The Politics of Want
On a trip to Italy a few years ago, my friend asked a group of Florentine men which of the two of us had a stronger English accent. After unanimously pointing at me, they turned back to her and shrugged, “You just sound more educated than her.”
People have always mocked my voice. Sometimes it’s because I slur my words. Sometimes it’s for talking too fast, or being too animated. These days, I make a living on the internet, pontificating to people through a microphone. And now, the issue is vocal fry.
I was invited two years ago to speak on a popular podcast about the state of film criticism today. As we finished up the recording, the host and members of the crew commended me on my heavily rehearsed performance. But on the day of publication, I received an angry DM from a disgruntled older woman: “I just wanted to let you know that your vocal fry was so unbearable to listen to, I had to turn it off.” Scrolling under the YouTube version of the episode, comments were more of the same. “Holy fucking vocal fry, Batman!”
My career requires me to produce opinions on a too-regular basis. But, often, from behind this solid barrier of vocal fry, I go unheard.
Vocal fry is reported by sociolinguists to be a slackening of the vocal cords, which causes them to vibrate irregularly and lower the frequency of one’s voice pitch. It occurs in people of all genders, and has even been found crackling from the intact syrinx of hooded crows. Yet still, it’s received and reviled by the world as a phenomenon specific to women.
I am a woman. I am also present, animated, and pathologically emotional. Yet thoughts filter through my lazy throat and come out the other end unintelligible. To a portion of the world, I am noise.
What, then, is this cultural filtration system that produces myself and other women’s voices as an infernal screech? Why can’t people hear me?
In a rant published in 2015 by The Guardian called “Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice,” begrudging feminist icon and present-day conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf laments the state of women’s voices today. Through consultations with various young women about why they speak the way they do, she comes to some spotty conclusions—unable to decide whether women speak with vocal fry to sound young or old, demure or assertive. In woman-yells-at-cloud fashion (perhaps the beginning of her slow move towards the conspiratorial alt-right) she then posits that vocal fry is a socially inappropriate mannerism, culturally imposed upon empowered young women to “tangle their steps and trivialize their important messages to the world.” For Wolf, vocal fry is an obtrusion to the feminist cause, and the onus should be placed on young women to change this behavior, rather than the culture that has apparently coerced them into it. She writes, “today’s women know they can do great things; what they doubt—reasonably enough—is that they can speak well about those great things.”
Vocal fry has been studied by linguists for several decades, but it was spat into the vernacular in 2011, when a study found the fry to occur “habitually” in the voices of two-thirds of a sample group of 34 female college students. It was then quickly picked up by media outlets and pundits, like Wolf, who pathologized vocal fry as a society-wide problem in need of addressing. As evidenced by Wolf’s tangled logic, vocal fry is understood by the culture in contrasting ways. On the one hand, it’s regarded as chronic underachieving. And on the other hand, it’s regarded as an attempt to be taken seriously by others. Ambivalence versus ambition.
Ambivalence is Kim K., whose luxuriated drawl is perceived as a clever ploy to shroud her naturally nasal tone and signal that she cares less than she actually does. Hers is a lackadaisical, Real Housewives-style voice which apparently plagues the wealthy women of LA and other supposedly superficial cities that suggests disinterest, disaffection, maybe even stupidity.
Ambition is Elizabeth Holmes and Margaret Thatcher, whose fastidious commitment to a cartoonish lower register did indeed result in their material success (to the detriment of everyone else). Their voices are a pantomime of the men around them. Ambition is also my friend Josie—a disarmingly intelligent woman, misunderstood by those around her, especially other women, due to her swooping West Vancouver rich-girl accent. Whenever she spoke in our university seminars, she would drastically lower the pitch of her voice to a gravelly affect that had the rest of us locking eyes across the table and stifling our giggles.
In most cases, the voice is not “put on” at all, but rather one of many vocal registers slipped into, unknowingly, at different moments in time. The popular podcast This American Life dedicated an entire episode to the subject of vocal fry after receiving a barrage of angry feedback about the voice of one of its hosts, Hannah Joffe-Walt. Much to her surprise. On TikTok, comedian Delaney Rowe parodies “insufferable female characters,” her comments littered with quips like: “painful watch as always!” or “this made my skin crawl, you’re so good.” Under one video someone said, “the vocal fry is so accurate!” “That’s just my voice,” she responded.
When it comes to vocal fry, we’re all confused. But stringing together our cultural response towards this irksome “habit” is an accusation of falseness on the part of the woman. That vocal fry is a tool she uses (intentionally or not) to conceal what she really cares about or wants, so irritating as to render null and void whatever thoughts had been floating around in her brain before arriving at the opening of her mouth. With widespread reports that vocal fry has no particular semantic or grammatical content, that there’s no real meaning behind it, philosophers Monika Chao and Julia R. S. Bursten observe in Hypatia, “a common reaction to it […] is a reaction that refuses to engage with the said content of women’s speech.”
It seems, then, that anger towards vocal fry comes from this supposition: if a woman is using this hideously affected voice to persuade me of how little she cares, then why should I care about what she’s saying? In lowering the voice, vocal fry allows women to adopt a masculine affect which casts an illusion of being chill. But those who hear it, who are angered by it, seem to catch us in this lie. After all, in a video captioned “Girl who is just super laid back and chill and not extremely high maintenance,” the gravel in Delaney Rowe’s voice is pointed.
I am not chill. In fact, in the lifelong failure to restrain my emotions, facial movements, and, yes, my voice, I have always been cast by those close to me as eager to the point of being annoying.
As a theatrical child, photo-taking was always a struggle. My dad would line us all up and snap us in a carefully curated composition with his Sony Cyber-shot camera. He’d then look back at the photo and sigh. “Maia, for the love of God please close your mouth.” We’d all huddle around the camera and, sure enough, I’d be sitting front and centre, toothless, eyes bulging, with my face twisted into a fake scream. It would usually take several tries before I got tired and we’d land on something appropriate.
When I was around eight, my cool older cousin Dylan came to visit—adorned in bright white Jordans scrubbed to perfection with a toothbrush, and a brand new fitted cap. Having watched me and our family friend Kerala zip around the house after drinking too much Pepsi, Dylan looked down at us as we jumped about below him. “Are we cute Dylan?” we probed. He thought about this for a while. “Well … Kerala is cute. She looks like Dora.” “Not me?” I wailed. “Maia, you would be cute if you weren’t so hyper all the time.”
Criticism like this, which came often from my cousins, was waived by a cloud of self-delusion that carried me through adolescence. The cloud broke, however, when I reunited with my childhood friend Miranda in freshman year of high school. Over Vanilla Bean Frappuccinos, she told me that the boys we were friends with in middle school had all confessed to her that they found me annoying, and were relieved when I chose to transfer.
Plummeting through the cloud, I left my Starbucks date with Miranda and pondered what exactly it was that made me so annoying. It was hard to fathom, but my three years at middle school were a blur—mired in a devastating crush on a boy named Max (who later kissed Miranda at summer camp while I was away on family vacation), the rest of my time there is difficult to recall.
In the unfortunate circumstance of our time, where our most intimate social interactions are fossilized in the annals of the internet, all of the messages between myself and Max have been preserved on Facebook. Getting home from Starbucks, I ran to the family computer to revisit these exchanges, and was horrified by what I found.
The chat, an endless scroll, was dominated by messages from me, sometimes lengthy paragraphs detailing what I ate for breakfast or how I felt about homework, sometimes nonsensical gibberish followed by “oops, that was meant for someone else,” punctuated just barely with monosyllabic responses from Max. “lol,” “cool.” “idk.”
It was true. I was fucking annoying.
Returning to these messages again recently, I am reminded of the semi-fictional letters sent by Chris Kraus to Dick Hebdige in her seminal, albeit controversial, book I Love Dick.
I Love Dick, which is one part epistolary novel, one part critical theory, is schizoid in nature. But there are a few occasions outside of Kraus’s desperate letters and scholarly diatribes where she actually interfaces with Hebdige, referred to here as “Dick.” Having developed a romantic attachment to Dick after she and her husband, Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer, host him for dinner, Kraus spends the next few years sending Dick letters confessing her affections for him, while also taking the opportunity to ponder what it means to be desirous as an aging woman and artist. When she finally does meet Dick again in person and has sex with him, upgrading their relationship from crush to full-blown affair, Kraus is elated. That is, until the two lie together in bed, and the conversation takes an abrupt, post-coital turn.
Admitting that much of her letters were fantasy, projection, she then asks Dick for an acknowledgement of their connection. After all, they just consummated it. Instead he accuses her of being psychotic and evil, a kidnapper who paws him around for her own twisted gratification. Kraus is heartbroken, pleading in a letter, “No matter what I do you think it’s just a game, but I was trying to be honest.” When Dick finally writes back at the end of the book, he continues to refer to Kraus’s attraction to him as just that: a game.
In another letter, Kraus recounts a time where she and filmmaker Nick Zedd were interviewed on television about their films, and that, when polled, audiences found Zedd to be more sincere. “Nick was just one thing, a straight clear line: Whoregasm, East Village gore ‘n’ porn, and I was several.”
Her book may sometimes get lost in its own winding intellectual pathways, but it’s in the moments where Kraus is speaking, diegetically, that she is least understood.
Again and again, I have tried to be cool and indifferent. But with each new stonewalling by a man who I allow to cross easily through my dried up emotional moat, I torpedo outwards. Refusing to let them walk away in peace, I explain my pain over walls of text which go unanswered. I fling my tears at them. Guilt them. Carry out an act of self-destruction so vivid as to eradicate any pretense of ambivalence that my vocal cords may suggest. But words are no use, for in the passage through these low-frequency cords they come out like my aunt’s hands, mangled. “Exegesis,” writes Kraus, “the crazy person’s search for proof that they’re not crazy. “Exegesis” is the word I used in trying to explain myself to you.”
Even within its own legacy, Kraus’s book is misheard. As pointed out in the afterword by Joan Hawkins, in spite of its rigorous theoretical enquiry and frequent feminist revelations, I Love Dick is largely remembered as “the story of Kraus’s unrequited love for cultural critic Dick Hebdige.”
For me, the great breakthrough, and offense, of I Love Dick is that it’s about a woman deigning to be unapologetically, obsessively interested in something.
Chillness, or rather, the illusion of it, can be a valuable currency. But it’s one that has no future.
These days, cultural scenes spring up as quickly as they fall, each one founded upon a logic of “chill,” a competition of who can appear to care the least. Whatever sincerity that had been dug up in the ’90s has been quickly buried again, beneath layers of cope. A culture-wide vocal fry.
It’s something that filmmaker Betsey Brown sees as a major threat. We met recently at an event celebrating internet “e-girls” and bonded over our matching tennis skirts, an earnest but misguided attempt to dress “on theme.” She told me, as we doodled in our Instagram-branded scrapbooks, that she felt alienated from her own audience. Betsey’s work is transgressive in nature, with her first film, Actors, which features a character who cynically transitions in order to “feel relevant in the entertainment industry,” banned from several cinemas for its provocative invocation of the trans community. Betsey, an actor herself, is willing to do anything for her craft. Including, but not limited to, peeing on camera. Transgression is just another facet of this practice. “When I sit down to write,” she explains to me, “I never think ‘I am going to write something transgressive today.’ I think ‘I want to be vulnerable.’ ‘I want to be honest.’”
Betsey draws a line between transgression and “edgelordism,” distinguishing the latter as shock for shock’s sake. Yet even still, through these more provocative elements of her work as well as associations with popular members of “Dimes Square,” New York’s edgy downtown scene, she has amassed a rather irony-poisoned following. As Dimes Square emerged from a cohort of committed partygoers breaking quarantine during the pandemic, Betsey remained at home. She admits to being enamoured with the scene at first, a self-proclaimed “outsider-for-life,” but now feels it encapsulates a “self-referential nihilism” that she cannot get behind. Betsey tells me that her work, which requires a great amount of sensitivity, cannot flourish in a scene that seems averse to the concept. She concludes, “I believe apathy and disaffection is the killer of art, which is a part of why I don’t like the association.”
Risking now what Kraus once risked, Betsey has now made a commitment to being sincere. Her next feature will be designed for more mainstream appeal. Or, as Betsey puts it, “[it] will not have a shocking logline. I have always been interested in relationships first and foremost. My next feature is simply about that.”
But again, breaking the illusion, dropping the proverbial fry, is risky. I myself was much more committed to sincerity at the start of my career, but have since become wary of the moralistic audience I have amassed. Not for lack of morals, but for self-preservation. The inverse of Betsey, I try to building those walls of irony, of “chillness,” to shield against the ire of scrutiny.
Chemically though, I cannot kill the theatric inside. Disordered hormones make a comfortable home inside my already animated body and shriek inside me, staining my bed with long black streaks of mascara, starting brawls with inanimate objects, and terrorizing my boyfriend with non-committal quips about wanting to “throw myself into traffic” as I wail with my head in his lap and stain his crotch with more mascara. I ease quickly, in the span of minutes, from this, to endless chatter, overwhelming my boyfriend in the morning as his brain struggles to wake up. Bursting from within are a havoc of emotions—giddy excitement, animus, despondance—to which my boyfriend is (mostly) inured, but the world is not. Chillness feels next to impossible.
Perhaps vocal fry really is something I learned along the way. A flaccid veneer of “chill,” that people with a global disdain for falseness (or women) can detect. If there’s one thing that critics of vocal fry have accurately caught onto, it’s the paradox of wanting something, but wanting no one to know that you want it. Wanting a career. Wanting someone to want you back. Wanting to be accepted. But the obsessive, all-consuming pursuit of one’s desires is not weighted equally. Culturally, it manifests in women as annoying, ugly, conniving, and insincere. Perhaps vocal fry is simply a protective cushion, invented by those who find our desire too loud to bear. As Kraus concludes, “I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”
It is revolutionary to be a public woman. But, like a petulant man, I am tired of mixed signals. The anger towards my vocal fry, so dated in its vigor, would bore me if it wasn’t so confusing. Damned for being shrill, damned for trying to be chill. This cultural moving of the “annoying” goalpost has become so protracted, it seems no one will ever have the answers. I hope one day we find them and that the anger subsides. In the meantime, will someone tell me how to speak?
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