Here, there and everywhere

“With the large number of women running for President this year, the word “shrill” is enjoying a resurgence in the national vocabulary, following its previous heyday, as an insult hurled at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential campaign. This spike in usage is hardly a revelation; women who speak publicly and challenge authority have long been dismissed as “shrill” or “grating.” What’s less widely understood is how the design of the technology that transmits human voices has shaped this gendered invective since the dawn of the broadcast era: everything from microphones to modes of transmission have been optimized for lower voices.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, women made up the majority of telephone-switchboard operators, but, when the new medium of commercial broadcast radio became popular, in the nineteen-twenties, women’s voices fell out of favor. When station directors were interviewed by Radio Broadcast magazine in 1924, they asserted that women sounded “shrill,” “nasal,” and “distorted” on the radio, and claimed that women’s higher voices created technical problems. 

The criticism didn’t end with pitch and timbre, however: the personality, authenticity, and sense of humor of female speakers were also questioned. Newspapers and magazines repeatedly referred to women on air as “affected,” “stiff,” “forced,” and “unnatural.” W. W. Rogers, a publicist for KDKA, in Pittsburgh, declared that “a woman speaker is rarely a success, and, if I were a broadcast manager, which I am not, I would permit few women lecturers to appear.” Charles Popenoe, the station manager of both WJZ and WJY, in New York, justified his avoidance of female announcers by offering an unscientific survey claiming that ninety-nine per cent of listeners preferred male to female announcers.”

You need something like this:

I clicked over (source) and saw these:

Someone make Gatsby interesting for me.

The narrator is a man-splaining creeper who has an unhealthy fascination with the wealthy man next door who has an unhealthy obsession with the woman across the bay. Imagine everything Nick Carraway says punctuated with heavy breathing and long, lingering staring, and you’re good to go. Same for Gatsby, when he’s in the same room as Daisy. It’s Red Flag for Dating and Friendship 101.

Gatsby is such an attention whore that he’s thrilled to have Nick as a hanger-on but can’t be bothered to learn his name. The Old Sport drinking game would give you cirrhosis of the liver, but since your students aren’t of legal drinking age, just have someone keep score. And then talk about why it matters.

Symbolism is obvious and easy to teach. Green lights? Unused swimming pool? The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg watching everything? The desolate wastes between the Eggs and Manhattan? The rain of gorgeous, unworn shirts? Dude, you’re rolling in English teacher Valhalla.

It’s a dark and cynical look at the so-called American dream. Turns out you can’t actually get what you want (cue The Rolling Stones here), even if you have all the money in the world. Turns out the 1% are even worse off than you’d like them to be: their lives are hollow and false. Even Nick Carraway isn’t immune; it’s clear from the opening paragraphs that he comes from wealth too, but compared to the people in the Eggs, he’s not as privileged as he thinks he is.

I’ll intro it by calling it Keeping Up With the Buchanans