The Self-Betrayal of Fundie Baby Voice

Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Mormon Wives, and Embodiment

Reece Allman/Instagram

In my teen years, I was so pro-life that once, during a heated argument in a Denny’s, I stabbed my friend with a fork. (Well, he would’ve said “stabbed,” I would’ve said “poked.” Maybe we can settle on “jabbed”?) And yes, I know, violence is never the answer, but also, he kind of deserved it? (Okay, maybe not.) It wasn’t easy being the one Conservative kid in my clique of artsy gay theater kids, constantly being nagged about politics and told I was betraying my gender. One friend often told me, “Conservatives just want to control women’s bodies.”

And I scoffed, because it wasn’t that all those Republican legislators hated women or wanted to oppress them, it was that this is how God ordained things: God created babies and women had to deliver them. Besides, weren’t we ALL being controlled at all times, either by God or Satan? The apostle Paul talked often enough about either being enslaved by sin or enslaved by righteousness—there were only ever two choices. Even the most innocuous decision could be divided into right or wrong.

This type of black-and-white thinking is intrinsic to more conservative forms of Christianity. The narrow road to salvation becomes narrower and narrower until you’re worrying what God would think about what to buy at the grocery store or how to style your hair. Along the way, we were warned “not to lean on [our] own understanding.” If our consciences conflicted with our church’s interpretation of the Bible (say we felt awful condemning LGBT people) then that was just proof of how evil we were. We could not trust ourselves.

One of the clearest examples of this sort of self-betrayal is how strictly gender roles are enforced in conservative religious settings. Two recent TV shows reminded me how real this feminine ideal still is for many: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (Hulu) and America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (Netflix.) In both examples we see women competing for position and influence. They can only maintain their value through rigorous physical transformation: hair extensions, veneers, heavy makeup, false eyelashes, and for some, eating disorders. The cheerleaders perform punishing “jump splits” which eat away at their hip and knee joints, all for minimum wage and a “no fraternization” clause in their contracts. The Mormon wives undergo so many identical plastic surgeries that many viewers have had trouble telling them apart.

But even more than their appearance, their behavior is often tightly controlled. They must be sexy, of course, but they should not wield the power of that sexuality. Instead, they should appear ignorant of their own (incredibly labor intensive) beauty, and depend on men, even if they, like most of the Mormon wives, are the breadwinners in their marriages. There are many rules on how they should dress and behave, including an emphasis on always smiling and always caring for others ahead of themselves. The ideal, we can sense, is for them to be naive, pliable, and feminine. And there’s no better expression of this than the fundie baby voice.

The term “fundie baby voice” has been floating around the internets for at least a year, while the concept of women modulating their voices goes back at least until 1963’s fundamentalist tome, Fascinating Womanhood. One famous example is Michelle Duggar:

Once you hear it, you start noticing it everywhere. It’s speaker of the house, Mike Johnson’s wife, Kelly. It’s Katie Britt. And it’s Reece from America’s Sweethearts. Compare her voice in the clip below to Michelle Duggar’s.

reece_christinee

A post shared by @reece_christinee

While women often have higher pitched voices than men, fundie baby voice is even higher and much breathier. It’s an affectation, one that I myself fell prey to. Despite my feminist beliefs, I was guilty of reverting to fundie baby voice. It wasn’t until a performance in one of my college theater classes that I finally realized this. We were performing Shakespearean sonnets, and I had forgotten my line. So I called, “Line?” My teacher responded not by giving me my line, but by pointing out how much lower my voice was when I asked for the line versus when I was reciting my sonnet. “That’s your natural voice,” she said, “use it.”

For those who feel powerless, life can often feel like a choice between integrity and safety. For many women and girls, being girly, soft, and pretty was the ticket to being loved by everyone, even God, it seemed. Living according to God’s plan, I was sure, meant becoming good wife and mother material.

But even my natural tendency towards feminine things wasn’t enough; I forever feared appearing mannish or like a lesbian. My body could never be small enough or hairless enough. Part of this was probably owing to my fear of being outed as bi, but another part is that, in these types of rigid roles, there’s never a finish line. Women can never be girly enough, just as men can never be manly enough. You can try and try to erase yourself, but there’s always the danger that someone will see behind the mask and know you’re faking it. And that’s because power gained through fitting into gender roles will always have a ceiling—after all, it was only ever granted by the approval of the patriarchy. And what the patriarchy giveth, the patriarchy taketh away.

It’s not that all people who believe in Complementarianism are controlling or abusive, nor that people in egalitarian marriages can’t be, it’s that Complementarianism or “benevolent” patriarchy as systems care more about maintaining power through hierarchy than about the well-being of people inside these institutions. This preference for power is well-documented in the many, many accounts of pastors who’ve counseled women to tolerate abusive husbands rather than leave. We’ve seen this everywhere from journalistic endeavors like Sarah Stankorb’s Disobedient Women, to Tia Levings’ memoir A Well-Trained Wife. It even shows up on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, when Zac threatens and bullies his wife. Appeasing husbands (even abusive ones) is the only way for women to maintain power in this system.

Faced with all that, I do have to wonder how much my friend was right about Conservatives wanting to control women’s bodies. That’s not to say that all pro-life people feel this way; often these debates are merely people shouting past each other and yelling down their own straw men. But much of these efforts to enforce rigid gender roles feels like it boils down to women’s bodies being viewed as objects, not subjects with agency. That’s why, this month, I want to look at the term “embodiment”—what does it mean? Why is it important? How are we taught not to be embodied, and how can we overcome this programming?

When I hear about proposed policies like those in Project 2025, it’s chilling, because women have fought and died to gain the right to vote, access contraception, leave dangerous marriages, and control our own finances. It’s naive to think these rights will just continually be granted to us by those in power. We have to vote like our rights depend on it, because they do.

Did you watch ‘America’s Sweethearts’ or ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’? Have you ever encountered “fundie baby voice” in the wild? How about “embodiment”? Do you have any recommendations on learning to be more embodied?