Vocal eroticism practices and what they tell us about gender dynamics

In courtship contexts, speakers use specific vocal practices to index attraction and to seduce their romantic partners. Data collected through a mock phone call scenario inspired by the research protocols designed by Puts (2005) and Hodges-Simeon, Gaulin and Puts (2010) showed that French speakers from Brussels and the Walloon Brabant (1) lower their pitch, (2) decrease their speech and articulatory rate, and (3) increase the frequency of the second formant of unrounded front and central vowels (effect of smiling) in seductive speech. Acoustic analyses showed no significant differences between female and male speakers in the three aforementioned vocal parameters. However, we noticed important gender differences in the way the experiment participants approached the phone call task during the recording sessions: female heterosexual speakers had no difficulties producing a voice they considered “seductive” and “sexy”, whereas male heterosexual speakers explained regularly they did not understand the task or what they were meant to do. We interpret this difference as a consequence of female seductiveness being more stereotyped and of women being more sexually objectified in society