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From Valley Girl vocal fry to fabricated baby voices, you probably spend more time dissecting the voices of famous—and infamous—women than you realize.
In 2022 the internet dedicated weeks of discourse to picking apart Julia Garner’s accent when she played Russian turned “German” grifter Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna. As part of the larger bimbo-hood reclamation, Paris Hilton recently told that her syrupy baby voice—the subject of decades of tabloid fixation—was part of a “perfect-life Barbie doll character” she created as a “trauma response” to her past. And in 2021 the voice of Amanda Gorman, “animated and full of emotion” as The New York Times described it, enchanted the nation when she read “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
From imitating cheeky Love Island villains to winding discourse about disgraced tech wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes’s deep voice, it’s clear that feminine voices influence how we perceive public women—and the amount, or lack, of power we believe them to possess.
In a shifting political landscape in which diverse women and femmes are increasingly winning seats and making themselves heard in public, famed speech coach Samara Bay, who’s worked with Gal Godot, Rachel McAdams, Ruth Negga, and more, tells Glamour that the era of “voice justice” is here, and it’s only just beginning.
In her new book Permission to Speak, Bay examines the vocal features of marginalized people who face discrimination not only for their physical identities but also for the very sound of their voice—their vernaculars and tones, as well as what those sounds project to a wider audience. By deconstructing specific intonations (the airhead Valley Girl of Clueless or Bring It On!) and poking holes in gendered biases against filler words (studies show women are disproportionately judged as less competent for hedging with like and um), Bay pushes us to rethink the oft-mocked markers of a feminine voice as the very mechanisms our ancestors developed for connection, nurturing, tenderness, and survival.
Glamour had the opportunity to sit down with Bay this month as we dove into a conversation fraught with class, race, and gender tensions all while unpacking how beautiful—and, at times, unglamorous—speaking in your power can be.
Glamour: There was a tiny switch in your voice from when we were chatting to when I asked you to start talking about your work as an author and speech coach. What does that transition mean?
Samara Bay: I think the switch that you just heard is from private to public. I’m very interested in the idea of the version of us that shows up publicly, especially for women who not even a century ago were not allowed out of the house or into the public sphere unaccompanied, let alone to speak their own convictions in front of a mixed-gender crowd. I’m so fascinated by that transition that takes place for all of us when we leave our literal houses, or our metaphorical houses if we’re going on Zoom, and scale ourselves up. The heart of my work lies in examining how those of us who want to be seen and heard at scale get in our own way—why, despite the many opportunities to practice being heard throughout our lives, we hide rather than show up.
Why do we get in our own way?
Many women and femmes have a history of speaking in our throat, which is either vocal fry (the lowest tone you can hit—think the much-ridiculed Valley Girl) or monotone. Either way, when we speak in our throat, we don’t have any pitch variation up and down, and pitch variation codes for vulnerability. If we’re not willing to vary our pitch, what we’re saying is “You can’t tell whether I care about this or not,” which is an extremely valuable defense mechanism. But it also unintentionally can make you sound untrustworthy…because who do we trust? People who will let us in. When you don’t know where someone stands, it’s more difficult to trust them.
This immediately calls to mind the Kardashian brand of vocal fry—Kim specifically. Is it possible that this family uses vocal fry, perhaps on an unconscious level, as a way of keeping their distance from the public?
Using vocal fry habitually will make us seem blasé and detached, and that is a performance of strength: It’s the opposite of vulnerability. Really, vulnerability is just showing people what we care about or, as I say in the book, the little holes in our armor. But once you show somebody what you care about, they can hurt you. For completely understandable reasons, we all have ways to hide what we care about, and one of the easiest methods at our disposal is to lay off our voice—to not breathe deeply enough, making us seem less present. But that’s not what an audience watching the Kardashians is going to think. Instead, they might think, I don’t totally get her, or, I don’t totally connect.
What does it mean that we glamorize and obsess over voices like Pamela Anderson’s and Marilyn Monroe’s, which are very characteristically breathy, soft, and high-pitched?
There’s so much data around how high-pitched voices for women are more appealing to the opposite sex, and we probably sense that on some level. But lower-pitched women’s voices are the ones who end up on all the listicles of “sexiest voices.” Amanda Montell, in her book Wordslut, suggests maybe that’s because deeper voices sound like bedroom voices. But I’m interested in the fact that neither of those voices are deemed powerful. We’re redomesticating women when we talk about their voices that way and doing so from a male gaze.
In talk-show interviews, Pamela can be very pingy, which is what we call it when your voice is positioned far forward and your mask, or your face, is vibrating. This is good: Being pingy means that you’re very present. When you’re not pingy, you sound underwater. At the same time, she’s often not using her full breath, which can result in a voice that feels a little disconnected from her body. Both her and Marilyn found a voice that worked for them. The question, then, is whether they felt trapped inside it in the end.
In the book you mention that many of us don’t know how to speak fully, or “swing our ribs wide.” Is that in part why femme-sounding voices haven’t been taken seriously in the past?
Well, a lot of us underbreathe. We do so by not intentionally using or contracting our diaphragm—this massive muscle that separates the top and bottom halves of our torso—over the course of an entire day. In that case, we’re taking shallow catch breaths in our upper body, we have a voice that’s thinner, and we have the benefit, as well as the drawback, of not digging into the lower part of our body, which is where trauma, a history of suck-in culture, all of our body issues, and a certain body wisdom lives, all of which are often inconvenient to listen to if we just want to get by. That’s the reality: These habits, which often get coded as girly or unserious, exist because we’re functioning members of a dysfunctional and misogynistic society, and we are doing what we can to get by.
Habits like upspeak or “mallspeak” (when the end of every sentence sounds like a question) are also part of the enduring reason that people discount femme-presenting people as leaders. How are we supposed to manage all of that when stepping into a room of people already prepared to dismiss us?
Some of our vocal habits are not authentically us. Maybe they’ve helped keep us small, unintimidating, or low-maintenance as a means for protection. Linguists will even say that every single habit we’ve picked up, we picked up for a reason, and the reason is not always as a response to sexism. Hedging, as I say in the book, is a generous act that softens statements, allows us to think while we speak, and signals that we’re not done speaking. It can help us negotiate sensitive topics and encourage the participation of others. It also helps us carve out asides and can be used to signal priority in sentence or work as a “trial balloon” to see how an idea is received.
Vocal fry and upspeak, meanwhile, have been said to undermine our credibility or promote immaturity, but those are also ancient tools to connect with other people: They provide social capital for young people can also signal relaxation. This can be our way of signaling that we’re part of the same club. That’s why voice variation around the world exists: It’s tribalism at its most basic. What do my people sound like? How do I belong? We are constantly making choices about what vocal tools are best at any given moment, and that agency gives us power.
When Oprah, for example, uses vocal fry in a podcast conversation, she’s surely not thinking literally about that choice. But it goes back to your question about private versus public: the Oprah that shows up in an Instagram Live that we’re allowed to listen in on is different from the Oprah speaking at the Golden Globes honoring the memory of Recy Taylor.
What would it mean for all of us to confront our voice biases?
We are talking about a mass culture-level shift in how we listen for power because this can no longer be a burden on the individuals who are already burdened because they didn’t grow up sounding like the old standard of power. Low and steady, devoid of emotion or singsongy nature…most of us don’t even want our leaders to sound like that anymore!
Take good ol’ Mike Pence in the now infamous 2020 vice presidential debate. There’s a reason the fly that landed on his head stole the show: because it seemed more real than the head it landed on. This is not to say that Pence is not a real human, but he is practiced in sounding so polished and so inauthentic that I don’t see somebody who’s showing up like a real human—on top of the fact that our values are totally unaligned. Pence represents the old sound of power: a really narrow archetype of what’s normal, that leaves most of us out and is directly connected to a white supremacist patriarchal worldview.
Pence was taking on now Vice President Kamala Harris in that debate. How do you think Kamala navigates the trap of sounding “authentic” for women and nonbinary people in positions of power?
Kamala’s voice hits a lot of different notes, and it’s certainly related to code switching—something people of color have long been unfairly forced to do to blend into predominantly white spaces. But originally as a linguistic term, code switching captured the spirit of how we shift our voices based on who we’re talking to. We don’t talk to a five-year-old like we would our mother, and we shouldn’t. When it’s not harming us or making us feel inauthentic, the ability to read a room and adjust accordingly makes us as malleable as humans actually are. Obviously, the inherent tension in the book is that one’s authentic voice is not only different for each person but can come in many forms. Ultimately, it’s up to them to decide what aspects of their voice and identity feel like nonnegotiables.
Part of what you’re naming in Kamala are the different modes of speaking that she’s picked up throughout her life. One of the things that anyone who’s gone through law school learns—especially women—is how to sound prosecutorial. For some of my clients, it’s a trap they get stuck in that feels masculine-coded and less authentic to themselves. All that to say that the voice of a femme-presenting lawyer is complicated and is often about matching norms in a school that is upholding all kinds of old-fashioned and white standards.
Why do you think the conversation around vocal bias must be had now?
What we’re actually talking about here, from an intersectional feminist lens, is voice justice. At a corporate level, there currently aren’t any antidiscrimination policies around sound. If we had that sort of language in place, perhaps when Black and brown people experience microaggressions at work related to how they speak, they could approach HR and label exactly what is happening. They could say definitively, “This is voice bias.” Businesses can’t just hire diversely; they have to listen with diverse ears, which means that there needs to be more training in different communication styles that don’t hue to the white dominant norm.
In your book you wrote, “Keep track of those who speak up in voices that seem entirely unconcerned about the old standards.” Who’s an example of one of these voices?
Lizzo is a fabulous example of somebody who we respect, who we take seriously, and who talks like herself. She talked like herself when she won the 2022 People’s Champion trophy at the People’s Choice Award and brought 17 activists of color up onstage to share the spotlight. She talked like herself in her competition series Lizzo’s Watch Out For the Big Grrrls when she’s offered advice to the competitors, being silly but fair. We see and hear so many examples of the new sound of power, but we don’t codify it, so those examples don’t get stored in our head. Instead, they just fall through like a sieve, so when each of us has the chance to speak in public, we revert back to those old standards—to 2,000-year-old Greek stoicism with no emotion. This cultural amnesia is one of the really subtle ways that patriarchy plays on us.
But we need to see and acknowledge and name Lizzo as a modern powerful voice, because that means we have a data point. We have evidence. And that allows her to give us permission to show up more fully…not like her, but like us.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
