Inoffensive song

The next time some “woke” millennial lectures you that the old Christmas classic Baby, It’s Cold Outside they’re trying to get banned from airplay is about date rape, give them a little lesson about context being everything. The politics to the song when first released was the rebellion of the wartime generation against societal double standards where a single woman who stayed out late had to be of “low morals”.

The Academy Award-winning song is taken from the 1949 film Neptune’s Daughter, where regular screen couple Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams sang the song first, then later Betty Garrett with Red Skelton with the respective “call and response” roles of one attempting to persuade the other to stay overnight reversed – something the “Me Too!” witchhunters conveniently omit to mention.

That certain lines of the song are also sung in unison also indicts writer Frank Loesser’s intent that the song is as much about one testing to see how much they mean to their other

half – it’s a song about courtship flirtation, not date rape.

The current furore began after South Park did a brilliantly bad taste 2014 parody of the song with Bill Cosby and Taylor Swift in the leading roles (Swift campaigning against date rape and drinkdrugging long before the rest of Tinseltown cared less), where in the Rohypnol era the line “Say, what’s in this drink?” took on a whole new meaning.

If there’s anything sinister about Baby It’s Cold Outside, it’s millennials not liking in their reflex interpretation what it says about themselves and the world they’re creating.

MARK BOYLE Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone