House of Eratosthenes

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

It is a conscious assault upon male things…or an unconscious one. Most likely a sloppy hodge-podge of those two. Being a resident of Folsom, I decided a month ago I’d left my own observations unmentioned plenty long enough:

The patchwork-quilt of [F]olsom is polka-dotted with parks of varying size, and being a parent myself I get to watch lots of parents interact with their children.
:
Fathers…and mothers…modulate their voices way, way upward. Several octaves in the case of the gentlemen. It does not sound like me telling my kid to keep his feet on the pedals. It does not lack a declarative tone at the end, like the Castrati described by Van der Leun. They declare things. They just declare them in this weird, other-worldly, somniferous voice. Kind of like Marvin the Martian. Except Marvin the Martian sounds like an opera baritone compared to this.

Victor Davis Hanson, last week, got in on the act (he must’ve been reading Gerard’s blog because nobody reads this one!):

Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience.

And now the eggheads have done their studies on exactly this thing. To whatever extent you allow eggheads to tell you what the girls want, it would seem the girls are starting to place a premium value upon that which is, according to the observations of the three of us, in a state of wane:

While Justin Timberlake’s high-pitched voice may be music to many female ears — it seems women actually prefer men with raspier, deeper voices like that of Sean Connery.

A study, done by researchers from Harvard University and Ontario’s McMaster University, found women are attracted to deeper voiced partners, which experts claim indicate dominance and good genes, the Daily Mail reported.

For the study, anthropologists and psychologists from the two universities studied 88 members of the Hadza tribe in Tanzania.

They found that when women are at their most fertile, they are attracted to deeper voiced partners because they are considered to be better hunters who offer more protection, the newspaper reported.

In fact, women are only attracted to higher pitched male voices when they are at their least fertile, such as when they are breast feeding, researchers said.

The findings, published in the British medical journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, go on to say: “Voice pitch may be an indicator of underlying mate quality in humans. Vocal attractiveness is correlated with body and facial attractiveness.”

Now, I’m no egghead; I don’t have sheepskin on the wall or a white lab coat or a pocket protector to put in the lab coat or a propeller beanie I can wear on my head. I may have picked up a thing or two about how to work with statistics, but I don’t apply it to my “research,” which amounts to nothing more than looking around at people, watching the idjit box, not being afraid to use the word “whenever” or to remember things like Hanson does.

Nevertheless — my “research” has noted there is a strong correlation between these cultural enclaves in which higher pitches are used for what passes through the masculine voice box, and lower standards in defining what is, or might be, a threat. No, not so much lower standards. Confusion. You know what I mean. Wherever people who mean to harm others, are perceived not to, and people who only mean to harm those who do harm, are perceived to be out of control and dangerous.

Social circles in which Denny Crane would be the “bad” guy…

These are bubbles of thought in which I notice the masculine voice starts to rise……..? And I would extend that into the playgrounds in which I see the daddies talking like Mariah Carey. I’m just going to assume, and I’m not going out on a limb here, that these daddies-and-kids come from households in which masculinity is regarded as a useless burden, an intrusive threat, or both. So daddy talks high, like mommy. Who wants to threaten his own kid? I don’t think this is conscious. I think this is an evolutionary trait — when the village imposes a new criteria for belonging, people who live within it start working like the dickens, to belong. Gals are better at this than guys are, but guys are improving their chameleon skills as they become more feminine. Spending more of their time within the walls of the village, as opposed to outside, where they used to be, running around in their loincloths hunting for rapidly-moving, sneaky, tasty things.

I find it interesting the eggheads have started to pick up on this conflict. The conflict will no doubt unfold, in the years ahead, becoming more and more effervescent…I find that interesting too.

What I find most interesting of all, is that the two juxtaposed and contradictory forces in this conflict — men talk high, men talk low — are both provided by the preferences of the females. Females, as we’ve said many a time before here at The Blog That Nobody Reads, are individuals just like anybody else. They are not of one mind. And the female individuals part company on whether or not it’s a good thing that men are different from them, and can do things they cannot…write something in the snow, open a pickel jar, grow all kinds and types of hair on the face.

There are women who get agitated just thinking about it. And still prefer the company of “men.” Quasi-men. And they manage to find some. The poor bastards.

There are other women who practice viva la difference. They may be conservative, they may be liberal, they may go hunting for moose, they may have spent their entire lives indoors.

What should men do? My advice is the same for all men, whether they’re looking for a nice lady, or are already happy with the one they got. Just talk the way you naturally talk. If your voice is, indeed, two octaves above Middle C, then by all means talk that way — but I don’t think it is.

Save the question-mark-on-the-end for occasions on which it belongs there. Learn to declare things. I’m convinced, at this point, and with the passage of time I’m only becoming moreso…this has a direct bearing on how a man thinks. Some things are open to question, others are not, and the guys I’ve met who talk like women, seem to have a profound weakness for intellectually regarding matters closed that, in fact, are. They seem to live in this mind-falsetto world in which everything’s open to question, constantly. That isn’t good. And no, I’m no longer willing to entertain any further thought or pondering about that. Dammit.

In short, just follow the advice of this guy…

I’ll tell you another thing you can look forward to, based on what we watched in the 70’s: increasing numbers of “women” convincing the society at large that they really want “more sensitive men”, while cheating on their husbands/boyfriends with “bad boys”. In the language of that time, “They say they want Alan Alda, but they always leave with John Wayne.” Substitute whatever surreal images of manhood seem to express your particular age range or generation.

Another thing I must add, as I contributed on the VDH thread, is this: I am a bass-baritone, and have been fortunate to spend some of my life being encouraged to use my full voice. I’ve also known many tenors who were extremely masculine. Pitch is not the issue, pussification is.
- rob | 12/03/2008 @ 15:50
Wow – I’ve never watched Boston Legal. Guess I’m going to have to add some DVDs to the Netflix queue…
- Daniel | 12/05/2008 @ 00:49
[…] speak in phony falsetto. They make a point of never, ever making any declarative statement about anything, other than that […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/27/2010 @ 06:26

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The Male VoiceWednesday, December 3rd, 2008

The Male Voice
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008