First, it’s important to note that women’s voices generally get more scrutiny. (Sample shaming trend piece: a 2006 New York Observer story headlined, “City Girl Squawk: It’s Like So Bad- It. Really. Sucks?”) Vocal fry, the subject of countless trend pieces and Today show segments in the last three years, is supposedly the terrible thing young women do to their voices to sound like dumb sex kittens. Remember uptalk? Before vocal fry, uptalk was the scourge of American English, in which young women would end declarative sentences with rising sounds as if they were asking a question. (As Liberman titled a 2005 Language Log post about uptalk, “This is, like, such total crap?”) The thing is, these things weren’t really new, and they weren’t exclusive to women. Here’s George W. Bush using uptalk. Here he is using vocal fry.

“There’s an idea that men and women talk differently, that men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” Fought says. “That’s really misleading. The biggest differences is in how men and women are perceived, and our ideas about how women should talk and how men should talk.” Men are supposed to be assertive, loud, and competitive. Women are supposed to be soft-spoken, cooperative, and helpful. “No matter who’s saying something, a man or a woman,” Fought says, “they’re being judged on their language via their gender.” 

Hence the extreme scrutiny for a woman politician’s voice. A fascinating anthropological document is a 2008 video of Republican pollster Frank Luntz explaining Clinton’s voice to Sean Hannity on Fox News. A clip rolls of Clinton speaking in a lecture hall with reverberation that wrecks the audio quality. Of course Clinton sounds awful. Luntz says, “Forget the words. Listen to the way she communicates. It’s ALL AT THE SAME LEVEL AND I DONT WANT TO MAKE YOUR CONTROL ROOM GO NUTS BUT IT GETS LOUDER AND LOUDER but her voice doesn’t go up or down.” Then Luntz looks like a little boy about to tell a dirty joke: “Her voice is … and we’ll end up getting hit by Media Matters, but it’s true. In the research I have done … her voice turns people off. Because they feel like they’re being lectured.” This clip exists on YouTube as “Hillary Clinton’s Voice is a Turn Off!”