As the holiday season rolls around, Christmas music starts to play on the radio again and finds its way onto all our Spotify playlists. One song that has been highly controversial in the past couple years is “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It is most famous for its appearance in everyone’s favorite Christmas movie, Elf. Listen to the song here and take a closer look at the lyrics here.
With today’s modern lens, it definitely sounds like a story in which a woman does not give consent to stay with a man one evening and some even claim that the man slips something into the woman’s drink to make her stay. Some have claimed it to be a “rape anthem” that condones sexual assault and argue that it should be retired as a holiday song.
However, let’s remind ourselves that this song was written in 1944—a very different time with different cultural norms. In 2016, a Tumblr post defending the song started circling around the web, and as it’s that time of year again, it has popped up once again.
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