In Defense Of Baby It's Cold Outside
People need to remember the 1940s are not the 2000s.
After the debate of if gift cards are thoughtless gifts or not the next big debate every year is about the 1944 song, "Baby It's Cold Outside." There are those who apparently have never read a book, seen a movie, or talked to someone who was an adult in the 1940s who insist that it's a date rape song.
We call these people complete ignoramuses.
You see, back in the 1940s women were pressured to remain virgins until they were married. It wasn't until the birth control pill came out in the 1960s that women started to have the freedom to say "yes." And as we well know, women are still slut shamed for saying yes, just not as much as they used to be. Nowadays you won't be run out of town for having sex outside of marriage. In the 1940s a landlord could kick you out of your apartment if you did and no one would come to help you.
Women were also taught to play "Hard to get" in order to snag a man. She must never appear to be "too available" and "too willing."
This is what the woman in the song is doing the entire time. She is saying "Yes" every time she sings something like "a cigarette more," "a half a drink more," and asking to borrow the man's comb. When she's singing about her maiden aunt and her neighbors she's saying, "I'm DTF but these people are going to be nasty to me so I need to pretend I tried to resist your charms."
The line everyone claims is a date rape drug reference, "What's in this drink," is actually a common 1940s joke about drinks that are incredibly weak. Basically she's saying he gave her a drink that is 99% water and she couldn't possibly get drunk from it.
The final lyric of the song is sung in unison. Which is her saying, "Okay, I out in enough of a protest to protect my reputation. Now it's freezing and I need your body to warm me up."
Yet people so out of touch with the past and the language of sex back then would put modern mortality to it and lie about it being a date rape song. Keep in mind this is the same generation that made Blurred Lines, an actual song about date rape, popular. The same people who made the meme "Rape Sloth." Yet they get a song where the woman is, in the vernacular of the time the song was composed, saying she's DTF the entire time, banned by lying about it being a date rape song.
It's not. You just need to go read a book and stop being a hypocrite.
