Consent in a Culture That Has No Word for ‘No’
Written By DaisyJane Darling
Hello hello, my friends!
I hope all you readers had a magical and wondrous holiday season. Mine was certainly full of lots of Christmas spirit, as the bar I work at had their annual Christmas pop up, and the cabaret theater where I serve put on their annual holiday show. The season’s music followed me ev-er-y-where and the Christmas carol bells are still ringing, even in my dreams. As much as I enjoyed it, I’m sure many of you are as excited as I am to retire the holiday tunes until next year so they can recharge their jingley joy.
However, there is one song I am always reluctant to let go of: Baby it’s Cold Outside. I will happily listen to any rendition of this Christmas song any time of the year, and always try to sing both parts of the duet (I have yet to find a good way to do this, but I will never stop). Every time the holidays come around and Christmas tunes begin to pop back into circulation, this particular favorite of mine unfailingly amasses some charged conversations around the concerning message the lyrics send. There are a lot of strong opinions against this song, which you yourself may have already heard. Many have denounced BICO (Baby it’s Cold Outside) as a date-rapey song that should be retired as a relic of the past, to be exiled alongside those racist Looney Tunes episodes, not wanting to perpetuate our culture’s tendency to romanticize veiled sexual harassment. As a self proclaimed radical feminist, my own opinion contrasts from this interpretation. If you’re interested in hearing why, stick around!
The first time I heard criticism of BICO was when I was in high school, probably around 2015. As I re-listened to the words I had sung countless times with new ears, I was sad to realize that there is undeniably an undercurrent of rape culture in my favorite Christmas song, and was scared to think that I might not hear it in public ever again, or be judged for continuing to sing it myself.
The song is a duet between a man and a woman seemingly on a date, and at first glance it seems as if the man is pressuring the woman to stay longer. He continues to implore her to stay, despite her many protestations and excuses of why she cannot: her parents will worry, the neighbors will gossip, her aunt will viciously judge her, she “ought to say no” (as a good moral girl of her time would be expected to do), etc. There is a mention of something in her drink, which if applied in today’s world could easily point to the addition of a drug, or simply the suggestion that he is trying to get her drunk.
My own opinion of BICO falls somewhere down the middle; I do absolutely agree that it exemplifies strong and nefarious aspects of rape culture - however, not in the overt way that is commonly interpreted as the above explanation. A few years ago I encountered a viral Tumblr post contending that a majority of the contention with BICO is taken out of context of the time it was written. This foreverThis take forever changed the way I see this controversial song. As I don’t think I could say it better myself, here is a copy of the original Tumblr post:
“Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s.
So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem.
BUT! Let’s look closer!
“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.
Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally- understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.
So it’s not actually a song about rape - in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.”
That last line gets me every time!!! For all the ways that our society has improved and begun to focus on the importance of consent, we still live and are conditioned to exist in a social setting that gives most of us (women especially) no clear way to say no. Our culture has a very difficult time with rejection, and gives us few to zero tools to let people down politely. Just as the woman in the song is giving culturally coded signals to express that she does in fact want to stay, the culturally accepted way to be polite in telling someone no also comes in the form of an excuse - so instead of being honest, we usually find ourselves resorting to lies and made-up excuses to avoid hurting the feelings of the other person. Women are all too often blamed for other people’s emotional reactions, and in line with that we are conditioned from birth to navigate the world making sure we don’t hurt people’s feelings, even at our own expense. The classic, “Sorry, I have a boyfriend,” is easier than, “No thank you, I’m not interested,” because the guy asking for your number might take it personally, meaning that you caused him to be upset.
On the extreme end, in the realm of romance especially, this can be a safety issue, as we all know that an ego wounded from rejection all too often can lead to a fatal threat. But it also manifests in situations as innocent as when an old acquaintance who you never really liked asks if you want to get coffee and catch up, or you when you don’t actually want to go to that party your friend has been planning because you’d rather lay in bed with your cat and watch New Girl.
This cultural phenomenon doesn’t leave a lot of room for honesty, and that complicates our ability to determine or express consent. For all of my fellow Pride and Prejudice lovers out there, this is the classic Mr. Collins condition: the expectation that a woman is supposed to play ‘hard to get’ invariably devalues the meaning of any ‘no’ she may provide, whether directly spoken or in the form of an excuse. Coded communication is subtle and risky, because different people might read it in different ways. Not everyone will be able or willing to ‘take a hint’ and may keep pushing - in the same way that many people interpret the man in BICO to be pushing his duet partner. The saving grace in the case of the song is that, as the Tumblr response mentioned, she was sending lots of signals that she did in fact want to stay, and he was picking up on that, and thereby retains his honor and integrity.
This can be frustrating in reverse as well; if a woman were to say no when she really wanted to say yes, and the other person takes that at face value and says “Alrighty then, have a nice day!” Instead of giving her more time to finally concede as she expected them to do, then she would be out a potential partner and that’s a bummer! While I am a proponent of just saying how you feel and not playing games, the human mating dance is a weird thing, and sometimes that’s how people learn you’re supposed to do it.
This same phenomena has also resulted in many a bruised heart when someone skips the excuse phase all together and just goes straight to ghosting. Even though the message may be clear, we are all fools in love, and it often leaves the person on the receiving end longing for closure and still hoping there might be a chance or explanation. It’s a cop out to not say anything at all and leave someone hanging rather than take responsibility for one’s own lack of interest - but we are scared of feeling responsible for hurting another’s feelings.
I have personally been working on changing this in the way I respond to people. If I get a text from my manager asking if I can pick up a shift, I’ve taken to simply saying, “I’m not available tonight.” Nothing more. I do not owe the world a reason why I don’t want to do something - I’m allowed to simply not want to, and that’s that.
Reading consent is a loaded and complex aspect of communicating. It seems like it should be straightforward, right? But the more I become aware of it, the more I see how two people might experience the same situation in vastly different ways, coming out of it with entirely opposite ideas about what happened. The way we’ve been conditioned to avoid clear honestly, or to not take it seriously when we receive it, definitely does not make it easy for us to navigate the tricky dance of reading consent.
In today’s post-Me Too era, continuing the conversations about consent is extremely relevant, necessary, as the concept is constantly evolving. Yet, in a social environment overrun by cancel culture and people scrambling to adjust to the recent wild swing of the feminist pendulum, I have noticed that a lot of nuance can be lost in these conversations. People are often scared of being shunned or judged or canceled, and this can translate to having strong opinions that tend towards black-and-white washing of any given issue.
In my opinion, the best solution is to approach the world with compassion, acknowledging that we are all in a process of re-learning, and communication is messy and complicated. Not one of us is perfect, and we are all produced within a system that is imbalanced and unequal, leaving us all with internalized understandings about consent, learned over years and years of experience. As a collective, our society is growing at an incredible rate, and having incredibly tough and complex conversations about issues such as these. It’s important to remember that things may not always be as they seem, and in any given situation there are layers upon layers of factors that may not be immediately visible. Stay rad and stay glad, and remember that we are all in this crazy world together. And if you were self conscious about loving Baby It’s Cold Outside like I once was, rest assured that it’s actually an example of feminist agency within a constricted world. We can all misshapenly sing both parts of the duet with pride!
If you are at all interested in continuing down this avenue of the nuances of consent, take a peek at this podcast episode of Armchair Experts where Dax and Monica interview the wonderful Constance Wu. Having experienced sexual assault herself, Constance has some refreshing and insightful things to say about her own healing, and ways we can shift our perspective around the finicky idea of consent to facilitate true growth and add nuance to the conversation. It’s incredibly interesting. The hosts add lots of fascinating points and do a wonderful job of leading the conversation. This is probably one of my favorite podcast episodes I’ve ever listened to; it’s been weeks, and the topics they covered keep popping up in my mind.