I’ve never heard of this before, but I don’t travel in Fundamentalist Christian Circles, so I guess that’s understandable.
I’ve seen several websites this morning explaining the weird voice Katie Britt used for her SOTU rebuttal as a case of “Fundie Baby Voice”, and comparing her normal speaking voice to the way she delivered the response to the SOTU.
It all sounds very weird, but believable. Has anyone else heard of this phenomenon? Can they corroborate ir?
It’s more than just the Voice, apparently. It’s the whole kitchen setting, the way she dressed, the choice of the sex abduction story (that didn’t even happen on Biden’s watch), all to subliminally suggest submissive women. Kind of like Bene Gesserit in reverse, only when they use The Voice it’s wheedling baby talk, not an imperative command voice. Only how that’s supposed to work on people not already schooled in the culture I don’t know.
A better solution might be to force the speaker to inhale sulfur hexafluoride. As they showed on The Big Bang Theory, Sulfur hexafluoride has the effect opposite to inhaling helium.
I don’t know what would happen if you made them inhale helium instead. You’d probably annoy all the dogs within earshot, and maybe somebody’s head would explode.
I noticed more than fifty years ago that some women use a different voice to talk to men than they do when only women are around. (I expect men are less likely to have the chance to notice this than women are; some women use the Voice For Men not only in direct address, but also whenever they think men are within hearing, so only women will ever hear their natural voices and only if they hear them in relatively private spaces.)
The voice such women use around men is higher pitched, more breathy, has a more tentative tone, and to my ears is overall less strong than the voice they use around women; ‘babyish’ is a fair description of it to some extent, though babies are often very much the reverse of tentative. What it is, is a voice indicating submission. The continuous smile Britt used often goes with it; it’s a smile of submission, derived not from a happy laugh but from the primate fear grin. Men also occasionally use the “nervous smile”, but it’s much more common in women, some of whom use it automatically in public even when they’re not particularly nervous; they’ve just had it ingrained in them that this is the polite expression for women to be wearing anywhere in public.
Neither the nervous smile nor the Baby Voice For Men are limited to fundamentalist women, or for that matter to Southern women; I’ve seen/heard them both occasionally in women native to the Northeast or to other continents entirely, not all of them fundamentalists. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re much more common among fundamentalists, possibly even being required by some groups. I doubt Britt has the faintest idea why she’s being called out and mocked for them; she may well think this is utterly normal, and that the women she’s around (in Congress, even if she isn’t around them otherwise) who don’t do this are being deliberately rude: just as some people from the South think New Yorkers are rude because of the different speed and intonation of speech.
One of the sites I link to shows her speaking at the post-SOTU and also in “normal conversation”, recorded earlier. I note that there are definitely men around, so she’s not invariably using Babyspeak around men. The implication the sites give is that the use of this high-register voice is deliberate , just as the venue (kitchen!) and topics were.
Some weird shit. I’d heard it before but never connected it to right-wing Christian culture. Now that I think about it every time I’ve heard this voice it came from this sub-culture.
So i’ve never heard of this a political thing, or associated with the American evangelical movement. FWIW I have heard people (but thats more “people down the pub” than “experts in the field who know what they are talking about”) claim adults having a very childlike voice is a sign of past childhood abuse. Make of that what you will.
I’ve only seen clips of the Katie Britt response, but I’ll tell you what her performance reminded me of. There’s a commercial that comes on the cable channels every so often, urging people to donate to save suffering animals who are the victims of cruelty and neglect. And the voice-over for that commercial is so over-the-top emotional, in a way that I assume is supposed to communicate “I’m overwhelmed by how awful this is and we need to do something about it” but that I find very off-putting. And that’s the vibe I was getting from Katie Britt: that she was trying to convince us that the Biden presidency was overwhelmingly awful and we need to do something about it.
I know the voice very, very well, but Katie Britt is not doing the best example of it. If you really want the flavor, listen to Kelly Johnson, the Speaker’s wife, as called out by Jess Piper (for Piper’s commentary, scroll down to the TikTok video which I’m unable to embed here). Fundamentalist Christian women all over the South speak just like this, though if they have naturally strong personalities they’re able to turn it on and off like a switch. The baby version is meant to be soothing and non-threatening to men.
Are you certain it’s the same TikTok video by Jess Piper? I saw where she commented on Katie Britt on her Substack, but for Piper’s commentary on Johnson, I had to go searching for the TikTok video I remembered, linked from BoingBoing.