The Cedar Lounge Revolution

The female voice… February 28, 2014

A thought-provoking lecture given by Mary Beard for the LRB a week or so ago and one well worth thinking about. In it she discusses the way in which women’s voices are excluded by a range of factors from the general (and socio-political) discourse. She talks about how in antiquity ‘A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman. ’ and how a raft of gendered assumptions entered into the picture (low voices – manly, courage, high pitched voices – unmanly, cowardice, etc). Her argument is multilayered. She notes that:

This is the tradition of gendered speaking – and the theorising of gendered speaking – of which we are still, directly or more often indirectly, the heirs. I don’t want to overstate the case. Western culture doesn’t owe everything to the Greeks and Romans, in speaking or in anything else (thank heavens it doesn’t; none of us would fancy living in a Greco-Roman world). There are all kinds of variant and competing influences on us, and our political system has happily overthrown many of the gendered certainties of antiquity.

And this has both a political aspect and a very contemporary social media one…

Of course, we don’t talk in those bald terms now. Or not quite? For it seems to me that many aspects of this traditional package of views about the unsuitability of women for public speaking in general – a package going back in its essentials over two millennia – still underlies some of our own assumptions about, and awkwardness with, the female voice in public. Take the language we still use to describe the sound of women’s speech, which isn’t all that far from James or our pontificating Romans. In making a public case, in fighting their corner, in speaking out, what are women said to be? ‘Strident’; they ‘whinge’ and they ‘whine’. When, after one particular vile bout of internet comments on my genitalia, I tweeted (rather pluckily, I thought) that it was all a bit ‘gob-smacking’, this was reported by one commentator in a mainstream British magazine in these terms: ‘The misogyny is truly “gob-smacking”, she whined.’ (So far as I can see from a quick Google trawl, the only other group in this country said to ‘whine’ as much as women are unpopular Premiership football managers on a losing streak.)

In a context like this it becomes a situation where for women the very act of speaking becomes one which is hedged in by this tangle of preconceptions, assumptions and diversions so that the essence of that speech, the message that is sought to be imparted is lost entirely, or at the very least muted. And we’ve all seen this, the unconscious and sometimes conscious marginalization of women in discussion and debates, the tendency to defer to men, to seek the ‘last word’ from them. My thought was that if they didn’t get how problematic that was then chances are they didn’t get anything at all.
One of my least cherished moments was at a meeting of politicians – all supposedly ‘progressive’ – where as a bystander I saw what could only be described as the males overdosing on their own testosterone and the females sitting impatiently waiting for them to be done. What was remarkable to me was that rather than a discussion of equals it was one where there was a meta discussion taking place between the men and directed to one another in the form of jokes and asides and the more serious formal discussion – engaged in by the women – was effectively sidelined.
Which means that when Beard asks the following it resonates with me very strongly:

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say. It’s an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere (people ‘whinge’ over things like the washing up); it trivialises their words, or it ‘re-privatises’ them. Contrast the ‘deep-voiced’ man with all the connotations of profundity that the simple word ‘deep’ brings. It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they don’t hear a voice that connotes authority; or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it; they don’t hear muthos. And it isn’t just voice: you can add in the craggy or wrinkled faces that signal mature wisdom in the case of a bloke, but ‘past-my-use-by-date’ in the case of a woman.

I hope that last is changing, if only very slightly and with agonising slowness, and there may be a few straws in the wind that indicate that it is. It’s difficult to judge – and I have to be careful that my own age doesn’t inflect my observations here – but it does seem that older women are becoming an increasing part of the societal backdrop and where – for example in the media, when their voices and faces are excluded there is much more a recognition of same and a backlash against it.

Beard also points to the way in which some women negotiate this issue – and in my view, rightly points to the enormous problematical aspects of same.

Those who do manage successfully to get their voice across very often adopt some version of the ‘androgyne’ route, like Maesia in the Forum or ‘Elizabeth’ at Tilbury – consciously aping aspects of male rhetoric. That was what Margaret Thatcher did when she took voice training specifically to lower her voice, to add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked. And that’s fine, in a way, if it works, but all tactics of that type tend to leave women still feeling on the outside, impersonators of rhetorical roles that they don’t feel they own. Putting it bluntly, having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.

But then as has been evident all too often online it’s often irrelevant whether a woman adopts a certain persona and role or not but the very fact that she is a woman. As evidenced by social media:

Some of these same issues of voice and gender have to do with internet trolls, death-threats and abuse. We have to be careful about generalising too confidently about the nastier sides of the internet: they appear in many different forms (it’s not quite the same on Twitter, for example, as it is under the line in a newspaper comment section), and criminal death threats are a different kettle of fish from merely ‘unpleasant’ sexist abuse. Many different people are the targets, from grieving parents of dead teenagers to ‘celebrities’ of all kinds. What is clear is that many more men than women are the perpetrators of this stuff, and they attack women far more than they attack men (one academic study put the ratio at something like 30 to 1, female to male targets). For what it’s worth (and I haven’t suffered anything like as much as some women), I receive something we might euphemistically call an ‘inappropriately hostile’ response (that’s to say, more than fair criticism or even fair anger) every time I speak on radio or television.

That statistic alone, if accurate or even if only half or a quarter or a tenth accurate, of 30:1 attacks online on women is dispiriting in the extreme. And it raises a parallel question, what is wrong with men (and a small minority of women) who carry them out? What is it in their psychological make up that they feel it is appropriate to act in ways that offline would be regarded as sociopathic at best? And worse still, what of this attitude inflects their offline interactions with women?

And Beard makes some very pertinent points about the reality as against the perception of social media and its effectivity and those who use it for hateful purposes:

It’s driven, I’m sure, by many different things. Some of it’s from kids acting up; some from people who’ve had far too much to drink; some from people who for a moment have lost their inner inhibitors (and can be very apologetic later). More are sad than are villainous. When I’m feeling charitable I think quite a lot comes from people who feel let down by the false promises of democratisation blazoned by, for example, Twitter. It was supposed to put us directly in touch with those in power, and open up a new democratic kind of conversation. It does nothing of the sort: if we tweet the prime minister or the pope, they no more read it than if we send them a letter – and for the most part, the prime minister doesn’t even write the tweets that appear under his name. How could he? (I’m not so sure about the Pope.) Some of the abuse, I suspect, is a squeal of frustration at those false promises, taking aim at a convenient traditional target (‘a gobby woman’). Women are not the only ones who may feel themselves ‘voiceless’.

Beard draws a line between the societal exclusion of the female voice and online media and the offline world too. And again she makes a clear point about the political aspect of this.

But the more I have looked at the threats and insults that women have received, the more I have found that they fit into the old patterns I’ve been talking about. For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it, it’s the fact you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves. They include a fairly predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder and so forth (I may sound very relaxed about it now; that doesn’t mean it’s not scary when it comes late at night). But a significant subsection is directed at silencing the woman – ‘Shut up you bitch’ is a fairly common refrain. Or it promises to remove the capacity of the woman to speak. ‘I’m going to cut off your head and rape it’ was one tweet I got. ‘Headlessfemalepig’ was the Twitter name chosen by someone threatening an American journalist. ‘You should have your tongue ripped out’ was tweeted to another journalist. In its crude, aggressive way, this is about keeping, or getting, women out of man’s talk. It’s hard not to see some faint connection between these mad Twitter outbursts – most of them are just that – and the men in the House of Commons heckling women MPs so loudly that you simply can’t hear what they’re saying (in the Afghan parliament, apparently, they disconnect the mics when they don’t want to hear the women speak). Ironically the well-meaning solution often recommended when women are on the receiving end of this stuff turns out to bring about the very result the abusers want: namely, their silence. ‘Don’t call the abusers out. Don’t give them any attention; that’s what they want. Just keep mum,’ you’re told, which amounts to leaving the bullies in unchallenged occupation of the playground.

It’s misogynistic process where such behaviours are if not excused allowed to persist.

She doesn’t offer a clear path forward, perhaps because there isn’t one. Instead she argues that:

We need to think more fundamentally about the rules of our rhetorical operations. I don’t mean the old stand-by of ‘men and women talk different languages, after all’ (if they do, it’s surely because they’ve been taught different languages). And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that we go down the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ route. My hunch is that if we’re going to make real progress with the ‘Miss Triggs question’, we need to go back to some first principles about the nature of spoken authority, about what constitutes it, and how we have learned to hear authority where we do. And rather than push women into voice training classes to get a nice, deep, husky and entirely artificial tone, we should be thinking more about the faultlines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.
…
What I’m pointing to here is a critically self-aware ancient tradition: not one that directly challenges the basic template I’ve been outlining, but one that is determined to reveal its conflicts and paradoxes, and to raise bigger questions about the nature and purpose of speech, male or female. We should perhaps take our cue from this, and try to bring to the surface the kinds of question we tend to shelve about how we speak in public, why and whose voice fits. What we need is some old fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it. We need to work that out before we figure out how we modern Penelopes might answer back to our own Telemachuses – or for that matter just decide to lend Miss Triggs some hairpins.

Consciousness raising. Questioning the fault lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse. And all that those entail. Her vision and her part-solution are egalitarian and necessary. They link into clearly progressive areas but they remained focus on one key issue in a structure that is by any standard oppressive/repressive.