Baby, It's Cold Outside: Classic or creepy?

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Classic or creepy?

It’s Christmas time; the days are shorter, there’s the smell of snow in the air, decorations have been up in the shops for weeks, and everywhere you go, a Christmas song is blaring out of tinny speakers. Among the classics and the all-time favourites, sits Baby, It’s Cold Outside. A duet between a man and a woman, this festive soundtrack tells the story of a man trying to persuade his female companion not to risk the journey home but to have another drink and spend the night with him instead.

What some people interpret as flirty banter or an attempt at seduction, others read as coercive and non-consensual. On the surface, it certainly seems sketchy: the lyric ‘Say, what’s in this drink?’ springs to mind. Apply our modern world view and images of date rape drugs and shifty men seem clear as day. But Vanity Fair has argued the song is emblematic of the kind of culture clash row that flares up in politically and socially polarised times like ours. Dig a little deeper, and apply the context of the time the song was written, and ‘what’s in this drink’ goes from contentious to harmless. In the 1940s, good girls didn’t spend late nights at a gentleman’s house, and certainly not unchaperoned—she doesn’t want people to judge her (‘the neighbours might think’, ‘there’s bound to be talk tomorrow’,) but she’s having a good time and she wants to stay. To excuse her boldness, she blames it on the drink—‘what’s in this drink’ was a stock joke at the time, with the punchline being there’s no alcohol in there at all. This isn’t a joke about her being drunk and vulnerable; it’s a joke about how she’s using it as plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Frank Loesser and his wife Lynn came up with ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ in 1944, when entertaining at parties was a requisite for success. They thought it was a flirty, crowd-pleasing duet that empowered women, and their peers agreed: ‘We got invited to all the best parties. It was our ticket to caviar and truffles’, said Lynn. In 1950, the song won the Academy Award for best original song in the film, Neptune’s Daughter. Covered by stars the world over, it’s now one of the classic holiday anthems but its message hasn’t quite translated to the 21st century.

The song makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject advances even when they don’t want to—the pressuring of the man in the song is part of the dance towards the consensual encounter they are working up to. ‘I ought to say no, no, no…’ she sings, following it with, ‘at least I’m gonna say that I tried.’ This woman has a voice and she’s playing the culturally expected game: she’s exercising sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so.

Cultural context is everything and personal opinion matters. With all good art, there’s room for interpretation and while it may fall in the problematic camp these days, it was confronting the condemnation of female sexual desire back in the 1940s. Enjoy the song and celebrate that, for the most part, we now have sexual liberation.