Sexy Voice means Sexy Bod? Since When?

All of us who play online games know that the only way to get a point across fast, without your character becoming catatonic for 10 seconds while you type, is to use voice. Voice chat is ubiquitous with today’s online games, and for good reason. Whether it’s to encourage your team with pep talks involving castration, inform your enemies that this team, while exactly similar to yours, is somehow inferior (but not you of course), or just to say, “Hey, I’d like to abuse a reasonable system of communication by screaming incoherently,” we know it’s all for the better.

Recently, though, I read an article entitled “Sexy People Sound Better” on yahoo news (LiveScience link), which stated that a study found that sexy voices were correlated with more attractive body types. There were all kinds of numbers and statistics about how they went about this, but I still wasn’t convinced, and neither should anyone who’s used voice chat online. We all know that most of the time, there’s a 50-50 shot of that cute innocent sounding 18 year old girl is actually a prepubescent boy with identity issues.

A friend of mine was in a World of Warcraft guild, which was lead by a man with a well spoken and intelligent voice. It was described to me as “what you would think a cross between Mufasa and that guy who plays Peter Swanson on Family Guy would sound like.” According to my friend, this guild leader commanded respect, but was actually a 5 foot 5, 16 year old boy who lived in Canada. Nothing against Canada, I’m just saying. I’ve had the same experience in my days of playing Counterstrike: Source, where people with commanding and respectful voices tend to be the youngest people I play with (and for some reason, they all end up being Asian. I don’t know why).

And girls. Aside from Uber-charged demomen, Big Daddies, and that huge antlion from Half-Life 2, girls are the most dangerous thing on the internet. There are several reasons for this:

1. It may be Chris Hanson and Dateline waiting to pounce with those oh so revealing chat logs.

2. From anecdotal evidence, the sexier the sound of her voice, the less attractive she is in real life. (Story – Friend played with one girl online, who thought it was a good idea to put some pictures of herself in the forums. My friend’s response: “I can’t see you in that picture, there’s just this fat chick taking up the whole frame. Oh God, wait, did she eat you? Do you need help?”)

3. From personal experience, voices of girls that I’ve played Counterstrike and team Fortress 2 with are in no way correlated with the way they look. If I had met them in person first, it wouldn’t be weird at all, but since I had to create an image in my head with just a voice as reference, things became skewed. That’s no downer on the girls I play with, it’s just you don’t look like what I had in my head (in case you were wondering, all girls I play online games with look like Lucy McClane in my head).

Hopefully people will stop creating these subjective studies, because even if you find some kind of correlation, there are too many factors to consider. Maybe these people should get online and play with voice chat. Perhaps they’ll change their mind after they get hoodwinked into thinking that sexually ambivalent kid actually is Nicole Kidman playing a medic. With a name like <>, how could you not believe?