Help me settle a bet plz
Think about the first time you heard your voice recorded. It probably felt wrong and you probably felt some sort of discomfort. There was nothing wrong with your voice. It’s how everyone else heard you all the time. But you heard it and you expected to hear yourself and you heard something that was just… off.
That experience, the experience of misaligned identity, isn’t something that can be recognized by analyzing the formants or resonance of your voice. It’s not a property of the voice. You might be able to pull apart the frequencies between a bone mic recording and a room mic recording of you saying the same thing and see what makes the resonance different. But the experience exists subjectively. You couldn’t look at a frequency and say, “that’s the one that made me anxious”
Actually I’ve never had that recording discomfort. My voice sounds different from inside than from outside just like everyone else’s, but it has never sounded ‘wrong’ to me. Though I get that’s a very common experience and understand where you’re coming from.
That doesn’t really get me any closer to understanding what a man is supposed to be.
Dammit, and that’s the first time I used that analogy too. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help
I’m trying to understand though. Do you mean that being a man is kinda just vibes like the unclear qualities which make someone happy or unhappy with the sound of their voice? That to be a man is to be content with the idea of being seen as a man?
Because though I can’t speak from experience, I feel like I could equally easily accept being seen as a man or woman. Like if I grew up being told I was a man and that some men just happen to have my body parts and that I’m expected to be boyish/manly and take an interest in masculine things, I don’t think that would ever have made me uncomfortable. I’d have the same mix of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine interests that I have now and probably have eventually settled on presenting my appearance basically the same way I do now. But I’d go by different pronouns.
