[Disclaimer: I meant to write this post around Christmas time, but since “Baby, it’s Cold Outside” has to do with romance, and it’s still sort of cold out, and Valentine’s Day is coming up, this seems apropos.]
“Baby, it’s Cold Outside” is a pop standard that is associated with Christmas, has been recorded many different times, and is considered a romantic song. It’s also widely known as the “date-rape Christmas song.”
There’s a good reason for this. The sheet music explicitly refers to the two roles of the duet as the “wolf” and the “mouse.” The mouse is trying to leave and the wolf is trying to get the mouse to stay. (Predatory relationship + sex = sexual predator.) The overlapping lyrics suggest that the wolf keeps interrupting the mouse, not even listening to the mouse’s objections. Then there are the questionable lyrics people point out as particularly problematic – “Say, what’s in this drink?” and “The answer is no!”
Lyrically speaking, this song – to quote Stan Marsh – is “pretty f***ed up right here!”
But I can’t claim to have reached that conclusion by myself. Somehow, I didn’t ever listen to this full song before the winter of 2010. I was vaguely aware that the song existed, but if I heard it, I didn’t absorb it at all. The first version of the song I heard was the Glee version.
Look at that performance, where Kurt is the mouse and Blaine is the wolf. Does Kurt look like he feels remotely threatened or unsafe? Heck no. This isn’t about one boy forcing himself on another or refusing to listen to objections. Kurt and Blaine are playing two people who are obviously into one another, both aware of it, who know damn well that they’re going to hook up at the end of the evening, and are simply play-acting and flirting. They’re both in on it and fully enjoying themselves.
This isn’t coercion. This is foreplay, and consensual foreplay at that.
It’s a far, far cry from the way the song was originally presented in the film Neptune’s Daughter, where Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams sing one version, and Betty Garrett and Red Skelton sing another. Interestingly, the Montablan/Williams version has the man as the wolf and the woman as the mouse, while the Garrett/Skelton version has the woman as the wolf and the man as the mouse. In both versions, though, the mouse (Williams and Skelton) obviously really want to get away from the wolf (Montalban and Garrett), and the wolves have to restrain the mice from leaving. (This is all presented as highly comical, because 1949.) By looking at the Neptune’s Daughter versions, I can see why people look at the song and think, “This is creepy.”
Which version is the intended meaning of the song? “Hey, let’s flirt and pretend we’re not going to hook up, but we totally are and we both know it?” or “This is creepy and I want to get away but you won’t let me, so fine, whatever, I’m staying, and what did you actually put in my drink?”
I’m not sure it’s possible to know the original intent. Frank Loesser originally composed it for himself and his wife and they performed it at a housewarming party, and then he sold the song to MGM (a decision that reportedly did not make his wife very happy). We don’t know if they performed it as a flirtation or a HILARIOUS coercion.
Either way, I think it’s a mistake to interpret this song – or any song, for that matter – based on the lyrics alone. Song lyrics are not poems, where the words stand on their own. Song lyrics only make up half of the song’s meaning – or, in the context of live performances/musical theater/film, one-third of the song’s meaning. The vocal and physical performance make up the other two-thirds.
To determine that “Baby it’s Cold Outside” is flirtatious fun OR to determine that it’s an anthem to date rape, based solely on the lyrics, makes about as much sense as judging the intended message of a film by reading the screenplay.
Of course, I am a total hypocrite in writing any of this, because I’ve insisted in several places that Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” is a creepy song about a possessive stalker (and have performed it that way at karaoke, with hilarious results!), so you are free to ignore this entire post and (correctly) see it as an attempt to justify my love for a potentially problematic song because I want to keep enjoying Kurt and Blaine flirting through music.
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I think both readings are entirely valid, but then I’m a post-structuralist who doesn’t believe the author’s intent is either recoverable or relevant. Both readings you offer are supported by the text, especially in the contexts you describe. I personally read the Kurt/Blaine rendition the same way you do, but reading it as creepy is perfectly legitimate.
aaaaaand that was incredibly pretentious and grad-student-y, sorry about that. French literary theorists are taking over my brain.
More than one person has recommended that essay to me. I really ought to get around to reading it sometime.
But I have to ask and maybe there’s no right answer – what’s the difference between taking the author into account, and taking the cultural context of the piece into account?
It’s to do with authority, I think. Barthes critiques the idea of the Author-God who hands down the text from on high, who is the primary authority on it, and whose mind we must seek to know in order to understand the text. That was largely the 19th-century approach to literary criticism, I think, and Barthes wants us to overcome this tendency to invest the author with absolute interpretive authority. The author is dead: the reader is the one who gets to decide how to interpret the text. Most readers probably agree that cultural context and even biographical information about the author can be useful tools in interpreting a text – it’s just that we need to lose the fallacy of the Author-God.
For example: Pre-Barthes, if you found an old letter from the writer of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” confirming that it was intended to be creepy, you would have to declare any non-creepy reading of the song invalid, because it contradicts authorial intent. What Barthes is saying is that, even if you found that letter, your reading of Kurt and Blaine’s rendition as non-creepy is a legitimate reading, because authorial intent is not a valid hermeneutic criterion.
I hope this makes at least some sense…
It does. Thanks for the explanation.
I also heard the Glee version first and didn’t consider it creepy, but context really is everything.
How could the Glee version be considered creepy? They’re so adorable!
The first time I remember hearing it was Miss Piggy singing it to Rudolph Nureyev. Hard to take something seriously when it’s played for laughs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EJ1SBAO1HU
I never really thought of it as a “date rape song.” (Even though Piggy is awfully aggressive.) Whenever I’ve heard it sung, the “mouse” has always had a sort of playful, coy quality to the performance.
And you’re totally right about the Taylor Swift song.
Whenever I’ve heard it sung, the “mouse” has always had a sort of playful, coy quality to the performance.
Exactly. I don’t know why “date rape” is the first thing that comes to people’s minds. I mean, she (usually she) sings “I ought to say no no no sir/At least I’m going to say that I tried…”
She’s saying she OUGHT to say no, implying that she doesn’t really want to, and that she’s going to pretend that she tried so the gossipy neighbors don’t think she’s a slut the next morning. Which is an entirely different sex and gender and stereotype-related issue, but not date rape.
Oh merlin, yes. I have the same quandry. Taken alone, the lyrics are pretty date-rape-y…but I can’t help but love the Kurt/Blaine version. You make a good point about performance style, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the song performed in a way that suggests assault, and that certianly is not the case with the “Glee” version, which is why I’m able to enjoy it even with the questionable lyrics.
The line that I find hard to rationalize, though, even within a flirtatious interpretation, is “What’s in this drink?” (and the fact that the qquestion is ignored). What purpose does that serve in a fliratious interpretation? What is that line supposed to mean, anyway? It’s thrown in there and then the drink is never mentioned again. Why would the mouse be wondering about the drink? Is there a strange color to it? Does it taste wrong? …But I’m over thinking this.
The knowledge that it was origenally created and performed by a husband and wife seems to argue for its innocence even more. A cute, flirtatious duet performed for friends makes more sense than writing a song in which one performer tries to force themselves on another in hopes that it will amuse the neighbors…unless you just have very twisted neighbors (which, to be fair, is possible).
I read a post that discussed the meaning of this song, which talked a little about that line and suggested it was a cultural thing. I don’t really know, but here’s a link if youd like to read it:
http://persephonemagazine.com/2010/12/listening-while-feminist-in-defense-of-baby-its-cold-outside/
Thanks for the link. That’s always how I’ve looked at the song.
Thank you for that link. That makes sense, and it definately throws that line into a much more innocent light.
Well, to be fair, I’ve never seen it performed as straight-up assault. The Neptune’s Daughter mice characters are clearly not wanting to stay but it’s all played for comedy (problematic, but it was a different time, yada yada).
I always thought the “What’s in this drink?” was a rather innocuous question, to be honest, in the vein of “Is this gin or vodka?”
At the level of “these two performers/characters are on equal, consensual footing” I think it certainly is valid to not read the song as “date rape.” Similarly to Kurt and Blaine, I could envision a long-married couple (or my long-term boyfriend and I) enacting a similar scene in an entirely flirty, consensual way.
At the same time, I think some of the phrases that sound the most chilling when heard without a consensual underlying context come from joking about rape as part of an old fashioned flirtation. Even if we assume that both participants have equal power and are engaging in a consensual flirtation, “What’s in this drink?” can most charitably be read as a joking reference to someone drugging the mouse’s drink.
I really want to be able to enjoy this song, but I think even when you remove the implied date rape from the performance, you can’t quite remove all rape allusions (or jokes, depending on the performance) from the song itself.
At the same time, I think some of the phrases that sound the most chilling when heard without a consensual underlying context come from joking about rape as part of an old fashioned flirtation. Even if we assume that both participants have equal power and are engaging in a consensual flirtation, “What’s in this drink?” can most charitably be read as a joking reference to someone drugging the mouse’s drink.
Good point. Even if “what’s in this drink?” is meant to be coy, there’s still some kind of non-consensual role-playing in there. That doesn’t mean that anyone who engages in non-consensual role-playing would do it in real life, but it’s still uncomfortable.
I defended that line earlier on because I thought, what’s the big deal about asking, “What’s in this drink?” That’s the kind of question I would ask if, say, the juice masked the alcohol really well and I couldn’t tell it it was rum or gin. BUT that totally innocent version of the question really doesn’t fit in with the rest of the song – why would she ask that as an aside?
Again, though, I think performance has to be taken into account (but I do agree about that one line). Someone suggested that the song is probably meant to be playful because they both join in on the last “Baby it’s cold outside,” and it would be an entirely different meaning if ONLY the wolf sang that last part.
I’m enjoying this conversation because I’ve always liked that song, especially those sexy, swingy, witty rhymes (“Baby, you’d freeze out there…it’s up to your knees out there.” Sing that line and drawl out those long ee sounds a bit, and it does it for me, I don’t know why).
I never even thought about the creepiness until just a few years ago.
I have the same problem with Cole Porter’s *Brush Up Your Shakespeare,* which is such a great and funny show tune, and then you get older and think about lyrics like, “If she fights when her clothes you are mussin’/What are clothes? Much Ado about Nuttin’!”, and your world undergoes a paradigm shift.
So I’m liking the post-modernist Schroedinger’s cat idea we’ve got going, in which consensus and foreplay get to be alive in the box.
And since come to acknowledge the coercive, rapey side as well, I’m struck by all the of sexual policing and slut-shame anxiety (again, 1949). It’s not just the neighbor who is taking note of where Mouse spends the night: “My FATHER will be pacing the floor…” (and doesn’t she also mention her mother and brother being up waiting as well?).
Which is even more problematic, because in that reading her coyness and game playing are but token resistance, and all her refusals are a front for her real desires. At least she can pretend she put up a fight. And doesn’t that just feed right into the rape mentality of “Women say no when they mean yes, so just keep asking.”
That said: the Kurt-Blaine duet was the happiest, sexiest gay thing I have seen ever seen on television. I’m not even much of a Gleester, but I did happen to catch that, and all I can say is: Hot damn!