It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol
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.
remember loves: context is everything. and personal opinion matters. If you still find this song to be a problem, that’s fine. But please don’t make it into something it’s not because it’s been stripped of cultural context.
This is actually really interesting. I’ve never known a lot of the background to this song.
i’m mentally ill too but fucking listen to me here. you need to take responsibility for your actions regardless of whether or not they’re a product of your mental illness. you don’t get to manipulate, gaslight, take advantage of, or straight up abuse people because you’re mentally ill! you don’t! what the fuck! why are some of you still thinking it’s okay to say things like “manipulation is okay because i have _____ and need attention from my significant other” oh my god. Don’t fucking do that
@the people who are angry that Freddie Mercury dies at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody, good. you should be angry. this is your history. this is what people like us went through, not that long ago. use that anger to fight harder.
and don’t blame the people who made the movie, because this is the truth. he lived, and he was brilliant and good, and he died because the government was cruel and didn’t care about people like him. I’m sorry. you can’t change the past, and it would be disrespectful to the memory of him to try. yes, it’s fucked up.
don’t let it happen again.
I’m not going to tag this with #spoilers because it’s not a fucking spoiler. it’s a real person, who lived and died, and it’s really fucking fucked up that you want to erase the life of a real goddamn person so that you can have a happy ending.
i was thinking about the weirdest phone calls i got when i still worked at the public library and i remembered this one phone call. it was probably less than 20 seconds long, but it still makes me laugh.
anyways, this woman called and without even saying hello after i said the usual “public library, how can i help you?” spiel, she said, “i have a very important question: when you shelve books, do you push them all to the front of the shelf or all the way back?”
it took me a second to process the question and then i answered that, at the library, we always shelve them so that they are even with the front edge so they’re easier to grab and see. she was obviously delighted by this answer and then, as if an afterthought, she asked, “okay, what about you? what do you do at home with your books?” i said i did the same thing. she hummed in obvious agreement and then just like that she said “thank you!” and hung up.
i never heard from her again. i hope she won whatever argument she was having.
for about a year, i worked at a call center for sprint. i have a similar kind of story.
a woman called, and said she had a question about the call history on her bill. “sure, let me just pull up your account-” and she cut me off going, “no, no, it’s not anything specific, it’s just. so, if you change the time on your phone, does that change the time on the bill?”
“uh… no? the time on the phone doesn’t matter, the call history is recorded by the towers.”
“ohhhh” she said in the saltiest voice i have ever heard “so even if you changed the timezone it wouldn’t change the time on the bill? to, say, the middle of the night?”
i stg yall i looked into the camera like i was on the office. “um… no? it would still be the local time of the tower. is there anything else i can help you with?”
to me, overly chipper: “nope! thank you! have a great day!” turning on someone as she hung up: “she says yoU’RE A LYING SACK OF-”
Borne Ceaseless 