Music Monday ~ Controversially Cold Outside

I guess Frank Loesser would be horrified if he knew the controversy his award winning song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is causing on the internet these days.

Wikipedia:

Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a popular song written by Frank Loesser in 1944. It is a call and response duet in which a host, usually performed by a male voice, tries to convince a guest, usually performed by a female voice, that she should stay the evening because the weather is cold and the trip home would be difficult. While the lyrics make no mention of any holiday, it is popularly regarded as a Christmas song due to its winter theme.

Loesser wrote the song for his wife and himself to perform at parties. He sold the song to MGM, which used it for the 1949 film Neptune's Daughter. It was sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbán and won the Academy Award. Since 1949 it has been covered by many singers, including Ray Charles, Michael Bublé, Sir Tom Jones, and Dolly Parton.

Another version of the song, not mentioned above, but drawn to my attention by my husband, was by Homer and Jethro, a comic version with silly replacement lines such as : "I'll take your hair your hat looks swell"...."I'll hold your hands they're just like feet". TSK!

I started to read a long thread of answers at Quora to "Why do people think the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is offensive? In trying to understand both points of view, I couldn't tear myself away, spent far too much time on it! I found myself upvoting answers offering opposite points of view, and couldn't decide, afterwards, exactly how I feel about the song myself. I do see both sides of today's argument.

Whenever I've heard the song in the past, it didn't strike me as being in any way offensive, certainly not "rapey" as some see it, rather just playful in tone. I didn't even assume that the point of having the female stay, due to inclement weather, necessarily meant...sex. But then I'm old now. I was 5 years old when the song was written, I grew up in the atmosphere of the context of that song, when a gal had to be careful not to be labelled "common", "easy", or "slut". As an answer at Quora pointed out - the song is really as much about "slut-shaming" as anything else. The female is afraid of what relatives and others might think if she stayed with her boyfriend.

Things have changed so much now, it's hard to find a modern movie where there isn't at least one scene of naked bodies writhing together - in close-up. In movies, a chance meeting in a bar, over a drink, almost always results in...please re-read previous sentence. In past decades such goings on were not allowed in films - there was even a rule at some point, I think, where one of the parties involved in a scene of sexual activity on a bed had to keep one foot on the floor.

While I can appreciate the shade cast on Loesser's lyrics by some of the horrors of rape and sexual abuse uncovered in the past few years, I still find it difficult to find this song to be actually offensive - it is simply old fashioned - and old fashioned ain't all bad! There's a simple answer for any who do find the song offensive - don't listen! As another answer at Quora pointed out - It is just a song.

I'll not post a video of the controversial song today, but another by Frank Loesser. This song depicts a situations not a million miles from the same circumstance as in "Baby It's Cold Outside" - but now the two are married, and the song is in softer vein:

Two Sleepy People with Shirley Ross and Bob Hope -