Any Stupid Cheater Life Plans?

The only research I know of which relates to this is about behavioral and mental age regression in cluster B personality disorders and psychosis. But I’ve never seen any research on “accidentally effeminate voice” in age-regressing heterosexual men.

I’ve also never seen research that specifically focused on “vocal age regression” and traumatic history in women. About the closest anything has come to this was when Dr. Phil used to do a parlor trick of correctly guessing whether adult female call-in guests to his talk show had been sexually abused as children according to how infantile their voices sound (if they sounded, say, five, Dr. Phil would correctly guess the abuse began at five. If they sounded twelve, it would turn out to have begun at twelve, etc.). He got flak for purporting this because there wasn’t enough science at the time to support the idea but some professional critics still generally agreed that age regression can be part of the legacy of traumatic childhood abuse.

This was more than ten years ago and, as far as I know, there still isn’t any science on “sexy baby voice” and potential association with childhood abuse in women. I don’t know why other than the fact that, at least in women, this trait is sometimes seen as acceptable or even demanded by “dah patriarchy” (the Japanese newscaster fired in the 90s for refusing to speak in the traditional falsetto “sweet voice” expected of women in the culture which is about 80- 100 Hertz higher than natural adult female tones).

Basically it seems gender politics may be getting in the way of advancing research on vocal quality, age regression and childhood trauma and, in typical backlash form, sometimes the media puts the patriarchal defenses in the mouths of pseudo-feminist sock-puppets. For instance, there was heavy media blowback against In a World creator Lake Bell’s famous contention that there’s a “sexy baby voice” epidemic in the US that’s demeaning to women. In response, various supposed feminists accused Bell of misogyny and defended the trend of millennial women using up-speak or sexy baby tones as an expression of choice and diversity. But the media attacks on Bell gave very little mention of the pressure on women to behave “cute,” “childish” and “dependent.” There was no discussion of how men may sometimes become enraged by and punitive towards women who speak like grown-ass adults, don’t do the “up-talk” thing of framing statements as questions, etc.

In reality, it seems Western men are pretty split on whether an infantile vocal tone in women is cloying or sleazy or disturbing or “hot” and “adorable.” But personally I think it’s a moot point what anyone “feels” about it and the only thing that matters is whether it’s healthy or not, which it apparently isn’t. Leading Japanese psychologist and phonetics expert Hiroko Yamazaki has rallied for years to get women in certain Asian countries to stop speaking in this false and unhealthy way which she sees as a “betrayal of self.” Then Shakespearean vocal expert Kristen Linklater who headed departments at Julliard and Columbia (and whose book I read in college for a media class) warned that both “hyperfeminine/infantile” or “hypermasculine/gruff” manners of speaking are artifices that– like bad posture, too much plastic surgery, or wearing tight shoes– can cause irreversible deformity. She particularly warned that habitually speaking in an unnaturally high pitched or breathy voice eventually destroys the vocal cords and the same person will end up sounding like they’re gargling on gravel or cackling by middle age. Meanwhile the voices of actresses like Emma Thompson and singers like Magda Olivera (at age 100) don’t degrade with time.

So if anyone can ever get past the political clusterf*ck surrounding vocal styles and start discussing it in terms of what is actually “natural” and “healthy” in adults, maybe this could pave the way for further investigations into vocal tones from a forensic perspective.

For now there really isn’t a lot of science and I can only speculate on what I’ve seen. It’s all anecdote but consistent, like the fact that I’ve heard many domestic violence survivors report this age regression/femme vocal shift in heterosexual abusers (and saw it myself in a workplace stalker– kind of a “Pee Wee Herman” shift, shudder). Or the fact that every single normal-sized woman (as opposed to women with dwarfism) I’ve ever known who habitually spoke in an infantile voice was traumatically abused in childhood (several were even aware of the link between rape and their Minnie Mouse voices and did vocal therapy for years to get rid of the audible “scar”). And every single woman I’ve known who shifted in and out of this voice had issues with dissociative rage. That’s why I definitely think it should be studied, maybe in men especially since, statistically, rage disorders are more dangerous in men.

I totally agree that people should get a heads up that hetero men (not closeted in other words) who display this vocal shift when drunk, sexed up or angry may be dangerous. It’s just that this should always come with a giant qualifier that it has nothing to do with homosexuality or bisexuality. Again, perhaps just an accident of men subconsciously or consciously trying to sound “child-like.”

As a side note, I’d add that I once worked for a monstrous straight married boss who spoke in a slightly effeminate tone. After I quit (in horror), the guy was all over the headlines for serial rapes of minors going back twenty years. Since then I’ve also wondered if sounding “effeminate” in straight men is an accident of pedophiles trying to sound “childlike” as a means of grooming children.

It really is curious that so little science exists over such an interesting subject that has so many social ramifications. You might be able to find research and commentary on the science of voice production coming from Japan where vocal affectations can be exaggerated due to traditional cultural pressures and therefore probably easier to study. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15508599

There’s also a lot of stuff on the web from vocal coaches describing methods for trans men and women to sound more masculine or feminine and also articles warning regular Joes not to try to deepen their natural tone to sound “more manly” because it wrecks the cords (https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/how-to/masculine-voice/). Yet I can’t find anything correlating artificially masculine voice (or vocal cord injuries from same) with misogynist tendencies or abusiveness.

That might be a potential red flag: guys showing signs of vocal cord damage. But even if such correlative studies existed, I’m sure the results would be split between men who damaged their vocal cords as part of their gratuitously domineering and aggressive tendencies or those who did so as protective coloring in dangerous environments or in jobs that involve keeping other rowdy men under control.

I guess that’s always the big caveat about trying to find “objective” means to detect bad eggs. Human motivations are incredibly complicated and, throughout history, attempts to develop some objective detection system frequently led to not only failure but also injustice and atrocity. Humanity has always wished that “devils wore horns” but then who decides what constitutes good and evil? Then there’s the fact that rotten people are like viruses and mutate themselves into whatever forms will evade human defenses.

In the end, it seems like nothing replaces time and careful observation for sussing out “devils” though some current behavioral experts are developing better theories and better tools for this purpose. I think research into coercive control, among other things, is really helping to create an improved early warning system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtX-kah5phQ

Again, people don’t alter their external behavior only out of some predatory agenda but also out of fear of discrimination or trauma. Like gay men trying to pass as straight in certain circumstances to avoid bigotry or violence. Or that widdle baby voice thing. I knew two adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse who consistently spoke in tiny twee little girl voices. I gathered it wasn’t just the abuse that deformed their voices but also the general misogyny and violent hatred of adult women that hovers like a toxic gas in environments where children are being sexually preyed on (whether because perpetrators who target little girls find adult women irritatingly “useless” or because adult women and mothers often attempt to protect children and are viewed as hindrances by pedophiles who target children of any gender).

In any case, both women grew up seeing their own mothers bullied into inert puddles and getting the message that adulthood made women contemptible and even disposable (um, killable?). So clearly terror of being perceived as adult-like or competent had a lot to do with vocal quality. But the other interesting thing is that both women were, in actuality, extremely assertive, driven and successful so this left me with the impression that one of the things that influenced developing these exaggeratedly childish voices was intuitive “hypercompensation” to conceal assertive traits.

The hyper-compensation might even have been proportionate to inner assertiveness because the two women above had rather dark and aggressive tendencies at times but only when really called for (one sued a stalker, the other punched an employer who groped her and literally knocked him out cold). Unfortunately, I’ve known other women with the same kind of breathy baby voices who weren’t selectively aggressive but just generally dodgy, psycho, userish and backstabbing though the latter also never attempted to correct infantile behavior traits and instead tended to maximize those antics for gain.

Meanwhile both the women I knew were fully aware of the quirks and spent years trying to get rid of the vocal “scars” though with varying degrees of success. Despite years of psychotherapy and vocal coaching, one– a computer scientist and feminist writer– never managed to fix her voice because vocal cords can “freeze” from misuse and she lamented having to spend the rest of her life with a voice that didn’t match her intellect and personality. The other– the founder and CEO of a global company– found she could only adopt an adult tone if she spoke Italian so she actually started splitting time between countries. She’ll never sound like Helen Mirren and still has a bit of a “yappy” tone in her voice when speaking publicly but nothing like the squeaky cartoon toddler voice she used to speak in.

So the “red flags” for certain behaviors aren’t consistent, at least not for individuals who habitually speak in unnatural tones. Then it’s also a mixed bag regarding people who go in and out of radically different vocal tones. But I think the giveaway of whether this is psychopathic or protective coloring is probably the ability and willingness or inability/unwillingness to acknowledge an affectation. If someone gets angry, defensive or weirdly dissociated in reaction to even an abstract discussion about vocal affectation, vocal age regression or radical vocal shifts, look out.

But the special education attorney I hired who completely slew a rotten school attorney by turning on her breathy, ditzy Southern belle persona during a contentious meeting and then privately joked about doing it afterwards when we celebrated victory? Not only isn’t she a psycho, she’s a total hero in my book. So I tend to see behaviors (and emotions) like colors in a paint box and whether the behaviors are good or bad depend entirely on what picture is painted.

At the height of her career, I remember one reviewer saying that if Melanie Griffith regressed any more that she’d turn into a fetus.

Maybe the baby talkers tend to cluster in the more undemocratic corners of the world or industries? I worked in the ultra-rapey, top-down, male-dominated and decidedly undemocratic and feudal media industry before #MeToo and noticed especially high numbers of women who concealed raw ambition with exaggeratedly infantile behavior.

I remember having this impression when interning for certain productions where, if a guy with power and a Rolex walked through the production office, suddenly half the women would go boneless, giggly and lispy and their voices would shoot up an octave. Then the dude would leave and the same women would revert to glum monotones and shark-eyed officiousness. It reminded me of zombie films where zombies go into neutral stasis until they’re “activated” by the smell of live human brains.

I’m guessing this is either how women got past the “patriarchal” filter (stooping to conquer) and/or was a reflection of what they had to do to get or keep a job (fluffing fragile egos and dicks). It also gave me a clue that, when unchecked, sexism invariably starts to veer in the direction of pedophilia if, in order to use sex to break in and climb the ladder or simply not to be shut out, women had to act like overgrown babies.

Like I said, I knew women who just happened to talk like this because of childhood trauma but who had enough self awareness not to exhibit internalized misogyny. But I encountered far more women like this (including Griffith herself) who were nearly feral with aggression towards other women.

My experience meshes a bit with some recent studies on “hyperfemininity” or “toxic femininity” in women which correlate investment in the same exaggerated gender norms associated with “toxic masculinity” (like “women should be cute and appealing and not threatening to men”) to something called “rape myth acceptance”– i.e., the ultimate reflection of internalized misogyny. But the thing that really surprised the authors was discovering women like this– despite the latter’s belief that women are supposed to be soft and squishy– tend to be conversely more aggressive, not only to other women but towards men who fail to be knuckle-dragging and dominant enough. The type also proved to be more sexually coercive towards men, particularly in terms of using deception and manipulation but also straight out pressuring men to have sex on the view that men are supposed to “want it” all the time and, if they don’t, they’re not worthy of respect.

That might be a helpful red flag for male chumps: beware the baby-talkers or women who periodically cop infantile behavior. It’s probably also a red flag for “mate-poachers.”

As it happens, Antonia Banderas was still married to his first wife when he began messing around with Griffith who was also still married at the time herself.