IBARW--voice

[truepenny]

oyceter and matociquala are talking about anger and talking about being heard, and, being a literal minded sort of person, I'm thinking about voices.

Nobody has ever or will ever call James Earl Jones "shrill."

(It's quite deliberate when I describe Felix's voice as getting shrill, or say he shrieks. Not to feminize him, but to insist that, yes, those words can apply to men, too.)

Women's voices are, in general, pitched higher than men's. One of the stereotypes of Asians involves high-pitched voices. African-Americans are stereotyped by their use of Black English, i.e., the way they sound. And they are also stereotyped as being "loud." And I'm thinking about how easy it is for the physical to become metaphorical, for people to be dismissed as "shrill" or "rowdy" when they are trying to say something their audience doesn't want to "hear"--whether they're actually hearing someone speak, or reading their words printed on the page. There are also connotations--which are hard to tease out so bear with me--of these voices actually hurting listeners. Shrill, as a quality of sound, is painful to listen to. Ditto excessively loud. Think of fire alarms, which are both. So using those particular words and their synonyms ("strident" is another that gets thrown at women a lot) signals to the speaker--and metaphorically to the writer--that they're saying it wrong, that they are inflicting discomfort on their audience.

Now maybe, you object, that audience ought to be uncomfortable, and, well, I'm going to find it hard to argue with you. But unless you've set out explicitly to make your audience uncomfortable, it is very hard to keep going when you are accused of being too loud, too shrill . . .

These words, of course, also have connotations of being out of control--the implication from the audience is that of course the speaker/writer didn't MEAN to be shrill/loud/unpleasant--and this is where Freud's double bind (yes means yes, and no means yes) kicks in full force. Because the more you insist you are in control and you aren't being shrill, the more shrill you are going to sound to an audience who has already dismissed you as overemotional or overinvested or just plain crazy.

It's also got the bonus feature of making the speaker/writer feel gauche and awkward and juvenile. Because it's not adult, not cool to care about anything enough that your voice rises or you start overusing italics and caps lock the way I may have done in the preceding paragraph. And if you can catch someone caring about something, you can make them look dumb.

(This is, as Diana Wynne Jones points out in her excellent YA novel, Fire and Hemlock, the single hardest thing about being a hero. You have to keep going, no matter how stupid you feel. No matter how mortified you are.)

All of which combine to ensure that the speaker shuts up and sits down and starts thinking things like, Nobody else is upset. What's wrong with me? And interpolates themselves right back into the oppression they were trying, however shrilly, however awkwardly, to find their way out of.

At least, that's the way it's "supposed" to work.

Thank goodness it doesn't always.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And there is always a way to make someone sound stupid by how you characterize their voice. Always. I've heard some people stereotyping Asian people as "jabbering" or "chattering" for talking quickly, but if someone was deliberately trying to counter that, they would sound "slow" or "thick" or "dreamy" if you wanted to indicate that they were unreliable. If a black person is deliberately not "rowdy," they can just as easily be "lazy." If you're not loud, why, you must be embarrassed about what you're saying, to speak so quietly! Poor shy little woman! Quick, someone take care of her!

Sigh.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

...huh.

When I am sober I'm going to go poking through The Literature and see if there've been any studies on this. And if not, perhaps I shall do one.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

All of which combine to ensure that the speaker shuts up and sits down and starts thinking things like, Nobody else is upset. What's wrong with me?

There are a couple people on LJ I've begun regarding in the light of a coal-mine canary; that is, I read them and think "So and so is upset. That generally means something is going on that should bother me, or that will upset me when it gets bad enough for me to notice. Maybe I need to react now instead of waiting." (This is mostly about political or social topics - forms of prejudice I hadn't yet noticed, for example.)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Mary Ellmann in her wonderful Talking About Women (c. 1969) has some mordant things to say about these kinds of usages about women's tone in litcrit.

There was an article that people were linking to a few days ago about men shouting or manifesting visible anger (providing they were in some kind of boss position) being seen as about strength, but for women in an equivalent position, it was seen as weakness. So it's also about exactly who is being loud and whether they are entitled to be noisy about getting themselves heard.

I think 'double bind' was R D Laing, rather than Freud, though his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing) suggests that Gregory Bateson originated the concept, though RDL popularised it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Freud used it on (against?) Dora:

The "No" uttered by a patient after a repressed thought has been presented to his conscious perception for the first time does no more than register the existence of a repression and its severity; it acts, as it were, as a gauge of the repression's strength. If this "No," instead of being regarded as the expression of an impartial judgment (of which, indeed, the patient is incapable) is ignored, and if work is continued, the first evidence soon begins to appear that in such a case "No" signifies the desired "Yes."

I may have been applying it rather broadly, but it's definitely that particular passage I was thinking of.

---
Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Ed. Philip Rieff. 1963. New York: Collier Books-Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993. p. 51

[oursin.livejournal.com]

True - and there must be lots of other pre-Bateson/Laing examples. To name something does suggest that it is something that is already out there.

Had a further thought while walking to the Tube that if a person is a man in a position of power, even if he has a squeaky shrill voice it's almost certainly not perceived as such. Just as although the basis for male power is alleged to be their superior physical strength, the men who are in actual power are often physical types who would be whupped in short order in any face-to-face, hand-to-hand, one-on-one struggle with even a fairly average other male (and probably a not insignificant % of healthy females).

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I had a reaction related to this last week--we were switching between the CNN and MSNBC coverage of the bridge collapse, and finally setled on MSNBC and Olbermann, because he sounded calmer and more in control of himself. The news wasn't any better, but it was easier to listen to without being driven into anxiety fits ourselves, and Blitzer and Cooper definitely sounded as if they were On The Verge themselves.

[poodlerat.livejournal.com]

I'll bet that not only do the stereotypes you mention allow people to dismiss those whose opinions they don't agree with or whose problems they don't want to acknowledge, but that they've actually become so fixed in our culture that they pervert our perceptions of every encounter we have. When a Black or Asian person speaks with any passion about something, it probably becomes confirmation for these (possible unconscious) stereotypes.

That's a very nice point about people being dismissed during a discussion or argument for being overemotional. Because of course, it's the person who is cool, calm, and collected who is generally counted as the winner in an argument---and of course, the person with privilege is more likely to preserve an icy calm, while the one who is oppressed is likely to be angry and upset.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Dismissive ad hominem attacks are quite popular: another handy one is the claim that a person is "being defensive." It is very difficult to refute this claim without seeming to justify it, and at the very least, it usually sidetracks discussion quite handily.

When these attacks are systemic, their function is to exclude a person or group of people from discourse. If it's applied consistently, the target may even come to believe in their own inability to discuss things.

I'm also right with you on the whole idea that if you care, you're a target. People with no houses may feel quite free in flinging rocks at any houses they see without fear of reprisal.

[mevincula.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I can agree with you that the person who maintains calm is said to have won the argument. when Mike Dukakis didn't react with sufficient passion as to if he'd support the death penalty if his wife were raped and killed, he was instantly "disqualified" in public opinion. When Cheney told Pat Leahy to go f*ck himself on the Senate floor, his supporters felt it was a manly display of understandable temper (after all, according to Cheney Leahy "nearly kissed him"). O'Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, etc. routinely scream at their guests, or while making a point, yet their supporters say they've won the argument.

I would go back to truepenny saying when you say yes you mean yes and when you say no you mean yes. For some people, you're going to lose no matter what you say. You'll be weak if you're angry or weak if you're not. (and yes, I understand that all my examples are political, but I'm feeling pretty angry politically)

It seems to me that there are pre-established criteria as to who wins and loses, and the language of "losers" is used to describe what was established before the discussion ever happened.

[poodlerat.livejournal.com]

The situations you mention are a bit different, though---those are all public debates, whereas I was thinking more of private ones, where it's the participants in the argument who decide who the "winner" is. In those cases, I think the one who maintains his or her cool is generally considered to have the upper hand by both parties---at least, that's the case in my experience.

From my own (Canadian) perspective, it seems like supporters of O'Reilly et al. are already so partisan that no behaviour or argumentation from either side of a debate could move them, although that may be my own political prejudices, or ignorance, showing. I don't know any Canadians, even ones who support some of his views, who find Bill O'Reilly convincing, but that may be because you guys have a really different news culture than we do, rather than anything particular to him.

It seems to me that there are pre-established criteria as to who wins and loses, and the language of "losers" is used to describe what was established before the discussion ever happened.

I definitely agree with that.

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

"Because it's not adult, not cool to care about anything enough that your voice rises or you start overusing italics and caps lock the way I may have done in the preceding paragraph. And if you can catch someone caring about something, you can make them look dumb."

This has been something I've been increasingly aware of and irritated by recently. If you're cool, by god you will be bored out of your skull, because you certainly won't be allowed to care about anything. I've finally had it with trying to pretend. See lj username "i has an enthusiasm". >:3

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

The subject of anger-re-oppression is always a difficult one, not least because not all anger is healthy. Nor is all anger healthy as soon as it is released, rather than being suppressed. It's very difficult to empower anger on the one hand, and take responsibility for the harm it can do on the other.

But. A potential beginning:

Look how many people are involved.

I suspect one case in which "shrill," "strident," "out of control," etc. might be used less prejudicially to describe angry speech critically would be when more than one person is talking and it's not in unison. It's sad but true that if there is one angry person, she or he looks like the bad guy (using guy in its unisex form), but if there are two angry people, people take sides as to who is the hero and who the villain. Whereas in real life, the more angry people are talking against each other and the higher the volume of discussion gets, the harder it becomes for the debate to remain on the level of constructive anger rather than trashing, or inanity. Just look at Congress.

I think it's one thing to say "a debate is out of control," in a particular case (not just because one doesn't like to hear that subject mentioned), and call for a time out, and another to say of a person "you are out of control."

Though sometimes people really are out of control, they usually don't show it by the intensity of their feelings so much as the way the feelings make them behave. It's one thing to say "I am angry," another to say "I am angry and I will get you."