On Vocal Fry, Bitterness, and Being a Woman

Oh squee, we have another recency illusion! On the evolution of the valspeak vocal fry: a LONG podcast, but a most interesting one, including as it does such an intensity of apparently unironic white male self-congratulation and feminine condemnation. For shorter, written pieces with a more interesting and scientifically useful bent, take a look at the debunking of the habits of vocal fry and uptalk as a privileged little American girl fashion (from the NYT – a really good look at the phenomenon and its *strategic* [defensive] utility), and here, the personal story of a woman who took a stab at rehabilitating her vocal creak – and then didn’t.

Full disclosure: I am EXTREMELY guilty of judging young women by their voices. I have ranted alone at my television and even talked with my mom about the buzzy, baby voices younger women use – the very picture of the judgmental old lady in my hatred of the sound. There will be a long and serious review of how much of my prejudice is born of self-hatred (my own tendency to valspeak as a kid, and many years of self-training to get over the noise) and how much of it is the bigotry born of age and the privilege that my own voice is so often *heard*. From the NYT link … "young women were generally interrupted more than men and so it’s a defense mechanism" …

In a mental review of the voices of the women and some of the men I love, there appears little creak among them, but uptalk (rising terminal inflection) is very common. My mom has a strong voice, and just on Christmas, I heard once again what I have heard since I was nine or so, that I sound just like her. I take this as a compliment; my mom has a jolly way of speaking. My oldest friend, TEO, has a soft way of speaking, but not lacking for authority; she is a mother and a teacher, and speaks smoothly and gently, but is not breathy. She uses lilt in the strategic ways noted in the New York Times article, and may not always assert dominance with her voice, but her confidence is complete.

Cute Shoes has a particularly beautiful voice. Low but never nasal and buzzing, she uses uptalk inflection with precision – again, a mother, and a professional manager, she nudges vocally with great effect.

My brother sometimes uptalks – he is a father of two girls, and guides them with a questioning voice, prompting them to display what they know, rather than telling them as if they don’t.

Mr. X, a man of six-feet-four and an impenetrably dour resting expression, can appear physically intimidating in a way, but has a manner of speech that focuses on his breath in a way that makes it more noticeable to me than I find it to be in other people. His speech most often is quiet, modulated. Modulated or even regulated. His breath is plosive, strong as Rowan Atkinson speaking the letter “B”, if he’s pressed to humor or surprise or passion. But most of the time, his voice is held back; he speaks with what I’d describe almost as another kind of “creak” – the softness of restrained pressure. I think of the way he says “Hello” on the phone, or the first time I really heard him speak, and am struck by the idea he often seems almost to be holding his breath. It’s not an unnatural sound – he doesn’t seem strained – only holding in reserve; typical of him psychologically too.

My dad had a warm and gravelly voice. No creak there, just the patina of a man of great experience, some years of smoking, even more of teaching, many of parenting, and all of loving. Like the satin-ing silver sheen of wood handled and handled again over long ages, it was strong and beautiful and deep and weathered. I can’t remember my dad’s voice at thirty; but, by sixty-five, he had a distinctive, soft growl.

Even dad used upspeak, though. He prompted his students, pulled his kids along on the upturned lilt of the inflection of his sentences, not all of them interrogative. His rising terminal was unlike that we think of when the term “uptalk” crops up – a promontory, not a steep rise. A place inviting you out to its tip, to take a look at the vista.



In 1981, still in middle school, I had left the small world of grade school behind, and came across people with the early-80s Eastern hippie inflected speech that seemed to me then and now to share a lot with what we soon were calling valspeak. Then high school, Zappa’s daughter, horizontal-striped shirts with puffed sleeves … and my own regrettable teenage speech.

Maybe I don’t really regret it.

But I did spend some years in remediating it.

I was never raised to be a woman out to form myself in the shape to please a man, but one or two points my dad made about the appeal of a woman did strike home (eventually). The major one was that a woman walks with grace, not a bounce. I feel like I saw Grace Kelly swiftly descending a long staircase, a long gown hiding all evidence she owned legs and feet, her head smooth as if on a gimbal, yet clearly RUNNING down, to catch a Cary Grant perhaps, in “To Catch a Thief” – but the image stays with me, real or imagined, transplanted from the wrong movie or not – that was grace the thing, in Grace, the woman.

Grace was one of the few things dad exhorted upon me as his girl child, and it’s not one I ever resented – and another measure of grace, aside from movement (which I cannot generally do so beautifully) is a womanly, beautiful voice.

I may not have attained any more beauty in my voice than in my physical comportment – but it is true I treasure the compliment once received, that my voice sounds like brownies baking.

It used to be I’d get joked at, “You should have your own 976-number.” This was a thing, kids, twenty years ago when porn was performed live by phone – and presumably I had a SENSUAL voice, which may or  may not have been typical of real sex-operators’ voices, but the general idea was meant to convey that I sounded good. (Or quite naughty …)

And, of course, the oldest comment of them all, “You sound like your mother.”

At work, in particular, I cultivate a variety of voices – for “my kids”, a warm and southern style – for new calls, professional and modulated, lapsing easily into laughter and friendliness where possible – or occasionally slipping toward interrogative-inflected passive (aggressive) voice, depending on how things need to be guided.

With my friends, mom, and brother, I like to think I am most often laughing or listening. We like to think a lot of positive things about ourselves, I suppose …

What about you?

Falling

There are two great usages of the concept of "to fall" in English, to which modern ears are no longer very well attuned, and which twine around one another.

A fallen woman, in antique parlance, was a woman - married or not - who has lost her virtue. Virtue is another of those concepts whose meaning has changed (at the very least), but it is not the topic today.

These days, as sneeringly as a woman may be treated for this or that infraction against other people's morality, it is little likely to be the death of her - at least, outside of contexts I don't propose to write about just now. My mother thinks Miley Cyrus is SCUM (her word) - largely because Miley, less a person than a child raised to be a product, has played into one of the major product marketing techniques of American popular culture, sex. Women who marry rich are as likely to be congratulated as written off for golddigging bimbos, but few observing one appreciate the finer points of her humanity. Britney Spears was the very paragon for a certain set of younger cousins of mine, as long as she touted her purported virginity, but she lost steam with many through a series of ill-timed underpantsless photos and that one time she shaved her daft little head.

Sigh.

But Miley has not been shamed out of society, and certainly the pariah has become staple to a leering community of celebrity  consumers - who literally DO *consume* people famous for five minutes, fifteen, or even almost an hour. Reality TV is built most often on the need to feel superior, even as we aspire to this or that thing such-and-such celebrity owns/product places in their "life".

There was a time it would have taken only the hint of impropriety to destroy a woman. One named Theresa Longworth spent a great deal of her life fighting the destruction of her reputation; and, to this day, the very sexual details of her existence perhaps outlive any sense of how profoundly distressing it must have been for her to have those things so much as imagined. Novels we still read today turn on the virtue of women whose wellbeing depended upon its never being questioned, never being destroyed.

To fall, for a woman, has through history been as fundamental a peril as the fall of Lucifer himself. To be thrown from society has been for MOST women - or anyone at all - through history, the most violent punishment conceivable (another aspect of a quote brought up this week in my comments).

Outcast. To many modern, especially American, ears, the term equates to the kid who gets bullied, or the million invisible mentally ill or imprisoned or otherwise "marginalized" people we rarely see, or try not to.

But in its practical, fundamental sense, it is those whom a community have put into the outer darkness.

This is no small thing, to be alone. Life today may be built to accommodate it, but the life lived solitary is still considered abnormal, and we punish people for living thus, whether they have chosen it or not. I've had my rants and fears about my social marginality.

But I have never been put aside, forsaken, nor shunned.

I have never fallen. Society has not shut me out, I have chosen and found my own place, but never been excluded.


The profundity of shunning is difficult to convey anymore, I think.

An awful lot of us have experienced it to one degree or another, but the ancient practice of social punishment has found a new face, and works in ways just as impenetrable to understand as The Past is for us to comprehend.


I know those who have fallen away ...

But I know nobody who has had to be a forsaken woman ... who has been denied fire and shelter ... who has fallen ...

Miss Manners

Anyone who believes an etiquette maven must necessarily be antiquated in her attitudes and quaintly out of touch must not read Judith Martin.  It's columns like this one I love most.  If someone is insulting, rude, and controlling on the very first date:  that someone is not good relationship material.  But, as she says, "Miss Manners will leave it to you."

The very height of evolved, progressive, and polite behavior.

Cable Television

Since getting cable again for the first time in about 15 years, less than two years ago, I've made a running joke about being grateful for my Roku box ... but, the fact is, cable seems to have a special place in the dumbification of our society.  The internet and broadcast are hardly great examples, and reality TV crosses boundaries - but cable generates some of the most shockingly stupid programming it is quite literally terrifying.  In this case, we have two documentaries about mermaids being real.  Why does that matter?  Read the link.

It's not just science, but our society and communities themselves under fire.  For every Housewife (and there are SIX of those series), there's an unmarried person babbling about "connections" and "this journey" under the pretense that game shows can end in "lurve."  And it's not just content; the sponsors have turned me into a middle-aged suburbanite who can't poop without resenting Jamie Lee Curtis and the massive conspiracy to get my obsessed with my own eliminations, losing weight, and an industry of food products designed to promise weight loss (because that is the only worthy goal for a woman) and simultaneously designed to hew precisely to exactly the poor diet issues which have brought my country in the space of half a generation to ownership of the fattest and most risk-ridden bodies in the whole of history.

There is a shrillness in the politics, in the morality, in the gender roles, in the rather overwhelming presence of alcohol in places it will create the most televise-able drama, which goes beyond the anti-science foolery of Animal Planet, Bravo, History, and what have you.  It goes into our PEOPLE, and that is sickening.  When I tell people I earned every minute of my age, I'm simultaneously blessing it.  With age, I've come to a more critical view of the world (even than I trouble to express in this largely non-critical/analytical blog), but a very real gratitude for the fact that I missed out on the rampant opportunities to whore my very "life" out for money in order to entertain and confirm the self-superiority of millions of Cheeto-snarfing strangers.  Because I certainly would have wanted to.  Impossible not to be concerned about the psychological fates of not only those who do it, but the susceptibility of those who consume this from early ages.

But the central problem is the willful ignorance cable so successfully fosters.  Believing in mermaids, but disbelieving climate change.  Taking talking heads of no credible expertise at face value, especially when they are popularly and entertainingly barking mean things about proven science, economics, what have you.  "Fairy tale" gender roles, self-defeating politics, incendiary anger directed not at oppressors, but at those who are different.  Bread.  Circus.

The older I get the more I realize I don't even know how to question our society properly or to any effect.  And the more I see that needs to not only be questioned - but changed.

THANKS, Ron.

I have always found it frustrating that many of those who choose to be most staunchly republican are in fact the very people that party is out to ignore, take advantage of, and whom it often (even if not "intentionally") outright destroys. I have some personal friends who fit right into this category, of supporters of a force which is perfectly satisfied to demean and betray their resources.

While it's nice to know I'm not the only person who has perceived this, I still have yet to see any actual discussion of the problem. I guess it's only been THIRTY YEARS since it became clear. Baby steps, I suppose. At least this article brings the topic up at all.

Hear Here

Perhaps my favorite comment on the State of the Union so far.

Nope.

Definitely my favorite.

Quote

This is about the best description of, and insight into, Tea Partiers I can think of:

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
--Alexander Hamilton

Yep, that's about the size of it. Strangepersons fear The Intellect. *Sigh*

Cue Phil Collins

Because to-NIGHT, to-NIGHT, to-NI-YIGHT! Whoa-ooooooooooohhh! Tonight's the night, my dear fella babies. Tonight's the night, I write, whoa-ooooh: the query for my first full MSS submission.

The complication ... I had a dinner invitation. Unfortunately, I was mistaken in the nature of this invitation. I'd thought, oh, everyone wants to go for a sandwich shop. Good. I can do that, come home, bat this thing out.

I am betting this sandwich place sells wine. Because (a) the time of our occasion is supposed to be 7:30, which speaks to me of a Friday Girls Night Out, more than a "let's get a sandwich"-y occasion. And (b) 7:30 also does NOT speak to me of a relatively short affair. Hmm.

On the one hand, I am probably a crappy neighbor and friend if I flake on the night out (though at this point I *still* haven't been able to speak with anyone directly about it ... so does phone-tag-invitation mitigate late-date-out-flaking ... ?).

On the other: seriously, I have been planning all week for tonight to be my deadline. And I'm kind of a weirdo of a writer. I actually hit my deadlines.

Hm.