Greetings from the land of lady-robot voices
Sexual stereotypes were bad before the Stepford Wives invaded our digital technology. Now what?
My eight-year-old daughter leaned forward from the back seat: “Will the lady tell us when we get there?” What she meant was, will the car’s GPS nav system indicate when we’d arrived at our destination, but because of its female voice, she understood it as a “lady.” I did the same thing shortly after we got our Google Home Assistant speaker: I wondered aloud if “she” would ever object to a song request, as in “Kid, you’ve listened to ‘Hurt Feelings’ by Flight of the Conchords eight times today. You’re cut off.”
No, of course she won’t object. Her job is always to give us what we want, even if it’s unreasonable: my 13-year-old son breezed by the speaker, calling out “Hey Google — how many fingers am I holding up?” She didn’t miss a beat: “Fourteen. Wait … that can’t be right.” Despite being asked an impossible question, she came up with a satisfying answer: a punchline! Oh, how she satisfies!
And if she can’t give us what we ask for, she apologizes: “I’m sorry — I’m not sure how to help,” or “My apologies — I don’t understand,” or “Sorry — I can’t help you with that,” are just three of her many mea culpas. Oh, she has so many ways of apologizing! And yet nothing is her fault! Any breakdown in the question-answer procedure is the fault of the person who asked for something that can’t be done or of the technology that has promised the moon but failed to deliver.
Amazon’s robot speaker, Alexa, bears the same pliant, agreeable brand of female voice, as does Apple’s Siri. I remember Emily, Bell Canada’s phone answering system launched in 2003; she had that same voice — most phone systems do. It’s everywhere. News about a sex doll brothel opening in Toronto (since cancelled) made me wonder if its high-tech dolls would have voices, and if so, would they sound like Siri, Alexa and Emily?
Yes, I just wrote a column about our new Google speaker and its surprisingly feminist design and functions, but that voice ... that voice. As our lives are increasingly populated with female-vocalized devices, we need to understand how they build on a foundation of sexism: we’ve long been habituated to think of the natural, rightful female identity as one that’s perpetually available, accepting and biddable.
In her recent book “That’s What She Said …” Joanne Lippman chronicles the many ways in which one can see the effects of this identity. She writes that in one U.S. study, men were three times more likely to interrupt women than other men in meetings; the few women who interrupted cut in on other women 87 per cent of the time.
A Northwestern University analysis of American Supreme Court arguments over 12 years found that the three female justices were interrupted three times more than their male counterparts. Legions of lady robot voices whose sole purpose is to wait silently, and to speak only when spoken to, only deepen our disrespect for the female voice.
Moreover, Lippman describes several studies that have shown how intolerant people are when women step outside the model of the eternally pleasant and reserved lady person: when professional men get angry in the context of work, their co-workers respect them more.
When professional women get angry at work, however, people respect them less. If a woman gets angry, it’s perceived as a personal failing whereas if a man gets angry, the cause is put down to something external, like things going wrong at work. One American study analyzing a set of performance reviews found that women were frequently described as “strident,” “abrasive,” “judgmental” and “irrational” — personal criticisms levelled at only two of the 102 men but at 71 of the 75 women.
It’s classic conditioning: the lady robot version of womanhood is so familiar to us that when we’re confronted with an actual woman who dares to speak for herself, unbidden and/or in opposition, we’re unsettled on an unconscious level: “What’s wrong with this woman? Why is she doing this? This is not normal.” (Actually, a lot of us are probably unsettled on a conscious level too.)
Though the real woman may only be expressing an alternative opinion or simply be in a leadership role, the contrast to our ideas about the submissive acquiescent female throw her into high relief — she becomes “combative,” “ranting” and “bitchy” (unfortunately but not surprisingly, I’m cribbing these three from my own personal history … really I’m an exceedingly charming lady person).
So, yes: things were bad enough before the Stepford Wives came to inhabit the technologies of our daily lives. Now what?
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communications; her writing has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print news for 25 years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.