This made me laugh like the Simpsons, showing my teeth and everything.
There’s a difference between having a higher-pitched voice and having the vocal affect of a child. The latter is usually associated with the general sickening cutesiness of personality described by Eve in her posts about Pwincess Pwecious.
I’ve learned to hold the Pwincesses of the world at arm’s length, because they’re usually covering up a spiteful catty viciousness to which I can only aspire.
This was a topic in my voice-training classes (I have an acting degree). While some women do legitimately have high voices, others learned over time to accentuate it because of the reaction it garners up until the age of, say, 22 or 23: the “take care of this little girl” phenomenon that makes inexperienced men leap to attention. After that, of course, it’s annoying, but by then they don’t know how to speak differently; it’s difficult to unlock the muscles and get the voice working “properly,” as msmith discovered with his girlfriend. With a lot of training, though, it can be done; there was a woman in my class who struggled with this, until one day, snap, the pinched tone disappeared and a “real” voice emerged, resonating in the front of her face and her chest instead of in her throat and the top of her head the way it used to. When it happened, she stopped, frozen, legitimately startled, as she couldn’t believe that sound had actually come out of her. The expression on her face was pretty funny.
I work with a woman with a childlike voice. She also giggles nervously after everything she says. She is the youngest of several children, is 15 years younger than her closest sibling in age, and has siblings who were adults when she was born. I think she was babied by not only her parents but by her siblings and she never stopped acting like a child. Men take advantage of her constantly.
She wanted to sleep with me but it was too creepy. Hearing a little girl’s voice say “I want to have sex with you” made me feel like a pervert, even though she doesn’t look like a child.
A speech therapist told me that many women speak in a higher than natural voice, and many men speak in a lower than natural voice. Gender programming.
There is a way to find out what your “natural” voice is… but I forget that part of the story. You hum or pronounce certain words or something. Perhaps Cervaise learned it in acting class and can remind me.
She - my friend the speech therapist - said I speak in a higher than natural voice, which strains my diaphragm or something. This is truly frightening, as the voice I use is a low monotone. If it was any lower, I’d sound like Ernest Borgnine groaning.
I know that I unconciously make my voice sound higher/younger when I am speaking on the phone or otherwise making some sort of polite exchange. My roommate pointed this out to me one day when she came to the bank with me. I was talking to the teller in my “polite” voice when my roomie interrupted with a question and I used my regular voice to answer her, then went back to my “polite” voice to talk to the bank teller. I also use my little girl voice when I am very tired or feel like acting like a child, especially around my boyfriend.
I remember reading that Kathy Ireland went through something similar. Her voice used to be a squeaky high-pitched annoyance, and I recently saw her in a commercial and while it’s still on the high side, it is markedly lower.
I know a woman who has 2 voices: one for when she’s talking to men (cutesy high) and another when she’s speaking to women (normal). Apparently she thinks guys like the cutsey voice. (Men I know beg to differ.)
Ah, being Deaf, this is one thing that I don’t have to deal with. But I often ask people what they sound like. Get some funny answers like, a mouse, a frog, etc.
There was a thread on her a several months back. What the heck is her name?
(The following is just a remark in general, not a reflection on anyone’s comments here.)
Please, don’t ask the person for their mommy or daddy. As hillbilly queen pointed out, it can get pretty annoying. I use my most businesslike tone on the phone because I work at home and any caller could be a client. Yet once in a great while, I am asked if my mommy or parents are home. Usually I say something like, “Well, my mother doesn’t live here, but do you think my husband could help you?” At this point there is usually flustered backpedaling, and then I say, “What is the name of the person you’re trying to reach?” and we go from there.
Just ask for the person you want to speak with, as you would normally. The person’s response will tell you if you have a six-year-old or not, and you won’t have insulted anyone.
That reminds me of the first time I whistled. I had never been able to up until the middle of one afternoon when I was in third grade. Suddenly I began whistling a high note and didn’t even notice. I got a nasty ‘stop disrupting the class’ look from the teacher (who was, incidentally, a real piece of work herself) which achieved nothing in the way of shaming me. My response was: “Wow! I’ve never whistled before!”
Not for the first time I got odd looks from my classmates.
I’ve known three adult women with “little girl” voices (actually, one sounded more like she’d been huffing helium), and that was just the way they talked. None of them were trying to seem childlike, and AFAIK none of them had been abused as children. They just had high voices…and they all got really sick of people making stupid remarks about it, too. One of them was frequently accused of intentionally putting on a falsetto, probably because she was about 6’ tall and certainly didn’t look like someone who should have the voice of a child.
Voice training can help people to speak in a different way, but some people do just have naturally high voices. This can happen to men as well as women, but men with high voices usually get “Are you gay?” rather than “How old are you?”
Of course, there are a lot of women who were abused and are not about to tell you about it. Oftentimes, they deny it to themselves, and want to speak of it as little as possible. I have one friend who I know was abused at a very young age, and she only has told 7 people this in her life, and only told me this after a Very involved friendship. She could barely say it without being taken back to the abuse, and therefore, she refused to talk about it very often.
Of course, I should point out, she had a very developed and mature voice, while her personal social development got stunted.
But If you ever listen to the call in radio show “Love Line” they immediately ask any woman with the “little girl” (not just high, but sounds like a grade school student) voice if she was abused. Often times the women deny it and later in the discussion it turns out that she was indeed, she just didn’t think it was a big deal (Often, victims of abuse think their experience was fairly normal, or that they’ve put it behind them, and it wasn’t a big enough deal to effect their lives 20 years later).
When a woman DOES call in with the little girl voice, their accuracy at pegging her as a victim of extremely young childhood abuse (like, in early developmental years, 2-8) is extremely uncanny. When I first heard them say it I thought they were talking out of their asses, but their hit rate is too amazing to just be bullshit.
That said, I doubt it’s a 1:1 relationship. I’m sure some “little girl voiced” women have had no abuse, while many abused women develop very normal voices. But from what I’ve heard on that show (which, I can’t 100% guarantee, but I have no reason to believe it’s all staged), I do believe there is tremendous overlap of these two groups of women.
Steve
There has got to be a difference between high-pitched and little-girl. Over the phone that might be harder for some telemarketer to distinguish, which is why I get asked if my parents are home.
I am quite short and have a short neck. I think it’s just the way I’m set up.
I imagine sometimes it’s also a self assurance thing. A lot of girls I’ve talked to that speak English as a second language have a quiet high pitched girlish voice b/c they’re afraid of speaking. In their natural language they sound just fine.
Well I was never molested nor do I act like a child but I have been told I sound about 12 on the phone. Likehillbilly queen I have had many people call and then ask if they can talk to my Mom. I used to tell them let me give you her number. I haven’t gotten one of those since she died. Maybe all the crying toughened the vocal cords.
On the plus side I can easily claim to be the sitter to telemarketers!
I’ve heard that as well, although what I was told was that the difference is especially pronounced in American men and women. Then again, these days people will believe anything about Americans if it’s abnormal enough. 
I’d be interested to hear more about that, if anyone knows. I have a low voice, but I have the feeling I force it upward in conversation because I used to speak in such a damn monotone.
I remember an episode of Jenny Jones (or some other talk show, I’m not certain) where they had people with little girl voices. They showed one scene where a woman tried to make a phone call to order a pizza:
“Get your mom to call us, little girl”
“I’m a 40 year old woman!”
click
Perhaps it was wrong to laugh at that, but I thought it was funny.
I’m sorrry I have a thing for women with little girl voices, I don’t know why but I do.
I’m glad someone does, MannyL. Frankly, they annoy the crap out of me.
The high pitched, shrillness of a female voice can be like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I can understand how some women never made it to the board room.
I naturally talk with an alto tone. Kinda Katie Couric-ish. I lower it when i’m being deadly serious rather than increase my pitch. I find it gets more attention and respect.