I'm not a huge Christmas person. But one thing I do enjoy about this holiday season is the holiday music, and one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time is "Baby it's Cold Outside."
Now I know this article is probably going to offend some people but please, hold your comments about how this song is about "oppression" and "rape" until I finish making my point. Because I intend to prove that "Baby It's Cold Outside" is NOT at all creepy, and that it is, in fact, quite the opposite, if you actually listen to the entire song and not just the occasional verse.
Origination Of The Song:
Something I feel is important to mention about this song is where it came from. This song wasn't just written by some professional songwriter who thought it would be a sly way to convince women to go along with whatever a man tells them to do. This piece was actually written by a man named Frank Loesser, who created the song so he and his wife could sing it together in front of their friends as a way of expressing their love.
In the 1940s, when this song was written, women were punished for going around with men they weren't married to. And because of that, we should be looking at this song through a different pair of glasses. It features an unmarried couple with a female who knows she shouldn't stay because of how it would affect her reputation but desperately wants to be able to. The entirety of the song is just her giving herself reasons why she can't stay and her male partner telling her that she should stop worrying about what others will think and just give in to her desires.
"Say, What's In This Drink?"
When the argument is made that this song is creepy, the most popular argument that I hear being made is that the line "Say what's in this drink?" implies that the man in the song is drugging the female. Now when you take this line out of context, it's going to sound bad no matter what it originally came from. Which is why I don't think it's fair that people overanalyze this lyric without putting it both in the context of the song and the decade. The part right before she sings, "Say what's in this drink?," the lady says, "But maybe just a half a drink more," showing that she asked her male partner to make her drink and the line that follows is simply her reaction to a tasty drink. You can overanalyze it all you want, but that is the line's intended meaning.
The Song As A Whole
When people criticize this song, they often just look at individual lines and not the song as a whole. As I said before, when you take anything out of context, it's going to lose most of its original meaning, and that's very true with this song.
If you listen to the song as a whole, it becomes clear that the lady in this song wants to be with her male partner, but society is telling her no. Therefore, this whole song is her trying to convince herself to conform to society, while her male partner is trying to get her to follow her heart and do what she wants. And what she wants is to stay with him.
In today's society, I can understand why people are misinterpreting one of my favorite holiday songs. With the 'me too' movement going strong, this song certainly can give off a weird vibe to those who focus on that one lyric. But the history behind the song proves that it was intended to be nothing more than an innocent piece for a husband and wife to sing together.
