Quick reminder: I’m hosting a Zoom workshop on Human Design with Emma Dunwoody this Saturday, July 27th at 4pm PST for paid subscribers. You can find the link to register at the bottom of this email.
A few weeks ago, I finally got to spend an hour with professor Carol Gilligan, legendary developmental psychologist and the author of In a Different Voice, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, and In a Human Voice. (I write about Carol’s work in the following posts: “What Are We ‘Really, Actually” Saying, “The Achilles Heel of Women,” “How to Keep Caring,” “Why is it So Hard to Scream?”—and she’ll be on Pulling the Thread on Monday.)
Gilligan clicked off the Zoom to go to Pilates (she’s 87 years old and still at it), while I clicked off the Zoom to sit on my butt and dig through my email. I had to laugh at the synchronicity of the podcast review below landing in my inbox while I was talking to Gilligan. After all, her work explores all the cultural forces that silence women and girls, pushing them to “not know what they know” and to paper over their voices with a more socially acceptable tone—or not speak at all. As she writes in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, her work explores what invariably happens to women and girls: “the coming not to know what one knows, the difficult in hearing or listening to one’s voice, the disconnection between mind and body, thoughts and feelings, and the use of one’s voice to cover rather than to convey one’s inner world.”
Here’s what this reviewer said: “Great show, but… This host is brilliant, and yet I am driven crazy by her valley girl lilt, and tone and voice. Too many sentences and [sic] in question mark sounds; it’s possible to be expressive and dynamic without sounding like a teenager from the burbs.”
Before we get to why this review is so interesting, just a note that I’m good, no need to jump to my defense. I wrote about negative reviews and podcast feedback in “The Flip Side of Vulnerability,” where my therapist gave me great advice, specifically that I’m not allowed to give anonymous feedback any energy because it is not inherently vulnerable. Plus, there’s not much to do about it: Like all the other female hosts I know, I get it all, including conflicting opinions: I talk too much or not enough; I’m too prepared or not prepared enough; my voice is soothing or my voice is replete with vocal fry, etc. (It’s not lost on me that this is my show—I’m not an NPR employee!—so I find it amusing that people stick around to criticize rather than just finding a more compelling host to listen to.)
Back to this review.
First, I need to be petty for a second: “Too many sentences and [sic] in question mark sounds” feels appropriate, no? After all, do I not interview people? (Like what I did there? And again?)
But primarily: The assignation of “Valley Girl” is fascinating to me, specifically because this person doesn’t have issue with what I’m saying (“the host is brilliant”), but in how it comes out.
The “Valley Girl” meme first emerged in the early ‘80s, thanks to Frank Zappa and his 14-year-old daughter, Moon Unit, who wrote a song of the same name which became an instant Billboard hit. Apparently Zappa woke Moon Unit up in the middle of the night and had her repeat phrases she’d overheard at “parties, bar mitzvahs and the Galleria.” The intent is contemptuous: Frank Zappa considered the San Fernando Valley and its inhabitants to be a version of hell.
And, well, the song took off—and the concept of a Valley Girl was popularized and valorized by movies like Heathers, Clueless, Mean Girls, and Legally Blonde. (You can now add Barbie to this list.) The premise of each film carries a similar theme—a subtext that is both subtle and clear—which is why each of these movies is part of a durable canon of films beloved by women and girls. These films are centered around girls we are coaxed to dismiss and write off for being vapid, materialistic, boy-crazed idiots. But we recognize this as the facade it is, a mask of social acceptance and an invisibility cloak for intelligence. Underestimate these girls at your peril:
Warner Huntington III: “I-I-I’m…sorry. Are you here to see me?”
Elle Woods: “No, silly. I go here.”
Warner Huntington III: “You go where?”
Elle Woods: “Harvard. Law School.”
Warner Huntington III: “You…got into Harvard Law?”
Elle Woods: “What, like it’s hard?”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but none of these girls are from the Valley: Elle Woods (Bel Air); Cher, Dionne & Tai (Beverly Hills); Regina George and the Plastics (Chicago); and the Heathers (Sherwood, Ohio). As a fellow Valley Girl, I want to point out that I’m from Montana. In short, this is how we police, mock, and deride the voices of girls and women from across the country while largely justifying it as a critique of class (typically Valley Girls are assumed to be upper middle class and above).
Denise Di Novi, the producer of Heathers and other movies we love (woot woot, here’s to the just-announced reboot of Practical Magic) is a friend. She told me that the Heathers were conceived as a mix of caricatures—they were “Bitches” when they spoke to each other, as signified by lines like, F*ck me gently with a chainsaw, and Stop pulling my dick Veronica, but when they spoke to boys, their personas and tones shifted. “They spoke like Valley Girls in order to disarm and manipulate them,” she explained. “They masked their power, which would have blown the boys away. Like sarcasm, this way of speaking is masking—we learn early on that if we pose a statement as a question, it will be less threatening and put us at less risk. We’re not allowed to be definitive or declarative.” Heathers reflected this reality.
Per usual, girls and women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. But to suggest that the mechanisms we’ve learned to maneuver through society are our fault is maddening—and the way we police women and girl’s tones, and collude in this type of veiled misogyny, is maddening as well. It’s also an efficient way to get women to stop talking at a moment in time when we desperately need the voices of women to get louder. (Sidebar, but this is related to the ways in which we blame women for not advocating and negotiating for themselves in the workplace when we all know what happens to women who advocate and negotiate for themselves in the workplace.)
I drafted this newsletter before Biden stepped down on Sunday and Kamala stepped up—I’ll be watching closely to see how she’ll be policed by the public, not for her politics but for the way in which she expresses herself—or laughs. If Nikki Haley were on the Republican ticket, I don’t think she’d be spared, though as a Black woman, Kamala will get extra ingredients. (Kate Manne, author of Entitled and Down Girl, and PTT guest, wrote a newsletter about what to look for and how to recognize misogynoir in action.) I was reading a WaPo piece from 2019— “That grating noise? It’s people criticizing female voices on the debate stage,” when I came across this quote from Susan B. Anthony: “No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public…For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.”
Here’s my other question: What is the corollary for boys and men? The only thing I can think of is the beloved Surfer Dude, a stoner like Jeff Spicoli, whose (lack of apparent) intelligence makes him so beloved. His smartest line: “People on ‘ludes should not drive.” Can you think of other equivalents? As the mother of two boys, it’s “bruh” town over here, but I don’t hear boys being dismissed, derided, or mocked for the way they speak or encouraged to make their voices more palatable.
In fact, boys and men are not penalized for vocal fry, whereas girls and women resoundingly are. Per this 2014 study: “Vocal fry is speech that is low pitched and creaky sounding, and is increasingly common among young American females. Some argue that vocal fry enhances speaker labor market perceptions while others argue that vocal fry is perceived negatively and can damage job prospects. In a large national sample of American adults we find that vocal fry is interpreted negatively. Relative to a normal speaking voice, young adult female voices exhibiting vocal fry are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable. 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 maximize labor market opportunities.”
Before I sign off, here are a few relevant passages from Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, which also arrived in 1982, the same month as “Valley Girl.”
“Women’s choices not to speak or rather to dissociate themselves from what they themselves are saying can be deliberate or unwitting, consciously chosen or enacted through the body by narrowing the passages connecting the voice with breath and sound, by keeping the voice high in the head so that it does not carry the depths of human feelings or a mix of feelings and thoughts, or by changing voice, shifting to a more guarded or impersonal register or key. Choices not to speak are often well-intentioned and psychologically protective, motivated by concerns for people’s feelings and by an awareness of the realities of one’s own and others’ lives. And yet by restricting their voices, many women are wittingly or unwittingly perpetuating a male-voiced civilization and an order of living that is founded on disconnection from women.”
“These women, all of whom work in the theater, have an understanding of voice which is physiological and cultural as well as deeply psychological. Linklater speaks of ‘freeing the natural voice,’ the title of her first book, and what she means is that you can hear the difference between a voice that is an open channel—connected physically with breath and sound, psychologically with feelings and thoughts, and culturally with a rich resource of language—and a voice that is impeded or blocked. Having worked with Linklater, I have heard and experienced the differences she describes. I also have learned from working with Noel to pick up relational resonances and follow the changes in people’s voices that occur when they speak in places where their voices are resonant with or resounded by others, and when their voices fall into a space where there is no resonance, or where the reverberations are frightening, where they begin to sound dead or flat.”
“This change of mind and also of heart, which we observed repeatedly among girls in adolescence, led my colleague Annie Rogers to speak of girls’ losing their ‘ordinary courage,’ or finding that what had seemed ordinary—having a voice and being in relationship—had now become extraordinary, something to be experienced only in the safest and most private of relationships. This psychological seclusion of girls from the public world at the time of adolescence sets the stage for a kind of privatization of women’s experience and impedes the development of women’s political voice and presence in the public world. The dissociation of girls’ voices from girls’ experiences in adolescence, so that girls are not saying what they know and eventually not knowing it as well, is a prefiguring of many women’s sense of having the rug of experience pulled out from under them, or of coming to experience their feelings and thoughts not as real but as a fabrication.”
Until next time friends? ;)
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Another subtlety: that we all default to using first names for Kamala and Hillary while using the men's lasts--Biden and Trump.
Whoa, was just listening to today’s episode of The 1A (on npr) about “How gender affects the way we speak and how we’re heard” while checking email and receiving this post in my inbox!….Perfect timing