At 13, Jesse Amesmith first learned how not to speak like a woman. “I read an article in Cosmo or something that was like, ‘13 Ways To Drive Him Crazy in the Bedroom,’ and one of the things it said was that men find high pitched noises in the bedroom to be annoying or a ‘turn off,’” Amesmith said. “So, for a good few years of my young sexual life, I was terrified to make a noise that wasn’t some sort of sultry low mumble, which at 15 or 16 is really awkward and strange.” Jesse is currently the singer and guitarist of the Rochester-based punk band Green Dreams, which has amassed a substantial regional following in their still relatively brief existence (their first demo was released in 2012). Part of what makes Green Dreams stand out against …show more content…
Ann Heppermann, producer of the Slate podcast “Culture Gabfest,” recently put together a mashup of over a dozen examples of male vocal fry. On a recent episode of “This American Life,” host Ira Glass was able to distinguish undeniable vocal fry in his own voice, but pointed out that he has never been made aware of it in the way that women are shamed for …show more content…
There is, however, emerging research supporting the idea that women who speak with uptalk or vocal fry could find it more difficult to land a job. A recent University of Miami study instructed 800 participants to listen to seven adult females between the ages of 19 and 27 years each speaking the phrase “Thank you for considering me for this opportunity” in both a normal register and with vocal fry. The participants said that they would rather hire the speaker with the “normal voice” 80 percent of the time. Interestingly enough, the same participants were asked to listen to seven men of ages between 20 and 30 speaking the same phrase “normally” and with vocal fry, and the 80 percent result remained the same. So what does research like this tell us about our persistent cultural phobia of the female voice? It shows us that both women and men face the same repercussions for having these vocal traits, despite women largely getting the blame for them. It also shows us, perhaps more significantly, that modern women are currently engaged in a zero-sum game in regards to how they choose to speak. If they speak with lower intonations, they are slammed with vocal fry allegations and lambasted as too “annoying” to listen to. If they allow their voices to drift into higher registers, they are lampooned as unintelligent — victims of the “uptalk” plague