since I can remember I've been told that I have a gay voice and the internet loves to tell me that I sound like the honey badger oh the honey badgers are just crazy so is there such a thing as a gay voice like is it quantifiable if we take out all the slay Boots the house down and remove any visual or behavioral Clues could you still tell surprisingly science has a lot to say about it gr ba get out get out get out in order to study gay versus straight voices researchers look at parameters such
as pitch variation like how much a person's pitch changes as they talk duration values for vowels and consonants AKA how long people hold their AE i o o sounds or how long people hold their S's and some studies just straight up get random people to listen to people talk and try to judge whether they thought that person speaking was gay or straight results find that gay men speak with higher pitch variation meaning that their range from low to high is much more extreme than men not surprised we have range honey these pitch studies were done
in many languages like English Dutch and French and in all cases gay men spoke with higher pitch variation meaning the gay voice expands Beyond language and isn't just the words or culture we engage in gay men were also found to have longer vowel durations for a i and U AKA they hold these vowels longer in general when they speak compared to straight men but gay men are also more likely to hold their s sound for longer than straight people gay people holding their s for longer may make you think of the quintessential like gay lisp
which is very triggering to me like as a kid everyone would always make fun of me and say I sounded like Super Silly Billy so sadly there is some truth to like those bullies making fun of me about that but it's also a common misconception because a lisp is when you mis articulate your 's whereas gay people are more likely to over articulate the s in fact studies show that gay men are no more likely to have a lisp than straight finally when studying gay versus straight men it was found that gay men were more
likely to articulate than straight men which totally makes sense to me all my straight guy friends was like oh hey man do you want to like hang out on like do something I'm was like okay what because of these findings it was hypothesized that perhaps the vocal differences between straight and gay men were due to hormones like differences in testosterone possibly but after studying this it was found that gay men have just as much testosterone as straight men so instead researchers began looking into environmental differences as a possible explanation it turns out both gay men
and straight men change their voice based on who is listening yes straight men will modulate their voice based on who is listening to One study found straight men would speak more stereotypically masculine to strangers than to people they were comfortable with straight men would lower their voice when speaking in leadership roles when giving orders or commands and they would also lower their voice in the presence of an attra itive woman gay men changed their voice too but under different circumstances one study found gay men who disliked sounding gay were able to modulate their voice to
sound more straight and were more likely to be mistaken as straight by listeners a tie study found that gay people changed their voice depending on if they're talking to friends co-workers or their family members they tend to use the most falsetto voice speech or upper vocal range when talking to friends an Italian study also found that gay man would sound more gay when they were talking to somebody they already came out to or if they were speaking to somebody who they presumed was gay a really fascinating study on gay youtubers found that after making a
public coming out video on YouTube their subsequent videos were more likely to be perceived by people as sounding gay whereas straight Youtubers of the same age over that same time period would end up sounding more straight to people the gay one sounded more gay over time this has led to a theory that sounding gay is an adaptation of gay men to allow others around them to know that they are in fact gay but this isn't set in stone it's important to note that while some people may feel gay men talk more like women the research
doesn't fully support this idea there are some syllables and ways that we speak that are similar to women but gay voice has its own unique characteristics as well in other words it adopts some female features but others are completely unrelated but what about our dear lesbian friends and other queer people we haven't forgot about you while there is less research on it Studies have found unique characteristics of lesbian voices but they're far less socially noticed than gay male speech of course many straight men can sound gay and gay men can sound straight but studies show
there is a difference in speech that will change based on who was listening to you how you're perceived will also relate to like your mannerisms you know I talk with my hands a lot the way you dress it's a large callar for a straight guy I must say and is all weaves together to create the complexity of speech in relation to sexual fluidity but what about gay face can you tell somebody's gay just from looking at their face we actually have an entire podcast episode diving into the science of gayface on our side note podcast
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