Vocal Fry

As a follow-up to my piece on people reacting negatively to voices that don’t fall into the authoritative white male category, here’s a This American Life segment on the same thing:

“Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this. But we don’t get many emails like that anymore. People who don’t like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.”

The most telling moment is when Ira Glass points out that he, too, has vocal fry, but:

“I get criticized for a lot of things in the emails to the show. No one has ever pointed this out.”

Only the women.