When the New York-based Barbie Liberation Organisation (BLO) discovered that Barbies and GI Joes used the same voice-box parts, it bought up 300 of them, switched their voice chips, and then surreptitiously returned the dolls to the stores in time for Christmas 1989. Unsuspecting customers found that they’d brought home testosterone-pumped GI Joes who trilled, ‘Will we ever have enough clothes?’, ‘Math class is tough,’ and, ‘Let’s plan our dream wedding!’, while the pinker-than-pink Barbies barked, ‘Attack!’, ‘Vengeance is mine!’, and perhaps most fittingly, ‘Dead men tell no lies.’
So vital is the voice in gendering our identity that the BLO couldn’t have provoked greater outrage if they’d given the dolls a sex-change and not just a voice-change operation. The way that men and women speak (and how we think they ought to) not only reveals our changing ideas of masculinity and femininity, but also helps to create them: since our voice ties us into our social role, sounding like a man or a woman is a crucial factor in being accepted as one.
Men’s average pitch is about 120 Hz, and women’s 225 Hz,1 with men’s usually lower than women’s because they have a larger larynx and longer, thicker vocal folds as a result of physiological change at puberty.2 Puberty changes the voice of both sexes, but while the boy’s larynx grows about I centimetre during puberty to form the Adam’s apple, girls’ vocal folds grow only 3 to 4 millimetres;3 the speaking voice of boys can drop a full octave, but that of girls only a third4 or half an octave.5 So the changes in boys’ voices are more dramatic, with some boys experiencing a sudden break in the voice – an involuntary change in pitch and quality that occurs because secretions of the sex hormone testosterone have made their larynx grow so fast that they have difficulty coordinating it. The breaking voice has thus become an emblem of male puberty.6
But geography, culture and race can influence the arrival of puberty – it happens earlier in the children of city-dwellers and more educated children,7 for instance, but later in northern countries.8 And what happens at puberty can’t explain all the differences between men and women’s voices. Every culture establishes contrasting norms and conventions for the sexes that go beyond the biological differences.9 The differences in secondary sex characteristics are much smaller in men and women than in the male and female of most other species.10 Indeed much of our nonverbal behaviour, far from being natural, has been developed to accentuate and draw attention to sex differences, rather than just reflect them.11 We could sound more similar to one another, as one sociolinguist put it, but we choose not to.12 In practice, the opposite takes place: ‘Men seem to be under some kind of social and psychological pressure to make their voices sound as different as possible from women (and, perhaps, vice versa).’13
As a result men and women really do seem to be speaking from different places. Social codes penetrate so deep into the body that men often breathe more from their abdomen than women (producing the characteristic ‘belly laugh’). One speech therapist trains her male-to-female transsexual clients to talk more from the head than from the chest, thereby avoiding the ‘foghorn’ effect that comes from men’s greater chest cavities. This also helps them reproduce women’s ‘lighter’ sound that emanates from smaller bodily cavities like the upper portion of the voice-box around the throat and head.14
Pitch has become a weapon in the gender wars. You’d expect, for example, pre-adolescent boys and girls of the same height and weight (who therefore have similar-sized larynxes) to speak in the same pitch regardless of sex, and yet a celebrated study found that the sex of children could be identified from their voices long before puberty, and that the average acoustic differences between boys and girls are greater than they would be if anatomy were the sole determining factor. What’s surprising is how early these differences begin to appear. One study found that, while vocal range for both sexes increased from 85 Hz to a maximum of 97 Hz during the first six months of life, by the end of the first year vocal range continued to increase to 110 Hz for the girls, but dropped back for boys to 80 Hz.15 By the age of 5 or 6, boys and girls can be distinguished fairly easily through recordings of their voices, even though their pitches still overlap a lot.16
So why? Children learn early what is culturally appropriate for their sex.17 Mothers might have talked to them (in motherese) differently from fathers; fathers give their children more commands than mothers.18 Pre-adolescents may be trying to match their parents’ pitch.19 Children as young as 4 or 5 have been heard adopting a lower pitch when they play at being Father or doctor, and higher to signal Mother or nurse.20 Another reason might be that, at around 7 to 8, boys begin to restrict their intonational range.21 Is it pure coincidence that, between the ages of 7 to 10, children also become more aware of prosodic rules?22 By then boys have realised that speaking in a monotone is a male thing. Cool male icons, like Clint Eastwood, use this restricted range too: vocal restraint is part of what makes them strong and silent.23
Children might also be picking up quite specific labial habits. Rounding the lips lengthens the vocal tract and lowers pitch: pre-pubertal boys may have already picked up that habit to sound masculine. Spreading the lips, on the other hand, shortens the vocal tract and raises pitch – the way some women talk and smile at the same time produces this effect.24 The net result by adulthood is that ‘men talk as though they were bigger, and women as though they were smaller, than they actually may be’.25
So have women and men simply learned contrasting vocal tunes, with most of the difference attributable to convention and upbringing? Or has biology provided them with different voices, and then culture evaluated them differently, prizing one and deriding the other?
Taboos against women’s voices have a long history. According to the second-century Babylonian Talmud (where rabbis interpreted Jewish law), ‘the voice of a woman is nakedness’.26 Men were prohibited from reciting the Shema, one of the most important Jewish prayers, while hearing a woman’s voice because it was so seductive that it might distract them with impure thoughts.27 St Paul followed suit with his edict, ‘Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak … For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.’28
The literature extolling silence in women is voluminous. According to Aristotle, ‘Silence is a woman’s glory.’29 Sophocles’ Ajax declared, ‘Silence gives the proper grace to women.’30 As a sixteenth-century writer on rhetoric put it, ‘What becometh a woman best, and first of all: Silence. What seconde: Silence. What third: Silence. What fourth: Silence.’31
Mute nymphs and voiceless maidens also figure prominently in Greek myths and other fables. Echo, the talkative nymph, is punished by Juno with the loss of her voice: all she’s able to do is repeat other people’s words.32 King Tereus of Thrace rapes Philomela, daughter of the King of Athens, and then, to prevent her telling anyone about his crime, cuts out her tongue.33 Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid is prepared to forfeit the use of her voice in order to live a human life: she trades in her voice to win herself legs.34
When women did speak, men drew on a thesaurus of contempt to describe their voices.35 A New England preacher proclaimed in 1619 that ‘the tongue is a witch ’.36 As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was argued that, if women persisted in speaking in public, their uteruses would dry up.37 In 1906 Harper’s Bazaar said of the American woman: ‘She sometimes spoke through her nose, she twanged, she whiffled, she snuffled, she whined, she whinnied,’38 while Henry James compared the female voice to the ‘moo of the cow, the bray of the ass or the bark of the dog’.39
The invention of the megaphone, loudspeaker, and microphone did nothing to change the common belief that women made poor orators because their voices weren’t powerful enough. In fact the history of women’s exclusion from broadcasting represents perhaps the most blatant example of prejudice against women’s voices: according to Bell Laboratories, ‘The speech characteristics of women, when changed to electrical impulses, do not blend with the electrical characteristics of our present-day radio equipment,’40 the fault lying with the women rather than the equipment.
Belief in the unsuitability of women’s voices for announcing began in the early days of radio, in both the US and Britain. According to the Daily Express, ‘Many hardened listeners-in maintain that … Adam has a more natural broadcasting voice than Eve. Some listeners-in go so far as to say that a woman’s voice becomes monotonous after a time, that her high notes are sharp, and resemble the filing of steel, while her low notes often sound like groans.’41
Many different reasons for denying women access to the British and American airwaves were advanced in the 1920s. One newspaper reported that ‘the general opinion is that there is only one woman in about 10,000 who is sufficiently educated in the general problems of the day to be able to announce news items as they should be spoken’, and then went on to quote an official saying that ‘women would no doubt get flustered in the rushing from one studio to another’.42
The female timbre was singled out for particular opprobrium. The wireless correspondent of the Evening Standard suggested that women’s high-pitched voices irritated many listeners, and that they talked too rapidly, over-emphasised unimportant words, or tried to impress listeners by talking beautifully.43 High voice in women was associated with demureness, and low voice with sexuality, so that – in a Catch 22 – the voice that escaped accusations of promiscuity wasn’t considered authoritative enough for serious broadcasting.
Women were also indicted both for conveying too much personality through their voices (‘Critics consider that women have never been able to achieve the “impersonal” touch. When there was triumph or disaster to report, they were apt to reflect it in the tone of their voices’44) and too little (‘For some reason, a man … can express personality better by voice alone than can a woman’45). America, too, threw up similar complaints about lack (‘Few women have voices with distinct personality,’ according to the manager at a Pittsburg radio station46) and excess (‘Perhaps the best reason suggested for the unpopularity of the woman’s voice over the radio is that it usually has too much personality’47).
In 1933 the BBC finally caved in and, in an ‘experiment’, hired a Mrs Giles Borrett to announce not the news but, daringly, ‘This is the National programme from London. The tea-time music today comes from the Hotel Metropole, London.’ The barricades had been breached, the fortress stormed. Or, in the words of the next day’s newspapers, £500 A YEAR FOR A FEW WORDS A DAY: BBC DEBUT OF WOMAN WITH GOLDEN VOICE’, adding, for good measure, ’HER BABY LISTENS IN’.48
Borrett’s voice was reviewed by the News Chronicle’s music critic: ‘[She had] good, clear vocalisation, correctly pitched, pleasing in its cadency, yet free from pedantic exaggeration’, leaving the paper’s radio critic to report on the technical, or perhaps electrical, side of the story – the reaction of her 15-month-old son (‘He gurgled with pleasure when he recognised the voice of his mother’).49
On 21 August 1933 Mrs Giles Borrett advanced further, reading the BBC six o’clock evening news bulletin for the first time, although two months later BBC officials declared that the experiment had failed, not for personal but once again for ‘technical’ reasons.50 Elsie Janis, Mrs Borrett’s American counterpart, appointed as first female announcer in 1935, met almost exactly the same fate. Her NBC employer soon declared that he was not ‘quite sure what type of program her hoarse voice is best suited for, but he is certain she will read no more Press Radio news bulletins. Listeners complained that a woman’s voice was inappropriate.’51
In the end, it was the war that created change – if only temporarily: as the men were called up into the army, the women began to be called up into the BBC. In 1939 the BBC appointed its second full-time female radio announcer and by 1941 she’d been joined by seven others.52 Sometimes these announcers were on duty for forty-eight hours at a stretch, but there are no reports of them being flustered. Yet scarcely was the war over than back came the view that ‘women have never been able to achieve the “impersonal” touch’,53 while the BBC’s report on the employment of women found that many female applicants ‘who have clear voices and good pronunciation are entirely lacking in “mike personality”’ – adding, a tad gratuitously, that this was ‘a most elusive quality’.54 The arrival of television brought more of the same – a woman announcer fired because she ‘was told [she] had too much personality’.55 In 1975 the only woman employed in a policy-making job at BBC Radio I ruled against a female daytime DJ ‘because men are more impersonal’.56
How different is it today? In 2000, writing at a time when BBC radio, at least, seemed to be full of ‘babes’ and ‘ladettes’, I argued that ‘as cultural shifts go, it’s harder to imagine a greater one than that which has befallen women and radio’ in under three decades.57 But it’s also easy to overstate, as I did, the extent of the change, both in employment and attitudes. When, in the 1990s, sixty years after the Borrett saga, male commercial radio broadcasters were asked to explain the paucity of female DJs on their stations, they raised exactly the same objections: that ‘people prefer to listen to a man’s voice on the radio rather than a woman’s voice’,58 and the old favourite: ‘People are sensitive to voice … and if a woman’s voice sounds grating or high … shrill, then that will switch them off,’59 once again placing the responsibility for switching the radio off on to women’s voices themselves.
Among the other faults commonly ascribed to women is that they talk too loudly and too much. And yet in reality there appears to be no difference between male and female volume60 – if anything, men tend to speak louder.61 Loudness certainly seems to be judged differently depending on the sex of the speaker.62 Talking loudly is considered an act of aggression in women, but in men as no more than they’re entitled to. Sit in a restaurant for any length of time, and pretty soon roars and guffaws gust over from a nearby table of men. Groups of women and girls seem to have got much noisier in public over the past five to ten years, yet men drinking and eating together still dominate public spaces with their voices. Interestingly, after male-to-female transsexuals had undergone vocal surgery in a German clinic, they found that their voices didn’t sound as loud as before. They didn’t mind, though, because they associated speaking loudly with maleness.63
Women are supposedly also voluble. A British Telecom advertising campaign encouraging men to talk more was amusingly mocked by Michael Frayn. ‘A characteristic man’s telephone conversation [British Telecom says] runs like this: “Meet you down the pub, all right? See you there.” They find this “abrupt”. I find it distinctly garrulous. “Meet you there … see you there” – the poor fellow’s saying everything twice.’64
In fact men talk more.65 When 100 public seminars were analysed, men, it was found, dominated the discussion time in all but seven.66 In American classrooms, according to one study, boys spoke on average three times as much as girls, were eight times more likely than girls to call out answers, and teachers accepted such answers from boys but reprimanded girls for calling out.67
So enshrined in popular belief is the notion that women speak more than men that a popular rhyme learnt by small children goes, ‘The daddies on the bus go read, read, read … the mummies on the bus go chatter, chatter, chatter.’ Yet in a famous experiment, where men and women were separately shown three paintings by Albrecht Durer, and asked to speak about them for as long as they wanted, the average time of the female descriptions was 3.17 minutes, and of the male ones 13 minutes. (These statistics aren’t entirely accurate, because three of the men simply talked until the cassettes, which had a recording time of 30 minutes, ran out.)68
Interruptions are interesting.69 Although there aren’t clear-cut gender differences, women seem to be more likely to be interrupted when they smile than men – and women smile significantly more when they begin to speak. A woman’s smile seems to serve as an invitation to men to interrupt them, whereas a man’s smile has precisely the opposite effect, inhibiting women from interrupting.70
So how do we square the fact that women are almost universally disparaged as chatterboxes with the proven reality that it’s men who dominate conversation? Perhaps women’s talk is evaluated differently from men’s? When two actresses spoke dialogue of exactly the same length of time, listeners recognised that fact (same with a pair of actors). But when the roles were played by a man and a woman, the women were judged – by both men and women – to be talking more.71 The feminist Dale Spender famously argued in 1980 that women seemed excessively talkative not, as had been assumed, in comparison to men but rather as compared with silence. In other words, if silence is the ideal for women, ‘then any talk in which a woman engages can be too much’.72 In 1975 the presentation editor of BBC Radio 4 defended the scarcity of women continuity announcers with the argument, ‘Women are still relatively rare in radio; if you have two on – it sounds a lot.’73
Some early feminist writing on the voice seems not only to confirm stereotypes about women’s voices, but to add to them. Women’s voices are more expressive, emotional,74 and cheerful than men’s.75 They tend to sound tentative, indecisive, and deferential, their statements often taking the form of questions or requests. So lacking in a sense of her own authority and power is a woman that she even answers a question to which only she knows the answer, like ‘When will dinner be ready?’ with an ‘Oh … around six o’clock?’.76 Men, on the other hand, ‘consistently avoid certain intonation levels or patterns: they very rarely, if ever, use the highest level of pitch that women use … most men have only three contrastive levels of intonation, while many women have at least four. Men avoid final patterns that do not terminate at the lowest level of pitch, and use a final, short upstep only for special effects’ – to sound deliberate, for instance, or interrogative.77
Beguiling though these theories were – and they were widely repeated – there was almost no evidence to support them. On the contrary, when they were tested, few of them stood up.78 Women, for instance, didn’t use more question intonation than men79 (today, of course, everyone is using it), and it was never indisputably proved that their intonation arched and swooped more than men’s.80
And yet it can’t be denied that we use our voices to establish certain socially admired characteristics of our gender. Today feminists are still finding differences in the way that men and women use their voices, but their arguments are more nuanced. So, for example, they’ve suggested that, when women do use a greater pitch range, they’re trying to show how warm and friendly they are,81 or they feel that they’ve got to win listeners’ (particularly male listeners’) attention. Similarly, by speaking with shoulders rounded, chest collapsed, and without taking a full breath, are women making sure that they don’t take up too much space?82 As a voice teacher observed, ‘The deeper ranges of the voice connect with the self at a fundamental level of power and many women avoid the feeling and expression of power because they do not want to dominate.’83
Yet if some of the stereotypes have fallen away, new ones have arrived to take their place. For instance, it’s been argued that when girls reach adolescence they move from the full speaking voice they had as children, via half-voice, into silence84 – outspokenness gives way to circumspection, confidence to compliance.85 Really? Teenage girls today, in revolt against the stereotypes, now rival boys in noisy outspokenness. Their role models in popular culture are gabby. Perhaps the school of feminism that sees girls as vocally suppressed at adolescence, written as it is by women now in their 50s and 60s, is actually more of a commentary about their own (1940s and 1950s) girlhoods. In truth there’s greater pressure on teenage girls today to be loud than retiringly quiet, to be feisty and opinionated rather than tentative or introvert.
And let’s not forget that men too, are stereotyped vocally. Even if the stereotypes governing the male voice are more positive ones, connoting authority and power, men too, are expected to suppress ‘unmasculine’ qualities in their voice.
One way in which the stereotypes have been challenged is by reversing them. ‘If either sex has to have the prejudicial label of abnormality attached to it, the stack of evidence points to male speech.’86 Girls, for instance, vocalise more than boys: they learn to speak earlier, develop vocabularly faster, have higher comprehension at 17 months, and surpass boys in speech abilities at about the age of 11. Boys have more speech disorders than girls. Girls don’t use the pitch range of which they’re capable, perhaps because they’re rarely praised for it. (If they hit its upper reaches, they’re accused of being ‘shrill’.)
Yet linguistic theory has traditionally treated the male as normal, the female deviant. One linguist declared, for example, that the Bengali initial ‘l’ is often pronounced as ‘n’ by women, children, and the uneducated classes. But since women, children, and the uneducated constitute the majority of speakers of Bengali they (as a female commentator later remarked) should serve as the norm.87
Today it’s no longer fashionable to describe men as dominating women through their voices – the talk is all about complementary social roles and different psychological styles. The misconception that women speak more is given a sympathetic gloss: men believe it, goes this argument, because they experience women ‘as talking at times when they would be less likely to talk themselves, and about matters about which men would be less likely to choose to talk about themselves’.88 The best-seller You Just Don’t Understand, first published in 1991,89 popularised this approach (which reached its apogee in John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus90). Early feminist theorising about gender and speech may have generalised too sweepingly, but today all communication problems between men and women seem to have been redefined – at least in popular culture – as differences in style and misunderstandings between social equals, entirely obliterating issues of power and inequality in the process.91
What further complicates our understanding of the differences between men and women’s voices is that our voices change depending on who we’re talking to.92 Women, for instance, adopt a kind of baby talk – high-pitched with wide-ranging intonation – to express affection to their boyfriends.93 Both men and women talk louder when speaking to someone of the opposite sex,94 women making ‘masculine-like vocal adjustments’ to avoid feeling at a power disadvantage.95 The average pitch of women is usually lower in formal situations than in informal: when they turn to serious topics women suppress the high pitches they use in casual conversational style, perhaps because it’s so disparaged.96 On the other hand a woman attending a course on presenting a positive image was shocked, when a recording was played back, to hear herself talking in a confident mid-pitch to a group of women until a man walked through the door, whereupon she immediately switched to a little-girly voice.97
The way that mothers and babies change their voices depending on the listener is even more striking. A 10-month-old boy babbled at 390 Hz when playing with his mother, but dropped to 340 Hz when with his father. Similarly a 13-month-old girl veered between 390 and 290 Hz depending on which parent she was interacting with.98 When they talk to girls of 10–14 months, mothers make language-like sounds, but to boys of that age they make non-language sounds like car-noises. They ask more questions of 2-year-old girls, but tell 2-year-old boys what they want them to do.99 These differences seem to emerge between 3 and 6 months, but the question remains: are mothers responding to the different interactional styles of boys and girls themselves, or to stereotypes?100
Perhaps, instead of focusing on speakers and apparent differences in male and female style, we should be concentrating more on listeners, for the human voice is so saturated with social beliefs that we actually hear and interpret men and women differently. A baby’s cry was interpreted as anger when listeners were told that the infant was a boy, and fear when they were told it was a girl.101 Verbal fluency has been evaluated negatively in women and positively in men.102 Class too is heard differently – girls are identified as middle-class more often than they actually are, and boys as working-class, resulting in problems ‘placing’ working-class girls and middle-class boys.103
And in a classic 1968 monograph, listeners evaluated the same personality attributes differently, depending on whether the speaker was a male or female. ‘Throatiness’ in men, for example, suggested an older, more realistic, mature, and well-adjusted person. The throaty woman, on the other hand, was perceived as being less intelligent, more masculine, unemotional, ugly, sickly, careless, naive, humble, neurotic, quiet, uninteresting, and apathetic.104
In one fascinating study, conducted in 1988, Americans of both sexes described the ideal voice in almost exactly the same terms as the male American voice, so that an American man could possess an ideal and an ideal male voice at the same time. It wasn’t the same for an American woman, though: she couldn’t have a voice that was both perfectly female and matched the American ideal – she had to choose.105
Is this still true today? Is it now possible, for instance, to sound feminine and authoritative at the same time? Perhaps there’s been enough social change for some female politicians – like Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Patricia Hewitt – to have begun to pull this off. On the other hand, listeners’ prejudices have proved remarkably resilient, shape-shifting in response to new conditions. If you ask the talking computers installed into next-generation BMW cars in Japan to give you directions, for example, you’ll be answered by a synthesised deep male voice. This, according to a Stanford University professor researching people’s reactions to computer voices, is because, ‘Our studies have shown that directions from a female voice are perceived as less accurate than those from a male voice, even when the voices are reading exactly the same directions.’106
Indeed so powerful is the prejudice against women’s voices that it even distorts the fact that men and women are heard differently. In a 2005 experiment British researchers found that men and women’s voices activated different regions in the male brain, perhaps because the frequencies in a woman’s voice are more ‘complex’ to process.107 Not much more than this was stated with certainty, since the researchers hadn’t yet conducted the complementary study to find out how women’s brains in turn process male and female voices. And yet all round the world headlines claiming that men’s brains weren’t designed to listen to women’s voices rang out (‘Can’t hear you, dear … blame my brain,’108 ‘Why Men Don’t Listen to Women’,109 etc). Truly we hear only what we want to.
In Greek mythology the Sirens, creatures with the head of a woman but the body of a bird, lured passing sailors with sweet singing until their ships came so close to the rocks that they crashed. To drown out their songs Orpheus plugged his ears with beeswax, played his lyre, and sang even more sweetly himself. Women have been accused of seducing men with their speaking and singing voices ever since.
A beautiful or erotic voice, of course, can excite sexual desire – Susan Sontag’s husband said that, the moment he heard her voice, he knew he was going to marry her – but this is as much the case with men’s voices as with women’s. For both sexes a body and breath are required to make a voice, yet again and again women’s voices are reduced to pure body, while men’s are treated as disembodied. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno articulated this idea when he wrote:
Male voices can be reproduced better than female voices. The female voice easily sounds shrill … in order to become unfettered, the female voice requires the physical appearance of the body that carries it … Wherever sound is separated from the body … or wherever it requires the body as complement – as is the case with the female voice – gramophonic reproduction becomes problematic.110
Our feelings for the earliest female voice we encounter, our mother’s, clearly have something to do with this attitude: since we hear that first voice in utero, perhaps it’s not surprising there’s so much of the body associated with woman’s voice.111 Certainly, in our journey from foetus to adult, something curious happens to the status of the female voice. Although the mother’s is in some sense the first voice-over that we ever hear,112 in both cinema and television voice-over, narrators are predominantly male – the female voice has been stripped of its social and public authority. Forever associated with matters internal, subjective, and corporeal, the mother’s voice must be repudiated.113
Perhaps sexualising women’s voices is one way of doing this (since it leaves them only with the power to ensnare). There’s a logic to sexualising the voice: it comes out of the mouth, an emblem of female sexuality that can be contorted into provocative shapes like the pout. And since women’s mouths today are outlined, glossed, stained, plumped up with collagen, or tricked out to look natural, they’re not what they seem – duplicity surrounds the very chamber of the woman’s voice. If the shrill voice turns listeners off, the sexy one even more reprehensibly risks turning them on.114 It’s not surprising, then, that the hijab or face-veil worn by some Muslim women hides their mouth, literally muffling their voice in the process.115
The case of breathy voice is particularly interesting. In sexual intimacy, because hormonal factors change the copiousness and consistency of lubricating mucus in the larynx, making it vibrate less efficiently, the voices of both men and women become breathy.116 Breathy voice has therefore come to be associated with sexiness.117 At the same time, since it’s less efficient than ordinary voice, breathiness is seen as a sign of vocal problems. But breathiness is also a characteristic of normal female voices. Sexy, sick, and female – all three go together. The ‘little-girl’ or ‘baby-doll’ voice, with a high degree of breathiness, was an essential component of the dumb blonde stereotype118 epitomised by Marilyn Monroe, although since her death Monroe’s considerable intelligence has become apparent. What she did, or was required to do, to her mind was similar to what, at least in public, she did to her voice – the girly, innocently sexual persona diminished and constricted them both.
A study over twenty years ago found that British women were deliberately (though not necessarily consciously) adopting a style of speaking that made their voices less efficient and more monotonous, sounding (Monroe-fashion) as if they were sexually aroused (even when they weren’t).119 So sexuality isn’t only projected on to women’s voices by listeners but is also actively used in speaking by women themselves. There’s nothing biological about it because Spanish women’s voices are no breathier than Spanish men’s.120 It’s an example of how the human voice has to try and accommodate often conflicting cultural demands.
If some doctors are to be believed, it’s all down to hormones. Hormones certainly affect the human voice. Eastern bloc female athletes developed deeper voices in the 1980s after taking steroids containing androgens. Some hormonal treatments for endometriosis have a similar effect.121 Ovulation can also change women’s voices:122 according to some laryngologists, oestrogen and progesterone alter the structure of the laryngeal mucus just before ovulation, causing decreased range, loss of power, loss of harmonics, and a flat, colourless timbre123 (although the connection between the voice and ovulation isn’t undisputed,124 except in the case of women suffering from premenstrual tension).125 Female professional singers sometimes develop hoarse voice and vocal fatigue just before their periods – in 1968 the National Theatre in Prague found one-third of its female singers to be suffering from ‘menstrual dysphonia’ (voice problems).126 La Scala, Milan used to include ‘grace days’ in its contracts, obliging singers not to perform during the premenstrual period and while menstruating (though they were still paid).127
What’s fascinating is why researchers focus on the effects of menstruation on women’s voices rather than, say, of sexual activity on a man’s voice, even though a singing teacher at the Royal Opera House says, ‘At Covent Garden I can always tell what a tenor has been doing the night before. They always have difficulty with the top notes.’128 Such different reactions to men and women’s voices reveal a lot about the state of gender relations. Implicated in every corner of our personal and social lives, the human voice resonates with our anxieties and values.
Consider the contrasting attitudes to the ageing voice. Compared to women’s voices, male voices deteriorate significantly from the age of 50.129 As they age their voices get higher – ‘His big manly voice / Turning again towards childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound.’130 Women’s, on the other hand, get deeper.131 Men’s vocal folds also become less flexible as they age, leading to an even more reduced pitch range.132 And yet, to add to premenstrual vocal syndrome, women are now graced with yet another syndrome, menopausal vocal syndrome, while the more dramatic ageing of male voices is simply regarded as a normal physiological process.
The signs of menopausal vocal syndrome are apparently a quieter speaking and singing voice, vocal fatigue, a decreased range, and loss of timbre, although there’s no evidence of large numbers of women suffering from this or being disabled by it. Yet that doesn’t prevent some from consulting a doctor about their worry that ‘the hormonal earthquake caused by the menopause was upsetting the entire balance of their emotional lives and vocal careers’.133 If laryngologists continue to publish papers about the disagreeable symptoms of menopausal vocal syndrome, then perhaps this is hardly surprising.
These doctors regard the child’s voice as supple, but in their view the vocal condition of even a perfectly healthy woman deteriorates thereafter. During the child-bearing progesterone years, they contend, one-third of women suffer from ‘vocal premenstrual syndrome’ and can only achieve vocal stability through oral contraceptives134, while during the menopause, these laryngologists recommend hormone replacement therapy ‘to avoid the development of a male voice’. Thus almost the entire female vocal cycle is found deficient or pathological. It never seems to occur to these specialists that, after a lifetime of being called shrill, some women may positively relish their deeper post-menopausal voices.