A special form of sexism
by digby
When I was in high school a boy I liked told me to “pipe down” that my voice was shrill and annoying and “hurt his ears.” I was devastated, of course, and went to work immediately to fix this horrible flaw. I spent weeks consciously keeping my voice very even, very soft and spoke with as little emotion as I could muster. I ended up feeling very depressed, my girlfriends told me I was being a bore and I finally let it go and went back to being my shrill, annoying self. But I was self-conscious about my voice from that time on and always worried that it was putting people off, especially men. That fear was validated many, many times in my corporate career in business meetings where I was either ignored or shushed to make room for a man to express my exact point in a timbre they evidently preferred to hear it.
Rand Paul’s infamous behavior is a perfect example of how this is done:
I cringed when she laughed. But I’ve done exactly that many times. It’s a reflexive way to shrug off the humiliation of being talked to as if you are a child in a professional setting. I should have told any man who did that to go fuck himself. Of course, they were almost always my bosses …
Even the Fox News women had something to say about this:
In recent years when I heard myself on the radio or saw myself on film I was shocked that my voice sounded so … normal. Even when I was being passionate and unself-conscious. It turned out that I didn’t sound any more shrill than any other woman. Of course, that’s the point. We all do when it’s convenient for someone to say so.
Anyway, I thought of all this because of this sad observation from an article in the New Republic called “Why Do So Many People Hate The Sound of Hillary Clinton’s Voice?”
That brings us to the over-scrutinized voice of Hillary Clinton. To pull one recent example, here’s a New York Times reporter analyzing Clinton’s presidential campaign announcement video last week: “It allows her to use her quieter-but-confident speaking voice, instead of the VOICE she uses at news conference and at rallies, when she sometimes SPEAKS SO LOUDLY in hopes of conveying ENERGY and FORCEFULNESS (rather than simply projecting her voice better).”
Bloomberg Politics has broken down Clinton’s accent as it has changed since 1983, as she moved from Arkansas to Washington and spoke before different audiences. The reporter felt moved to assert three times that Clinton’s changing accent was not a sign of inauthenticity.
First, it’s important to note that women’s voices generally get more scrutiny. (Sample shaming trend piece: a 2006 New York Observer story headlined, “City Girl Squawk: It’s Like So Bad- It. Really. Sucks?”) Vocal fry, the subject of countless trend pieces and Today show segments in the last three years, is supposedly the terrible thing young women do to their voices to sound like dumb sex kittens. Remember uptalk? Before vocal fry, uptalk was the scourge of American English, in which young women would end declarative sentences with rising sounds as if they were asking a question. (As Liberman titled a 2005 Language Log post about uptalk, “This is, like, such total crap?”) The thing is, these things weren’t really new, and they weren’t exclusive to women. Here’s George W. Bush using uptalk. Here he is using vocal fry.
“There’s an idea that men and women talk differently, that men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” Fought says. “That’s really misleading. The biggest differences is in how men and women are perceived, and our ideas about how women should talk and how men should talk.” Men are supposed to be assertive, loud, and competitive. Women are supposed to be soft-spoken, cooperative, and helpful. “No matter who’s saying something, a man or a woman,” Fought says, “they’re being judged on their language via their gender.”
Hence the extreme scrutiny for a woman politician’s voice. A fascinating anthropological document is a 2008 video of Republican pollster Frank Luntz explaining Clinton’s voice to Sean Hannity on Fox News. A clip rolls of Clinton speaking in a lecture hall with reverberation that wrecks the audio quality. Of course Clinton sounds awful. Luntz says, “Forget the words. Listen to the way she communicates. It’s ALL AT THE SAME LEVEL AND I DONT WANT TO MAKE YOUR CONTROL ROOM GO NUTS BUT IT GETS LOUDER AND LOUDER but her voice doesn’t go up or down.” Then Luntz looks like a little boy about to tell a dirty joke: “Her voice is … and we’ll end up getting hit by Media Matters, but it’s true. In the research I have done … her voice turns people off. Because they feel like they’re being lectured.” This clip exists on YouTube as “Hillary Clinton’s Voice is a Turn Off!”
“I don’t know that the best evidence of the effect of Hillary’s voice would be in a recording of her giving a speech over a PA in a reverberating hall, captured on a cell phone, rebroadcast over TV and then recaptured on cell phone,” NPR linguist Nunberg says.
If you watch old clips of Clinton from the 1992 campaign, she is presenting herself in a much more feminine way, Fought says. She sounds more emotional—even if that means being pissed off when reporters ask about Gennifer Flowers. She sounds a little bit more Arkansas. She even wears a headband. But not anymore. “I think the advice she’s gotten is to get anything marked out of her speech,” Fought says, “anything that people can pick up on and make fun of.” It’s not masculine of feminine, it’s not regional, it’s not overly emotional or overly assertive. Hillary Clinton, having learned some lessons from the 2008 presidential race, might be playing up her femininity, talking about weddings and yoga and babies. But when you hear her voice, she doesn’t want you to think “girl.”
Let’s face it, she’s going to be hit whether she sounds like “a girl” or whether she doesn’t. When we’re trying to speak with authority we will either be criticized or shushed for sounding ditzy or grating by people who want to shut us down.
(Links to all that at TNR and they are fascinating. I just didn’t feel like copying and pasting them all.)
Here’s an example of this phenomenon. I know it’s cheap to use Tweety but in my experience he was just a guy who said what others were thinking:
MATTHEWS: Let me go back to Frank Luntz. Frank, you were talking about smooth transitions and I was thinking how hard it is for a woman to take on a job that’s always been held by men. And it is so hard.
We were watching Hillary Clinton earlier tonight; she was giving a campaign barn-burner speech, which is harder to give for a woman; it can grate on some men when they listen to it — fingernails on a blackboard, perhaps.
Now, here’s Nancy Pelosi who has to do the good fight against the president over issues like minimum wage and reforming — perhaps — prescription drugs, so that people can afford drugs and get them in a program that’s easy to understand. All kinds of things like that she’ll have to go head-to-head with this president. How does she do it without screaming? How does she do it without becoming grating?
“…to men”, he should have added. Women don’t seem to have this problem. But does it even matter what they think?
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