Una Mullally on vocal fry, women’s latest affliction

Vocal fry is a creak that sometimes happens at the end of a sentence or a statement when you’re talking

You can find dozens of articles and news pieces online examining the "phenomenon" of vocal fry, but my personal favourite is the ABC News headline, "The debilitating speaking disorder afflicting North American women". That really doesn't hold back. Vocal fry is a creak that sometimes happens at the end of a sentence or a statement when you're talking. As the sentence progresses, it ends with a crackling on the last word or two. Debilitating, right? Over the past few years, as news organisations search for more nuanced ways to make women feel bad about themselves, vocal fry has provided a trendy, hot topic.

Why don’t some people like women’s voices? Is it because they’re women? That can’t be it. It must be how these women talk. The noise that comes out of their mouths. There’s something wrong with it. Listen to you! So womany! Stop it! There’s a celebrity angle too. Kim Kardashian is cited as a vocal fry pied piper, leading young American women downwards towards the dangerous depths of creaky-speak. Her vocal chords are certainly not the most famous part of her anatomy, but I’m sure Kim Kardashian is guilty. Why not? I don’t need any evidence.

Recently, the radio programme and podcast This American Life dedicated an item on their show to vocal fry, following a piece about a female comedian and writer who had been trolled so spectacularly on Twitter, it culminated in a guy setting up a Twitter account pretending to be her dead father. She didn't have vocal fry, but she was a woman. The presenter of This American Life, Ira Glass (who also "has" vocal fry, but people don't complain about it – I wonder why?) said listeners have always complained about female reporters on This American Life, generally younger women, but lately, "People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry." There doesn't seem to be any evidence that vocal fry harms people's voices, and the initial speculation that it affected only women doesn't seem to hold any water either. Men's voices on air can sound like whatever they like, but the issue with a female voice, is generally an issue with the female, not with the voice.

We get used to formats on radio. This is the reason most radio news reporting is exactly the same, a format where the newsreader with as neutral an accent as possible reads short sentences in an overly formal style, finishing off with business, sport, weather and traffic, for no reason, really, other than that’s the way that it has always been done. After news, the sports bulletin slips into a more casual tone, generally read by a man who you can tell loves sports because he isn’t as uptight as the newsreader. He’s probably reading the bulletin in his underwear wearing a Guinness-stained Manchester United jersey, the green and yellow one from the 1993-1994 season with “Bruce” on the back. He is your mate.

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Business news is read in a voice that you immediately attach to a thin, bookish person, the type who peers over their glasses at you from behind the desk of the bank booth you go into asking for a loan you can’t afford to pay back. They mean business. Traffic is read by a young sassy south county Dublin woman who you resent because she will never encounter the gridlock you experience on the way home because she is probably too busy drinking cosmos with her BFFs on Dawson Street. The reason for this is because Lorraine Keane read the traffic once, and now everyone has to do it in the same way because AA Roadwatch fell victim to a gypsy curse, or something. The weather is rattled out in chirpy tones by the now relaxed news reader, unless you’re in RTÉ, in which case a meteorologist tells you it’s going to rain again.

Formats are appealing because they're familiar. We know what we're getting. They are a shorthand the listener can easily grasp, and they don't demand the effort of paying too much attention. Because the presence of women in roles previously assigned mostly to men is automatically unusual, everything gets picked up on. Women in radio are the broadcasting equivalent of the red coat in Schindler's List. They stick out.

The most commonly-cited study about vocal fry was done by researchers at Long Island University in 2010, when they sampled a whopping 34 women between the ages of 18 and 25. A more recent study titled ‘Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market’ stated, “The negative perceptions of vocal fry are stronger for female voices relative to male voices. These results suggest that young American females should avoid using vocal fry speech in order to maximise labour market opportunities.”

Alternatively, these young American females could dress up as young American males in order to maximise their job opportunities. The common denominator is not voice, it’s gender. Throw out your vajazzling kits, ladies, for at long last, us women have another anatomical defect to worry about. It’s been a while.