Baby, It's Cold Outside

It began in 2014, I believe, when The Huffington Post ran an article that, for sheer purblind stupidity, would be hard to beat. "A Line-by-Line Take Down of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’"(1) by the eponymous Em & Lo, accuses the 73-year-old Frank Loesser song, which he wrote for himself and his wife, of being "creepy" because its language suggests nothing less than date rape. Whether the legions of admiring listeners across the decades were aware of it or not, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is "a song that basically sanctions date rape — roofies and all."(2)

In disbelief, defenders of the song insisted that the key to the song's charm is its context of a loving couple (Loesser and his wife) kidding around on a cold night. Rich Lowry of The National Review wrote last Christmas, 'A cottage industry has sprung up denouncing the song as “creepy” and even as a “rape anthem.” Two singer-songwriters recently reworked the song so it could pass muster, say, at the holiday party of the Oberlin College gender-studies department. The result is predictably leaden and humorless.'(3) Even the greatest songs are subject to interpretation, the interpretation of the singer who has to find its true meaning and present it to the listener. Simply reading the printed lyrics is like reading the text of a play: it often provides nothing but indications, clues for an actor to "flesh out." 

Unconvinced, the critics of the song continue, every holiday season, to stand on their own necks, proudly displaying their ignorance of double entendre and denying the possibility of the tongue-in-cheek. The corrected (unsexed) alternate version of the song accomplished nothing but make the original seem far better than it is.

Which raises the ultimate point: it's only a song - an old song at that, written for a generation that is long gone. The fact that it has stuck around for so long is all the testimonial its qualities need. It will probably outlive the current fidgeting with the past. I mean, why should men and women from the 1940s, like my father and mother, be held to our enlightened standards of behavior? Times have changed and, we can only hope, so have people.

Nobody seems to have seen the MGM film in which the song debuted - and which won an Oscar for Best Original Song.(4) Neptune's Daughter was a star vehicle for former Olympic swimmer Esther Williams. The scene in which the song is performed features two couples in separate locales - Williams & Ricardo Montalban and Betty Garrett & Red Skelton. Montalban and Williams perform the song straight, i.e., "romantic," as it was written. But Betty Garrett and Red Skelton perform the song with the roles reversed, presumably for laughs, with Garrett playing the aggressor and Skelton playing the victim. I hate to break this to the enemies of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" but the Garrett-Skelton duet stands their date-rape argument on its head, unless they mean to suggest that Garrett has plied Skelton with roofies and is planning to rape him? 

One of the most entertaining recent renditions of the song by She & Him is contained in a very clever animated short that can be found here. The woman very aggressively tries to convince the man to stay in her cabin. She even stoops to disabling his car. Finally, all her efforts wasted, she sits, exhausted and alone. But then the man comes back to knock on her door, and, smiling, holds up a mistletoe. I wonder how many people will lose their jobs this Christmas season by hanging mistletoe around the office?


(1) Huffpost, The Blog, Dec 19, 2014.
(2) In the same article, Em & Lo take a swipe at the Richard Curtis film Love, Actually, which is "mind-bogglingly offensive in its depiction of women as nothing more than the embodiments of men’s romantic and/or sexual fantasies." Such sexism isn't the exclusive domain of men. One of the most cogent criticisms of Jane Austen's novels is that they are exclusively about young women seeking to land good husbands. I wouldn't dream of equating Love, Actually with Sense and Sensibility, but isn't Austen guilty of depicting men as nothing more than the embodiments of women's romantic and sexual (and monetary) fantasies?
(3) The National Review, December 24, 2016.
(4) A different Frank Loesser song was going to be used in the film called "(I Want to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China" which - ironically - the infamous Hays Office warned was too risqué. So Loesser sold MGM "Baby, It's Cold Outside" - over the objections of his wife.