Fellas! Sorry to have to issue another warning about the devious females of our species, but I have learned of yet another way that these wily lady creatures secretly control our minds.
On the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, a fella named cactiscat explains how the ladies manipulate us by “contorting [their] face[s] and voice[s].” And it’s all the fault of Starbucks and the Kardashians and possibly Rachel Zoe.
Women, cactiscat informs us, “are programmed for manipulation.” As little girls, they learn to charm their fathers by “act[ing] sweet and cute in order to get what they want at home.”
But they become true mistresses of manipulation as young adults, when they all, inevitably, get jobs at Starbucks or McDonald’s or somewhere else where they have to deal with idiots all day without punching any of them.
Modern women in the US have almost all worked customer service jobs, either as baristas, waitresses, cashiers, receptionists, ect. In these jobs they naturally hone and perfect their social manipulation skills. They have to put on a smile and make their voice sweet, hour after hour, day after day, regardless of how they feel inside. After doing that for long enough, they essentially become like sociopaths.
Damn you, Starbucks!
Of course, the problem has been around a lot longer than Starbucks. Back in prehistoric days, you see, wily cavewomen learned how to charm hard-working cavemen into giving them some of the mammoth they had so bravely hunted and killed.
Women have always been better at social manipulation than men. This is how they ensured their survival during the caveman days. They couldn’t hunt, or make tools, so they carved out the niche of being social manipulators instead.
Here is an authentic cave painting showing how these evil caveladies conned their men into giving them free stuff.
But there’s one sneaky new trick the ladies are using to control men: talking like a creaky-voiced Kardashian.
Have you heard of “vocal fry”? That’s one of the most blatant tricks in the modern woman’s arsenal. Its a tone style of speaking that sounds like after sex bedroom whispering, and a lot of modern women have shamelessly adopted it into their everyday speaking, because it gives them power.
Here’s Kourtney Kardashian showing us how it’s done:
And here’s dress-picker-outer to the stars Rachel Zoe with her low croak.
As you can see, Rachel Zoe’s vocal fry is so powerful that she’s given vocal fry to pretty much everyone around her except her loser husband.
So be careful, fellas. The next time you hire Rachel Zoe to pick out your outfit for the Oscars, stuff earplugs or bananas or something else in your ears to block out her beguiling croak.
Wait, so that’s what vocal fry is? It’s just having a dry/stuffy throat? We need a name for that?
Why do I always get the impression that every single MGTOW grew up super jealous of their smarter, cooler, cuter sister?
Is vocal fry an American thing? When English women speak in a throaty voice is usually just suggests they smoke a lot.
I’m fairly sure prehistoric women could make tools, as well as clothes, fire, food; as well as hunting, butchering, gathering, healing, keeping children alive, etc, etc,
Though of course one day an evo-psych archaeologist will unearth a paleolithic nail file and some fossilized bon bons and suddenly all the MGTOW rhetoric will be vindicated. Possibly.
gotta wonder what “vocal fry” was called years go when white guys like Noam Chomsky used it. And honestly, the only “public voice” I find objectionable is Michio Kaku.. he’s so damn *squeaky*, I want to oil him.
Sometime in the sixties, American women started dropping their speaking pitch about half an octave because Dictaphones and answering machines made them sound like Minnie Mouse. A good many of those career advancement books published in the Eighties called characteristic female voices a negative because their higher pitch was said to make them sound squeaky, screechy, or whiny, unlike the manly, authoritative pitch of male voices. But now, lowered female voices are considered guile-ish. You can’t win… not by their rules.
Snork Maiden, I’ve noticed English women sound almost piping or fluting compared to North Americans, and put the lower pitch of the latter down to compensating for recorded voice squeak, supra. Also, Anglophonic North American speakers of both sexes and all regions have a slight growling undertone seldom found Across The Pond.
So… would this dude prefer that women yell and scowl at him instead of patiently putting up with him when he’s ordering coffee?
Vocal Fry is discussed in this episode and Ira Glass points out that he has a lot of fry in his voice. But strangely he’s never had a single complaint about it, unlike female colleagues, who get regular vitriolic attacks.
http://tal.fm/545
More discussion of fry if you’re really into it:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=vocal+fry
Larry Gonick, in his “Cartoon History of the Universe”, speculated that prehistoric women’s tools were less likely to be stone (at first, he’d drawn a woman paddling a youngster, then thought that was too much of a cheap shot and revised it to women carrying stuff in woven slings) and therefore less likely to survive intact through the eons.
Magnesium,
So, it’s a reverse Ferris Bueller situation?
I read somewhere that they’ve done studies and men commit the heinous act of vocal fry as often as women do, we just don’t notice it because we’re not looking for reasons to get up in men’s business.
Unlike “Nosey Joe”, the original PUA, who LOVED sticking his big nose in women’s business. But Nosey came to a very bad end because of it….
And so’ve most men. Whats yer point?
This is a guy who just found out that the barista who said “have a nice day” DID NOT REALLY CARE IF HE HAD A NICE DAY OR NOT and is REALLY pissed about it.
I use the hell out of vocal fry, because I enjoy annoying the people who want to police my tone of voice. It works amazingly well, because someone chiding you on the pitch of your voice is being incredibly petty and they sound incredibly petty doing it. Usually all it takes is just looking at them until they hear themselves making this utterly inane criticism and shut up.
Dudes (and occasionally ladies) who have tried to curtail my vocal fry clearly expect me to curl up in on myself at the slightest hint that I am not completely pleasing to those around me. They literally don’t seem to know what to do when I behave as though nitpicking my presentation of myself is inappropriate and impolite. Then they just have to be annoyed in silence, forever, every time I open my mouth.
It is delightful! Everyone should try it!
Actually prehistoric art indicates that women hunted:
http://www.evoanth.net/2014/02/28/12000-year-old-prehistoric-art-shows-woman-hunting/
And also this:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/female-chimps-more-likely-males-hunt-tools-180955004/
Realistically it is far more likely that hunting and gathering were not divided roles, but something that one did simultaneously on expeditions whenever they encountered something edible. Prehistoric people ate small prey like rodents, birds, lizards and fish way more often than attacking large mammals, so brawn was not a necessary factor in successfully obtaining meat most of the time.
A couple months ago, “Vocal fry” was known as “Who the fuck cares? It’s just the way some people’s voices sound. There’s no reason to even have a word for this other than misogynists desperately looking for something to police women with now that fat shaming and slut shaming aren’t as socially acceptable as they used to be.”
They call it “vocal fry”? And it’s supposed to be Teh Sexay? Huh. And here, after all this time, I just thought it was hoarseness!
I love how they assume that even if gender roles existed back in caveman days women did nothing useful, but just mooched off men.
No acknowledgement that women could have out gathering plants for food and medicine. They weren’t caring for children, the sick and injured, or the elderly. They weren’t gathering water. Weren’t cooking. Weren’t making useful items like baskets. Weren’t protecting the homesite from animals. Apparently they were all sitting around eating the prehistoric equivalent of bon bons while the men hunted dangerous animals.
This is the first I’ve heard of “vocal fry.” What, so it’s just that frog-in-your-throat voice that makes it sound deeper than normal? Pretty sure I’ve never heard that after sex before. Unless one of us is sick or dehydrated.
@rugbyyogi
There’s an MRA in the comments of your link arguing that the male equivalent of women being policed for “Vocal fry” is men being “Policed” for sexist/racist rants (and that the latter is worse, of course). And his main example of a man who unfairly lost his livelihood to this “Policing” is Mel Gibson.
*facepalm*
I was listening to an episode of This American Life that covered vocal fry, where Ira Glass played a quick blurb of a woman with vocal fry and was like “So now you know what it sounds like” and I was like “No, actually, I’m still not super clear on what’s going on.” I really couldn’t hear the difference.
Interestingly, the researcher who first covered vocal fry specifically said that part of her conclusion is that older people just kinda dislike how younger people speak, what are you gonna do about it.
So when people complain about vocal fry–which young men do just as frequently as young women!–it’s hard for me to hear it as anything other than “God, I just hate it when women speak, it’s the worst.”
Which is kind of what MRAs want, isn’t it? For women to be silent and compliant.
I forget where I heard this first, but I once read that people who have access to power don’t have to manipulate. So if you don’t like the fact that women are “more manipulative” (are they? I haven’t seen any real data over that) the best way to do that would be to level the playing field.
He gets so tantalizingly close to the right conclusion (that having to smile and be nice when customers are rude or you’re having a bad day is difficult, and takes a toll) and then takes a sharp left turn into…SOCIOPATHS!
It’s like there’s some invisible force field that flings them backwards every time they approach decency.
I guess the complaint here is that when the sexthing’s inner state does not match her outer state, men are being fooled into being nice to the sexthing even though she secretly has no intention of dispensing sex. So the sexthing receives all the niceness but gives nothing in return except a stinkin’, lousy smile. And a cup of coffee. Sexthing: 1 MGTOW: 0.
Maybe if they had a functioning moral compass, niceness wouldn’t be such a gigantic effort for them, and they’d be happy with a simple exchange of pleasantries. I think they feel ripped off because it’s such hard labor for them to be nice to women. They feel they ought to get a big payoff for it.
Wow, these guys really hate any and all reminders that women might be having sex with other guys. Such delicate flowers.
Still, it’s nice of MGTOWs to keep giving us all these tips for repelling them. I’m going to keep practicing until it sounds like a side of bacon is sizzling in my larynx. hissss! spit! pop!
God dammit creaky voice does not sound (traditionally) sexy! It’s creaky! It sounds old and a little alien if you use it for an entire sentence!
The aroused-sounding kind of voice is breathy voice AKA “murmur”, not creaky voice AKA “vocal fry”. In my phonetics class we explicitly listened to recordings of Marilyn Monroe as an example of breathy voice. Vocal fry is the opposite of that. No, seriously: you make breathy voice by separating the arytenoid cartilages, and creaky voice by putting them together. They are direct opposites.
Yeah, women have historically sometimes modified their voices to sound sexier – away from creaky voice. Vocal fry isn’t women trying to seduce you, it’s women not going out of their way to seem sexually attractive.
It’s bad enough when you confuse your boner for a conspiracy among women to seduce you, but how do you confuse your lack of boner for a conspiracy among women to seduce you?!
I’m legitimately surprised that “vocal fry” doesn’t have anything to do with the part about working at McDonald’s.