Hmm. Is it sexist – or even misogynist – to advise women to talk with authority? Marybeth Seitz-Brown at Slate is more or less arguing that, and I don’t think I agree.
Last week, I gave an interview on NPR, and while most of the reactions were overwhelmingly positive, I also received several messages suggesting I change my voice so that people will take me seriously. Why? Well, I uptalk. But I’m not ashamed of it, and no one else should be either.
Uptalk, in case you’ve missed several years of media frenzy, is using a rising intonation at the end of a phrase or sentence. What’s the matter with that? Well, that rising intonation is similar (although not identical) to how any English speaker sounds when asking a question, so to some people it sounds as if uptalkers are speaking only in questions, and are thus not very confident.
Well I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of uptalking, but that’s not the issue. Talk of being ashamed seems like a deflection. And I gotta be honest: I hate uptalking myself, and I do think people should avoid it in places like interviews on NPR. (By the same token, I think Terry Gross should get rid of her many vocal affectations so that she would sound more professional and, yes, authoritative in a job she’s been doing for more than thirty years.) One thing I hate about uptalking is that it seems to demand a response from the listener at the end of each sentence – a grunt, an “uh huh,” a brief check of some sort – which is a burden, and silly. I do think it’s a bad habit to get into, at least for people who have to do some talking as part of their jobs.
And the same applies to talking in a baby voice, and to saying “like” every fourth word, and to any other leftover from childhood that adults should leave behind. I don’t think it is specific to women, and I don’t think women should be immune to the criticism.
I really do appreciate these listeners’ concerns, but the notion that my uptalk means I was unsure of what I said is not only wrong, it’s misogynistic. It implies that if women just spoke like men, our ideas would be valuable. If women just spoke like men, sexist listeners would magically understand us, and we would be taken seriously. But the problem is not with feminized qualities, of speech or otherwise, the problem is that our culture pathologizes feminine traits as something to be ashamed of or apologize for.
No, I don’t think it is misogynist and I don’t think it does imply that women should speak like men. I think adults should talk like adults, at least in situations like NPR interviews.
I believe we can do better than that. We can evaluate the merits of an idea based on the soundness of its reasoning, not the pitch range in which it’s articulated. We can reject the knee-jerk habit of dismissing people for the sound of their voices without actually hearing what they have to say. And—rather than telling women to talk like men or shut up—we can encourage each other to celebrate the different rises and falls, the creaks and quakes that make up our voices.
Well how about not creating a false dichotomy? It’s not a forced choice between talking like men and shutting up, it’s advice not to talk like a fumbler or a child if you can help it.
Here is the transcript and link to the audio of her NPR interview:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/06/369008760/how-the-rolling-stone-story-could-hurt-future-victims
She doesn’t uptalk at the end of sentences, just sometimes in the middle of sentences. It doesn’t bother me.
Like: hear, hear? 😉
(Yes, drives me up the wall, whoever does it. I’m not telling women to cut it out, I’m telling anyone who does it to cut it out.)
Women are taught to speak differently so complaining about how many women have been socialized to talk without changing the process of socialization seems like it only works to hurt women. My mom hated rising intonation and would call me out when I did it so that I could learn to speak without it. She essentially had to counter what other people were teaching me (but not my brother). Not everyone has someone to do that for them.
I’m not sure what I think about the uptalking. I don’t like it but if I said Texan accents irritate me so cut them out, you’d quite rightly tell me it was my problem. And she’s definitely right about the race, class and regional identities, as well as gender. It is a burden to retrain your natural manner of speaking, and lo and behold if it isn’t always the less privileged who are expected to bear it. Also, while it’s true that professional speakers are groomed to match society’s expectations in speech, dress and presentation, that’s very much a self-reinforcing conservative social force, one in which female speakers are groomed differently from males and we listeners are encouraged in our standard responses to people of different genders.
And that’s the thing: people want her to change one aspect of her voice, but they don’t really want to see her adopt the style of expression and body language of a man displaying authority. We don’t see female speakers do that and if they did, it would likely come across as aggressive. Men can lead, order and berate. Women are, and always have been expected to deliver pleasantly voiced sensible suggestions. And I’m a bit worried that some of our irritation at this uptalking is fed by that same stereotype. Ooooh, that irritating question mark which demands a response, when what we really intended was to go away and make up our own minds, then pretend it was all our idea in the first place. She’s gone beyond suggesting, she’s nagging us! – perhaps because as a woman, she’s barred from just giving us our marching orders?*
* I’m not saying she’s doing it deliberately for that reason, but she probably developed her uptalk habit within that context.
The uptalk sounds clearly subservient and pleading. “Please listen to me, ‘kay??” Like a dog begging for scraps at the dinner table. Regardless of who’s doing it. It just sounds like the person has no confidence in his/her perspective and is demanding affirmation from the listener at every term. Stop.
@Anne Fenwick: I like your points, and well taken. However, something that is clearly an affectation simply doesn’t reflect well upon the person using it, and always stands out. There are female politicians who manage to speak in a way that doesn’t suggest a pathetic childlike neediness, and if the purpose of affecting such is to require others to attend to one as they would a child, this is hardly empowering. It is more likely to result in annoyance and further disdain.
There exist social norms, and people flout them at their peril.
“Term” – I had “turn” in mind, but whatevs. Freudian slap or whatev.
Sorry but this seems like elitism to me. Different affectations annoy different people in different ways and that is very much tied to a lot of things like class and background. The idea that certain people should normalize their accents and affectations to match your ideal seems pretty privileged. In this case it happens to be a white woman. What about southerners or people of color who speak different dialects?
Also talking like an adult is like having a beach body. Be and adult and talk. Now you’re talking like an adult. Insulting people by calling them childish for not speaking like you, to me at least, seems childish.
In fact I’ll just link here because although this is talking about grammar as opposed to talking style I fundamentally believe the same argument should be made: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/05/grammar-snobbery/
Particularly given for many people it’s easier to review and normalize written text like a cover letter than it is to change their mode of speaking on the fly.
Is it part of a larger youth-oriented culture thing?
Because it seems like many middle-aged people are trapped in teenager-speak.
I cringe when my fellow 50-ish males insist on referring to me and each other as “dude.”
I didn’t use “dude” even when I WAS a teenager.
She seems to be assuming that uptalk is innate. It’s not; it’s learned. Worse, it’s learned precisely because women are trained to be unsure of what they’re saying, or at least pretend to in order to not be seen as threatening. I think it should be discouraged, but from a very early age, not just once you hit adulthood and need to sound authoritative.
I don’t know. I used to uptalk until someone pointed it out. I don’t even know where i had picked it up, but when I started paying attention to myself I was able to stop it.
I also don’t know that it is a gender-specific affectation. I hear it from a lot of men, too. It’s a curiosity, but the reason that I had it pointed it out to me is that my boss was concerned that if I explained concepts to our clients that they would think I was unsure of the concept I was presenting, that I lacked confidence in the product or material or process. I do know that once I stopped doing it, people stopped second-guessing me.
I know that code-switching is important, and that giving a lecture or reporting news on the radio requires a different speech style than talking on the phone to your mom. I understand that. But “like” is extremely useful. For instance, I have a mild stutter and I find that having some small word I can say if I feel that I have to break off for a moment — no matter where I am in the sentence — is a great help. Blanket condemnations of “like” make me uncomfortable for that reason, but that might be just me.
@Blanche Quizno #5: I have to quibble with this one as well. Uptalk, creaky voice, and all those other things people are always complaining about aren’t affectations. On the contrary, a lot of people don’t even notice that they do it. It’s no more an affectation than a Texan accent is, as Anne Fenwick (#4) said. I actually interpret uptalk differently: the rising intonation signals “I’m not done yet, it’s still my turn.” And then when the complete thought (like a paragraph, but of speech) is over, the pitch goes down. (The same thing happens when you read off a list: the pitch of your voice goes up at the end of each item, and finally goes down when you’ve reached the end of the list.)
Do you have a source for that?
In New Zealand we all uptalk. It’s just the accent. Now I’m going to be all self-conscious speaking to non-Kiwis, if they’re going to judge me harshly on my intonation at the end of sentences.
I became aware of this speech affectation back in the early 1980s, but the term “uptalk” is new to me. The person who observed the pattern back then called it the “reject me” inflection because of the lack of confidence implied by turning statements into questions that begged for affirmation. Based on my experience, it’s a meme that can spread through a group, not something innate. People used it less after they became aware they were doing it. Uptalking may have been more commonly used by the women in the group, which only reflects something sad about perceptions to me.
The problem with uptalking is that the people who say it most are children under seven years old. They’re uncertain of what they’re saying, afraid of mistakes or are seeking approval. When an adult does it, it sounds the same way – it makes the listern wonder if the person knows what they’re talking about. If you actually know the person and know how educated the person is, it doesn’t irritate. But when it’s a new acquaintance, it could make the listener question or doubt the speaker’s level of education and cost people opportunities (e.g. a prospective employer conducting a job interview).
” We can evaluate the merits of an idea based on the soundness of its reasoning, not the pitch range in which it’s articulated. We can reject the knee-jerk habit of dismissing people for the sound of their voices without actually hearing what they have to say.”
Even as a complete lay person, I know this statement is disingenuous. The way we speak affects the the meanings of the words we say. The entire meaning of a sentence can change depending on which words are stressed and the speakers cadences and inflections. Take the phrase “we can not do that”. Stressing the “we” implies that someone else can do it, stress the “can not” and you imply that it shouldn’t be done, stressing “that” and the implication is that there’s another course of action that can be taken, and an upward inflection of “that” can be used to show confusion or to ask if the action can be done.
As for the broadcast, I thought she did well and was able to get her views across clearly.
imback @ 1,
Thanks for the link. And I am glad to have the term, uptalk. I probably would not have noticed Marybeth Seitz-Brown’s uptalk had I just happened to hear her on npr since she otherwise sounded confident and in command of what she was saying. When I do notice uptalk I think I have mixed feelings, ‘oh you don’t have to sound tentative’ or ‘ I guess you do need to sound apologetic for speaking because it seems to be required of women’ or ‘feeling bad because I collude in the requirement’.
Recently I happened to attend a presentation (not a professional one) by a retired professor of psychiatry who had a little girl’s voice. She was of age where she would likely have undergone a Freudian style training psychoanalysis, and yet that small voice survived that process. It was quite distracting observing a mature accomplished woman and hearing a little girls voice come out of her mouth. No doubt she has endured rude comments about her voice over the years. And I hope Marybeth Seitz-Brown does not get much of that.
Bumberpuff #16:
But this applies to literally every speaker, no matter what the timbre of their voice is!
I had not seen the tic described as ‘uptalk’ until now. It seems like a useful term to have. I associate it with 1970-80s Southern California ‘valley girl’ speak. Being addressed in that tone feels like being milked for support and approval for every sentence.
I don’t know about New Zealanders, and I haven’t heard the broadcaster in question. But from what I’ve heard, criticizing ‘uptalk’ is no more misogynistic than objecting to the ‘fashion statement’ of the burka.
Does anyone have any history on the trend? Does it have a regional source, or has it been spread by radio/television/pop-music? Is it really as gender-linked as it seems? I do recall an Australian, speaking in one of Moyers’ documentaries on English, demonstrating ‘uptalk’ as a fad among teenage girls in the ‘beach’ culture.
re johnthedrunkard #19:
Taking a quick look at it on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal – suggests that it’s got a variety of origins: Norwegian influence in the US Midwest; Australia; southern California; and treating declarative sentences as almost questions. So any given instance of it may be a regional accent or a personal speech style. It’s at least got gender associations, at least some of which are probably located in differing social expectations by gender. When they’re coming from or contributing to gender-based power asymmetries, or conveying an impression the speaker ought not to want to convey, I do think it’s a reasonable thing to point out. The problems we allow to persist in our language won’t go away by being ignored, after all. We ought to take care not to go bashing simple regional accents though, so knowing where it’s coming from in a given instance is important.
@ 18,
Matzo, absolutely. I assumed that the issue was not with the overall sound of her voice but with the up-talk. To criticize her voice is always inappropriate, to mention that her vocal inflections makes her sound like she’s asking questions is legitimate. In this instance I don’t think there was a communication barrier between her and the audience, but I’ve had personal interactions where up speak led to confusion and unhappiness.