If I had known in my freshman year college history class that this was the so-called churchy song that set Mr. Prudish Muslim Exchange Student off…
Well, I probably wouldn’t have realized its significance, as it wasn’t until my junior or senior year domestic violence course that I learned about certain very popular songs carrying messages of such wicked male domination and violence. The latter was extremely influential on me, such that I celebrate this song’s disfavor tremendously.
Come to think of it, just about every single idea I’m a fanatic about comes from something that happened or that I read during my college years, especially the things I didn’t share with my family (my mother has a way of inserting values and history into conversations about facts). It’s pretty dangerous to give too much unsupervised “education” to adults. It’s so easy to be traumatized and “triggered.” Young adults need to learn how to call home every once in a while.
Anyway, this is not the scalp I’m looking for, but it’ll help.
posted by JohnInCA on
I had a bit of a revelation about this song the other day.
A large part of the problem is that, in context, it’s not about date rape, but that when songs are played on the radio, they very rarely give “context”, and expect the listener will provide the context on their own.
As such, if the song was only played on “oldies” stations where the people listening already had the context, it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But it’s not. Like a lot of “Christmas music”, it gets played on random radio stations all across the country, stations that normally would never play a song from the 40s, 50s or even 60s. And that obviously leads to people that don’t have the context hearing it out of context, to predictable results as, in a modern context, “what’s in this drink” is not a joke, it’s date rape.
So the bottom line is that regardless of the merits of the individual song, we should stop expecting every radio station to rehash nostalgia for the 40s, 50s and 60s by playing “classic Christmas music” every year. Take away that forced nostalgia trek, and stations play “Christmas music” that’s actually appropriate to their theme and genre, and you don’t get this hubbub over nothing.
posted by Kosh III on
Just when you think the topics have reached the furtherest extent of irrelevancy, boom! this waste of time and effort comes along.
Meanwhile the Religious Reich continues to use the Trump Administration to further it’s war on gays and anything else that blocks their reach for power and money.
posted by Jorge on
I think I feel microtriggered. (What’s wrong with religion or Trump?) I will microsilence you, belittling your livid experience. [misspelling intentional]
I trust the reason you need not mention what you mean by the war on gays is because you already mentioned it yesterday in the other topic?
posted by Kosh III on
The problem with religion is not necessarily with the beliefs but the distortions and perversions done in the name of religion.
As to what is wrong with Trump: let’s start with his lying, stealing, cheating, adultery and divorces—for a start.
Please feel free to feel triggered: bless your heart!
posted by Jorge on
And also yours.
posted by MRBill on
I’m pretty sure, for most folks, Christmas and the Holiday Season* implies a heavy emphasis on nostalgia and old times, certainly in it’s contemporary practice: or Dickens wouldn’t be so central to it’s ethos.
I always thought “Baby, it’s cold outside” to be the sort of hipsterish number that pretty much laid out the power dynamic between men and women at the time of its composition. Never liked it, and would skip it when I could, even when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong covered it. JohnInCa gets the change in the culture that has made this song problematic for some. We are facing just what that culture implied and why we need #MeToo.
And here, as y’all have noted, it appears to flog in this blog liberals with a charge of intolerance.
For an important debate, that is not tied to Right vs. Left politics explicitly, here a review of several books questioning if an emphasis on marriage has misdirected GLBT social Justice: http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/hugh-ryan-love-won
While I have always thought 2 (and conceivably more) people should be able to wed, having been (and in a relationship with another man whom) had been in straight marriages, I tended to think securing protections in work, residence, health care, hell, basic human rights of expression (including presentation as a person) needed to be secured as the priority.
I now see that Gay Marriage can be the royal road to attaining these rights: but has taken much of the air out of this struggle for rights at the State and Federal level.
And a certain bourgeois attitude expressed on the right “We are nice married homosexuals, they are awful, confusing trannie gender rebels” shows that the radical politics isn’t necessarily left wing, and formerly oppressed folks are all to willing to oppress others.
I’m acquiring and reading a couple of these books.
(One Imagines “Christmas and the Holiday Season” as a musical side project, Christmas the front person, Ramadan on Lead Guitar, Hanukkah on Rhythm Guitar, Kwanzaa on Drums, Diwali Percussion, Yule on Keyboards, Festivus, and The Solstice Backup…)
What ever festival or season you observe, I hope all Y’all, even Matthew, have one full of Love, joy, and Light, from Bill and Tim, somewhere in the woods near trendy, Fabulous Blue Ridge (an anagram for “I Blur Edge”) GA.
posted by Jorge on
And a certain bourgeois attitude expressed on the right “We are nice married homosexuals, they are awful, confusing trannie gender rebels” shows that the radical politics isn’t necessarily left wing, and formerly oppressed folks are all to willing to oppress others.
I think in order to have compassion toward others, one must accept that one will always have faults and blind spots, and be willing to allow others to stand in as needed–so long as such people exist. To stand up for what you believe in does not mean you have to be right; know your role and respect others’.
posted by David Bauler on
Yawn.
posted by Jackson on
Re: Yawn, LOL and such. Sarcasm is not an argument.
The brouhaha over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — the efforts to press stations to pull the song and the subsequent pushback — is important to understand because it shows how far feminism has traveled from telling women they should feel free to enjoy sex, to telling women that flirtation is rape. And that’s nothing to yawn about.
10 Comments for “Flirtation or Date Rape?”
posted by Jorge on
If I had known in my freshman year college history class that this was the so-called churchy song that set Mr. Prudish Muslim Exchange Student off…
Well, I probably wouldn’t have realized its significance, as it wasn’t until my junior or senior year domestic violence course that I learned about certain very popular songs carrying messages of such wicked male domination and violence. The latter was extremely influential on me, such that I celebrate this song’s disfavor tremendously.
Come to think of it, just about every single idea I’m a fanatic about comes from something that happened or that I read during my college years, especially the things I didn’t share with my family (my mother has a way of inserting values and history into conversations about facts). It’s pretty dangerous to give too much unsupervised “education” to adults. It’s so easy to be traumatized and “triggered.” Young adults need to learn how to call home every once in a while.
Anyway, this is not the scalp I’m looking for, but it’ll help.
posted by JohnInCA on
I had a bit of a revelation about this song the other day.
A large part of the problem is that, in context, it’s not about date rape, but that when songs are played on the radio, they very rarely give “context”, and expect the listener will provide the context on their own.
As such, if the song was only played on “oldies” stations where the people listening already had the context, it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But it’s not. Like a lot of “Christmas music”, it gets played on random radio stations all across the country, stations that normally would never play a song from the 40s, 50s or even 60s. And that obviously leads to people that don’t have the context hearing it out of context, to predictable results as, in a modern context, “what’s in this drink” is not a joke, it’s date rape.
So the bottom line is that regardless of the merits of the individual song, we should stop expecting every radio station to rehash nostalgia for the 40s, 50s and 60s by playing “classic Christmas music” every year. Take away that forced nostalgia trek, and stations play “Christmas music” that’s actually appropriate to their theme and genre, and you don’t get this hubbub over nothing.
posted by Kosh III on
Just when you think the topics have reached the furtherest extent of irrelevancy, boom! this waste of time and effort comes along.
Meanwhile the Religious Reich continues to use the Trump Administration to further it’s war on gays and anything else that blocks their reach for power and money.
posted by Jorge on
I think I feel microtriggered. (What’s wrong with religion or Trump?) I will microsilence you, belittling your livid experience. [misspelling intentional]
I trust the reason you need not mention what you mean by the war on gays is because you already mentioned it yesterday in the other topic?
posted by Kosh III on
The problem with religion is not necessarily with the beliefs but the distortions and perversions done in the name of religion.
As to what is wrong with Trump: let’s start with his lying, stealing, cheating, adultery and divorces—for a start.
Please feel free to feel triggered: bless your heart!
posted by Jorge on
And also yours.
posted by MRBill on
I’m pretty sure, for most folks, Christmas and the Holiday Season* implies a heavy emphasis on nostalgia and old times, certainly in it’s contemporary practice: or Dickens wouldn’t be so central to it’s ethos.
I always thought “Baby, it’s cold outside” to be the sort of hipsterish number that pretty much laid out the power dynamic between men and women at the time of its composition. Never liked it, and would skip it when I could, even when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong covered it. JohnInCa gets the change in the culture that has made this song problematic for some. We are facing just what that culture implied and why we need #MeToo.
And here, as y’all have noted, it appears to flog in this blog liberals with a charge of intolerance.
For an important debate, that is not tied to Right vs. Left politics explicitly, here a review of several books questioning if an emphasis on marriage has misdirected GLBT social Justice: http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/hugh-ryan-love-won
While I have always thought 2 (and conceivably more) people should be able to wed, having been (and in a relationship with another man whom) had been in straight marriages, I tended to think securing protections in work, residence, health care, hell, basic human rights of expression (including presentation as a person) needed to be secured as the priority.
I now see that Gay Marriage can be the royal road to attaining these rights: but has taken much of the air out of this struggle for rights at the State and Federal level.
And a certain bourgeois attitude expressed on the right “We are nice married homosexuals, they are awful, confusing trannie gender rebels” shows that the radical politics isn’t necessarily left wing, and formerly oppressed folks are all to willing to oppress others.
I’m acquiring and reading a couple of these books.
(One Imagines “Christmas and the Holiday Season” as a musical side project, Christmas the front person, Ramadan on Lead Guitar, Hanukkah on Rhythm Guitar, Kwanzaa on Drums, Diwali Percussion, Yule on Keyboards, Festivus, and The Solstice Backup…)
What ever festival or season you observe, I hope all Y’all, even Matthew, have one full of Love, joy, and Light, from Bill and Tim, somewhere in the woods near trendy, Fabulous Blue Ridge (an anagram for “I Blur Edge”) GA.
posted by Jorge on
And a certain bourgeois attitude expressed on the right “We are nice married homosexuals, they are awful, confusing trannie gender rebels” shows that the radical politics isn’t necessarily left wing, and formerly oppressed folks are all to willing to oppress others.
I think in order to have compassion toward others, one must accept that one will always have faults and blind spots, and be willing to allow others to stand in as needed–so long as such people exist. To stand up for what you believe in does not mean you have to be right; know your role and respect others’.
posted by David Bauler on
Yawn.
posted by Jackson on
Re: Yawn, LOL and such. Sarcasm is not an argument.
The brouhaha over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — the efforts to press stations to pull the song and the subsequent pushback — is important to understand because it shows how far feminism has traveled from telling women they should feel free to enjoy sex, to telling women that flirtation is rape. And that’s nothing to yawn about.