..in which people start complaining about how they aren’t
allowed to/are shamed for/tired of hearing about listening to Baby, It’s Cold
Outside.
I get it. I listened to that song growing up too. It’s
catchy. It’s part of the canon. It’s part of the culture.
It is, in fact, a creation of that culture. And maybe it
hits that nostalgic note for some in which men were men and women were women
and the relations between the sexes were seen as simpler. And wouldn’t it just
be great to get back to that… Romance, desire, lust even. Enjoyable things for
many.
We are still there/here. Because one, things are (and were)
never simple. But two, we still are immersed in a culture of sexual coercion
and assault. We breathe that culture. We keep it alive. Brett Kavanaugh does
not just happen. Brock
Turner does not just happen. Sexual traffickers do not just happen (nor
do life sentences for their victims who kill their captors). Fraternity
presidents who rape women get
plea deals and no jail time do not just happen. This is not Bad Apple
Syndrome. This is rape culture.
Yes, I am making a connection between Baby, It’s Cold
Outside and horrendous acts of violence. Is there a direct line? No. But we don’t
live in a society of direct lines. We live in a matrix of power relations and
interconnections.
This is sometimes an abstract concept and not everyone gets
it (or wants to). Power is complicated. We are all implicated in it. Here is
something a little more concrete. Every semester I assign Sexual
Coercion Practices Among Undergraduate Male Recreational Athletes,
Intercollegiate Athletes, and Non-Athletes. Male athletes—both intercollegiate
and recreational—were more likely to engage in sexually coercive behaviors than
non-athletes. It was not because of the mere fact that they are athletes—it is
because they had high scores on measurements of rape myth acceptance and traditional
gender role attitudes. Those things are reinforced in many sports cultures, but
they are not only in sports cultures. When rape myth acceptance and traditional
gender roles attitudes were controlled for there was no difference between
athletes and non-athletes in terms of engagement in sexual coercion.
In other
words: 1. Culture matters and, 2. We learn these things in our social
institutions. Entertainment (and sports, and law, and education, and religion)
is a social institution through which cultural norms are transferred. Movies do
that. Books. Television. And songs.
So listen to the song—or don’t. Listen to the She and Him
version in which the “roles are reversed” and call that equality (it’s not
#becausepatriarchy). But we cannot dismiss the critique just because it tempers
our enjoyment. Our cultural products matter. Our continued use of them matters.
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