The first time I ever even noticed vocal fry was when someone was complaining about vocal fry.

It was in an episode of the radio show This American Life. Apparently, listeners had been calling in to complain about about some of the younger female presenters’ speaking voices. Apparently, they were making a croaky sound when speaking. I had never even noticed it.

But since I heard about it, I’ve been paying attention, and I have observed as many young men doing it as young women. There is ample evidence that shows men do it too. But you’d never know that from all the moralising and hypothesising about young women and vocal fry.

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Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice | Naomi Woolf Read more

Vocal fry is not a problem. It is merely another excuse to dismiss, ignore and marginalise women’s voices, both literally and figuratively. And it’s just the latest in a long history of finding excuses not to listen to what women, especially young women, say.

The rejection of women’s literal voices is not a new phenomenon. Before vocal fry, there were complaints about overuse of the word “like”. Before that, there was upspeak. Even the mere sound of women’s voices is used as an excuse to dismiss women.

Broadcaster Kellie Underwood’s brief stint as an AFL commentator was unsuccessful in part because much of the audience reacted negatively to her. It wasn’t that she was a woman, they said, it was because they didn’t like her voice (see comments here and here). As though the two things exist independently of each other.

Women’s figurative voices suffer the same fate.

Female artists encounter this marginalisation all the time. Stories by women that are seen as overly concerned with “female issues”, such as love or domesticity, are categorised as niche and rarely get the kind of widespread praise and attention say, a Jonathan Franzen gets. While Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project was charming, there are dozens of similarly wonderful books of the same genre that never make it to the front table of the book shop. They are almost always written by women.

Sometimes this tradition of ignoring women when they speak has tragic consequences. One of the stark and confronting truths of the Bill Cosby rape stories is the fact women were speaking about it for years, but it took a male voice raising it to get attention. When we ignore women’s voices, we enable horror.

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All of this brings to mind Claudine Herrmann’s The Tongue Snatchers, which suggests that language itself is constructed in a way that marginalises women. It describes the two options usually available to women: to either be silent or to adopt the dominant language of men. But even when we adopt and adapt, there are always excuses not to listen, representing the no win situation women are faced with. When they speak with assertiveness, they’re bossy or aggressive, even “bitchy”. Vocal fry is merely the most recent excuse not to listen to women.

So when Naomi Wolf urges women to change their vocal patterns to regain their strength, she merely addresses a symptom. She suggests those women who are raising their voices should change the way they speak. But history shows once vocal fry is no longer the excuse, there’ll be another. It is the listeners, not the speakers, who are the problem.

And the listeners will continue to find reasons to dismiss women’s voices. They might be too high or too squeaky. They’ll dismiss art that tells female stories as trash or niche, while lavishing praise on men who describe the domestic realm. They will say they listen to music created by male artists because female voices don’t sound as good to them. They will continue to find any excuse not to listen.

Stop telling women how to speak. Instead, listen to them.