Men everywhere don’t sound alike, any more than women. Polish men use a higher pitch than American men,1 who’ve been found to speak in a much lower pitch than German men.2 Are these differences caused by language or culture? And can we read into the fact that Mexicans expect the male voice to be much louder than Americans do3 something about the different ways in which Mexicans and Americans define masculinity, or how assertive they’re expected to be? Cultural differences in men and women’s voices are profoundly revealing of a society’s doctrines and desires. But they also enable us to track social change: the transformation in women’s lives over the past forty years has had striking oral consequences.
Just as the Second World War made it possible for women to find work on radio, so too did it allow them to sound different on screen. The ‘fast-talking dames’ of the 1940s were a flamboyant contrast to the quiescent female stars who’d preceded them: the Barbara Stanwycks talked snappily with no hint of gentility, Hepburn’s voice dripped with assurance and mockery. Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, and Bette Davis were anything but dumb (and rarely blonde). The characters they played excelled at repartee,4 and refused to be silenced or derailed.5 Exuberant mistresses of screwball comedy, they challenged the simplistic idea that women merely simpered, flattered, or remained silent until 1970s feminism gave them a voice.
Of course their voices, like their lines, were shaped by men. Howard Hawks famously made Lauren Bacall deepen her voice with months of punishing exercises until it attained the degree of huskiness he thought it needed for the 1944 film To Have and Have Not. Was this to get an older, sexually experienced woman’s voice emanating from a 20-year-old woman’s body?6 Or did he prefer women’s voices in the lower registers because there they harmonised more easily and unobtrusively with men’s?7 If Bacall – who, in the film, even went by the nickname of Steve – was to be the sultry foil to a much older Humphrey Bogart, did she have to match him vocally, pitch for pitch?
For all the acoustic liberation of the war years, by 1948 women were being urged to practise vocal exercises in front of the mirror to ensure that words that began with a ‘v’ didn’t transfer their lipstick to their teeth. The result was a pouting style of speech, common to the film stars of the era.8 In the 1950s, when gender roles were so precisely differentiated, so too were Western men and women’s voices,9 although these were to undergo change again as the women’s movement began to affect women’s daily lives.
Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women. American women’s voices are lower than Japanese women’s, Swedish women’s are lower than American’s, and Dutch women’s are lower than Swedish women’s.10 Vocal difference is one way of expressing social difference, so that in Dutch society, which doesn’t differentiate much between its image of the ideal male and of the ideal female, there are few differences between male and female voice. The Dutch also find medium and low pitch more attractive than high pitch.
Japanese women, by contrast, adopt a very high pitch to distinguish themselves acoustically from Japanese males.11 When Japanese women are being polite, they can reach an abnormally high peak of 450 Hz, while English women in one study never exceeded 320 Hz. Similarly Japanese men speak in a lower pitch than their English counterparts, although the range of which they’re capable is hardly different. Sometimes, the same study found, the English men even reached the top pitch used by Englishwomen; this was never the case with the Japanese men.12
Perhaps Japanese women’s extremely high voices come from their smaller physical size, or from differences in the language.13 But then why aren’t these shared by Japanese men? More likely the large difference in pitch reflects the more rigid sexual and social roles that have existed in Japanese society until recently. Through the way they control their larynx, Japanese women are displaying their femininity,14 using the voice to give an impression of powerlessness15 in a culture where modesty, innocence, subservience and helplessness are much more highly prized as female attributes than in the West.16 Japanese women’s high pitch has even been compared to the Chinese practice of foot-binding.
How do the differences between the voices of Japanese and English women square with evolutionary theories based on animal behaviour? Darwinian ideas of sexual selection, in trying to explain why male toads have deeper-pitched croaks than females and why female toads seek out the males with the deepest croaks,17 suggest that there’s a relationship between size, sound, and attracting a mate. The larger a creature is, the noisier and deeper the sound it makes. Aggressive or dominant humans, according to this argument, use their low pitch not only to signal their body size to rivals but also to intimidate them. Submissive humans, on the other hand, make high-pitched sounds to give the impression of being as small and non-threatening as possible.18 Add in sex differences to this argument, and ‘sound symbolism’ (high equals submissive, low equals aggressive) now corresponds with, and is produced by, anatomical differences in men and women.19 Volume and low pitch, it follows, are a way of demonstrating and ensuring male dominance (a premise shared, interestingly, by both evolutionary biologists and some feminists), and winning a female.
Yet human beings today live in highly evolved, complex social structures20: as falling birth rates, easily available contraception, and large numbers of child-free lesbians and gay men testify, mating is no longer the same irresistible human imperative. Nor is a deep voice always equated with sexual potency – nobody thinks David Beckham, of the skilful right foot and squeaky voice, any less virile for his lack of an aggrandising growl.
On the other hand, if men’s voices are deep in order to convey the size and mastery essential to triumphing over their rivals, shouldn’t we expect the voices of women, as they enter the competitive commercial world in greater numbers, to deepen accordingly? It may be entirely coincidental, and not so much about dominance as having to fit in with male values and standards, but this is exactly what’s happened.
Women’s voices have deepened significantly over the past fifty years. When recordings of 18-25-year-old women made in 1945 were compared with similar recordings made in 1993, the average pitch of the later batch was 23 Hz lower.21 Some of this deepening might have been conscious: women working in the Australian media have admitted lowering their voices at the suggestion of voice coaches or sound engineers.22
The pressure to speak huskily had already been observed back in the 1970s. Women, one researcher remarked, were tending to use an average pitch-level lower than advisable – around two-thirds of an octave higher than men’s, rather than the more usual one octave. Under the influence of actresses and TV personalities, women were restricting the range of their voices, making them less expressive, and risking injury.23
Even in Japan. When TV announcer Etsuko Komiya joined a serious news programme from a lighter daytime show, her male co-host urged her to lower her voice, to ‘speak, not squeak’.24 And so she did, soon abandoning her natural high-pitched voice. ‘I feel so embarrassed when I watch my early tapes because I sound as if I was speaking from the top of my head,’ she said in a later interview. ‘When reading hard news, it’s important to sound credible and comprehensible. I trained hard to get a lower voice for that purpose.’25 Monitoring this descent, a professor in a department of engineering found that her voice had fallen from an average of 223.4 Hz in 1992 to 202.6 Hz in 1995. Komiya’s strategy seems to have been successful: she ended up as the programme’s sole anchor.
The trend for abnormally deep female voices has caused concern, which Komiya shares. ‘Naturally, my voice resonates around the nose and mouth. By lowering the tone of my voice, I can feel that I am straining my vocal cords.’ Other female Japanese newscasters’ voices are also deepening.26 ‘Although low-pitched voices sound stable and might relax listeners, it can weigh down the overall impression of the programme if announcers read all the stories, including cheerful pieces, in a low voice,’ said another female announcer at the station. In a country where a high-pitched voice used to be considered the apotheosis of femininity, some Japanese women are even undergoing surgery in their search for a deeper voice.27
This rejection of the ‘nightingale’ voice isn’t confined to media workers, but has spread to other industries. According to a Japanese voice specialist, in a male-oriented society men’s voices sound trustworthy, so to gain trust women have to deepen their voices. A lower voice also connotes maturity.28
Comparable changes have taken place in the West. The British broadcaster Jon Snow believes that ‘a woman without bass registers in her voice would find it very hard to get on in broadcasting unless she was exceptionally beautiful’.29 An online poll conducted by an American centre for disorders to discover the ‘Best and Worst Voices in America’ found that the worst voices were all higher than normal for their gender, and that Americans preferred melodious, low-pitched voices.30 Americans’ idea of the ideal female broadcasting voice resembles more and more the ideal male one.31 A 70-year-old woman I interviewed admitted:
I probably force my voice to be lower than it should be. I think its natural pitch is probably a little higher, but of course that’s not acceptable – when I was in theatre taking acting lessons, my acting teacher told me to drop the pitch down. Now if you go to the Supreme Court of the United States and listen to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, she has this little high squeaky voice, so it obviously isn’t an authority issue.32
In pursuit of social and economic equality, have women traded in one vocal convention for another? Instead of liberating women, and men, to use the full range of intonation and colour, has the new tyranny of huskiness made women with higher voices feel inadequate? Professor Higgins famously asked, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ Well, now she increasingly is.
Yet perhaps, in contrast to the 1950s, ours is an era of ‘gender-neutral’ voices.33 The deepening of women’s voices might be an expression of lack of confidence, of the need to emulate men, but it might equally be an indication of greater confidence. Already in 1975 one study found that feminist wives spoke longer than their husbands, and more often had the last word.34
Most of the people I interviewed revealed something different, however: that conflicts in the home almost invariably followed the same pattern – female anger, male silence, provoking even greater female anger. In all but two couples this sequence of rage and silence seemed not only gendered but almost to have been inscribed in the family DNA.
’B. is not a big fighter,’ said a 37-year-old woman, ‘but I yell at home all the time. On the whole he’s silent, which makes me yell more. I want more engagement – I will push him for a response … I think, oh boy, that’s exactly like your father – no wonder your mother threw plates. I’m definitely like his mother.’35
A 57-year-old man admits:
I go very quiet in conflict and L. gets louder. Sometimes I join in the shouting match and then realise, just like my father, that’s not anything I’d win so pull out of it … Things get resolved by a bit of dumb insolence on my part. I think that she goes too strident too quickly, as if to pre-empt a more rational tone … so I say I do object to being shrieked at, and in a metallic tone … I’m sure that sets her teeth on edge, but it certainly doesn’t modify her voice.36
A 60-year-old man says his wife ‘has got a louder voice. If she’s minded to shout it’s awesome, and all I can literally do is just retire. I try to shout but she always prevails – she’s totally uncontrollable if she gets cross … I walk out. I’d like to come back but I don’t dare because I know I’d be losing the argument and would have to apologise.’37
And finally, a 54-year-old man. ‘I’m silent a lot of the time, using silence as a weapon as my father did, because silence on my part also means I can’t think of what to say. When she gets agitated, I always say it’s not what you’re saying that irritates me, it’s your hectoring tone. And this drives her really mad.’38
By withdrawing from conflict, it’s usually argued, men are exercising power. Male silence makes their behaviour seem unemotional and rational. ‘To not say anything in this situation is to say something very important indeed: that the battle is to be fought by my rules and when I choose to fight.39 Perhaps. All these men are certainly trying to control the women, but they’re withdrawing not because of any sense of power but precisely its opposite – what they experience as powerlessness. In contrast to public life where, as we’ve seen, they tend to talk louder and longer, in the private realm they find themselves drowned out: when the strategies for control they use at work are no longer effective, they feel at a disadvantage.
The women here may be silenced by men in public, but within their own home they metamorphose into uninhibited yellers. The men, on the other hand, silence themselves at home, in the belief that they can’t prevail over their shouting partners. What they hear in the women’s timbre – the whine of helplessness, a loss of control – is anathema. They’re also often the recipients of women’s contempt and disappointment, expressed at full volume, which makes them retreat instinctively to the safety of their own lower, more level pitch or to silence, their very inexpressiveness enraging the women even more.
Is the mute male the product of an earlier culture? Teenage boys today seem (except to their parents) anything but taciturn. They can hold their own in telephone marathons with teenage girls, and happily converse at interminable length about daily trivia. The mobile phone has helped make talk cool. According to a recent survey, the arrival of the mobile phone has caused men to spend more time on the phone than women.40 With the Internet permitting controlled self-disclosure and self-invention, perhaps the new technologies have carved out a new space in which men feel more comfortable speaking. Or maybe men are developing new ways of speech that, mediated by technology, don’t seem so girly. Either way, it sometimes seems as if boys are the new girls.
If women, as we’ve seen, are under pressure to masculinise their voices, then men are increasingly expected to adopt more traditionally female ways of speaking. As service industries grow and technology takes over many of the occupations that used to depend on brawn, social skills become more vital.41 And just as women’s voices have been compared to men’s, so men’s voices are now being compared to women’s – and are being found wanting. An era that exalts an expressive style of communication is beginning to demand the feminisation of the male voice.
This poses a dilemma for men, who are stigmatised when they speak like women.42 Women who talk like men gain in status, but men who talk like women risk ridicule. Men with higher-pitched or swoopy voices are mocked as effeminate, camp, or gay, and labelled simpering or mincing.43 Imitating a man in a woman’s voice is a way of insulting him, but the reverse isn’t the case.44 A 43-year-old man said that he found pronouncing French with a good accent impossible because the amount of labial mobility it required felt ‘cissy’.45
Men today have to find a way of making their voices more expressive, while at the same time ‘achieving’ masculinity in the voice (or avoiding sounding female). In effect they’re being asked to develop voices that are at once masculine and feminine. And yet, for some, inexpressiveness is the very foundation of masculinity. As one 63-year-old man said:
Our father’s voice was the one me and my brothers modelled ours on. It didn’t have a great range – my father had great difficulty in expressing emotion. If there was any trace of emotion in one’s voice, you could be attacked by him – he thought women were at the mercy of emotion, and the goal in life was to avoid it. So, when we talked, we tried to drain our voices of emotion – every trace had to be expunged. The result is that, when broadcasting and presenting programmes, I’ve had to really try and put back what normal people have.46
A successful male broadcaster today would be expected to have a far greater expressive range.
According to an American voice teacher, ‘White American men hold their voices in a very tight, small place. If they use even one ounce more of expression than they think they should be using, all kinds of issues about their masculinity and sexuality come up for them. If you show too much emotion in the voice, you run the risk of sounding feminised in some way.’ On pitch too, they operate within a strictly circumscribed range. ‘I’ve heard a few men who literally have some kind of frozen basso thing about them. But most of the guys I encounter are capable of two and three more octaves vocally than they actually use.’47 Black American men, on the other hand, use a much wider pitch range.48
So, despite major vocal changes affecting both men and women, most of us are still trapped in vocal worlds not of our making – women’s mouths are still regarded as a gateway, and men’s as a sentinel. The full vocal range isn’t yet available to us all, male or female. The human voice can tell us, with remarkable clarity and resonance, how far our gendered lives have changed. In the voices of men and women we can hear their evolving roles and relative power.