Discussion
Related to bias against screen-shots of text, am noting there's also a bias (from the same sort of dudebro, perhaps?) against talking with one's hands. Both seem to amount to annoyance at rich semiotics.
Am frankly surprised there isn't a term for the latter. Misocheremia, perhaps, as a special expression of misokinesia?
i have a hard time not interpreting the hands thing as somehow being lowkey misogyny, like aversion to vocal fry. maybe the screen shot of text is somehow also coded feminine, containing extraneous information or frippery, or too aesthetic ... ?
The context that had me searching for a term was men telling a woman lawtuber to stop talking with her hands on a live stream, so yeah. (Like, dudes, myself am thinking, bluetooth is a thing. You can just walk into the next room and keep listening.)
Only, on searching for the topic, there's lots of studies indicating that those who talk with their hands are generally trusted more and more effective overall at communication. Including one study of TED talks that found a positive correlation between gesticulating and high view counts on videos.
Here's the thing: all those studies are discussed in publications directed to business people. The TED Talk study was published in a journal of the marketing industry.
Which now has me wondering if a) misocheremia is only triggered when a woman is speaking (don't know if the TED Talk study accounted for gender); or b) talking with one's hands is associated with a certain kind of smarm specific to practiced inauthenticity of authority figures.
1/2
Which now has me wondering if a) misocheremia is only triggered when a woman is speaking (don't know if the TED Talk study accounted for gender); or b) talking with one's hands is associated with a certain kind of smarm specific to practiced inauthenticity of authority figures.
i.e., it's something people in business cultivate in their own presentation, and so talking with one's hands comes to be associated, by some, with noxiousness?
Still, recent research has shown that even LLM resumes are rated more or less favorably, with identical text, depending on the gender of the name at the top. So my inclination is that the smarm hypothesis won't hold water.
My guess would be perhaps that there might be enough of a gender imbalance across TED Talks, that the negative effect might not even show up in aggregate.
2/2
the vocal fry aversion, according to this piece on the interwebs, is fairly exclusively lobbed at women:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/men-use-vocal-fry-more-than-women-counter-to-stereotype/
and i've seen the LLM research too
so yeah i'd easily believe that most-to-all instances of misocheremia are on some level simply reducible to disciplining how women speak (decide for yourself whether it's also about disciplining them for speaking at all). i'm open to other interpretations but if it talks and handwaves like a duck, prolly a duck
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