Baby, It's Cold Outside

If you aren't familiar with the song, the lyrics are here.

I've never much liked the song, especially as it gets put into the Christmas rotation on radio just because of coldness.  I am one who never liked Santa songs, nostalgia songs, or winter songs mixing in with actual Christmas Carols, but I have made my peace with that, because I want to share Christmas celebrations with others. But this one is pretty far afield even by Holiday Song standards. It's a seduction song.

Yet I had to find it ridiculous that some couple from Minnesota tried to rewrite the lyrics in a fashion which emphasises consent.  If you sent your children to Christian schools or ever got stuck with bad Sunday-School curricula you've seen this sort of lyric: strained, didactic, prissy. Let's work Jesus into this popular song somewhere. Yeah the kids will think that's the bee's knees, Grandma.* Let's work female empowerment into this song.  Woman, O-o-oh Wo-o-oman.  Have you got FREEDOM on your mind?  (Maybe you have to be a baby boomer to see how lame that was.)

The whole mess did kick off some interesting thoughts for me, though. When people were trying to guess song-titles at the department Christmas party, one of the young women was trying that lyric on the initials to see if they fit.  It was that evening I saw the story about the bowdlerisation, and so forwarded it to her and commented when I brought sample puzzles the next day.  Her office-mate, a nice young woman who has a bit of SJW in her, said "It's a little rapey." Well, yes but no.  Yet even beyond the intrusion into Christmas there is something I didn't like about it.

Terms of endearment are strongly cultural, but I have never liked "baby," and referring to a woman as if Beautiful is her nickname, rather than saying she is beautiful just rubs me wrong. So for reasons that likely go back to mid-20th C class associations I'm already not liking this guy. He's a manipulative jerk.  A snake.  On the other hand, she's getting a lot of chances to just say no, but she's throwing out lame excuses instead. The attitude in my era was "No! means No, but 'No, because...' means Maybe." The more she talked about it, the more she want to be talked out of it. BTW, the reference to "what's in this drink?" in its era could only mean alcohol, not some date-rape drug. (If there were any chance it had meant the latter, it wasn't getting onto "The Ed Sullivan Show."  Trust me on this.) This looks a little different to us now, in an era when full disclosure is expected. But not entirely different.  As with the manipulative statements and weak protests above, the boundaries were fuzzy, but there were boundaries. Blasting a woman with large amounts of disguised alcohol was low, and probably criminal, even though everyone knew that prosecution was going to be difficult. You'd cut a friend off forever for that.  But spiking drinks just a little was not universally regarded as unfair.  Women were taught to be alert for the possibility.  In my own circle, encouraging a woman to have more alcohol was acceptable, but any sort of trickery was not.  It was just out.

It wasn't class in the financial sense, as the guys I knew who regarded treating secret alcohol with women this way tended to be richer, if anything.  Hell, it's Dean Martin singing the song, right? Yet there was some class distinction of "decent men don't do this." So taking one thing with another, rapey isn't the right word, but it's not crazy. 

*Not to say that it can never be done.  "Pharaoh, Pharaoh" is fun. But that's a complete rewrite, not a doctoring of a few words.