Holiday lament: Baby, It’s Scold Out There
There is a radio station in Ohio, a state where you generally expect to find good, salt of the earth people who don’t need to Make America Great Again because they’ve always been amazing (unlike some states I could think of that start with C and end with “alifornia”), that has gone off the deep end and tumbled into Lake Erie.
Star 102.5 FM in Cleveland made national news last week when it announced that it was going to stop playing “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” a sweet and clever little holiday ditty that has been around for more than seven decades. The reason that the station decided to ban the song is that, in its opinion, the lyrics were inappropriate in the #Metoo era, an evolved moment when educated, white, upper middle class women went off their meds at the stroke of midnight. Whereas Cinderella got stuck with a pumpkin, these dames went out of their gourds.
Some of the critics of the song believed that it glorified a sanitized version of “date rape,” where a woman who initially appears unwilling to “stay” is persuaded by the dulcet tones of Dean Martin and, possibly, a spiked drink to hang around for “just a cigarette more.”
Frankly, I never saw what made this song a Christmas classic, but I was always happy to hear it played on a loop between Thanksgiving and New Year’s because it sounded clever and harmless. But at a time when you cannot look at a woman a certain way without having her run to Ronan Farrow and have him write an expose for The New Yorker, the program director at Star 102.5 and other stations around the country decided to shelve the song, which was made popular long before Harvey Weinstein ever bought his first couch.
You might think that I’m being a bit too flippant with the whole idea of #Metoo, and you would be absolutely right. I long ago stopped taking the movement seriously, if I ever did, because there is something a bit ridiculous about equalizing every offense from catcalls to actual rape and combining it together in a trendy hashtag. It is horrific to be the victim of true abuse and persecution, and I know this because I deal with immigrant women and their asylum cases on a frequent basis. It is just as horrific to see an upper middle class white woman accuse a man who jokingly offered her his hotel key instead of a business card (something recently detailed in a lawsuit filed by a local professor who was terminated from his job for that “joke”) of sexual harassment. There are no longer any boundaries, any common sense, and hope of acting normally in this politicized and toxic society.
Similarly, we are now slaves to our past indiscretions, and our claims of having evolved are no longer accepted as legitimate. Kevin Hart was going to host the Oscars, until some random member of the LGBTQ community dug up some comments the comic had made about not wanting his 2-yearold son to, and I am paraphrasing here, “turn out gay.” It’s understandable that people who actually did turn out gay would be offended by the quip, and Hart apologized to them. But that wasn’t enough for the Social Stalinists, and they hammered him to the point where he withdrew from hosting the event. I am guessing that the next person who gets offered the job will be able to check off all the diversity boxes: A gay Mayan with an astigmatism and three different personal pronouns, who practices Santeria and in his spare time works in a soup kitchen. Now that’s an awards show I’d tune in for.
But back to “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” I am embarrassed by any woman who is legitimately triggered by a song that was written seven decades ago and who is incapable of understanding the difference between a slightly risqué song from our grandparents’ era (when Mary Magdalene wore shoulder pads and looked like an Andrews Sister) and real, legitimate, break-your-spiritand-your-body assault. They are destroying the credibility of the rest of us, females who do not think that riding the victimization express is going to take us to a desirable destination.
And if “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is on the chopping block, what’s next? Is the “Little Drummer Boy” transphobic because we’re just assuming it’s a boy when it could very well identify as something else? Is “Silent Night” judgmental because it describes “yon virgin Mother and Child,” since it’s really none of our business what she does in her private life? Is “Frosty The Snowman,” who had “two eyes made out of coal,” an affront to the planet, because we know how dangerous fossil fuels have become to the environment. Shouldn’t we stop singing about Rudolph, who wasn’t allowed to join in any reindeer games, since that might trigger people who didn’t get invited to the prom? Should we nix “What Child Is This?” because it’s rude to have the baby daddy do a DNA test?
And don’t even get me started on “Oh come all ye faithful.”
I hope you are shaking your head at the stupidity of my comments. Because then, and only then, will you have some idea of how I feel about the idiot children of the #Metoo movement and their increasingly successful crusade to destroy everything valuable in the world. Including, dammit, Christmas.