The Problem with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” Isn’t Consent. It’s Slut-Shaming.

It happens every winter. The clocks change, the chill settles in, and, like the flurries of the first snowfall, a new cascade of shocked friends and acquaintances pepper my social media feed with the observation that, oh my God you guys, the lyrics to the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” are actually super rapey.

Aside from this being a little repetitive at this point (this phenomenon’s been on a perennial hot streak for like a decade), this assertion is also, well, wrong. Because like with all art — even popular art — you can’t draw any sort of valuable conclusions about it without a demonstrable understanding of two things: nuance and context. They’ll get you every time.

Penned in 1944, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a duet usually staged between a man and a woman. The lyrics place the pair at the guy’s home following a date, with the woman lamenting that she has to leave and the man trying to convince her to stay. The complaints of skeeviness stem first from the song’s overall tone, in which a man is putting pressure on a woman to engage in assumedly intimate behavior, and second from one now-infamous line in which the woman muses, “Hey, what’s in this drink?”