CHILLY OR NOT?
Revisiting Baby, It’s Cold Outside in a new era
The CBC and Canada’s two largest commercial radio operators, Bell Media and Rogers, have said this week they are pulling Baby, It’s Cold Outside from their playlists, calling the 1944 Frank Loesser song “controversial.”
So what to make of a decadesold duet — covered by duos as various as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, Al Hirt and Ann-Margret, Bette Midler and James Caan, James Taylor and Natalie Cole, Willie Nelson and Norah Jones and Idina Menzel and Michael Bublé — suddenly considered politically incorrect despite remaining one of the world’s most popular Christmas songs? Is it a rape anthem or a song of women’s empowerment? There are arguments for each side.To modern ears, the song indeed checks most of the boxes for sexual misconduct. The lyrics may not have aged well. It’s essentially a woman seeming to give reasons for why she should leave a man’s home while he repeatedly counters them.
The song even includes the cardinal sin of 21st-century sexual consent: A woman saying “no” (“I ought to say no, no, no, sir”) while the man ignores her (“Mind if I move in closer?”).
LOESSER WASN’T A SEXUAL PREDATOR
Loesser wrote Baby, It’s Cold Outside as a fun duet to perform with his wife at parties.
“It was never anything other than a sweet couple’s number for him and his spouse,” the couple’s son, John Loesser, told Vanity Fair, adding his father would be mortified by its modern association with sexual assault.
THE WOMAN HOLDS HER OWN
Baby, It’s Cold Outside gives agency to its female character. “If we look at the text of the song, the woman gives plenty of indication that she wants to stay the night,” wrote Slay Belle for Persephone Magazine. “Her beau in his repeated refrain ‘Baby, it’s cold outside’ is offering her the excuses she needs to stay without guilt.” None of the woman’s lines indicate she feels unsafe or is uninterested — they’re all concerned with societal expectations (even the “no” line expresses that she “ought” to say no, not necessarily that she wants to). “Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not,” reads a widely circulated Tumblr post defending the song. “So it’s not actually a song about rape — in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so.” Others have noted that the woman is the one who has come to see the man — he sings, “Been hoping that you’d drop in.” and later, “How lucky that you dropped in.”
SEXUAL NORMS WERE CHANGING
women.” It was written in the very earliest years of the sexual revolution, when the social upheaval of the Second World War had opened up an entire generation of young people to sexual experimentation. “After 15 years of Depression and war, there was … a desire on the part of Americans to live in the moment and enjoy life, and they were accordingly less likely to defer to traditional restraints on their behaviour,” University of Florida researcher Alan Petigny said in 2005 after publishing a study showing higher-than-expected rates of wartime premarital sex. Defenders of Baby, It’s Cold Outside say it is a cheeky ballad of a couple wanting to get cosy, but who must work their way around those “traditional restraints.” “The lyrics make it obvious the couple is colluding to create a cover story,” wrote Shan- non Rupp for the Tyee in 2014. “His arguments and her protests are a ritual.” Rupp notes that the ambiguity of this era would end up having dire consequences for women and would ultimately usher in a much clearer picture of “no means no” sexual consent in the 1960s. “But that wasn’t true when the song was written in 1944,” she wrote.
‘WHAT’S IN THIS DRINK?’ MAY NOT BE SO DAMNING
This is easily the most uncomfortable line for anybody currently of dating age who happens to overhear the song on a mall loudspeaker. Comedian Bill Cosby is currently in jail for raping women he drugged with spiked alcoholic drinks. A 2016 study of U.S. university students found that as many as one in 13 reported having been drugged. Musical references to drink control just don’t have the same whimsy they once did. It’s probably safe to assume Loesser didn’t write a song extolling alcohol or illicit pharmaceuticals to drug his wife into unconsciousness in order to rape her. The counter theory is that the line is actually the woman attempting to excuse her own desire to spend the night in defiance of social conventions. Slay Belle wrote that some variant of the line “What’s in this drink?” was a common gag in movies of the era, and was primarily used by characters looking to excuse their own behaviour, writing: “The drink is the shield someone gets to hold up in front of them to protect from criticism.”