Baby Its Cold Outside
It’s finally December, which means its officially Christmas music season on all the radio stations. Radio listeners will get to hear all the classics, the modern renditions of the classics, and the one or two new Christmas songs for the year. But one song you likely won’t hear on the radio this year, well at least the past few years, is Baby It’s Cold Outside. A few years ago radio stations pulled the song from their rotations and caused a huge controversy that keeps rearing it’s head every Christmas season. As a self admitted Grinch, I don’t even remember hearing the song before Will Farrell and Zooey Deschanel sang it in the movie Elf. So I was surprised that it had such a strong following to begin with, and then even more surprised that the song is over 50 years old and I was just oblivious to it for the majority of my life.
Baby It’s Cold Outside has been around at least since Dean Martin sang it in 1959. A quick look at the lyrics will find no swear words, and what was considered pretty innocent flirting at the time. If we were using movie style ratings it would get a very mild PG, for implied alcohol consumption and kissing references (fully stretching with those). With next to nothing unclean in the song, why would a reasonable person ban the song from the radio?
Even though it feels like an eternity ago, Baby It’s Cold Outside was banned in the later part of 2018. Two very important things happened before this. The first was that the #MeToo hashtag started at the end of 2017, and eventually became a movement in 2018. It gained even more attention after Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual abuse by more than a dozen women. Moving into the Christmas season of 2018 there were a lot of open conversations about how common sexual abuse is. In this new environment, people started to realize that the seemingly innocent flirting in Baby It’s Cold Outside reflected several real world scenarios where a man wouldn’t take no for an answer and either by force or by coercion put women in situations they weren’t comfortable with (to put it mildly). In other words, it’s a song about a man continually badgering a woman who flat out says “The answer is no” and we label it as flirtatious.
I realize that “badgering” is a bit on the strong side, especially in the context of the song and the way that it was intended to be interpreted (playful/flirtatious). However, we have to be aware that for far too many people, this brings back memories of truly horrific events that were not playful or flirtatious. The other side of all of this is what a “ban” of this song actually means. The way some people make it seem you would think that there are cries for the song to be removed from the face of the Earth. While there probably do exist some people who think that way, what the practice and main controversy entail is the removal of the song from radio playlists. What that means is that people are trying to eliminate the instances where the song will spontaneously play without the listener’s foreknowledge. You cans till find hundreds of versions of the song on Spotify, YouTube, and probably even CD (do people even buy CDs anymore?). In other words, it’s not a true ban, just not broadcasting it on a radio station where there is no “next” button.
The bottom line is there are reasonable people on both sides of this argument. The song was intended to be innocent (well at least as innocent as two adults engaging in consensual relations can be) but it has real world implications that can make it very uncomfortable for thousands of people (on average there are 463,634 victims of rape and sexual assault each year). If you want to listen to the song, you have several avenues to listen to it any time you want. If you don’t want to listen to it, I’m glad that you won’t turn on the radio and hear it unwillingly.
Of course, I wouldn’t complain if they banned all Christmas songs and movies, but I’m just a grinch that way.