Has anyone else noticed this weird trend in the speaking voices of younger British men? It’s as if there was a subtle agreement amongst the young men to adopt camp, effeminate vocal habits as standard. Something to do with the - entirely proper - rise of women’s liberation from societal oppression, perhaps: a signal of gay-ish harmlessness by the boys, since women often seem to find gay men less discomfiting than heteros reeking of blustering, manspaining testero-chauvinism? Or what?
I make this odd observation here because this perception has been growing on me lately. I seem to be hearing it more and more. This morning, listening to the consolidated all-channels three-minute 8AM ‘news’ bulletin on BBC Radio 3, there were no less than three male ‘correspondents’, all with variants of this same campy tone of voice.
I understand that if you live long enough, you’ll notice that the language which you learned in your youth is changing, as each generation brings its own creative inventions to the speaking of any live language, evolving it constantly.
Weirdly, the young women of the same generation seem also to be adopting little-girly voices, with a noticeably babbly quality as standard also. Western younger adults becoming Eloi, perhaps, without even noticing?
In an odd jump of association, this reminds me of an observation in a recent Dmitry Orlov essay: At the time a few years back, when there was that incursion into Europe of refugees from the Middle East, including an oddly high concentration of suspiciously fit and well-dressed young male migrants. When some of these incomers began offering sexual affronts to local women in their receiving countries, Dmitry pointed out a stark difference in the responses. In Germany, the local men seemed to be nonplussed and didn’t know what to do, even the Politzei. In Russia, by stark contrast, there was an instant spontaneous upsurge of vigilante action by Russian men of all ages, which straightened out the migrant mens’ ideas in very short order. Add to this my observation that, when watching Russian news broadcasts, as I often do, I have never once heard anyone using the campy effeminate voices which seem to be spreading in the West; very noticeably in the US also.
Russian society, of course, is much more conservative about things like gender fluidity. Stark cultural differences creating noticeably different spontaneous life-responses in their rising generation, I suppose.
Just a maithering elder’s slightly bemused, time-stamped observations. Anyone else noticed this stuff?
