In recent years, vocal fry and upspeak, generally speech trends attributed to women, have been heavily criticized. The voices of young women are becoming more and more controversial, but why? Sometimes, pet peeves reveal an uglier truth. Cartoon by Ashley Lawrence
By MADDIE HALL – Opinions Editor
Sometimes, the line between a simple pet peeve and unfounded bias gets blurry.
Junk mail. Slow Internet. When the cafeteria line is so long you spend more time waiting than eating. Bad hair days, nails on a chalkboard, the incessant tapping of a pen. Having to wash old food off of dishes.
These are all things that annoy me, and not to overstep any journalistic boundary, but probably you too.
Or maybe your list has some variances, maybe your issue is with shaking legs or car alarms, but regardless, my point stands: we all have our pet peeves. And who can blame us? A sound repeated over and over is annoying. These tiny vexations don’t really hurt anyone…but the line between pet peeves and biases is easily, and often, blurred.
In recent years, many articles have surfaced about vocal fry, upspeak, and the population’s general annoyance with both. For those who don’t know, vocal fry is a speech pattern in which the speaker’s voice is purposefully lowered, producing a more guttural, vibratory sound. Upspeak is when the speaker raises the pitch of their voice at the end of a sentence, making the sentence sound like a question regardless of whether or not it is one.
While different, vocal fry and upspeak have one important commonality: both are significantly more used by women, especially in the United States, according to a 2011 study by Science Magazine. In a popular episode of NPR’s This American Life, journalist Jessica Grose describes the shocking amount of criticism she received on her voice, not her ability, while hosting a Slate podcast. “I remember one [comment] in particular said I sounded like “a valley girl and a faux socialite,” and there were a couple of comments that echoed that, and the tenor of them was pretty nasty,” Grose said.
I have no method of compiling scientific data on a large scale, quantifying criticisms in relation to gender to the third or fourth decimal place, but as a young female living in present society, I am confident in saying that I often observe “pet peeves” that correspond to a specific group of people. And there lies the line between an innocent aggravation and prejudice.
Think: when is the last time you heard a man being told not to talk like a valley girl? When is the last time you heard a white person being told their natural hair is unprofessional? When is the last time you sat down and thought about WHY filler words (most notably like) and dreadlocks and hijabs come with the connotations that they do?
Often, hatred is masked as something light, playful. Just a joke. But it’s important to remember that in any form, hatred hurts someone. So next time you hear someone making fun of what is supposedly “valley girl” speak, just tell them to, like, chill out and take their internalized misogyny elsewhere? Because you so, like, don’t have time for that today.
