This article makes some good points, it’s overall argument is incredibly muddled though, she seems to be criticising the practice on the one hand, and then trying to laughably claim that it’s some kind of patriarchal plot to oppress women (because those evil men in power also criticise the practice, how come she can do it then?).
It is because these young women are so empowered that our culture assigned them a socially appropriate mannerism that is certain to tangle their steps and trivialise their important messages to the world.
Culture doesn’t assign anything to anyone, it evolves naturally out of individual interactions. The more we understand how things evolve the better we can change them, and she points out good reasons why we should try and do this, but trying to assign intention to the process is just as ludicrous as intelligent design.
I had vocal fry for decades before it was cool, i.e., before I’d ever heard the term “vocal fry”. Does that make me a hipster-fry?
Seriously, what @stagamancer said above: not new, not for women only. The whole discussion pisses me off, and it reeks of misogyny, telling young women how they should speak. Not that I imagine young women give a flying fvck how Naomi Wolf thinks they should speak.
Does vocal fry in young women annoy you? My heart is breaking for you.
" when women do something annoying, it’s the whole gender that’s the problem."
Do you work for FOX News? You should! You have a talent for making straw person arguments. It’s not the whole gender that’s the problem, it’s THE PEOPLE WHO SPEAK THAT WAY who are the problem. The vast majority of women I know don’t speak with vocal fry. The few who do are neo-valley girl airheads.
You heard it here first, y’all: the best way to raise a young woman’s confidence in her speech is to complain about its sound and brutally mock it.
It works even better if you compare it to “those women” who don’t meet your societal standards for vocal quality. Also be sure to bemoan how young women’s speech isn’t respected in our society because they’re all doing it wrong, and if they just spoke correctly everything would be so much better.
Not caring works surprisingly well. Another of my great former students, now a peer and a friend, saw a request from a magazine reporter doing a tech story and looking for examples. My friend, who’d previously been too quiet about her work, decided to write the reporter and say “My work is awesome. You should write about it.”
The reporter looked at her work and wrote back saying “Your work is indeed awesome, and I will write about it. I also have to tell you you are the only woman who suggested her own work. Men do that all the time, but women wait for someone else to recommend them.” My friend stopped waiting, and now her work is getting the attention it deserves.
e.g. when every sentence ends in an implied question mark, that doesn’t project an aura of confidence, but an aura of constantly questioning yourself. But that’s only uptalk.
I never really thought of vocal fry, the low vibratey, drawn out words in "they just don’t get it" as negative, not in the way that uptalk could be.
I heard that one too. My main takeaway from the story was how fortunate I’ve been to have managed to get by this long with only a vague notion of what a “Kardashian” is. I don’t generally take pride in my ignorance, but that’s one place where I’ll happily make an exception.
Yeah, but you can’t use that for or against your case. You I hate it when people do that. Like people find the 5 black guys who like the Confederate flag and say, “See, it’s heritage! It’s ok!” You can use what they actually SAY as a way to argue for or against something, but just because she is X, doesn’t make her opinion more or less valid. (I think it would be considered the fallacy “appeal to authority”)
Conversely, I hate when people say, “You aren’t X, you can’t speak on this subject.” If you have an informed opinion, then by all means make your case for or against something.
I thought the lady in the video did a good job, but at the same time I find worrying about it rather trite. Granted I am from the midwest where this doesn’t seem very “in” - and we are well known for having the most neutral accents. Then again I am very “do what you like” in my attitude.
The article is way more nuanced than is presented here. I would go far to say that the excerpt that was chosen is a massive distortion of the article’s points. The article actually states that vocal fry is one of several things about the way some women speak that tend to make them sound less confident about what they are saying and that this directly affects how their opinions are perceived. Is it fair? Probably not, but that is irrelevant. It is also unfair that if a man is wearing a nice suit that he will be considered more competent than if he is wearing sweatpants. Still it’s worth putting a suit on for an interview. On the other hand if you are just lazing around the house feel free to wear the sweats or use vocal fry, run-on sentences and uptalk…
This could be a book sized post, but I will make it short.
Yes.
My perspective: standard are applied to genders differently. So we celebrate Tom waits but daria is a joke. And I truly doubt it is based on talent. Well, tom is a gem, and I am using hyperbole…
Tonality in non-tone languages fascinates me. It does convey information. But it is applied in English in a way that reinforces stereotypes.
Yeah, it’s complicated. Maybe vocal fry is more like Japanese “Feminine Falsetto” voice, where women change their voices to sound more childlike and non-threatening.
Or, maybe it’s more like the sterotypical “gay lisp”, in that hostility to the speech style is really just a proxy for hostility to the group with which it’s associated.
I seem to remember that shortly after NPR’s Frank Tavares retired (you might remember him as the “voice of NPR,” the guy who did all the funding credits, like “Support for NPR comes from this NPR station, and from Novo Nordisk…” in a preternaturally neutral and toneless voice), he was replaced by Sabrina Farhi, who is in her thirties, and I remember someone discussing vocal fry with her on the air, and I could swear some people were concerned that her vocal fry might drive away listeners. I don’t remember thinking she exhibited any vocal fry in her funding credit announcements, but apparently someone else did, since it eventually ended up costing her her job.
To a certain extent, I understand where this decision would come from (at least if we were talking about someone who exhibits serious vocal fry; again, Ms Farhi’s voice didn’t strike me as particularly sizzly), since the way I see it we wouldn’t really think it appropriate if a male announcer on NPR sounded like, say, Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure or Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But for a lot of people, vocal fry sounds like the voice of a laid-back, informal high school student. I imagine many people who sound like that have spoken thus since adolescence, which makes perfect sense to me, since I’ve been speaking and dressing like a high-schooler from 1976 ever since I was a high-schooler in… er… 1986. (I was always behind the times.)
And for the record, I have an awful voice. Pitchy and shrill when I don’t want it to be, hoarse and gravelly when I don’t want it to be. Just like some homely people were said to have “a face for radio” one could say I have “a voice for newsprint.” I’ve kinda wanted to be a Loop Group artist for a while (they’re the ones who record crowd voices for movies and TV shows… like all the cops in the background of a crime scene, or all the doctors and nurses in the background at a hospital) since they make really good money… like $700 for four hours’ work.
But alas… my voice is too weird and unpleasant to even sound inconspicuously average.
I thought the concern with vocal fry was originally that over time it harmed your vocal cords? Other than that, it just seems like a stylistic choice to me, none of this “sounds less competent” stuff. Upspeak sounds like questions, and some people use it to sound nonconfrontational by taking weight out of statements, so I understand concerns about that, but I don’t get why vocal fry concerns people (other than concern for actual vocal cords)
