‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ is a classic and well-known Christmas song, but in recent years, it has faced some controversy for being “sexist.” In 1944, Frank Loesser wrote the song with Lynn Garland, his wife, at one of their housewarming parties in New York City at the Navarro Hotel. They sang this song for their guests to hint that it was time to leave. After their first performance, they became “parlor room stars.”
In 1948 after a while of performing their song, Loesser sold it to MGM for the 1949 romantic comedy Neptune’s Daughter. Neptune’s Daughter is about a swimsuit fashion designer who is determined to protect her sister from heartbreak, but mistaken identity makes things complicated. According to Esther Williams who played in Neptune’s Daughter, the producers of the movie were planning on using the song ‘I’d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China’ by Loesser, but the studio censors were concerned the song was suggestive, and replaced it with ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside.’
The song did go on to win the 1950 Academy Award for Best Original Song. This song is known as a call and response which is a duet between two people, a host (called “Wolf” usually performed by a male singer) and a guest (called “Mouse” traditionally performed by a female). In the song, every line is a statement from the guest which is then followed by a response from the host. The lyrics in the song are the host trying to convince the guest that she should stay for a romantic evening because he has the fear of her getting too cold outside, even though she should return home to her concerned neighbors and family.
Around 2009 the song faced criticism from some listeners for some of the lyrics, with one of the lines “Say, what’s in this drink?” with the “wolf” unyielding pressure for the “mouse” to stay despite her repeated statements to return home. This line is being described as sexual harassment or date rape. There is the other side though where people have noted that in the cultural times when the song was written, ladies weren’t socially permitted to spend the night with gentlemen to whom they weren’t married.
The woman states she wants to stay the night, with the statement “What’s in this drink?” a common idiom at that time used to avoid social expectations by blaming someone’s actions on the influence of alcohol. In 2018 the song was canceled by a number of radio stations including Canada’s CBC streaming service after receiving social media criticism and pressure from the public regarding the song’s lyrics.
November 30, 2018, Cleveland, Ohio radio station WDOK Star 102 announced they removed the song due to listener input and amid the MeToo movement. “I do realize that when the song was written in 1944, it was a different time, but now while reading it, it seems very manipulative and wrong,” host Glenn Anderson wrote on the station’s website. December 4, 2018, Canadian radio stations Bell Media, CBC Radio, and Rogers Media followed.
Following its controversy the song scaled to the top 10 of Billboard’s digital sales list for the week of December 22, 2018, with it having a 70% increase in downloads. In 2019, John Legend and Kelly Clarkson decided to record the song with modified lyrics, which were written by Legend and Natasha Rothwell for a longer edition to Legend’s, “A Legendary Christmas” album.
The lyric change, which included the wolf emphasizing sexual consent, became another source of controversy. Deana Martin daughter of Dean Martin who had recorded a popular version of the song in 1959 condemned the lyric change as “absurd,” stating her father wouldn’t approve.
