notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, Martin Soto Climent, John Brown: Untitled (Colt 45), 2015, Aluminum can, plasticine, glass eye, 3 x 6 x 3 ½ inches. Via. More. Bottom, Elizabeth Jaeger, Music Stand, 2013, Hydrocal, ceramic, found clothes, shoes, synthetic hair.  Via. See also, Greer Lankton.

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Australian feminist Dale Spender theorizes that this happens because men aren’t comparing how frequently women speak to how frequently men speak; they’re comparing how much women speak to how much they think women should speak. ‘The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence,’ she explains. ‘Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.’

Anne Thériault, The real reason some men still can’t handle the all-female ‘Ghostbusters’, for The Daily Dot, July 2015. Via.

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1) Vocal fry is not gendered, but rather a generational divide

There are so many things that preceding generations see as “ridiculous”, and this linguistic tendency has become one of them, so goes this argument. Proponents of this argument think that it’s not sexist to tell people to stop using vocal fry, but that it does make us sound stupid (for some reason). Bob Garfield, of the media criticism radio show On the Media over at NPR, thinks that vocal fry is “vulgar,” “repulsive,” “mindless,” and “annoying.”

OK, but this likely strikes most women as suspicious given that these words are often used to describe women with behaviors that deviate from traditional gender roles, like the “annoying” woman with opinions, the “mindless” woman who simply lacks intelligence, the “vulgar” woman who makes bawdy jokes, or the “repulsive” woman who has sex outside of marriage. These traits are also tied to masculinity, which leads to the next argument.

Kristen Cochrane, Sounding Stupid: Vocal Fry and Girl Talk, for Slutever, July 2015.