Bless You...

I heard something today I hadn't heard in a long long time. I got a snootful of lint when I was cleaning the dryer screen and heard my sneeze.

Now, a lot of you who know me are confused. I sneeze all the damn time, how could I have not heard it in years?

It's the my part. My sneeze.

I used to have a really distinctive sneeze. I worked hard to change it after one very active spring season where I heard a client as well as a coworker both comment on it within the same week. They both said the same thing. They used the dreaded c word.

Cute.

"Oh you have such a cute sneeze."

What? Excuse me? The fuck I do.

So I worked hard to change it. To stop the little up lilt at the end. The little musical note that finished each ahh choo. It was not an easy thing to do but I did it. Or at least I thought I did.

I did the same thing as a teenager with my voice. Dropped it into a lower register when I spoke. The one thing I didn't want was a little girl voice. A breathy high pitched voice. I wanted a voice that people would take seriously. And a lower toned voice was the way to go. I hate hearing my voice in recordings because it's so much higher than what I hear in my head.

I'm not the only woman who has done this. If you get a chance to hear old recordings of Margaret Thatcher when she was younger she had a really high pitched soft voice. When you heard her at the peak of her career she did not. It was much lower. It's a thing. Do you want to be taken seriously? Get rid of the little girl baby voice.

But why?

I mean, that's what I thought today. Why did I work so hard to get rid of that sneeze? Why did I work so hard to make sure my voice was lower? Why does it bug me so much when I hear a grown woman speak who has a baby voice? Why do I think of a higher voice as a baby voice in the first place?

Well fuck. It's internalized misogyny isn't it? Damn it.

That whole automatic baseline where we ascribe positive traits to things that are more masculine (deeper voices) and negative to things that are more feminine (higher pitched ones). We do it with hobbies, masculine hobbies are better than feminine ones. We do it with personality traits, we've decided that being "overly" emotional is a feminine trait and as such is a bad thing.

It's all nonsense.

First off just the whole segmenting out hobbies and personality traits as male or female is nuts. There is nothing that is gendered about any of it. Then doing the man good woman bad thing on top of it? Batshit crazy. But we do it all the time. I mean we had people elect Trump over more qualified women TWICE because he was a man and so clearly would be a better leader because...man.

And I rail against that sort of bullshit all the time.

While still having so much of it in my own personality. Lower voice, good. Not cute sneeze, good. Higher pitched voice, bad. Cute up lift at the end of a sneeze? CATASTROPHE.

Jeez...

I'm not sure how easy or hard it will be to change that in my own head. I imagine it will be like changing my sneeze. A lot of focus on it until it goes away. Then a surprise attack every once in a while that it's still there.

Work in progress. That's the best we can all hope for, I guess. To continue to be works in progress toward the best version of yourself you can be.

Cute sneezes included.