Baby, It's Pretty Cold In Here, Too

Frank Loesser and Lynn Garland

Seems like every December anymore, we have the debate: is “Baby It’s Cold Outside” offensive? The winter jazz standard, by Guys and Dolls composer Frank Loesser in 1944 to sing as a novelty duet with his wife, Lynn Garland, has become infamous for a man plying a woman with alcohol and persuading her to stay with him overnight. Several radio stations have banned the song, but a few have reversed themselves under public pressure.

The controversy, which has simmered for years but really only opened up to widespread public awareness in the last five years or so, turns on how we should interpret Loesser’s narrative. On the one hand, the male voice’s disdain for the female voice’s protests, while she sings things like “What’s in this drink,” suggest he’s manipulating her. Some critics have called him a sexual predator. I’ve heard some amateur pundits call him a date rapist.

By now, we’ve all heard the counterargument, that the song is laden with post-Depression stock jokes and sexual politics. Women back then couldn’t outright consent, because of social pressures; the female voice must perforce couch her desire to stay with her lover in acceptable protests. The song advances through a sequence of arguments that Loesser’s first-generation audience would’ve found predictable and funny, and finishes with the pair singing in beautiful, consenting unison.

This year, I encountered a new counter-counter-argument, that art, like language, changes. Our definition of acceptable sexual behaviors has evolved, we now believe men should take women’s word at face value, and clinging onto a Howard Hawks-era screwball comedy interpretation yokes audiences to the past. Let things go, we’re told. The world changes, and our artistic interpretation criteria need to change with it.

I can’t completely accept this argument. All art reflects the context in which it’s created. If we cannot require audiences to understand the social milieu, we cannot really appreciate any art from a prior generation. From Ovid and Shakespeare, to sacred texts like the New Testament and the Koran, works that were downright progressive in their time look reactionary and knuckle-dragging when pulled from that historical context.

(This is especially problematic with holy texts. Whenever fundamentalists say “I’m just saying what the Bible says,” they miss an important point: everything in the Bible was written in response to something else, and that something else might not be explicit in the text.)

However, that being said, people don’t perceive all art equally. When people read books or watch plays, they tend to focus on that effort exclusively; with the exception of audiobooks, people don’t, indeed can’t, read while doing something else. By contrast, audiences frequently perceive music passively, putting the radio or iTunes on for background noise while cleaning, doing homework, or hosting a party.

So maybe, because “Baby It’s Cold Outside” doesn’t jump the same mental hurdles that “Much Ado About Nothing” does, we should accept that people cannot comprehend its context, at least not without significant coaching. It’s a top-40 song, not High Art. Yet I can’t accept that either. I’ve argued with loved ones about how to interpret popular songs before, especially when they express outdated sexual mores.

As long as “classic rock radio” exists, new generations can discover songs like Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” or Marshall Tucker’s “Heard It In a Love Song,” both of which, by today’s standards, are aggressively disrespectful to women. I’ve argued that we should hear both songs in their historical context. Forcing our understanding onto these, or any, songs, sucks the artistry out, while depriving us of opportunities to step outside ourselves.

That, though, may be the most important factor in this debate: while we’ve become more attuned to people in our own context, more conscious of (for instance) women as independent beings with their own sexual motivations, we’ve also become willfully blind to anyone different. That’s why kids flip their shit over Halloween costumes, and we insist cute postwar novelty songs mimic current social mores no matter what. Because everyone has to think, act, and be like us.

These debates matter, because how we interpret the outside world becomes, ultimately, how we interpret ourselves. We have an obligation to understand other cultures, peoples, and times in their own terms, not according to standards we impose on them. Because the minute we begin insisting everyone conform to us, we become yoked to how we think in some particular moment. We become rigid and hidebound. And inevitably, we get overtaken by changing social mores, too.