Baby It's Old Outside?

The holiday season is frequently dominated by Christmas and Christmas-themed memorabilia. Sure, there are other holidays in December, like Chanukkah and Kwanza, but Christmas is so infused with the spirit of the month that you can’t escape it. And nowhere is this more-apparent than in its music, particularly the controversial song “Baby It’s Cold Outside”. It’s a song so contested that it’s even been recently pulled from many radio stations in-light of the Me Too movement gaining momentum.

The discourse surrounding “Baby It’s Cold Outside” isn’t new. I’ve heard debates over whether or not it’s creepy for a decade, and I’m sure it was going on before then too. For some, the song is a lighthearted duet between a man and woman, no harm intended. For others, however, it reeks of date-rape and non-consensual behaviour. It doesn’t help that the lyrics are especially uncomfortable with this stanza:

“…The neighbors might think (baby, it's bad out there)/Say, what's in this drink? (no cabs to be had out there)…”

To be fair to Frank Loesser, the lyricist, I don’t think he meant anything insensitive with this line. Keep in mind that societal attitudes about flirting and romance were different in the 1940’s, and this might’ve been considered charming. The line “what’s in this drink?” could’ve even been a joke about how the martini/cocktail/insert drink here was non-alcoholic. And given that alcohol’s the drink of choice for guys shamelessly picking up women at bars, being non-alcoholic could suggest that the man has nothing to hide and wants the woman to be warm.

That said, while Loesser was no prophet, and, therefore, couldn’t have predicted the long-term implications of his work, I understand why it’s aged poorly in the 21st Century. Standards for dating, especially within the past year, have changed drastically since the song’s inception, and what might’ve sounded “cute” or “funny” in 1944 is creepy in 2018. Art doesn’t change, but our perceptions of it can over time.

It, therefore, doesn’t surprise me that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” would be deemed inappropriate, especially given what we now know about date rape and sexual assault. It also doesn’t surprise me that people have protested over the song’s existence, to the point of boycotting it or refusing to air it on the radio. But while the intentions might be noble, I’m not a big fan of the song myself, I don’t think pretending it doesn’t exist is helpful either. Like it or not, it’s a part of our historical zeitgeist, and pretending bad behaviour never occurred in the past, intentional or not, is equally as bad as continuing to propagate it.

So, what to do with “Baby It’s Cold Outside”? Honestly, I’m unsure. One suggestion would be to go the Warner Bros. route and include some sort of disclaimer, much like they did with their Merrie Melodies/Silly Symphonies collections. You could have someone famous, like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep, warn people of the historical context so as to brace them. It’d be expensive, and not completely foolproof, but it’s not entirely out of the question either.

Another suggestion could be to update it, which is what happened a few years ago on YouTube. Making the song consensual would definitely be a step in the right direction, not unlike how parodies or updates transform original works. Besides, speaking personally, while the song itself might be a little creepy, by changing the wording to be more tolerant and accepting, you might actually “fix” what was wrong with it. Even still, going by that train of thought, you can gender-flip the song. It’s been done before to illustrate a point about its questionable content, and having the woman’s position be reversed with the man’s could actually serve as a teaching tool for why the song was objectionable in the first place.

Or you could toss it away, which is what many people are doing now. But I think this is the stickiest response, as, like I said earlier, it pretends that the song and its context never happened, hence revisionist history. It’s not even my least-favourite Christmas tune, that honour belongs to “Grandma Got Run-Over by a Reindeer”, but acting like it never happened won’t only insult the “something-something SJW, something-something PC-culture gone too far” crowd who likes to pretend that there’s a war on Christmas, but also music historians who might find value in it. This isn’t mentioning the aforementioned issues, either.

I don’t think that, at the end of the day, there’s an answer that’ll satisfy everyone. We can have a disclaimer, though that’s easily ignorable. We can update or gender-flip the song to teach a lesson about consent, though that’s only a band-aid solution. We can even toss it out the window and pretend it never happened, though that ignores history altogether. But, like it or not, we live in a world where “Baby It’s Cold Outside” does, in fact, exist. It’s up to us, as a collective, to decide how to handle that.