Ee up, lass, give over

Ooooh, all right out there, chucks? A bit parky out, innit? Well, ah've bought myself a jolly excellent coat in the sales, and blahddy good it is, too. Like, totally cool, yeah?

It is only lunchtime and I have already encountered all the above accents - exaggeratedly northern, dodgy Midlands, Merchant Ivory posh and spaced-out Californian, for clarity's sake - from various women, all of whom, not incidentally, hail from the decidedly differently accented London. Women's weakness for launching into a comedy accent mid-conversation has bothered me for some time, and not just because, as an American, I often find my own voice bastardised and then thrown back at me, making me wonder if I'm being openly mocked or if the person I'm talking to suffers from some sort of accent Tourette's syndrome.

Granted, men can occasionally be heard getting into the comedy accent schtick, too, but these tend to be in the context of parroting TV catchphrases (Vic Reeves and Little Britain being particularly popular, in my weary experience), whereas with women - who, according to my very unscientific survey, unquestionably do it more often - something very different is going on, and one for which I can't, sadly, blame David Walliams.

"I hate it! But I do it! I hate myself!" wails Molly Rivers, a 30-year-old singer. "My accent of choice is a fake LA one à la Traci Bingham. I think I do it when I'm embarrassed or something - God knows why, though, because it only makes me more embarrassed. If I made new year's resolutions, my first one would have been to stop doing it - it's awful."

"I used to do it a lot more than I do now. 'Comedy' northern accent, since you ask - think Victoria Wood, but less funny," admits Ellen Greene, a 28-year-old lawyer. Phoebe King, a 35-year-old chef, looks startled when asked whether she indulges in annoying fake accents: "I'm partial to this and it never occurred to me that everyone else thinks it's annoying. I always do an American accent, like when something looks good, I'll say, in the style of Paris Hilton, 'Oh that's hahhht.'"

I even know one woman whose reliance on comedy accents is so great that although I've known her now for over three years I genuinely don't know what her natural voice sounds like: nearly every comment is prefaced with a nosey-old-lady-esque "Oooooooh!" and the comments themselves tend to come encased in a hybrid northern/Welsh/American accent which is so grating I've started ducking round corners to avoid her, in very un-comedic 1940s slapstick manner.

Even worse, though, is when a woman chooses to speak in the accent of the person they're talking to. Isabelle Ferry, a 37-year-old teacher from Newcastle living now in the south, says, "People ape my accent all the time. If I like the person, I think that it's some sort of primordial wavelength thing, like when couples mimic each other's body language and they're meant to be getting on. Otherwise, I find it embarrassing and patronising, like they're using a northern accent to appear thick." She does, however, concede that "sometimes I do fake posh - but never to a posh person."

It's easy, and admittedly rather satisfying, to complain about this female tic. But the real question is, why do so many do it? Even if all women were as daft as they make themselves look with their comedy accents, they still could not possibly believe that launching into a bit of awright-chuck-ness is funny or, worse, endearing.

In her recently published book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy discusses how women today are indefatigable in their search for ways of making themselves look ridiculous in men's eyes. She concentrates on the sex industry, with women today claiming that lap dancing makes them feel "empowered" and posing for a lads' mag is "sexy" and other depressingly common nonsense.

But Levy could go much further. While only a relatively small percentage of women decide to take lapdancing lessons for reasons other than the pressingly economic, it is a rare and admirable woman, I'd wager, who doesn't subconsciously do something every day to make herself look a little less smart, a little less threatening. Some do it through fashion, such as wearing baby pink or physically incapacitating shoes; some do it by claiming they can "really relate" to Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, or any other TV show claiming to be aimed at women but which is actually just a hotchpotch of female stereotypes. A lot of us do it by adopting a comedy accent when we're trying to make a point, thereby diminishing what we imagine would be the potentially disturbing sight of a woman - gasp - expressing an opinion.

"I reckon I did it when I wasn't confident and I could hide behind it," says Greene. Rivers agrees: "I also think I probably do it when I don't really know what I'm talking about, which," she adds, with an instinctive kick of self-deprecation, "is often."

Psychotherapist Susie Orbach believes it's a little more complicated than that: "I don't think women do it to diminish themselves exactly, but part of the construction of being a woman is to be pleasing as well as to be your own person, and these things have to work together."

Also at play is that other twitchy female tendency of feeling we have to amuse men, or make sure they're happy - "almost caretaking" is how Orbach describes it. You often see this at play in restaurants: when a couple are eating it's not uncommon to hear the woman make exaggerated "Mmmmm!" noises and other similar signs of enjoyment, as if not only to show her own easygoing, content nature, but to encourage the man to enjoy himself, too, as though he were a small child.

Comedy accents work on a similar tangent, in that they are, allegedly, funny, or at least acceptably so to men. There is a similar undertone to imitating someone's accent to their face: maybe sometimes it is mockery, or social awkwardness, but it comes across as nothing so much as the ultimate in placation, trying to make yourself more pleasing by divesting yourself of your own accent and imitating someone else's.

And this is my real objection to comedy accents. They not only encourage all the tired cliches about women (insecure, self-deprecating, desperate to endear themselves to people, bad sense of humour), and assume the same of men (needs to be entertained; a comedy accent will do) but they also lead to a self-created vicious circle: if women really do feel that they can't ever express themselves boldly or sincerely, or that it is unfeminine to do so, then lapsing into a wacka-wacka accent is hardly going to change that view and will probably, in fact, confirm it. Levy says in Female Chauvinist Pigs, "If we believed we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like ... anyone other than our own, specific, individual selves." And, ladies, coming over all Dick van Dyke ain't ever going to work in your favour.

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