I’ve never understood the backlash over vocal fry, particularly in context of NPR-style voices. I always read it as a universal consequence of speaking in low tones, where a sort of rumble underlies the trailing edge of speech. The same effect that makes male voices like Johnny Cash or Sam Eliot, or, yes, even Ira Glass so compelling occurs in female voices, just at a higher register. And men have the same opportunity to modulate their tone to sound more serious. Why people don’t immediately understand that is beyond me.
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There’s a movie, Do I Sound Gay? on Netflix right now where they talk about where the gay voice comes from and how it effects men who affect it. As a result of watching that movie, my daughter and I watched the movie Lara and OMG we had a laugh riot not so much over the “limp wristed” man that was the iconic gay voice star, but over the insane police work, like, you know, the technique where you invite all the suspects to a dinner party and get drunk with them. Fun movie and great visuals, and interesting to know the history of the “gay voice.”
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I have some vocal fry, and I’m generally complimented on my speaking voice. But my voice is also fairly low for a woman. Maybe I sound masculine enough to be interesting.
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Related:
Saying gender is not playing a role is incorrect, at least for society at large.
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That was the joke, yes.
That’s interesting that both you and the NPR response consider it a filler-word, not too different from “ummm.”
I find the initial “so” to be widespread in the tech/software industry, and generally see it in the bloviating male members of the species. Typically it means “I’m going to answer this simple question with a story.”
“Why are we getting a delay with these network requests?”
“So, when the TCP/IP stack was being developed in the early 1980s…”
Edit: A different NPR story describes it similarly:
Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …” If that “so” were a chapter title in a Victorian novel, it would read, “In which it is explained what the reader must know before his question can be given a proper answer.”
Scientists have been using that backstory “so” among themselves since the 1980s, but its recent spread is probably due to the tech boom. In his 2001 book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis noted that programmers always started their answers with “so.” That’s around the time when I first heard it, working at a Silicon Valley research center. Mark Zuckerberg answers questions with “so” all the time: “So, it comes down to the economics …” “So one of the services that the government wanted to include …” But by now that backstory “so” is endemic among members of the explaining classes — the analysts, scientists and policy wonks who populate the Rolodexes of CNBC and The PBS NewsHour.
… That backstory “so” puts me on guard, too, even when I hear it coming out of my own mouth. Usually it just introduces some background qualification that the question calls out for, as in, “So … German isn’t actually a romance language.” But sometimes it announces some nugget of specialized linguistic knowledge that I feel the need to share.
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Pix or it didn’t happen.
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Ah yes, all the complaints being leveled at Hillary Clinton accusing her of shouting, Shrillary, and so on.
I think an interesting thing to consider is the fact that electronic voices are almost exclusively female voices.
"people tend to perceive female voices as helping us “solve our problems by ourselves, while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems. We want our technology to help us, but we want to be the bosses of it, so we are more likely to opt for a female interface.”
“http://www.wired.com/2015/10/why-siri-cortana-voice-interfaces-sound-female-sexism/”
It seems most people like to hear submissive female voices, but not authoratative or powerful ones.
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I find vocal fry viscerally irritating when used in singing (doesn’t really bother me when taking, but I do notice it). It’s literally the only thing I hear and it’s like nails on chalkboard for me. It’s not gender specific, though.
See also:
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Yeah, I got it.
There are ways to use it to link causality, but I suspect the leading so is more often a filler (with the significant caveat that I’m no kind of expert on the subject and haven’t done studies). I’m not sure ummm is ever anything other than a filler word (unless one considers the Om sound in some mediation techniques). Curiously, I hear it a lot on NPR (where it usually seems to be a nervous tick). I probably hear it slightly more from guys than women. I recognize that in the grand scheme of things it’s not a horrendous sin, a lot of people who use filler words are just nervous, and it’s a profoundly stupid reason to straight-up ignore the content of what someone is saying.
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The leading ‘so’ does serve a role (or can):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216608002634
I hear it used that way in tech. discussions when we’re talking about app development/etc. (and use it myself a lot), and in that context it’s an aid to understanding the direction of the discourse. By virtue of them being tech. discussions about development topics, I hear it a lot more from men. 
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Uptalk is the most annoying of the discussed, I have a hard time taking seriously a woman who does it, she sounds like a child. but none of the vocal them bothers me as much as overuse of fillers. And “so” is not one of them, it usually only occurs once in a while. “You know” kills me. I heard an interview with someone knowledgeable in their field, but he was unlistenable since he used “you know” at least once in every sentence.
And men do get penalized for their voices, there was a study showing electoral success correlated with deepness of voice.
Edit: my tic is starting sentences with AND or BUT.
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Then there’s the British, “Right”.
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That’s all on you bringing your biases in, though. I hear it from women (and men), and while the inflection does indicate something about perceived relative status that’s good to be aware of, it’s more a cue to you, than a problem with how they’re speaking.
Men seeking a few rare positions of higher power do get penalized. Women in any role get dinged.
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I disagree. If you want to be taken seriously, you speak normative english. Not uptalk. Nor inner city dialect, or even heavy regional dialect in many case. Same as wearing appropriate attire. While we don’t quite yet have rigid inherited class structure in the US, we do require people with aspirations to be successful in non-entertainment or sports fields to act, speak and dress with class. It’s not ok to always put it on everyone else to be receptive to “whatever” or be labeled biased.
Saw the new Anna Gunn movie “Equity” Tuesday, about female investment bankers. Funny reimagining it with uptalk.
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I take people who speak with uptalk and inner city dialects seriously. If you don’t, that’s on you. Issue’s with society’s speech policing isn’t something I’ve got the time or will to into today, though perhaps someone else is interested and willing.
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That’s pretty true. I think it’s still more culturally acceptable to say vapid shitty things like that about women than men.
All I’m saying is, sometimes. Yeah. A bit. Or maybe better to say they get ignored over a focus on a broader set of nonetheless shallow characteristics that might be tacitly discussed as “who I’d like to have a beer with.”
I didn’t mean to get into an argument about gender. I was just making a comment about how deep-seated of a thing this seems to be. One of those unconscious biases that trips you up even if you know you have it. You can be completely dedicated to equal rights and still take people more or less seriously because of the way they talk. It seems like just about every animal there is that makes a noise, with maybe a few notable exceptions like whales and elephants, the loud ones with the deep voice are in charge. Those are the ones you mate with, those are the ones that lead the pack. Howler monkeys resolve territorial disputes entirely by volume, and as late as the American civil war encounters between rival scouting parties were sometimes handled in exactly the same way.
Bass carries. I don’t disagree with anything any of you have said, just be aware that physics and evolution may be on the wrong side of this argument. And I mean, those guys said we shouldn’t go to the moon, so fuck them. But still, it’s a hard problem.
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Agree with this. While we should all aspire to make the world totally merit-based and egalitarian, the harsh reality is that it’s just not that way - especially in “professional” environments such as the corporate world. Bias and judgement creeps in whether you watch for it or not and we are all guilty of it from time to time.
Let’s face it, speech discrimination is the least of society’s problems. There are many more hard pressing prejudices like race, gender identity and sexual discrimination that have greater direct impact on our daily lives than on how one talks.
Same thing I was trying to express but said much more eloquently.
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