And yet, perhaps after simply being confronted with the possibility of Jessie’s demise, I’ve developed a new fondness for her. Jessie doesn’t pretend to be the ideal woman; she has less in common with the imperfectly perfect Alexa than she does the deep, resonant and pompously put-on voice of authority that Laurie Anderson cultivated in the speech that emerged in her innovative music in the 1980s. (Here’s some unknown pontificator, maybe a retired geology teacher, channeled by Anderson: “There are some things you can simply look up such as the size of Greenland, the dates of the famous 19th-century rubber wars, Persian adjectives, the composition of snow.”) Anderson’s voice was clearly a female one that relied on technology to question masculinity; Jessie could be heard as sending up, also artificially, some stereotype of the featherbrained female. Both play with technology to announce themselves as patently fake.
Give me Jessie, in fact, over many of the other female voices that contemporary media has produced: One typical female voice of Japanese anime is so disturbing it makes me physically queasy — high, young, whispery and querulous, yet somehow sexualized. More maddening is the voice of the wildly popular internet tradwife, who’s soft, calm and gentle as she separates wheat from chaff while her children — drugged on Benadryl? performing with docility, trained on pain of death? — play quietly with sticks off camera. A former Christian fundamentalist wife and mother, Tia Levings, built up a considerable following on TikTok talking about, among other things, her former “fundie voice” — a submissive tone, breathy and high-pitched, gleaned in part from tips in a 1963 book called “Fascinating Womanhood” — which she left behind when she left the church; meanwhile, another new generation of women are learning how to cultivate that same voice from the rise of videos that highlight it against images in soft light.
If the porn of the digital age has distorted, as many sociologists worry, young people’s sense of what an ideal sex life looks like, the ubiquity of narrated media in their lives may have also warped their idea of what the female voice is supposed to sound like — which is another way of saying how females are supposed to be in the world, how much noise they can make and according to which rules. A.I. is likely to learn from those real women’s voices, perhaps even the ones with the most followers, creating a potentially dizzying feedback loop of female murmurings rather than roars.
As the mother of two teenage boys, I became used to hearing the noise, coming from the basement, of some epic anime struggle, those helpless female voices competing with the sound of the local news I tried to concentrate on (as I performed my own gender conformity, making dinner). But when I wasn’t hearing that, I was bombarded with the sound of one son yelling loudly at his computer in the middle of a Fortnite battle. I find it fascinating that my son, like many serious Fortnite players, chose what’s called a female skin for his avatar in the game. This means that, from the time he was maybe 11, he’s spent countless hours identifying incredibly closely with a female character who represents him at his most powerful: shooting, eluding, outfoxing. Maybe he chose a female skin, or avatar, at so young an age because the older gamers he admired also did, and maybe they chose female skins because they’re faceless — the game entails staring for hours at that avatar’s backside (which, in the case of some female skins, is noticeably round and toned). But I’ve also been struck by another facet of his Fortnite avatar, true of her and all her peers: She has never, in all the years he’s been playing the game, uttered so much as a word.
Those avatars are remote cousins of the women on TikTok who rely on Jessie, I could argue: The scores of influencers who choose Jessie’s narration for their videos are, in making use of technology, also making the choice to silence themselves. A crucial aspect of their humanity is entirely absent, with only their beautiful young faces the lasting representation of themselves in front of their thousands of followers.
But I turn it around in my mind again, and I land somewhere else. Perhaps in choosing Jessie, they’re finding a way to protect themselves, making a subtle assertion of power: With their voices kept private, the world can have only so much of them. Jessie may be annoying, but she apparently doesn’t care, which might be why so many women embrace her for their endless “get ready with me” videos — just as they’re priming themselves for the male gaze, they’re making it clear to the male ear that they aren’t entirely packaged for consumption. Jessie’s loud and proud; she’s a pill, so wholly artificial she’s transcendent — entirely above seeking male approval.
