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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.
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.