With Christmas right around the corner, you’re probably decorating the tree, planning the family gathering or wrapping up your shopping. Through these joyful moments, Christmas music will inevitably be piping in the background, classics like Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” or Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”.
We’ve gotten down to these hits for decades, but now one long-popular song has everyone is up in arms.
“Baby It’s Cold Outside”, a song often thought of as cute, is being said to promote rape culture in the era of the #MeToo movement. One Cleveland radio station banned it completely after several listeners complained about the alleged “hidden” message behind it.
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Tongue-in-cheek lyrics such as “Say, what’s in this drink?”, “I really can’t stay / Baby don’t hold out” and “I ought to say no, no, no, sir / Mind if I move in closer?” have sparked the backlash.
But what do these lyrics actually mean? A reblog on Tumblr went viral and might be the explanation we need to stop taking an innocent song outside of the context in which it was written and putting it into our own.
Photo Credit: Tumblr, bigbutterandeggman.tumblr.com
By no means should anyone take the #Metoo movement lightly, but the song doesn’t seem to be quite so insidious – at least according to this explanation.