The Male Britney, Katy, and Beyonce

Maura Johnston , a music writer for the Village Voice,  posted a link on her Tumblr to a site called Voice of Men, which is really the voices of popular female singers pitched so they sound like men, except they don't. Sort of. She adds:

As the person who alerted me to it noted, “The male voice allows us to more clearly see the feminine singing styles and vocal tics that we take for granted in women.” So true.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call them "female vocal tics," but the inflection, phrasing, and timbre in most women's singing (and speaking) voices in different enough from men's that just lowering the pitch doesn't make women "sound like men." Of course, a lot of this can be chalked up to female pop singers' pressure to "sexy it up," but I think it says more about the way women's speech is allowed to be, or is even expected to be, expressive in a way that men's speech isn't.

It also reminds me of John Oswald's "Pretender" in which he takes Dolly Parton's voice from treble all the way to bass, essentially "masculinizing" her in contrast to her hyper-feminine, campy sex appeal. When I first heard it, I thought, "Ha, she sounds just like... Cher." Then it just got weird.



Deeper, darker women's voices still sound "female," to our ears they're still within the range of what "a woman's voice" is supposed to sound like. As steeped as that is in gender essentialism, it's a large part of why we're so confused when someone steps out of that box.

Haters

Last week Feministe linked to a post Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle wrote about Katy Perry -- specially how Katy Perry is bad for feminism. I'm not here to argue that. I'm so far from Katy Perry's target audience, I should be worrying about her influence on my daughter (if I had one) than her influence on me. I do want to talk about the discussion that followed, particularly the idea of "hating" a celebrity.

You can't really "hate" a celebrity. In essence, what you're really hating is that celebrity's brand. And you know, that's okay. And it doesn't hurt the sisterhood or anything if you hate an artist whose brand promotes tired old tropes about women's bodies or psyches. Hate on.

I think this is one of those areas where I really feel some sort of generational disconnect: the idea that women can't, or shouldn't, hate one another. Or (lately) that criticizing another women automatically brands you a "hater." I see this a lot in the feminist blogosphere and I always want to scream "You can hate! It's really okay!"



I kind of think of "haters" as the continuation of the old stereotype "she doesn't like me; therefore, she must be jealous." Though I absolutely do not believe that "hating on" someone is motivated by jealousy, jealous itself is another thing I wish were okay to own up to. I'm jealous. I'm jealous of others' success. I'm jealous of bloggers who can write 5000+ word posts in less than a hour and have them be free of typos and grammar gaffes. (Even if I hire a secretary, I'll never be that person.) It's not jealousy that's wrong, it's what you do with it.