness about our speech.

‘Helping people to sound like themselves’ is the vocal equivalent of what the beauty industry calls ‘the natural look’, where you apply cosmetics with the aim of making people think you’re not wearing make-up, you’ve just got naturally radiant skin, dewy lips, long dark lashes, etc. Similarly, a voice coach quoted in the FT piece says she doesn’t set out to lower her female clients’ pitch; rather she concentrates on ‘giv[ing] people the confidence to find their natural voice’. By happy coincidence, a woman’s ‘natural voice’ usually turns out to be ‘a couple of notes lower’ than the one she came in with.

But having apparently squared the circle—’see, you can change your voice and be even more authentically yourself than you were before!’—the article takes a further confusing turn. It introduces us to two women who have managed to succeed in their fields (respectively, law and business) despite having not only female voices but also working-class accents. These women say they haven’t been disadvantaged—on the contrary, in fact, they feel they’ve benefited—by sounding ‘down to earth’, ‘accessible’ and ‘authentic’. The writer presents this as a sign of the times: ‘the diversification of business leadership’, she observes, ‘has shifted our idea of what a leader’s voice should sound like’.

Really? When did that happen? Not, I assume in 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s ‘shrill’ voice was a constant reference point in commentary on her supposed unfitness for office. And not in 2018, when the BBC’s decision to let a woman, Vicki Sparks, take charge of the commentary during a men’s World Cup football match prompted a deluge of complaints about her ‘squeaky’, ‘screeching’, ‘shallow’, ‘shrill’, ‘strident’ and ‘annoying’ voice. If we’re so cool with female-voiced authority figures, why are the voice coaches and the advice-givers still in business? Why do newspapers still publish articles like this one?

The last person the article quotes is the podcaster Helen Zaltzman, whose assessment of the current situation is more cautious. Women in her line of work, she notes, have to deal with endless insulting remarks about their voices. Yet Zaltzman is optimistic: the trolls and grumblers, she says, need to wake up and realize that ‘in 30 years’ time, that’s how power will sound’.

I hope she’s right (though it’s unlikely I’ll be around in 2049 to assess the accuracy of her prediction), but to be honest I have my doubts. Not because I believe what I was taught as a student (that power will always sound male: men’s deeper voices, like lions’ manes, are natural signals of their dominance); more because I think most of the judgments made on women’s voices have very little to do with what those voices actually sound like.

When people complain that a woman’s voice is ‘shrill’, for instance, there’s often no objective, acoustically measurable quality to which that descriptor corresponds. Hillary Clinton is a case in point: if one element of the meaning of ‘shrill’ is speaking at a higher than normal pitch, then Clinton’s voice is not shrill (as an acoustic analysis of her 2016 campaign speeches confirmed). What people mostly mean when they describe a woman as ‘shrill’ is ‘I don’t like her’, or ‘I don’t think this position should be occupied by a woman’. Criticizing the way she sounds is just a pretext for criticizing her—it’s like when racists complain that their neighbours are ‘loud’ or ‘rude’ when what they really mean is ‘not white’.

A similar argument could be made about Elizabeth Holmes’s fake baritone. I don’t know if it really is fake (when I first listened to her voice I didn’t think so–to me it doesn’t sound obviously forced), but in any case, its authenticity only seems to have become an issue after she was exposed as a fraud. Before that, her unusually deep tones were treated as a positive asset: they symbolized her status as an exception, a successful woman in the uber-male biotech industry. Once she had fallen from grace, however, those same deep tones, now reframed as ‘unnatural’, became a symbol of her dishonesty and amorality (‘she lied about everything—even her voice was a lie’). Her voice itself was never the point: the point was what it said, or could be made to say, about her.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting anyone should sympathise with Holmes. She clearly lied about more important things, and it’s those lies she’ll be punished for. But most commentary on women’s voices punishes women simply for being women. That’s why I’m so critical of articles like ‘Pitch Perfect’: they reinforce the belief that women have a language problem, when in reality it’s our culture that has a woman problem. And that’s something no amount of voice-coaching will ever fix.

Can there be a genderless voice?

Back in the 1990s, I worked at a university where my office was half way up a tower block. There were two lifts, and both had voices—one female and the other male. ‘Sixth floor’, they would announce; ‘doors opening!’ But though their scripts were identical, their personalities were not. The female voice, soft and slightly breathy, addressed the occupants of the lift in a warm and soothing tone. The male voice was very different: there was something officious, even hectoring, about its gruff, staccato delivery. These lift-voices, in other words, were gendered as well as sexed, performing a highly stereotypical version of femininity or masculinity.

These vocal stereotypes weren’t new. In the 1980s, when talking cars were all the rage, Chrysler made one which became famous for the stern, almost parodically deep male voice in which it issued warnings and commands. Its most iconic line, much ridiculed at the time and later immortalized by the Kronos Quartet, was ‘a door is ajar’ (you can listen to some more of its output here). Some models used a female voice, but not all drivers responded well to what they perceived as her nagging (‘fasten your seatbelt!’ ‘The washer fluid is low!’): she was nicknamed ‘Bitching Betty’.

Technology has advanced since then, and disembodied voices are everywhere; but we still seem to associate male voices with authority and female ones with deferential service. During a recent three-day period when I kept a record, I encountered only one disembodied male voice, making a security announcement on the London Underground. The other voices I heard–in lifts, shopping centres, supermarkets, trains and buses–belonged to women who all sounded very similar: white, middle-class (though not aggressively posh), under rather than over 45, and ‘feminine’ in the same ways as the 1990s lift voice. Their speech was generally quite soft, often a touch breathy, and pitched in the mid-to-low part of the female range. In many cases it also had a definite hint of ‘smiley voice’ (smiling can be heard even when the smile itself can’t be seen).

The persona this voice constructs is warm, helpful and ‘approachable’–all, we might think, desirable qualities in someone who’s providing a service. But why are they so often voiced by a woman rather than a man? Would a soft, smiley male voice sound too eager to please? Would a man who spoke in those warm, breathy tones sound inappropriately …well, sexual? As the journalist Barbara Ellen observed recently in a piece about the dress codes imposed on flight attendants, female service workers are often expected to present themselves in a covertly sexualized way. Whereas men can satisfy the demand to look ‘smart’ or ‘well-groomed’ just by wearing a jacket and tie, for women those same words may be code for donning heels, tight skirts and full make-up. It’s the same with vocal self-presentation: for women, ‘approachable’ can become a euphemism for sounding, as Ellen puts it, ‘semi-sexually available’.

This issue has become more salient since the advent of a new kind of disembodied voice, that of the ‘virtual assistant’ who lives in your home or in your smartphone. Whereas we don’t interact with talking lifts and cars, our relationship with Alexa, Cortana and Siri is more personal: one recent study which interviewed people about their use of voice technology found that  ‘Alexa, in particular, was often treated as a member of the family, brought into conversations, and asked for “her” opinions’.

The ‘engaging’ personality which has helped to make Alexa the current market leader is clearly gendered. She’s like a male chauvinist’s dream girlfriend: not just warm and helpful with a quirky sense of humour, but also a good listener who only speaks when she is spoken to. She was originally conceived as female, and it was not until 2018, four years after the product was launched, that Amazon gave users the option of switching to a male voice. (Even then, the default setting has remained female.) Apple has offered male voices for longer, but most users prefer the female Siri. That also seems to be true of the nameless Google Assistant, which, like Alexa, started out exclusively female but launched a male-voiced alternative in 2018.

What’s behind this preference? The industry maintains that customers prefer female voices because they’re ‘warmer and more relatable’–an answer that, even if it’s true, begs the question of why we find female voices more ‘relatable’ than male ones. In other situations we clearly don’t: on planes I’ve seen people blanch when addressed by a female pilot. What these biases really reflect is our cultural beliefs about gender roles. We understand that the function of a virtual assistant, like that of a real-life PA, is to make life easier for someone more important; and we think of that as prototypically a woman’s job.

Some feminists have expressed concern about the increasing number of households where children as well as adults are interacting with disembodied female servants. Welcoming the introduction of male-voice options for Alexa and the Google Assistant, one writer suggested that

bossing around a not just female-voiced assistant seems like a healthy step in teaching [children] gender equality and eliminating traditional gender role expectations.

Well, maybe—but arguably the effect will be limited if the voices themselves remain gender-differentiated in the ways I’ve already described. Though male-voiced assistants may challenge the belief that role itself is female, people will still be getting the message that women have to sound ‘warmer and more relatable’ than men performing the same tasks. Is it time to consider a more radical approach—giving voices to machines that have no gender or sex at all?

That was the aim of a team of researchers who recently unveiled Q, described as ‘the world’s first genderless voice assistant’. As they explain on their website,

Technology companies often choose to gender technology believing it will make people more comfortable adopting it. Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress. As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.

Q was developed by digitally altering the voice of a single speaker (possibly, though it’s not entirely clear, one who ‘neither identified as male nor female’), and the most obvious alteration relates to fundamental frequency (F0)—what we mean when we talk in general terms about pitch. After puberty, when the hormone-induced lengthening and thickening of the vocal folds causes boys’ voices to ‘break’ and become lower, there is a significant difference between the average F0 of men and women (though their pitch ranges overlap, and the mean values move closer as people age). Q has been made to speak with an F0 of 145–175Hz, which is in between the male and female averages (these are usually taken to be approximately 120Hz for men and 210Hz for women). To hear how the voice sounds, have a listen to this clip.

Does Q’s voice sound genderless to you? It doesn’t to me: I hear Q as a woman, albeit one with an unusually low-pitched voice. And in this I’m apparently not alone. When the neuroscientist Sophie Scott tweeted out the clip and invited responses, most people who commented thought Q sounded female. The name ‘Q’, unlike ‘Alexa’ or ‘Cortana’, gives no steer in that direction, and nor does anything the voice says. So, what is it that gave us the impression of femaleness?

It could be a lot of things: while F0 is an important clue to sex, it’s not the only one. Some experiments have shown that if you present people with recordings of a male and a female speaker producing the same sound at the same F0, they’re still pretty good at telling the difference. What they’re probably responding to is a number of subtler differences, some of them related to anatomical factors (e.g., as well as having thicker vocal folds than women, men also have longer vocal tracts) while others are more sociocultural. For instance, a number of studies have found that there’s gender-linked variation in the way English /s/ sounds are pronounced—with the tongue further forward or further back in the mouth. To my ear, the pronunciation of /s/ in the clip suggests femaleness; so does the pronunciation of /t/; so, mostly, does the voice quality. So, while Q’s F0 is ambiguous, there’s other information a listener can use.

In fact, ‘can use’ may be a misleading way to put it: it might be more a case of ‘can’t help using’. Distinguishing male from female voices is something we’re able to do from infancy: even if it isn’t ‘natural’, it’s an ingrained and habitual response. Is it possible to make a voice that people will perceive as ‘genderless’? And what do Q’s designers actually mean by that?

As I said when I was talking about the 1990s lifts, voices are both sexed (shaped by characteristics of the male or female body) and gendered (influenced by cultural understandings of masculinity and femininity). When Q’s designers describe their creation as ‘genderless’, I think they’re probably using ‘gender’ to cover both; but in practice they seem to have concentrated on characteristics which are primarily related to sex. This is possible when you’re using technology to create a virtual voice, but it wouldn’t be so easy for an embodied human speaker. Though there are some things humans can do with their bodies that will perceptibly change their voices (for instance, a female-bodied person who takes testosterone will develop a deeper voice), how they sound will also depend on things that can’t be altered, such as the size and thickness of the skull, the length of the vocal tract and the capacity of the lungs.

Speakers have more flexibility to alter their vocal performance of gender. This is what speech therapists who work with trans women tend to focus on: developing gendered speech-habits that communicate femininity (for instance, articulating certain sounds further forward in the mouth, or using a breathier voice quality). But for people who do not want to sound gendered in any way, the question of what to alter is more complicated. What does ‘genderless’ sound like? I don’t think we have a model, and we evidently don’t find it easy to process human speech without using (binary) sex and gender as reference points. On Twitter and elsewhere, people who’d listened to the ‘Meet Q’ clip invariably compared it with their mental templates for men and women: though they didn’t all come to the same conclusions (most thought the voice was female, but some thought it might belong to a young and/or gay man), no one said they heard Q as simply neutral or unclassifiable.

It’s also instructive to consider our perceptions of the voices given to real or fictional non-human entities. Daleks, for example: as far as I know they don’t have sex or gender,  but I’m sure most people who’ve ever heard one would agree that their loud, harsh and monotonous low-pitched voices sound male and masculine rather than female/feminine. That doesn’t mean, however, that people perceive Daleks as literally male. They understand the Dalek-voice as a metaphor, signifying qualities like aggression, ruthlessness and lack of empathy.

In the clip I’ve linked to above, the actor who voices the Daleks also demonstrates how he varies their voices to symbolize their place in the hierarchy. When he gives orders in the voice of the Supreme Dalek he speaks forcefully, using a markedly low pitch; when he voices the subordinate Dalek’s response, ‘I obey’, the voice is lighter and pitched much higher. Though both voices are male-sounding, the second is ‘feminised’ by comparison with the first. This is another example of the conventionalised use of sex/gender differences to stand metaphorically for other differences–notably, as in this case, asymmetries of power and status.

We could also consider the nonfictional Yuki, a humanoid robot used as a teaching assistant at a German university. Yuki’s creators have decided to make their robot male (its human handlers use the pronoun ‘he’), but they haven’t given it a masculine voice: it sounds like a child who could be of either sex. Once again, the point is not to present Yuki as a literal child (who would want a six-year old giving them feedback on their homework?) Rather it’s to capitalise on the associations of the child-voice, encouraging the students who will interact with Yuki to perceive him as cute and unthreatening.

Having given their robot this voice, the designers could in theory have left its sex/gender unspecified. But in that case, what would students make of Yuki? Would they identify the robot as male by default (the same way people automatically refer to any animal that isn’t self-evidently female, from the squirrel in the garden to the hippo at the zoo, as ‘he’)? Would they take it to be male because it’s a robot, a piece of hi-tech hardware? Would they conclude it must be female because it acts as a human man’s assistant? I don’t know, but I think all these scenarios are more likely than the scenario in which they would simply leave the question open. Some roboticists have argued that it’s unethical to give robots a gender, especially where that might encourage vulnerable people to think of them as human, and perhaps develop feelings for them that they can’t reciprocate. But I don’t think it will be easy to stop people anthropomorphising robots, and therefore ascribing sex/gender to them. Especially, perhaps, if they talk.

By now you’ll have gathered that I’m sceptical about the concept of a genderless (and/or sexless) voice. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy with the status quo. While I have no problem with the existence of identifiably male and female voices, I do think there’s a need to diversify the ways those voices perform gender, and in particular to move away from the female voice I described earlier, the one the industry calls ‘warm and relatable’, and which I call ‘subservient with a hint of sexual availability’.

I’d like to hear a balance of male and female voices (of all ages, and with a range of accents) both in public space and in digital devices, and fewer female voices which have been manipulated, either by technology or by the speakers themselves, to sound softer, warmer, lower or breathier. The woman who informs you of your impending arrival at King’s Cross is not your mother, nor is she auditioning for a porn movie. The way she speaks should reflect the setting and the message–not some voice designer’s fantasy of femininity.

Should we also be embracing synthetic voices like Q’s? Maybe: I don’t think a lift or a virtual assistant needs to sound like a real person. But we shouldn’t imagine that this will automatically take gender out of the equation. A voice doesn’t have to be perceived as human to be (metaphorically) gendered. Nor should we forget that the binary is also a hierarchy. In practice, what’s presented as ‘gender neutral’ or ‘inclusive’ will often be interpreted as male by default. That’s one reason why I don’t see creating genderless voices as a solution to the problem of sexism. Presenting people with voices they don’t recognise as female does nothing to challenge their sexist ideas about how actual female voices should sound.

Q, of course, was not designed to do that: what its makers wanted to challenge was binary perceptions of gender. But it still seems ironic that they ended up creating something which is not a million miles from the stereotypical female service-voice. I would rather have Q than some of the smiley-voiced fembots you hear telling you that ‘all our agents are busy’, or trying to sell you replacement windows. But if we want to change the attitudes that make Miss Smiley-Voice and Ms Warm-and-Relatable such ubiquitous vocal presences, I think we’ve still got a long way to go.

 

They think it’s all over: football v. sexism

And they’re off! As we move into the Season of Endless Televised Sport (this year centring on the month-long FIFA World Cup), some men have started their own competition to find the Most Unconvincing Reason Why We Shouldn’t Have To Listen To Women Talking About Football. I’m tempted to name this contest the Samuel Johnson Memorial Award for Sexism, in homage to Johnson’s famous remark comparing a woman preacher to a dog walking on its hind legs: ‘it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’. (It also doesn’t hurt that ‘Johnson’ is a slang term for ‘penis’.)

Simon Kelner made an early splash with his suggestion that asking women like Eni Aluko and Alex Scott to offer expert technical analysis of matches played by men was like ‘getting a netball player to discuss major league basketball’.  Er, not really, Simon: netball and basketball are different sports, whereas women’s football and men’s football…well, the clue’s in the name. Scott, who made 140 appearances for England during her career and played in three World Cups, can hardly be said to lack insight; Aluko’s analysis has been incisive enough to prompt applause from Patrice Evra (a patronising gesture which makes him another leading contender for the Johnson award).

Of course it’s true that unlike Evra, these women have never played in a men’s World Cup. But as someone pointed out on Twitter, if you followed that line of argument to its logical conclusion you’d have to leave expert analysis of the Grand National to a panel of horses. Who but a horse can truly understand the physical and mental challenges of this unique event?

Kelner’s article was really just a lengthy whinge that should have been headed ‘Why I don’t like being expected to pay attention to some bird when I’m watching the football’. Other men who felt the same way came up with different justifications. There were several variations on the complaint made by one Mail reader that ‘male commentators have a better camaraderie and banter’. Football-talk just doesn’t have the same laddish, all-boys-together vibe when there’s a woman in the room. But by far the most popular argument–most often produced with the triumphant air of a magician plucking the rabbit of self-evident truth from the hat of mere disputable opinion–was that no one could be expected to pay attention to what the women were saying, because of (stop me if you’ve heard this before) their annoying high-pitched voices.

The woman who bore the brunt of this tediously familiar complaint was not a player-turned-pundit, but the broadcaster Vicki Sparks, who became the first woman ever to commentate live on a men’s World Cup match. While she was commentating on Portugal v. Morocco, John Terry caused a stir by posting on Instagram that he’d been forced to watch with the sound off. He later clarified that this wasn’t because of the commentary, it was because the sound on his TV wasn’t working. But others had already picked up the ball and were evidently determined to run with it (oops, sorry, wrong game).

Their comments came straight from the Bumper Book of Ancient Clichés About Women’s Speech. Here’s a selection taken from the comments section of a Huffington Post piece. (Incidentally, I chose this piece because it was basically positive, deploring the sexism dished out to Sparks elsewhere. Nevertheless, in the comments section the ratio of negative to positive or neutral judgments was approximately 4:1.)

One day they may find a woman with the right knowledge and gravitas to pull it off but that time has still to arrive.

Whatever next…. the commentary done in the style of nagging I expect.

Women commentators just don’t work. Reason is because of the voice rather than the gender (before I get hate). You’d never get a squeaky guy as a commentator, so why have a squeaky woman

Her voice tone wasn’t clear, difficult to listen to, I missed half of what she said, and yet shrill. Not for me.

Sorry I am all for equality but this is one step too far, what a screeching high pitched annoying voice. Had to turn the sound off, please spare us.

Nice to have a woman, but NOT this one. The voice was just too strident. May be more suited to a boxing match. Sorry, but there is a lot of female talent out there that is more suitable

In the same way that a short person is unlikely to make a good basketball player, it should be accepted that a person with a high, shallow voice does not have the necessary attributes to be a good football commentator.

There are just some things men are better at and women are better at and the roar of a passionate crowd being drowned out by a high pitched voice doesn’t work, be it male or female, thank god I’ve lived through the best days. ‘They think it’s all over, it is now’ RIP Football

What I find striking about these comments is that the tropes they use are exactly the same ones that turn up with monotonous regularity in discussions of female political leaders—especially when the theme is ‘why I’m not going to vote for [insert name of woman]’. There’s a tried and tested formula, which goes something like this:

1. I’m not a sexist: I’ve got nothing against women/ I’m all for equality, but
2. This woman is not the right woman. I know she isn’t right because
3. She has a shrill/ squeaky/ screechy/ strident voice which means she (a) lacks the necessary gravitas and/or (b) is unbearably painful to listen to. And after all,
4. We shouldn’t put a woman who isn’t the right woman in this position: that would be tokenism/ box-ticking/ political correctness.

This is what was said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election campaign; now it’s being said about Vicki Sparks in the context of the 2018 World Cup. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Politics and sport may be different in many ways, but they are both symbolically masculine domains, arenas for the cultivation and display of symbolically masculine attributes like power, strength, competitiveness and fraternal loyalty. As such they are seen, at least by some men, as sacred turf which women should not be permitted to profane.

This may help to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that women’s voices only seem to become an insuperable obstacle to equality when women are using them to talk about certain things. You could almost formulate it as a law: the more important a subject is to men, the more they feel it defines them as men, the more likely they will accuse any woman who speaks about it with authority of being ‘shrill’.

Why is this line of criticism, making reference to the fact that women’s voices are higher in pitch than men’s, so popular with sexists? Some would say, because it trades on the idea that men are ‘naturally’ more authoritative speakers. As I’ve pointed out before, there’s good evidence that people tend to associate lower pitch with greater authority, and this has often been explained in terms of the natural relationship between larger bodies and lower-pitched sounds. But we’ve known for a long time that pitch differences between the sexes aren’t entirely explained by physical factors–they also have a social dimension. Research has shown that they vary across cultures, and that they emerge in young children before there’s a physical basis for them. They can also change over time: a number of recent studies done in Europe, North America and Australia suggest that the average pitch of the female voice has fallen quite significantly since the mid-20th century. This has not, however, stemmed the flow of complaints about the high pitch and ‘shrillness’ of women’s speech.

I think there’s a simple explanation for this: the complaints were never really about the way women’s voices sound. That’s just a figleaf, a red herring, a proxy for a different kind of concern about women speaking in certain domains. If the issue were really about acoustics–if female voices were genuinely more unpleasant to listen to and more difficult to understand– we would surely expect to hear the same complaints about every kind of public and broadcast speech. But in reality the criticism is selective, and always has been.

I’m old enough to remember when women weren’t allowed to read the news on the BBC because their light, high voices allegedly lacked gravitas. Today people complain that their voices are too ‘high and shallow’ for football commentary. Meanwhile, there are no such criticisms of the female duos who present Strictly Come Dancing and (until recently) The Great British Bake-Off.  Ballroom dancing and baking are already symbolically feminised activities, so in those domains a female voice of authority (or a flamboyantly gay one, as adopted by Strictly’s two male judges) poses no threat to the existing order. Introducing that voice into football coverage is a different matter: for some people it can only mean that the best days are behind us. ‘RIP Football’.

It’s not only football that these people are in mourning for. In the words of another Huffington Post reader (who probably spoke for quite a few of his peers, even if he himself was being sarcastic):

Wow, a woman commentator, they are getting everywhere (except back in the kitchen)

If women are getting everywhere, where does that leave men? From where I’m standing, not too badly off: in football as in life more generally, they’re still getting the lion’s share of the power, the glory and the money. But some of them are evidently brooding on what they feel they’ve lost. They look back nostalgically to the golden age when each sex had its proper sphere: when a woman’s place was in the kitchen and a man’s was everywhere else.  Sorry-not-sorry, guys. If you think that’s all over, I’m pretty sure you’re right.

It ain’t what you say…

Women/ Rabbit rabbit rabbit women/ Tattle and titter/ Women prattle/ Women waffle and witter/ Men talk. Men talk.

These are the opening lines of ‘Men Talk’, a rap poem by the incomparable Liz Lochhead (you can watch her performing the whole thing here). It’s built around the familiar lexicon of disparaging terms for women’s speech: words like ‘rabbit’, ‘prattle’ and ‘witter’, which represent women’s talk as excessive, trivial and inane; and words like ‘gossip’ and ‘nag’, which represent it as malign and spiteful.

But those words are only the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the way the act of speaking is described in everything from news reports to Great Literature, you’ll soon discover that it’s persistently represented in stereotypically gendered and sexist ways.

The most neutral way to describe the act of speaking is by using the generic verb ‘say’. ‘X said’ is the reported speech equivalent of Lochhead’s ‘men talk’: it conveys no more than ‘this person uttered these words’. But writers often add colour by choosing something a bit less basic. Here’s an example, from a political sketch that appeared in the Telegraph after the second TV debate of the 2015 General Election campaign.

“Ed Miliband is scared to be bold,” scowled Ms Sturgeon. “We don’t want a pretend alternative to austerity.” “Exactly right!” squeaked Ms Bennett.

“Labour are letting the Tories off the hook!” snapped Ms Wood. The audience applauded.

Desperately Mr Miliband tried to steer the debate back to his absent foe. “Let’s not pretend there’s no difference between me and David Cameron,” he said, rather pleadingly.  “There’s not a big enough difference!” barked Ms Sturgeon.

Notice that it’s the only male participant in this exchange, Ed Miliband, whose contribution is reported using the basic ‘said’ (though the writer does add some extra information with the adverbial ‘rather pleadingly’). The three women, by contrast, don’t just ‘say’ things, they ‘scowl’, ‘squeak’, ‘snap’ and ‘bark’.

These verbs aren’t literally describing how the women sounded. They’ve been chosen to help the writer tell a story, in which a hapless male is ganged up on and berated by three angry and aggressive females. If we only had the speakers’ own words to go on, we might not make that interpretation: we’re directed to it mainly by the writer’s choice of verbs (‘scowl’, ‘snap’, ‘bark’) and adverbs (‘desperately’, ‘pleadingly’). The verbs also say something about the power dynamic among the women. Whereas ‘squeaked’ casts Natalie Bennett as a small animal, ‘snapped’ and ‘barked’ suggest bigger beasts.

This example isn’t unique. When Elisabeth Gidengil and Joanna Everitt examined TV coverage of the 1993 Canadian election campaign, in which two of the five parties were led by women,  they also found a tendency for men’s words to be reported with the plain and non-committal ‘he said’, while women’s were described in more elaborate, less neutral terms. Among the verbs which were only used about the women party leaders, and never about their male opponents, were ‘argue’, ‘blast’, ‘fire at’, ‘hammer away’ and ‘launch [an attack]’. There were also verbs, like ‘accuse’, which were sometimes applied to men, but occurred more frequently in relation to women. The women, in short, were systematically represented as more verbally aggressive than the men.

The researchers did consider the possibility that the women really were more aggressive, but when they analysed the five leaders’ actual speech they found no evidence to support that. The real difference, they argue, is in the way male and female speakers are judged: if women deviate from stereotypical expectations by presenting themselves as tough rather than gentle, combative rather than conciliatory, they are perceived as more aggressive than men who behave in exactly the same way. That perception, Gidengil and Everitt suggest, explains why female leaders’ speech is reported using more aggressive verbs of speaking. The contrast between ‘he said’ and ‘she blasted’ is an explicit encoding of the underlying double standard.

Do creative writers rise above these journalistic clichés? Not according to Ben Blatt, who analysed a large sample of literary and popular fiction for his book Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve. His number-crunching revealed, among other things, that male fictional characters habitually ‘mutter’, ‘shout’ and ‘chuckle’, while female characters ‘murmur’, ‘scream’ and ‘weep’. Other patterns were influenced by the sex of the author as well as the character. Male authors were more reluctant than female ones to allow their male characters to ‘sob’; and in their books it was usually female characters, not male ones, who ‘interrupted’.

This particular finding caught many readers’ attention because it’s the opposite of ‘realistic’ in the everyday sense of the word (in real life women do not interrupt more than men). But gender stereotyping can function as a ‘realist’ device in the more technical sense. Even if a stereotype is factually inaccurate, if it fits with readers’ common-sense beliefs it can help to make a fictional world believable.

As feminists have often pointed out, though, our beliefs about men and women are not just things we bring from our real-life experience to our reading; they are also things we may get from our reading and take back into the non-fictional world. I was reminded of this recently when a colleague told a story about a conversation she’d had with her children, who were insisting that ‘mummies don’t go out to work’. ‘Where’, she asked them, ‘does daddy drop me off every day when he’s taking you to school?’ They answered without hesitation: ‘work’. But knowing their own mother went out to work hadn’t prevented them from absorbing the stereotype of mothers as stay-at-home parents.

Concern about what children might be absorbing from the books they read has prompted a number of feminist researchers to analyse the language used in children’s fiction—including the words used to describe characters’ speech. One researcher, Sally Hunt, analysed the verbs of speaking used in some of the most successful children’s book series of the last 75 years: Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. And despite the differences of period, genre and target audience, she found there were patterns which recurred across the sample.

One of these patterns related to the distribution of verbs which tell you what action an utterance is performing. Verbs suggesting authority were more typical of male characters, and verbs suggesting deference were more typical of female ones. ‘Ordered’, for instance, was 77% male, whereas ‘begged’ was 68% female. Some actions, like ‘giggling’, were off-limits to male characters, while others, like ‘boasting’, were virtually an all-male preserve.

Hunt also remarks on authors’ fondness for verbs which allude to the vocal qualities of speech. In her sample, male characters’ verbs often implied low pitch (e.g. ‘he bellowed/roared’) whereas female characters’ verbs emphasised high pitch (e.g. ‘she shrieked/screamed’). It’s interesting that this contrast features so prominently in books for and about children, because the physiological differences which produce it in adults do not develop until puberty. But like the ‘squeaking’ and ‘barking’ attributed to female politicians in the sketch I quoted earlier, words like ‘bellow’ and ‘scream’ are rarely intended just to evoke the sound of the speaker’s voice: they are also code for emotional responses like anger, surprise and fear. Associating these words with either male or female speakers is thus a covert way of telling readers which emotions are typical of each sex.

The representation of male and female speech in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books has been investigated further by Maeve Eberhardt, who approaches the question through a detailed comparison of two characters, Hermione and Ron. As Eberhardt notes, Hermione is widely considered a ‘strong’ female character: Rowling herself has described her as the ‘brightest’ of the three friends, and she is also portrayed as morally courageous. But are her intelligence, strength and courage reflected in descriptions of her verbal behaviour?

Eberhardt’s answer is ‘yes and no’. In some respects, she finds that Hermione and Ron are treated similarly. Across the series as a whole they are given approximately equal amounts of speech, and the neutral ‘said’ is by far the commonest verb of speaking for both of them. The number of other verbs used to describe their speech is also approximately the same.

But the verbs themselves are not the same. When Eberhardt examined ‘unique’ verbs—those which were only ever used about one character—she found that Hermione’s tended to imply strong emotions, especially fear and sadness (they included ‘screamed’, ‘squealed’, ‘shrieked’, ‘squeaked’, ‘wailed’ and ‘whimpered’). Ron’s unique verbs, conversely, included a number (such as ‘mumbled’, ‘grumbled’ and ‘grunted’) which suggested emotional disengagement. The two characters were also distinguished by the frequency with which certain verbs were used about them. Both of them ‘whisper’ and ‘gasp’, but Hermione does those things about three times more often than Ron. He, on the other hand, does five times as much ‘muttering’ as she does, and over fifteen times as much ‘yelling’.

Eberhardt also looked at the use of adverbials to modify verbs of speaking (as in ‘he said, rather pleadingly’). Since Hermione is meant to be the clever one, you might expect her adverbials to include a high proportion relating to intellectual or mental states (e.g. ‘thoughtfully’, ‘logically’, ‘sceptically’). But in fact most of them are about her feelings: her unique adverbs do include ‘seriously’, but that occurs less often than either ‘timidly’ or ‘sadly’. And the most frequent of the adverbial modifiers which are only applied to Hermione’s speech is that old sexist cliché ‘shrilly’.

Since this study only compares two characters, it might be argued that the patterns it uncovers have less to do with their gender than with their distinctive qualities as individuals. What the reported speech verbs tell us is simply that Ron is the kind of person who mutters and grumbles, while Hermione is the kind who wails and shrieks. But I don’t think that argument will wash, given that other studies, like Sally Hunt’s and Ben Blatt’s, have found the same general patterns, and even some of the same specific word-choices, in a range of other texts. Generations of male fictional characters have expressed themselves by muttering and bellowing, while their female counterparts have screamed and spoken ‘shrilly’. These verbal and vocal habits could not be less individual, or more gender-stereotyped.

They are also remarkably persistent. A children’s writer starting out today wouldn’t be able to build a successful career on stories like the ones I read as a child, in which boys had adventures and girls helped mummy make the sandwiches. That kind of sexism is much less common now. Yet successful writers can still present children with a linguistic division of labour –boys giving orders and girls asking questions, boys bellowing and roaring while girls scream, squeal and giggle—that doesn’t seem to have changed since the 1950s.

I’m not accusing these authors of deliberately reproducing stereotypes. I’d be surprised if they had any conscious awareness of the patterns revealed by analyses of their work. But if we accept that those patterns both reflect and perpetuate sexism, perhaps we should be challenging writers to make a conscious effort to break away from them.

For those who want to avoid sexist clichés, whether in fiction or journalism, the research I’ve discussed suggests several top tips:

1. Check you’re not consistently pairing minimal descriptions of male speech (‘he said’) with highly elaborate descriptions of female speech (‘she enunciated crisply’/ ‘she gasped in horror’).
2. Go easy on the vocalisation verbs (like ‘growled’ or ‘squeaked’) which differentiate male and female speakers overtly by pitch and covertly by emotional state. And you’re going to use them, don’t make a habit of picking more ‘extreme’ ones for female speakers (if a boy ‘shouts’ or ‘yells’, why does a girl have to ‘shriek’?)
3. Try not to give all the ‘thinky’ verbs to male speakers and all the ‘feely’ verbs to female ones.
4. Watch out for the speech act trap–don’t let conversations be all about male speakers ‘asserting’, ‘instructing’ and ‘explaining’ while female ones ‘ask’, ‘suggest’ and ‘agree’.

The way I’ve phrased these points (‘go easy on X’, ‘don’t make a habit of Y’) is deliberate: they aren’t meant to be blanket prohibitions. As I’ve said a million times on this blog, context is all: any word–even ‘shrilly’–can be the right word if the context calls for it.  What you want to avoid is not specific words, it’s the kind of regular pattern that results from the habitual, unthinking repetition of the same stereotypical formulas.

Precisely because we’ve encountered them so often, phrases like ‘he muttered’ and ‘she murmured’ or ‘he yelled’ and ‘she screamed’ may seem obvious and ‘natural’; but really there’s nothing natural about them. On the contrary, they are products of our cultural obsession with magnifying gender differences, or imposing them where they don’t exist. In reality, men and women use language to perform the same acts and express the same emotions. Girls give orders and boys make suggestions; women chuckle and men have been known to scream. If we can cope with this complexity in our face-to-face encounters, why can’t it be reflected in our descriptions of the way people talk?

2016: the bad, the bad and the ugly

Once again tis the season to look back on the last twelve months, and since we’re talking about 2016, that may not make for uplifting reading (unless your heroes are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and President-Elect Donald Trump). If the Words of the Year chosen by dictionaries are any guide, the mood among English-speakers is darker than it was a year ago. Whereas Oxford’s choice in 2015 was the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji, in 2016 it has gone for ‘post-truth’; other dictionaries’ selections have included ‘paranoid’, ‘surreal’ and ‘xenophobia’.

The reasons why this year sucked were not primarily to do with language, but language played a part—in some cases quite a prominent part. So, this review will be more about the lowlights than the highlights. Here are six of the worst:

Bantering bigots. In my 2015 annual round-up I named ‘banter’ as the word I’d most like to ban (if banning words were either feasible or desirable, which IMHO it isn’t). But banter continued to be exchanged in 2016, and the word ‘banter’, and variations thereon, continued to be used to wave away accusations of misogyny and bigotry. Both these tendencies peaked in October with the release of a 2005 tape in which Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump engaged in what he and his defenders called ‘locker room talk’. He was elected just a few weeks later.

Relentlessly sexist commentary on female politicians, often focusing (most notably in the case of Hillary Clinton) on their voices and style of speaking. All the familiar word-weapons—‘shrill’, ‘harsh’, ‘grating’, ‘aggressive’—were deployed by all the usual suspects.

If you’re thinking, ‘but surely there was plenty of critical commentary on Donald Trump’s language too’, you’re not wrong, but the comparison is instructive. When negative judgments are made on the speech of a female politician, her alleged failings are typically presented as the failings of her sex in general. Trump’s failings, on the other hand, were presented as his alone. They were ‘Trumpisms’, not ‘man-isms’ (it was even argued that Trump talks like a woman). The one exception was the ‘locker room talk’, where the idea that this was typical male behaviour got wheeled out not to condemn Trump but to excuse him.

If a female politician is widely acknowledged as an excellent public speaker, you can always accuse her of talking too much. In April, Owen Smith MP (in case you’ve forgotten, he was the man who unsuccessfully challenged Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership) tweeted about his visit to a café in Millport in Scotland. He included two photos, one showing him with his arms around two of the ‘ladies’ (his description) who worked there, and the other showing a jar of old-fashioned gobstoppers. The part of the tweet relating to this second image said: ‘they’ve got the perfect present for @NicolaSturgeon, too’. A gobstopper, geddit? Because Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland (and at the time—before Theresa May became PM—the most powerful female politician in the UK), talks entirely too much and needs a good shutting up.

The continuing war on the word ‘women’. Two of the most popular posts I published this year touched on the question of why ‘women’ now seems to be the hardest word. In April the women’s section of the UK Green Party set off a Twitterstorm with its use of the term ‘non-men’. Across the Atlantic in September we had Planned Parenthood talking about ‘people’ being ‘criminalised for their pregnancy outcomes’. And throughout the autumn there were regular sightings of a new addition to the lexicon of ‘women’-avoidance: ‘menstruators’.

Having rejected sex or gender-based labels as essentialist and exclusionary, promoters of this term apparently felt that bodily function-based labels were the way to go. I, by contrast, feel pretty sure they aren’t. If you don’t want to say ‘women’, OK, I get it, but why not try using your linguistic judgment to find a contextually appropriate alternative? In this case, where the news story was about the removal of sales tax on pads and tampons, ‘sanitary product buyers’ would have worked—or where the report had already made clear what products were being discussed, just ‘customers’. If you’d find it offensive, or just plain weird, to read statements like ‘the recent fall in the price of toilet paper has been welcomed by defecators across the country’, or ‘perspirers have questioned the classification of deodorant as a luxury’, then you shouldn’t be giving house-room to ‘menstruators’ either.

More terrible advice and stupid opinions about women’s speech. This year hasn’t (yet) brought us anything quite as ludicrous as the ‘Just Not Sorry’ app that appeared at the very end of 2015, but bullshit continued to be churned out by the bucketload. It remained a truth universally acknowledged that women apologise too much, and constant criticism of female ‘verbal tics’ was once again presented as empowering rather than undermining.  An op-ed piece in the New York Times added ‘I feel like’ to the list of words and phrases women should avoid if they want anyone to take them seriously—while also managing to relate the rise of ‘feeling like’ to Everything That’s Wrong With Our Society Today. (If anyone from the Times is reading this, I’d be happy to advise on what linguistic opinions editors should avoid giving space to if they want anyone to take them seriously.)

Not all bad advice is addressed to women: some of it is advice for men on how to make women’s lives a misery. The example that got most attention this year advised on how to make a woman take off her headphones and PAY ATTENTION. Because it’s part of a woman’s job description to be available to random men who want to converse with her AT ALL TIMES.

Death. It’s become a truism (though maybe not an actual truth) that 2016 brought a bumper harvest for the Grim Reaper. Two posts on this blog reflected that: one was a response to the death of the architect Zaha Hadid and the other was prompted by the murder of Jo Cox MP.

Online misogyny. In 2016 the abuse directed at women online was widely acknowledged as a significant problem, and in Britain it was the subject of a high-profile cross-party campaign—which was launched with a report that managed to blame half of the problem on women. (If you want to read something more sensible on this subject, I can recommend Emma Jane’s new book Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History.)

There were a few small consolations:

Resolution 109. The American Bar Association made the use of patronising endearment terms to women lawyers a breach of professional standards. (Meanwhile in the UK, a female judge responded to a male defendant who called her a cunt by saying ‘you’re a bit of a cunt yourself’.)

Women political speakers kicking ass. In the wake of the referendum that brought us Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon showed once again that few politicians can touch her when it comes to rhetorical skill. The US presidential campaign brought another outstanding female political speaker to the world’s attention: Michelle Obama.

Arrival. Not the best thing I’ve ever seen, but hey, Hollywood made a film about a woman linguist who saves the world!

In real life, of course, linguists don’t save the world: the best someone like me can do is try to make a bit more sense of some of the things that are happening in the world. As ever, my efforts to do that this year have been indebted to the work of many other researchers and/or bloggers, and I’m grateful to everyone I’ve cited/linked to in my posts.

I’ll be back with more feminist guiding in 2017, but in the meantime I thank everyone who reads the stuff I put here (there are a lot more of you than I ever thought there would be when I started this blog in 2015), and I wish you as much peace, love and joy as you can find in these unsettled and discouraging times.

Voices at an exhibition

Last week I went to see the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition ‘This is a voice’, which explores, among other things, ‘how the unique grain of the voice locates us socially, geographically and psychologically, and how the voice can be dramatically altered by treatment and training’. The exhibits relating to this theme deal with subjects ranging from accent reduction to ventriloquism. But in this post I’m going to concentrate on two pieces which consider the way voices are gendered.

In Chris Chapman’s 2016 video ‘Voice and identity’, Adele, a trans woman, and James, a trans man, talk about the way their voices changed during the process of transitioning. Their personal reflections are intercut with explanatory commentary from a speech and language therapist, Jen Read.

One of the first points the video makes is that altering the way they sound is much more difficult for trans women (who make up around 85% of the caseload for speech therapists working with trans people), because the feminizing hormones they take do not affect their voices. Taking testosterone, by contrast, causes a trans man’s vocal folds to thicken and so produces a deeper voice. James recalls that his voice had changed perceptibly within three weeks of beginning treatment. He presents the way he sounds as something he has little or no control over—though he is happy with the result, saying that others now respond to him more consistently as a man.

Adele describes a much more conscious process of thinking about the kind of voice she wanted and then working out how to produce it. She says she never wanted a ‘girly’ voice: even if that had been achievable, it wouldn’t have been right either for her profession (acting) or her sense of who she was as an individual. Her post-transition voice has remained noticeably low in pitch. But like James, she reports a positive effect, saying that people no longer have difficulty in recognizing her as a woman.

What Adele’s case underlines is that sounding like a woman is not just a question of pitch. If you were only going by pitch, Adele could be a person of either sex. What leads others (including me) to perceive her voice as a woman’s rather than a man’s is her whole vocal performance of femininity; in her case that depends less on pitch per se than on her voice quality, intonation (that is, pitch movement, the melody of speech), and the way she articulates certain sounds.

Jen Read’s comments make clear that pitch is only one of the things she works on with her clients. She also shows them how to produce what she calls a ‘brighter’ sound by articulating further forward in the mouth, encourages them to add more breathiness to their voices, and teaches them to make use of more varied intonation patterns. Some courses and advice books aimed at trans women go further, offering suggestions for feminizing your vocabulary (use words like ‘gorgeous’), grammar (ask lots of questions) and paralanguage (smile!).

Not all the intended recipients of this advice are eager to take it. The veteran trans activist Kate Bornstein rejected it entirely:

I was taught to speak in a very high-pitched, very breathy, sing-song voice and to tag questions onto the end of each sentence. And I was supposed to smile all the time when I was talking. And I said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk like that!’

The truth is that nobody talks like that. Many of the tips given to trans women are plucked from the same steaming pile of ‘zombie facts’ about women’s speech that I’ve criticised in earlier posts (e.g., that women chatter away endlessly, apologize constantly and make everything sound like a question). What they collectively add up to is a picture of female speech that has approximately the same relationship to reality as Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent in Mary Poppins. But the thing about caricatures is that we do generally recognize what they are meant to be. If your main concern is to avoid being misgendered, a highly stereotypical performance might actually serve your purposes better than a more ‘realistic’ one.

Even at its least stereotypical, though, the voice-training given to trans women takes a normative approach. It doesn’t start from empirical observations about the way most women actually sound, but rather from an idealized notion of how a woman ought to sound. Most of Jen Read’s advice, for instance, is based on the idea that sounding like a woman means projecting ‘feminine’ qualities in your voice–that’s why she teaches clients to make their voices softer, breathier, warmer and more emotionally expressive. These vocal characteristics have nothing to do with the physical differences between the sexes: their association with women rather than men is cultural rather than natural. And from a feminist perspective they are not unproblematic, because so many of the qualities we define as ‘feminine’ are inextricably linked to women’s subordinate status.

If there is more to the gendering of voices than pitch, why is it assumed that trans men do not need to be instructed in the finer points of ‘masculine’ performance? Reviewing the literature on transgender and language in 1999, the anthropologist Don Kulick commented that virtually all the sources he read, both expert and popular, made that assumption. What lay behind it, in his view, was a tacit understanding that femininity requires (from all women, not just trans women) a more elaborate kind of performance than masculinity. As Kulick puts it,

Being a man is self-evident, whereas being a woman is a complicated set of procedures that require careful adherence to detailed, explicit instructions…about how to walk, talk, sit, eat, dress, move and display affect.

His point is illustrated by the contrast between James’s unselfconscious account of finding his voice (which he presents as more a case of it finding him) and Adele’s acute awareness of the choices she had to make. It’s a pity ‘Voice and identity’ doesn’t explore this difference in more depth. In fact, I found it generally lacking in complexity, though that may be because it isn’t aimed at people like me who already know something about its subject. For those who don’t, it’s a clear and informative presentation.

The same cannot be said about the other exhibit relating to the altered/gendered voice, Imogen Stidworthy’s video installation ‘Castrato’. This consists of three screens, showing, respectively, a soprano, a boy treble and a counter-tenor–those being the voice-types that were digitally merged to simulate the castrato voice for the film Farinelli. The catalogue description says that the artist has taken the ‘lost voice’ of the castrato (the last one died in 1922) as ‘the starting-point for an investigation into the interdependence and divergence between voices and bodies’.

I’m not sure what kind of ‘investigation’ the artist had in mind, but I did find it strange that an exhibition in a museum devoted to the history of medicine and science provided no historical information about the practice of castrating boys to preserve their pure, high voices into adulthood. All the curator’s notes say about this is that it was ‘long since made illegal’.

Actually, castration was always forbidden by canon law (i.e. the law of the Roman Catholic Church)—though between the 16th and 19th centuries, when the practice flourished in Italy, it was the Church that gave castrati both their musical training and in many cases their employment. At a time when women were prohibited from singing in church (where St Paul had decreed they should be silent), castrati were highly valued as choral singers. They shared the boy treble’s ability to sing high-register parts, but they were more experienced, more rigorously trained and had far more vocal power (castration prevented their voices from breaking, but it did not stop them from developing the lung capacity of adult males). They were also in demand as operatic performers, playing both male and female roles. Until the 18th century female singers were banned from the stage as well as the church, but in any case the castrato voice was considered superior because of its greater purity and power.

Most of the boys who supplied this demand came from poor families who saw the castration of their sons as an investment. The pay-off was supposed to be economic security, and perhaps even fame and fortune. This didn’t always work out, though: some boys died from bleeding or infection (or overdoses of the opium that was sometimes used as an anaesthetic), and not all those who survived had the musical talent to succeed. Historical sources suggest that even those who prospered quite often expressed resentment towards their families, and sometimes refused them financial support.

The most famous castrati have often been presented as exotic or romantic figures, and in recent decades, as Patricia Juliana Smith points out, the way they ‘blurred distinctions of sex and gender’ has given them ‘a certain queer appeal’. The facts I’ve just outlined, though, make it difficult to regret the end of the practice that produced their ‘angelic‘ voices. Not because that practice produced anomalously-gendered people, but because it was brutal, dangerous and enacted on children (most were aged between 7 and 9) who could have had little idea what it would mean for their future lives. Some castrati are known to have married,  but hypogonadism usually impairs sexual function, and it always results in infertility. That isn’t a small sacrifice, especially when you didn’t choose to make it.

Thinking about the case of the castrati might also prompt reflection on the ethical dilemma that has recently arisen in relation to the increasing numbers of children who are presenting as transgendered before the onset of puberty. It is now possible to alter the course of their sexual development by treating them with puberty-blocking drugs and then initiating the transition process. But since treatment must begin before children are able to make their own medical decisions, the question arises of whether parents should be able to make this highly consequential decision on children’s behalf. As I mentioned before, many castrati seem to have felt regret, and in some cases deep resentment, about the choice their families made for them. Will that history be repeated with the current generation of trans children?

We might tell ourselves that the two cases have nothing in common: the motivations behind the choice are different, and this is not the 18th century. Our medical science is far more sophisticated, and our attitudes to sex and gender are more enlightened. But one thing we learn from the history of  science is to be cautious in assessing the state of our knowledge. What one generation of scientists presents as settled, objective fact may later come to be seen as wrong, incomplete and biased; what is regarded as an enlightened view in one time and place may be judged very differently in another. After seeing both the exhibits I’ve discussed, I couldn’t help wondering how our beliefs about gender, and the associated practices of training and treatment, will be seen by future historians and scientists.

The parts of this exhibition that deal with gender most directly focus on unusually dramatic forms of voice-alteration, and one point that gets lost as a result is that all gendered voices are in some sense altered voices. In most cases this doesn’t involve  medical treatment or formal training, but it is still an example of culture modifying the raw material supplied by nature.

That point even applies to the relationship between sex and voice pitch. Though this mostly reflects the physical differences between adult men and women, research suggests it has a learned component too: the ‘normal’ pitch of a male or female voice has been found to vary across cultures and languages. Studies have also found that boys’ voices can be distinguished fairly reliably from girls’, though before puberty that can’t be because of any significant difference in their vocal anatomy.

What we see in these cases is the effect of everyday socialization processes. As they become aware of the norms of their culture, children unconsciously train themselves to perform gender in accordance with social expectations. They’re also taught to do this by others’ feedback on their performance. The girl whose teacher repeatedly tells her to speak more quietly, or the boy whose peers deride his ‘gay’ pronunciation of certain sounds, are both learning lessons about what kinds of voices should go with what kinds of people.

What feminists need to keep in mind, though, is that the ‘should’ in that last sentence is a cultural injunction: it doesn’t refer to some immutable natural law. Like other norms for gender-appropriate behaviour, the norms that regulate gendered vocal performance can be criticized, resisted, and changed.

‘This is a voice’ is at the Wellcome Collection in London until the end of July 2016.

The taming of the shrill

During last year’s UK General Election campaign, Richard Madeley told readers of the Daily Express:

I can’t get enough of Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood. That gorgeous accent! I could listen to it all day. It’s warmer than sunlight shining through a jar of honey.

Madeley wasn’t the only commentator who found the ‘warm’ or ‘lilting’ quality of Wood’s voice a bit of a turn on. Over in the USA, by contrast, it’s become a truth almost universally acknowledged that Hillary Clinton’s voice is a turn off. It’s been described by commentators as ‘loud, flat and punishing to the ear’, ‘decidedly grating’ and, inevitably, ‘shrill’.

The extent to which her critics have made an issue of Clinton’s voice has become a mainstream news story in its own right. Yet the topic of the male voice has barely featured in discussions of Clinton’s rival Bernie Sanders, nor in reporting on the Republican race, which is now an all-male affair. In the UK, similarly, election pundits expressed no opinions on the ingratiating smoothness of David Cameron’s vocal performance, or the blokeish braying of Nigel Farage. As Elspeth Reeve observed last year in the New Republic, men’s voices just don’t seem to make much impression:

[T]hink about Jeb Bush’s voice. It’s so—wait, what does it sound like again? He sounds just … like a guy, maybe?

It’s not that male politicians’ language gets no attention: there’s been plenty of commentary on their rhetoric, especially in the case of Donald Trump. And–as the New Republic piece goes on to demonstrate, quoting linguists like Penny Eckert, Carmen Fought and Mark Liberman–it’s not as if there’s nothing to say about the voices of Trump, Cruz, Rubio and Sanders. So, why is it only women whose voices are subjected to relentless critical scrutiny?  The short answer is, of course, ‘sexism’. But why does it take this particular form?

The most familiar feminist explanation for prejudice against the female voice connects it to the larger question of gender and authority. For historical and social reasons, the ‘unmarked’ or default voice of authority is a male voice;  criticism of female politicians’ voices is essentially a way of tapping into the still-widely held belief that women do not have the authority to lead.

Low voice pitch, a highly salient marker of maleness, is also strongly associated with authority. In 2012 an experimental study using digitally manipulated recordings of men and women saying ‘I urge you to vote for me this November’ found that judges of both sexes preferred the lower pitched version of each recording. Both men and women were advantaged by having a lower voice than their same-sex ‘rival’.

This association is what makes the word ‘shrill’, which combines the concept of high pitch with the idea of an unpleasantly piercing sound, such a common criticism of female public speakers. The linguist Nic Subtirelu has investigated the use of ‘shrill’, along with two other terms that do a similar job, ‘shriek’ and ‘screech’, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. He calculates that the media are

2.17 times more likely to describe a woman or a girl as “screeching” (or a related form of the word) than a man. A woman or girl is also 3.14 times more likely to be described as “shrieking” (or a related form of the word), and she’s 2.3 times more likely to be described as “shrill”.

High pitch is associated not only with femaleness, but also with other characteristics which imply a lack of authority, such as immaturity (children have high-pitched voices) and emotional arousal (we ‘squeal’ with joy or fear, ‘shriek’ with excitement, ‘screech’ angrily). Saying that a woman’s voice is ‘shrill’ is also a code for ‘she’s not in control’.

It was this perception that led Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first and so far only woman Prime Minister, to undergo voice-training which lowered her pitch significantly. But the result was—to put it mildly—not to everyone’s taste. As Mrs Thatcher soon discovered, the only prejudice more widepread than scepticism about female authority is deep resentment of female authority.

That resentment is expressed in some of the other disparaging terms that are commonly used about women’s voices, like ‘abrasive’, ‘bossy’, ‘grating’, ‘harsh’, ‘hectoring’ and ‘strident’. Rather than focusing on pitch, this set of negative descriptors focuses on the tone and volume of a woman’s voice to suggest that she is aggressive and overbearing.

Today this is an even bigger problem for female politicians than it was for Mrs Thatcher. In an age of interactive, 24/7 media, we no longer treat our leaders as remote authority figures: we want them to be likeable or ‘relatable’ on a human level. But research suggests that it is harder for women to combine authority with likeability. If they score well on one, they’ll do badly on the other.

The female authority figure with the ‘shrill’, ‘grating’ voice is not just unlikeable, she’s also stereotyped as sexually repulsive. When Sylvia Shaw and I analysed media commentary on the UK General Election for our book Gender, Power and Political Speech*, we were struck by how frequently women in authority—and not only politicians, but even the woman newsreader who moderated one of the TV debates—were compared to archetypal female ‘battleaxes’ like the headmistress of a girls’ boarding school, the sadistic nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and ‘Matron’ from the ‘Doctor’ and ‘Carry On’ films. What these fictional characters have in common is that they’re grotesque: ageing, usually ugly, and either totally sexless or sexually voracious, terrifying the male objects of their insatiable desire.

The theme of the sexually predatory female was especially noticeable in commentary on the relationship between Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, and the then-leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband. In the Times, for instance, we got a strange little fable about pigeons, under the headline ‘Nicola Sturgeon and the politics of sadism’:

Spring is the season when pigeons distract us with their mating dance. The male paces about in an exotic strut, coo-cooing and puffing out his chest. The female makes a show of mincing away from him. He follows; she sidesteps; he pursues; she retreats. … On Thursday night on the BBC a similar courtship ritual could be observed taking place between two politicians, but with this striking difference. It was the lady in the dove-grey jacket coo-cooing with a puffed-out chest, and the gentleman in the dove-grey tie who was being coy.

The Sun compared Sturgeon to a Black Widow spider who ‘eats her partners alive’. And in this extract from a political sketch in the Telegraph, the words used to evoke the quality of her voice (in this case through the choice of quotative verbs) play into the depiction of powerful women as bossy bullies:

“Ed Miliband is scared to be bold,” scowled Ms Sturgeon. “We don’t want a pretend alternative to austerity.”
…Desperately Mr Miliband tried to steer the debate back to his absent foe. “Let’s not pretend there’s no difference between me and David Cameron,” he said, rather pleadingly.
“There’s not a big enough difference!” barked Ms Sturgeon.

Whereas Miliband ‘says’ things, ‘pleadingly’, Sturgeon ‘scowls’ and ‘barks’. Hillary Clinton has been described as ‘lecturing’ her audience (the behaviour of a schoolmarm or a strict mother) and her laugh has been called a ‘cackle’ (suggesting another version of the powerful but repulsive female, namely the witch).

Our cultural stereotype of the ‘attractive’ or sexually alluring female voice is very different. A ‘sexy’ voice may be high or low in pitch (think Marilyn Monroe or Lauren Bacall), but it is never ‘shrill’ or ‘grating’: it is breathy rather than clear, soft rather than loud, and ‘warmer than sunlight streaming through a jar of honey’.

Of course, a politician who used this voice would be criticized for ‘lacking authority’. Leanne Wood, whose warm and honeyed tones Richard Madeley said he could ‘listen to all day’, was endlessly patronized by the media: another writer described her as looking like ‘a 16-year-old whose date had failed to show up for the prom’. But unlike Margaret Thatcher, Nicola Sturgeon or Hillary Clinton, Wood did not commit the cardinal female sin of being a ‘turn off’.

Which brings me back to the question of why it’s women whose voices get all the attention. I think it’s at least partly for the same reason there’s more attention to female politicians’ faces, figures and clothes. Women are judged, to a far greater extent than men, by their perceived physical/sexual attractiveness. Judgments on a woman’s voice—the most directly embodied, physical aspect of linguistic performance—are part of the same phenomenon. And just like the judgments made on their bodies, the judgments made on women’s voices often express something more visceral, and more sexual, than the commentators are willing to admit.

Consider, for instance, Ben Shapiro’s defence of ‘shrill’ in a piece whose self-explanatory title was ‘Yes, Hillary Clinton is shrill. No, it’s not sexist to say so’.  His trump card is the observation that not all women politicians get called ‘shrill’:

Nobody calls Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) shrill, because she’s not shrill. She may have lifeless eyes, a doll’s eyes, but she doesn’t shriek like a wounded seagull.

‘Lifeless eyes, a doll’s eyes’??? On reflection, I think I agree with Shapiro that comments like these aren’t most aptly described as ‘sexist’. I’d describe them as outright misogyny.

*Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election, by Deborah Cameron and Sylvia Shaw

Missing words

Last week, the BBC radio programme Woman’s Hour ran an item on the American documentary film Do I Sound Gay?  The film explores what’s popularly known as ‘the gay voice’, a way of speaking that identifies a man as gay (though not all gay men have it, and some men who do sound gay are actually straight). The Woman’s Hour feature ranged more widely over the subject of gay language, including a lengthy discussion of Polari. But it was all about the boys–until, towards the end of the item, the presenter broached the inevitable question: do lesbians also have a language of their own?

The short answer is no: there isn’t a lesbian equivalent of the gay voice, or a lesbian argot comparable to Polari. But since this blog does not do short answers, let’s consider the question–and what’s behind it–more closely.

Questions of the form ‘what is the lesbian analogue of X?’, where X is something gay men do, are usually asked with good intentions–most often the idea is to counter the tendency for discussions of gay culture to centre on the male variety, thus erasing or marginalizing the contribution of lesbians. But the way the question is framed introduces another kind of male bias. It treats gay male culture as prototypical, assuming that lesbian culture must be a copy or a mirror image, rather than something that needs to be considered on its own terms.

What this overlooks is that a group’s culture is a product of its history, and gay men and lesbians do not have identical histories. Though there were certainly experiences they shared, their lives were also affected by gender difference and inequality. How that may have influenced their ways of using language is an interesting, though also complicated, question.

The non-existence of a lesbian language was noticed and discussed as long ago as 1941, when Gershon Legman, a folklorist with a particular interest in sexual matters, published ‘The language of homosexuality: an American glossary’. As Legman acknowledged, what was documented in this list of more than 300 slang expressions (which appeared, somewhat incongruously, in a weighty tome summarizing the current state of medical and scientific knowledge about homosexuals) was an almost exclusively male vocabulary. ‘Very noticeable’, he wrote, ‘is the seeming absence of almost any but outsiders’ slang in relation to female homosexuality’. He proceeded to speculate on the reasons for this absence:

The tradition of gentlemanly restraint among Lesbians stifles the flamboyance and conversational cynicism in sexual matters that slang coinage requires; and what little direct mention of sexual practice there is among female homosexuals is usually either gruffly brusque and vague, or else romantically euphemistic.

But restrain yourself, gentlemen, there’s more:

Concomitantly, Lesbianism in America—and perhaps elsewhere—seems in a large measure factitious: a faddish vice among the intelligentsia, a good avenue of entry in the theatre, and most of all, a safe resource for timid women and demi-vierges, an erotic outlet for the psychosexually traumatised daughters of tyrannous fathers and a despairing retreat for the wives and ex-wives of clumsy, brutal or ineffectual lovers.

So, most so-called lesbians were only pretending, and the rest were either too restrained or too romantic to be capable of coining slang terms.

It’s tempting to dismiss Legman as just an arrogant sexist jerk. But if we put what he says alongside the work of later historians, it becomes easier to understand what actual characteristics of gay and lesbian cultures in the 1930s and 40s might have led him to pursue this line of argument.

One difference between lesbians and gay men was that lesbians were less likely to be arrested and imprisoned for engaging in illegal sexual acts. The riskiness of sex between men may have been a factor influencing the ‘language of homosexuality’, since it intensified the desire for secrecy and in-group solidarity. Legman remarked that lesbians had less sense of ‘criminality, let alone criminal community…two attitudes of mind which seem particularly conducive to the manufacture of slang’.

In other ways, though, gender inequality made life harder for lesbians. It was harder, economically and socially, for women to live independently of men, and to inhabit public space without male protection. This suggests an alternative explanation of why lesbians did not develop an extensive in-group vocabulary or a widely-used argot like Polari. As the lesbian feminist linguist Julia Penelope once put it,

Lesbians have been socially and historically invisible in our society and isolated from one another as a consequence, and have never had a cohesive community in which a lesbian aesthetic could have developed.

In their history of the working-class lesbian community in Buffalo, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis point out that in the 1940s and 50s what we would now call the ‘lesbian community’ was not perceived as a unified group whose members shared a single identity. Rather, ‘butch’ and ‘fem’ were regarded as distinct identities: they were associated with different ways of behaving, and in the case of fems, though there were exceptions, with a less permanent commitment to the lesbian life. When Legman talked about ‘factitious’ lesbians it was probably fems he had in mind. .

By contrast, when he talked about ‘gentlemanly restraint’ he was probably thinking more of butches. Kennedy and Davis show that butches, who were more visible as gay women because of their overt gender non-conformity, faced a different set of risks from those that confronted gay men. Butches attracted hostility not only as sexual ‘deviants’, but also as women who claimed certain male prerogatives. Kennedy and Davis think this may be why they did not display the kind of wit and flair that were features of gay men’s linguistic performance. Butches’ survival depended on acting and talking tough, so their style needed to be blunter and more assertive.

But I don’t think we can take it for granted that lesbians never created in-group vocabularies or other distinctive ways of speaking. Whenever the record seems to show that women haven’t done something, the question always has to be asked: is that because women really didn’t do it, or is it just because history did not preserve the evidence?

That question did occur to Legman: he acknowledged that there might have been something for him to find if he’d been able to look in the right places:

I have been assured that the situation is quite different in prisons, and that a fairly extensive Lesbian argot is likely to be found there. I have not had the opportunity to find out.

Later research would bear out this prediction. In 1966, the social scientist Rose Giallombardo published Society of Women , a study of a women’s prison in which she reproduced a number of the letters exchanged by inmates involved in romantic relationships. These suggested that a lesbian argot did, indeed, exist, and offered a glimpse (though only a glimpse, since language wasn’t the author’s main interest) of what it might have looked like.

Women’s prisons are not the only locations where this kind of evidence might have been found. Slang typically flourishes in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called ‘total institutions’ (e.g. prisons, asylums, boarding schools, religious orders, the armed forces), and many institutions of this type have historically been sex-segregated. All-female total institutions (like girls’ boarding schools, women’s colleges and the women’s armed services, as well as prisons and reformatories) would have been good places to look for lesbian slang in the pre-feminist, pre-Stonewall era. But they weren’t readily accessible to male researchers. Legman’s methods had an inbuilt male bias: as well as reading pornography, he spent time hanging out in burlesque theatres and what he described as ‘the grimier shit-houses around Broadway’ (toilet wall graffiti was one source of slang and vulgar terms, and some toilets were also ‘tea rooms’, places where men had sex.)

By the time lesbian researchers came on the scene, the linguistic situation was changing. The advent of the women’s and gay liberation movements at the end of the 1960s produced divisions between those gay men and lesbians who saw sexuality as a political issue, and those who remained resolutely unpoliticized. While the second group continued to use the traditional slang in the traditional way, the first denounced it as reactionary and oppressive. As Julia Penelope argued in 1974:

Too much of the lexicon of gay slang is given over to a preoccupation with sexual objectification and social stratification… Insofar as gay slang reflects and encourages the value system of a racist, patriarchal culture, those gays who use it are engaging in self-oppression. …although gay slang is the vocabulary of those who are themselves outcasts from the straight culture, it also binds us to the same value system that makes us outcasts.

Penelope noted that the gay community’s political awakening had not led to the wholesale abandonment of traditional slang terms, but rather to a shift in their meaning. ‘Certain terms…have ceased to be used with sexual meanings and have, instead, taken on new, political meanings’. The pejorative words ‘dyke’ and ‘faggot’, for instance, were reclaimed as positive identity labels. For activists, the term ‘gay’ itself now denoted ‘a state of political awareness in which one no longer needs the narrowly-defined sex stereotypes as bases for identity’.

These new meanings, however, were not accepted by everyone. Many self-styled homosexual men who remained outside the movement (and often firmly inside the closet) thought ‘gay’ was ‘trivializing and inane’. Meanwhile, some lesbians rejected the label ‘gay’ because their primary allegiance was to feminism. In the new nomenclature of sexual identity politics,

A dyke is a woman committed to revolution, the most radical position. A lesbian is committed to a more liberal position, and she is more willing to compromise and work within the system. A gay woman affirms her commitment to a gay community, and sees nothing wrong with working with men.

Today if you Google ‘lesbian slang’ you get more than half a million hits. I can’t say I looked through all of them, but many of the top ones turned out to be variations on the same two wordlists. Commentators continued to wonder why lesbians lag behind gay men. A piece posted in September 2015 with the title ‘11 lesbian slang words we wish existed’ began:

IDK if you’ve noticed, but the gays have completely monopolized the gay slang world. They have words for everything. Otters?! Pups?! Twinks! Where are our words!!!??!

That question has a long history, but maybe it’s time to move on. If we only ever talk about what lesbians’ language isn’t, we’ll never understand what it is.

An extract from Legman’s glossary is reprinted in The Language and Sexuality Reader, which I co-edited with Don Kulick. This post draws on other research and writing which Don and I  did together, and I thank him for his contribution–though he isn’t responsible for the views I’ve expressed here.