Oh, I was just trying to make the (absurd) joke that @manybellsdown should provide a photograph of something inherently un-photographable, that is, the voice she described.
Looks like I won’t be here all week, after all.
Okay… thanks for explaining! 
I am so fed up with people who have no idea of how to speak loudly in public situations, or think that raising your voice is rude under any circumstances. What did we do for millennia before amplification? Worse is musical theater performers who need body mikes no matter how small the theater. I’ve seen body miked professionals in places hardly larger than a classroom.
The theaters I grew up performing in generally didn’t have much in the way of budget, so projection was a necessity. I still have trouble with microphones - wait, you mean I can just talk normally to this auditorium full of people?!
Thank you! Can’t believe it took 87 posts to get to this point.
I agree that there’s gender bias against these styles of inflection. What I’m not hearing in this conversation is acknowledgement of the pressure on males to conform to the implicit and incredibly stringent, narrow code of conduct set by hetero-male culture.
Don’t cross your legs. Firm handshake. No limp-wristed hand gestures. Anything more colorful than puce, you wear as a tie only. Don’t use words like ‘adorable’ or ‘precious’ unless you’re talking about your kids. Don’t inflect your voice anymore than the conversation requires. Talk like ‘a man’.
They mike high schoolers now. It allows for poor singers to be the star of the play. Is that really a better thing than teaching them how to sing?
One of my favorite concert moments was seeing David Crosby perform in a wooden church in Berkeley ca 1981. Walking between his miked guitar and piano he stopped, clapped his hands to test the acoustics, put his hands in his pockets and and sang a chantey a cappella and un-amplified. It was magical.
This is great evidence to the biases behind evo-psych just-so stories.
It doesn’t prove much about your point, sadly.
That’s a particularly cultural supremacy right there. Was it a joke?
Outside of America, some people think we’re boorish louts for how we shout and scream all the time. Hell, I was raised in Miami and I am LOUD in public, and in the Pacific Northwest, it doesn’t always jive with the local, more quiet culture.
Also common is the attitude that women shouldn’t be loud and brash, that it’s unfeminine, you rightly attack that, but insult the women who adapt to a “man’s world” by adapting to be taken seriously?
There’s some mixed messages there.
Our ideal world doesn’t yet exist and knocking people who can’t conform to a world that doesn’t exist isn’t great either. Is there any way for a woman to not be disdained in that scenario?
Fry, uptalking, and nasal don’t bother me in the least. But the voice that does bother me is what I would call “breathless NPR voice”. It’s easier to imitate than describe, but it’s just very breathy and every few words will get over elongated and emphasized. It bothers me because it always sounds to me like they are trying to show they care so much more than anyone else, like they want us to focus not on what they are saying but on how empathetic and caring they are. Which always makes me immediately suspicious, male or female.
Sorry, but you’re reading way too much into my comment. I’m simply talking about people who won’t make themselves heard in a situation appropriate to speak loudly, not speaking loudly in all circumstances. I used to be active in the Neighborhood Assn, and people would sit in a small auditorium and ask questions or come to the front and present an issue in a normal speaking voice, and no one could hear them. When asked to speak up, they repeated it in the same voice. This happened more times than I could count.
Haven’t you ever sat in a overloud restaurant with a number of people, and can’t participate in a conversation between the person next to you and their neighbor, because they’re speaking just loud enough for only them to hear? Not intentionally to exclude you, it’s just that they’re oblivious and being virtuously soft spoken. People are also oblivious to the effects of wind and speaking direction in addition to background noise levels.
Then why does it bother you so? Persons raised in the States are given the opportunity to speak to a small, generally less chaotic classroom, not given Toastmasters and voice lessons.
I have plenty of problems hearing persons unamplified and with microphones, but I can understand how that happens, especially when a person feels meek.
It’s interesting how some professions have a distinctive sound. Priests and ministers for example. I remember being at a wedding years ago and being barely able to keep from laughing when the priest or minister (I forget which as there was one of each) kept talking about “the Lard.”
I would have had a hard time not giggling as well because of this:
Well . . . . it’s interesting. At least the first minute or so that I could get through. 
I would say the band Lard is to Devo what Devo is to Brahms.
I can see why it would make you giggle!
Well you did hurt my feelings a little bit, but I can see how I deserved it 
I didn’t mean to detract from the main point of discussion. The treatment of women described in the article is gross. It’s not far evolved from foot-binding, you are put through a lifetime of discomfort and degradation in the pursuit of some utterly meaningless superficial standard. Another example of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 23 hour days. Just a waste.
Where I live these days I don’t think there’s any equivalent discussion about nasal fry or vocal whatevers and the level of discussion about gender in general is relatively mature, but the dynamic persists anyway. That’s all I was trying to add. Some of the responses I got, I felt like I’d been taken as saying “it’s equally bad for men and women” and noooooo. Nope. I was trying to disentangle myself from that and I appear to have made a mess. Sorry about that.
I can’t help myself though…
Well yeah, I said “it feels like” to acknowledge that it’s a complicated subject and it’s hard to be sure of anything, you don’t have to beat me over the head with it. But I did like the point made by a marine biologist who studies dolphins and whales - when we study animals we assume nature and expect nurture/culture to be proven, but when we study humans we reverse that. Either way, when humans exhibit a bias that is also exhibited by damn near every other animal in the kingdom, you can be sure you’re going to have your work cut out with it.
It’s Jello AND Ministry! What’s not to love? 
Another invention is not any more convincing than the last.
Do you believe that stating this as fact is as good as presenting actual fact?
They may not be able to speak up, or it may cause discomfort. Lots of medical things can go wrong that affect speaking, some of which are pretty common. For instance, many things that cause repeated episodes of coughing get be made worse by loud talking. Some things may make getting any volume truly impossible, like paralysis or extreme weakness of the muscles controlling the vocal cords. That’s one’s not exactly a common problem, but not a rarity, either.
I have vocal cord problems that don’t have a big effect on how much volume I can produce, but do make my voice really unpredictable. That’s led me to notice that people who would take pains to avoid judging a person on uncontrollable aspects of appearance will still somehow think of a person’s voice as clear reflection of character and personality. While such impressions have something to them, there can be a lot of complicating factors. (The pamphlets available in my ENT’s office suggest that many patients with diseases or disorders affecting voice production find those conditions to be a severe cause of social distress.)
