"Just as Valley Girls are perceived as overly feminine and submissive, Creaky Girls may be seen as overly masculine and derisive," she wrote. Those subjective social evaluations include judging women's voices for not fitting the womanly ideal, as Slate's Amanda Hess noted on the subject of creaky vocal fry. "But there is also evidence that our assessments of vocal attractiveness also relate to more subjective social evaluations."Īlthough Babel didn't comment on whether such findings apply equally to men and women with high-pitched voices (hello, Fran Drescher and Janice!), research on so-called " baby voice" and the female phenomenon known as vocal fry indicates that men are just as sensitive to women's voices as women are to men's - even if they're not judged quite the same. "There is some evidence out there that, yes, women like male voices that suggest a larger physical size," Molly Babel, a linguistics professor at the University of British Columbia, told Mic. Sorry, Darth.īut it's not just evolution that influences our judgments. A 2013 study took it further and concluded that women preferred men with deep voices because they associated them with bigger, stronger bodies.Īnd in what is perhaps the most disheartening study of all, 2014 research published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior determined that men who try to manipulate their voices in hopes of sounding more attractive to women were unsuccessful. Part of this stems from biology: A 2012 Scientific American article, for instance, cites plenty of research suggesting that there's a strong positive correlation between deep voices and overall testosterone levels, which many women find attractive.
Nonetheless, research suggests that on the whole, humans do prefer men with deep, resonant voices to those with higher, more tinny ones. Why are we so shallow when it comes to high voices? If all of this sounds painfully sexist and archaic, that's because it kinda is. Much like wedding traditions or high school proms or The Bachelorette, it seems that our voice preferences are rooted in the restrictive gender archetypes dictating that men are supposed to be deep-voiced and brawny, while women are supposed to have soft, feminine voices. "I don't mean to sound basic, but I want someone to be manly-sounding. "It made me think of a cartoon character, and I just got even more turned off," she said. She wasn't sure if she was attracted to the guy in the first place, but his voice was the straw that broke the camel's back. Justine*, a 27-year-old lawyer in Los Angeles, also told Mic that she recently nixed a potential suitor based on similar grounds. I shouldn't have focused on it at all, but I had had such an expectation leading up to the date that I couldn't shake it."Įmma's is not an isolated incident. "But it wasn't the deep, rugged voice I was expecting. "His voice wasn't freakishly high," she told Mic.