Baby It's Cold Outside
One of the most popular songs at Christmas is Frank Loesser’s 1944 ditty, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Today, Frank Loesser is known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway legend, whose other hits include the musicals Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Yet somehow Loesser — the guy who also wrote a song called “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” — managed to write one of the most controversial songs in modern history. (Hint: it’s not about ammunition.) How did you manage that, Frank?
The Loesser Evil
Loesser originally wrote “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in 1944 to sing with his wife Lynn Garland at their housewarming party. It was so well received that they started performing it at their friend’s private parties. The duet featured two roles: Wolf (sung by the man) and Mouse (sung by the woman). Much of the world first heard it in the romantic comedy, Neptune’s Daughter, where it was performed by Ricardo Montalbán and Esther Williams. It was also performed by Betty Garrett and Red Skelton in a comedic twist of role reversal.
But the world didn’t initially embrace it the way Loesser hoped. Many people denounced it as risqué because it insinuated that the woman wanted to spend the night with the man. TIME magazine reported on June 27, 1949 that “Queasy NBC first banned the lyrics as too racy, then decided they contained nothing provably prurient, and put the tune on the air.”
Dating: The New Thing
Dating back then was new and fraught with problems. People weren’t used to unchaperoned time with the opposite sex. WWII had thrown open the doors to sexuality as people began to live with a carpe diem attitude, thanks to the threat of imminent death. But women still weren’t allowed to say "yes" to sex. Therefore, a negotiation commonly occurred between men and women before lovemaking outside of marriage. According to Beth Bailey, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, the song documents that negotiation. And saying “What’s in this drink?” was a joking way of blaming alcohol for your actions, especially when you were doing what you wanted to do.
As dating became more common, the early controversy was clean forgotten. The song was re-recorded over the next 50 years by a stunning list of talents such as Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Henry Mancini, Bette Midler, Zooey Deschanel, Lady Antebellum, Lyle Lovett, Kelly Clarkson, and many, many others.
Baby, It's Cold Online
But by 2009, audiences were once again turning chilly. While the #MeToo movement was started back in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, the hashtag went viral in October 2017. It’s since been used over 19 million times on Twitter alone. Feminist listeners were turned off by the song’s implications that the man was pressuring the woman to have sex with him. And because dating practices (and abuses) had changed wildly since the 1940s, many people were now alarmed by the insinuation that the Wolf had put a date rape drug in Mouse’s drink, which was a growing form of sexual assault. By Christmas 2018, radio stations were taking the song off the air. The outrage on Twitter over the song was enormous, with massive flame wars raging over whether the song should be heard or not.
Susan Loesser, the composer’s daughter, blames Bill Cosby. “Bill Cosby ruined it for everybody,” she told NBC News. “Way before #MeToo, I would hear from time to time people call it a date rape song. I would get annoyed because it’s a song my father wrote for him and my mother to sing at parties. But ever since Cosby was accused of drugging women, I hear the date rape thing all the time.” According to NBC, the link between Cosby and the song was cemented with a popular Saturday Night Live skit.
Look Back and Learn
Here at the Museum of Inappropriate, we believe in looking back and learning from our society’s mistakes. But in this case, we feel the song’s original intent should be understood for entirely different reasons — namely to gauge the progress (or lack thereof) of women’s rights and agency.