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That other Christmas baby

5 min read

Words have power. Words can be inspiring, insulting, infuriating. Words also can be misappropriated, misused and misinterpreted – especially misinterpreted. Take, for example, the case of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

A number of radio stations in the United States and Canada began pulling this Yuletide standard from their rotations about two weeks ago in response to listener complaints that the song is inappropriate in the #MeToo era. Complainants said the song’s lyrics describe date rape. Maybe … if you still believe Santa will be comin’ down the chimney, down.

Written in 1944 by Frank Loesser and intended to be a fun ditty he and his lounge singer wife, Lynn, could perform at parties, the lyrics of “Baby” are a playful dialogue between a man and a woman. The woman has arrived at the man’s apartment for a tête-à-tête. She appears to want to leave; he tries to keep her there using a series of lame excuses. There are no overt sexual references.

The complete lyrics are readily available online, but the portion that seems to have caused the most offense to some is this:

“Say, what’s in this drink …”

Critics argue the line implies the man has slipped the woman a mickey.

Forgive me, but to assign this meaning to those lyrics is to also believe Elvis Presley’s girlfriend set him on fire because he sang “hunka hunka burnin’ love.”

And I have to ask – at least of grownups of a certain age, be they male or female: Have you never asked or been asked to stay “just a little bit longer” on a frigid December night? Or even on a sweltering Fourth of July?

“Baby” made its film debut in 1949 in the musical “Neptune’s Daughter.” It is performed twice in the film, first by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the traditional male/female roles, later by Betty Garrett and Red Skelton, who reverse roles. Neither performance seems to have been viewed as inappropriate.

But because I am a man, you might argue my opinion of “Baby” is skewed. So let me defer to an intriguing analysis of the song’s lyrics written in 2010 by Slay Belle, an editor and new writer mentor at the women-centered “Persephone Magazine.”

“Mass culture is the stew we all live in; when we learn to look at it critically, we can discuss the messages we’re soaking in every day,” Belle wrote. “Sometimes we’re good at it, sometimes we’re bad at it, sometimes we get bogged down in the wrong details. … I’ve heard the take on ‘Baby’ as ‘rapey’ a couple of times over the years, and the concern about the song usually centers in on one line: ‘Say, what’s in this drink,’ which many contemporary listeners assume is a reference to a date rape drug. But narrowing in on this particular line divorces it from its own internal context, and having only passing familiarity with the song divorces it from its cultural context.”

Belle goes on to say reading the song’s lyrics in their entirety and viewing them in the context of the times in which they were written is essential to understanding what’s happening in the song. It’s clear, Belle argues, the woman wants to stay, and the man is offering her a series of excuses for doing so that will be accepted by a judgmental society in which a single woman was called a slut if she was caught alone after 9 p.m. in a man’s apartment.

“Later in the song,” Belle points out, “she asks him for a comb (to fix her hair) and mentions that there’s going to be talk tomorrow – this is a song about sex, wanting it, having it, maybe having a long night of it by the fire, but it’s not a song about rape. It’s a song about the desires even good girls have.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Belle: Sometimes we get bogged down in the wrong details.

But if we’re calling out sexist songs, let’s include “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” and “Santa Baby.” It’s OK for a woman to stomp on a man and use sex to get what she wants for Christmas?

The #MeToo movement is long overdue and needed. Sexual harassment is real and should be called out. But flirtation is not always sexual harassment. Offering a woman a drink is not always a prelude to nonconsensual sex. In our attempts to avoid every possible offense to every possible person, we have navigated a field of land mines only to walk into a live grenade.

Yes, we should be offended by lyrics in rap and other genres that degrade and dehumanize male and female alike.

But let’s not throw “Baby” out with the bathwater.

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