The Song is Back

With the return of the Christmas music, comes the return of the Christmas music discourse. Specifically, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and Is It Rape Culture.

So I am going to discuss this in the form of a meme. (A bit of an old-fashioned meme these days, actually, but the current equivalent involves embedding a lot of images of glowing brains and it's a tremendous pain.)

Broke: She says "no" very clearly! She says "what's in this drink!" This song is a song about pressuring a woman into sex and implied date rape and we really need to stop singing it all the time.

Woke: Everyone misses the context of it being written in a time when women couldn't say yes directly. She's always maintaining a playful tone and all her excuses are about what other people might think; it's actually about a woman taking control of her sexuality in a time when it was expected they wouldn't do that. It's actually empowering!

Bespoke: We always listen to songs in the context we live in. "Fair for its day" doesn't mean it's good now; just look at Pern and homosexuality. Besides which, the version we listen to is already somewhat different from its early days-- when it moved away from being something its writers sang at parties and was placed in "Neptune's Daughter," it was sung both as we hear it today... and immediately followed by a version with the genders swapped. People were already playing with the gender politics in 1949 in its first major appearance, so the return to recording it as just a conventional love song actually is a step backwards that ignores a lot of the history and context. Originally, it might well have been meant to be empowering, but the majority of people who hear it have no idea about any of this history and context and are consequently absorbing it as a rape culture song. It was not meant as one originally, but it is probably time to lay it to rest.

The Memetic Hazard

So a while back, siderea discovered the existence of r/collapse on Reddit and posted about it with the warning that it was a "memetic hazard": something with the potential to seriously screw up your brainspace if you read it too much. I stayed out of it for a while and then eventually poked my head in just to skim, whereupon I went "What? This is mostly similar to Sharon Astyk's Facebook feed, just somewhat more scattered and less useful, and I look at that every day... oh. Oh."

Sharon Astyk is a writer who I discovered when her essay on the importance of reading aloud whirred around the librarian community several years ago. When I realized she mostly wasn't writing much there I went looking around to see if she was writing somewhere else, and found that she has a lot of public posts on Facebook, both sharing useful articles and writing her own incisive essays. She's very realist and does not at all believe in pulling her punches, so the essays have gotten progressively more frightening about the state of the world... in large part because thus far she's been very on-point in terms of predicting things, which means I know I'm not looking at exaggerations.

And I've been at the very least skimming the headlines and often actually looking at a few of the articles she shares which taken all together put forth an apocalyptic picture. And I read her original essays.

I didn't make the connection between "memetic hazard" and "this stuff" until I actually went and peeked into r/collapse, at which point I realized that I've been looking at a whole bunch of stuff about the impending end of the world, which has indeed been having something of a deleterious effect on my mental health.

On sharing this revelation with Mathfriend it was suggested to me that I should perhaps not be looking at this Facebook feed every day.