It comes around and around. Vocal fashions of teenage girls cause consternation. Remember the handwringing over uptalk (HRT)?
In fact, I think there's a lot of the anti-HRT sentiment at work in vocal-fry. Girl's being told that high rising tonation is bad, so no wonder they ground out at the bottom of their range.
Women can't win. Not too high, don't push low, don't use like. And so on.
Men also fry, btw, you'd just be hard pressed to find a handwringing article decrying that.
It's a preference, not prejudice. Prejudice would be if you see a person and assume they speak a certain way based on other characteristics like age, race, gender, or appearance.
But if you actually hear them speak and don't like their voice, that's not prejudice.
When you describe the natural sound of someone's voice as if it were pathological or the product of incompetent mic/broadcast technique, you're moving past "preference" and into something darker.
Maybe, but the style in question is cultivated. I don't think it's prejudice if you don't like the way Coltrane plays the sax. I feel the same way if you don't like some person's intentional vocal affectations.
It's the notion that "vocal fry" is an "intentional vocal affectation" that generates so much professional scorn for listeners who complain about "vocal fry".
Not sure what we are arguing about here. I don't believe any of the three myths that article purports to debunk. It's not a myth though that fry is something one does to ones own voice, intentionally or from habit. It is the same for American gay male voice: just a style of speaking, learned to conform to a peer group, and relatively easily changed even in adulthood.
Respectfully, please color me unsurprised that two traditionally marginalized groups in American culture just happen to have problematic "styles of speaking, learned to conform to a peer group, relatively easily changed".
I agree with what Alex Goldman from Reply All has to say about this phenomenon.
What reading I've done about this suggests that to the extent the phenomenon is empirically grounded at all, it applies both to men and women, while complaints about it are almost entirely gendered.
I think that's because vocal fry is usually seen as somewhat "out of place" in a female speaking voice. Few, if any, complain about male vocal fry because male voices are expected to be low and gravelly.
Preference against female vocal fry is just an nth-order effect from basic biology, and bias against females who use vocal fry is just an (n+1)th-order effect. A bias like that is often not a useful decision-making heuristic and should be checked accordingly.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your comments but it sounds like you share some of the outraged tone I read from the article you linked above, and I'm really confused as to why. It's just a thing some people do with their voices (sometimes but not always consciously) and some people do or don't like (sometimes but not always consciously). Are you saying people shouldn't care about vocal fry at all?
I also don't understand your hesitance to acknowledge the phenomenon of vocal fry. I'm not sure if these are entirely credible sources but here are some links that I found informative:
