baby its cold outside
"Baby, It's Cold Outside" is an Academy Award-winning popular song written by Frank Loesser in 1944, which gained wide recognition in 1949 when it was performed in the film Neptune's Daughter.
Every year at Christmastime these days, as sure as fake antlers and Aunt Ruby's fluorescent-cherry fruitcake, the feminists are out denouncing Frank Loesser's 1940s seasonal-seduction duet Baby, It's Cold Outside as "rapey."

As cheerless as Scrooge wondering why there are no workhouses, the sexual-assault sisterhood reads sinister subtexts into Loesser's lyrics every Yuletide. "Say, what's in this drink?" That's all about roofies, the date-rape drug. "I ought to say no, no, no." That's women being socialized by the patriarchy to be nice when they really want to get away. "I've got to get home" - "Oh, baby, you'll freeze out there." That's him wearing her down into unwanted sex.

I can't decide whether these Grinch-ettes of rape culture have tin ears, tin eyes, tin brains, or all three. Have any of them ever heard the song sung? (My favorite cover is Jerry Mercer's and Margaret Whiting's, although Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan are close runners-up.)

The contrapuntal lyrics, in which he puts the moves on her by invoking freezing exterior weather and she tries to think why she ought to go home when she'd really rather not, actually tell a tale of sex at its most pleasantly consensual (or maybe, since this was 1944, after all, just a little kissing and hugging). There's flirtation, there's wooing, and above all, there's a languid lightheartedness. He never forces himself on her, merely persuades her to...stay a little longer (and remember that it's she who's arrived to "drop in" on him, not the other way around).

As the musicologist Thomas Riis wrote, "Loesser can be said to have built his little tune into a miniature dramatic scene, a scena in the operatic sense, in which two characters and the nature of their relationship are fully sketched with efficiency and emotional clarity."

And it should be noted that the very first performance of Baby, It's Cold Outside was by Loesser and his wife (you can't get more affirmatively consensual than that), entertaining their celebrity guests at a housewarming. The Loessers loved singing it, and their guests loved hearing it. Commentator Mark Steyn quotes Lynn Loesser's memoirs: "It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act."

Well, not quite everyone loved Baby, It's Cold Outside. A young Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, studying at what is now Northern Colorado University, heard a recording of the song at a church dance and wrote that was outraged: "The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . ." Qutb went back to Egypt to become a leader in the fanatically anti-secular Muslim Brotherhood. Later hanged for plotting to overthrow the Nasser government, he's regarded as the godfather of modern jihad.


Comment: Clutching pearls too tight apparently creates the pressure for the emergence of extreme ideologies!


Feminists love to cultivate sympathetic "allies." And they've got them aplenty in their grim and puritanical loathing of a cheery Christmas song: radical Islamic terrorists.