From Bekah appearing on a missing persons list (only to be found hiking on a marijuana plantation farm) to Corrine’s comparisons between her heart of gold and platinum “vagine” – Bachelor nation thought they had seen and heard it all. That was maybe true…until last year’s most dramatic season of the Bachelor, where a contestant was not only disliked because of her catty attitude towards others, but also her voice. For those of you reading this that haven’t figured out who is being referenced here, it’s none other than: Krystal Nielson.
Jimmy Kimmel has gone as far as declaring her voice “the single most annoying […] in television history”. He later commented on it saying her voice was like “the song the mermaids sing that makes you want to crash your ship into a pile of rocks”. Typically, the siren song meaning was about how the female voice was so majestic that it had the power to lure people in, causing them to lose control. However, in this example, it is used to indicate the opposite and implies that people would willingly want to crash their boats in order to make it stop. (Pretty big statement if you ask me).
Brian Petty, a speech pathologist, suggests that Krystal’s voice annoyed people because she had an exaggerated prosody. He adds “prosody is defined loosely as the variation in pitch that happens within the context of a sentence. We can manipulate prosody to express emotion, or emphasize certain words within a sentence”. So, depending on where Krystal chose to put emphasis on certain words when talking to other contestants and during her video diaries, this could be an explain why she received a lot of criticism in the Bachelor mansion, on talk shows, and social media. Petty notes that exaggerated prosody “can sometimes make a listener think that the speaker is mocking them or being sarcastic”. In other words, Krystal made people feel like she was talking down to them.
A lot of fans went into a frenzy when Krystal took the hot seat during the “Women Tell All” episode and noticed that her “Valley Girl” accent had disappeared. Many took their concerns and conspiracy theories to twitter to question whether the producers of the show had asked her to use this accent to generate more buzz in the media or if she had done so on her own free will.
I think that there is something larger at play here and deserves our attention. We need to acknowledge that Krystal Nielson experience is not unique. In fact, the historical perception of female voices in patriarchal societies have been used for centuries to perpetuate negative gendered stereotypes.
Anne Carson notes that “according to the sounds people make we just them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlike to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God” (119). The ideology behind voice performance and its relation to subjectivity enables society to judge a person based on their tone, accents, as well as several other technical features of speech. For instance, Aristotle believed that the high pitched female voices were associated with an evil nature and that individuals who shared these traits embodied some form of madness and witchery (Carson, 120). On the other hand, deeper voices are perceived as brave and heroic. Hence, why Margaret Thatcher trained for years with vocal specialists to manipulate her voice and make it sound more authoritative so she would earn the respect from the public and her opponents (Carson, 120). And maybe why Krystal felt the need to change her voice after receiving all kinds of backlash from the media???
Subjectivity is an assortment of opinions, experiences, personal or cultural understandings, and set of beliefs unique to each individual. Voices can be a way through which subjectivity is constructed as it is a mechanism that influences, informs, and enables the creation of negative gendered stereotypes. No one truly gave Krystal a chance to break away from the stereotypes attached to her “Valley Girl” accent. Instead we (myself included) liked, retweeted, and shared video clips like Jimmy Kimmel’s that further perpetuate this divide between genders. The next time you see something on the internet, urging you to use notions you have about voice performance (or anything for that matter), stop to look at the bigger picture.
Or maybe I’m completely wrong about all of this and am just salty because people say I have a “Valley Girl” accent…
Carson, Anne. “The gender of sound.” Thamyris1.1 (1994): 10-31.
https://search.proquest.com/docview/194882980?pq-origsite=gscholar
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