So, it seems the topic of conversation lately is the decision of one radio station pulling the song, Baby It's Cold Outside, from their Christmas line-up as well as discussion of the #MeToo movement. As you might have guessed, I have thoughts on the matter. Baby It's Cold Outside is just a wintry-themed song that people play at Christmas time. I didn't really know anything about it except the version sung by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer. You know, the version you always hear.
I used to like the song because it was kind of catchy and their voices are nice. However, several years ago, before it was anywhere on the internet about the lyrics, I actually was listening to the song instead of merely bee-bopping my head and busy with other things. The lyrics were rather surprising. I just kept saying, "What the hell?!" out loud in the car and when I came home I immediately found the song online and followed along with the lyrics. I hadn't like the song since. I have never seen Neptune's Daughter, though I'd heard the name, so I watched the video supplied in the article. I dig Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbàn, though I wouldn't have recognized him, at this 20 years younger than when he played Khan on the Star Trek epi Space Seed. I did recognize Red Skelton however from the second portion of this scene and looked up the film just to make sure I was correct. I dig him too. However, the singing in this film is nerve-grating. The friend who shared the article was saying she always hated this song with the back and forth element. I loved that about it, except ya know, it seems like in all the other versions it was pleasing to hear and didn't sound like dying cats. So, a lot of comments were talking about "But it was a different era back then, this is being completely taken out of context." However, I think that is what they are doing, these certain commenters. First off, I'm getting ahead of myself. As I think this is most certainly a case of if you haven't lived it, then you don't know. That's OK, but it's not OK to berate the ones who have been through something. It's like skinny girls not understanding what it's like to be overweight. I get that, because really how would they know exactly what it's like, if they've never been overweight? I think that if you've been raped or sexually assaulted or preyed on by the male variety, then you understand. If you haven't, then this song is nothing more than some weird playful folly that's just something normal and common place. It was the first time hearing that song in a long while, that day in the car, and it was only a few years after I'd been raped. Is that why certain words were being picked up by my ears to make me actually start listening to the lyrics? Quite possibly. I can say with certainty, however, that every single woman I know who has been raped or sexually assaulted (in which I know that as well) does not like this song. They're not saying so right now in this moment. It was women in my childhood during the eighties and nineties. Even my own maternal grandmother, who was raped, did not like this song. At all. So, let's move back toward the whole different time periods issue. Yes, that's true, it was a different time, but this song was and also was not scandelously bad in 1949. Let's take a look, shall we? First, women were groomed to be virginal and pure and please men. They're sole purpose in life was to grow up learning to take care of a household, children, and a husband. To have the house cleaned and dinner on the table by a certain time, to do anything and everything the man wished and basically to lie back and think of England. They were groomed to not have thoughts of their own, hopes or wishes, because it was thought to that women were hysterical and things should be decided for them. And also with that whole pleasing men, men rule the world, women are subservient and must be virginal is the entire issue with this song. He's insisting that she stay. The night. It's not like people never had premarital sex in the history of ever. They did. But, for a woman, during that time, to emerge from a man's house the next morning, well her whole life would be ruined. She'd be labeled a slut. She wouldn't be virginal and pure and she'd be lucky to get married because everyone would talk about it, which is wrapped up in these lines said by the woman. "My sister will be suspicious." "My brother will be waiting at the door." "My maiden aunt's mind is vicious." "There's bound to be talk tomorrow." "At least there will be plenty implied." Her whole reputation and livelihood are at stake if she stays. Doesn't he see that? "But don't you see?" Does he care? No, not really. She's denying him sex "How can you do this thing to me?" (because honestly why else would she be staying over so late?). I think many of the people defending this song so vehemently have absolutely no idea what it was like during these time periods. They were small children or not even born yet. Hell, my dad was only 1.5 years old when this film and song came out. Besides the fact that he also isn't a female. And we'll get to that entire fiasco in a minute. They have this grandeur and inaccurate portrait of times gone by. They seem to think that everyone was celibate (and if a man had pre or extra marital affairs, well it's par for the course in being a man and it's OK... and there weren't too many events or partners, not like with young people today), there was no rape or sexual assault or unwanted pregnancies because women were virginal until marriage and never strayed from their husbands and always wanted babies. Besides the fact that your film stars had lovely trans-atlantic accents and you had the elegant modern triangle look in clothing, not much has really changed between 1949 (or 1929 or 1909 or 1849, etc) and today... except the training. Though it might have been slightly less dramatic in 1949 as opposed to say 1899, the end goal was the same. Men are the masters of all, they have all the jobs because a woman's place was at home and girls were trained from an early age for the ultimate destination of marriage and childbirth. End of discussion. Oh we'd done away with the trousseau and the eligible marriages to wealthier, established men; trading off daughters for commodity or power. Now you could marry for love... if your parents approved. But little else had changed. That is if you were middle class or above. Because women who were poor were destined to marriage as well as work. And just because she might have been working didn't mean she could support herself and it didn't mean she didn't need a husband. And I don't mean sexually, I mean most women had to get married, even if not forced by their parents, for two reasons. One, it was seen as the utmost embarrassment if you were unmarriageable (the governess or school teacher who wasn't pretty or wealthy enough to have someone want to marry her or the spinster daughter living with her parents - all of it was almost as bad a blight as if she'd been labeled a slut) and for most of history girls were trained that marriage was where all their satisfaction as a person sprang from. She was only ever to live through and for her husband, then her male children, then her female children... and never for herself. There was no self worth if they weren't married. Besides the fact that for most of history a woman simply couldn't go it alone (even if they'd wanted to) and that one job that all the unmarrying ladies were vying for wasn't enough money. Not too mention that all the jobs which most people think are women's work were predominantly held by men until around the 1920s or 1930s (as that's when the most change happened. Teachers/instructors, nurses, secretaries, personal assistants, cooks/chefs, tailors (because seamstress is female and that was after they were allowed to sew clothes for people and own their own shops), personal shoppers (as in the person greeting you and helping you select items in the larger department stores), etc. You think I'm making it up, but when department stores first opened, except for the ladies department of clothing and underthings, a woman had to purchase make-up, parfume, hair accessories, and personal hygiene items from male clerks. No one had thought to put women behind these counters yet. Seriously look it up. The first feminine hygiene product was sold by a (probably confused and embarrassed) man to a female in a department store in Chicago. Most people just take all that for granted and think women have always filled these roles. They have filled the role of governess (being hired by a wealthy family to care take of and educate the children of that family - though sometimes still a male tutor was brought in for certain subjects for all the children or only the male children. And it depended. It was either something the governess could teach, but society felt a male could teach it better, or else it was a subject in which she wasn't allowed to learn, thus the teaching of it falls to a male), house maids, ladies maids, and wet nurses (breastfeeding women, hired by wealthy families, to breastfeed the infants because it was unseemly and unfashionable for the wealthy mother to do so herself). That's it. That's most of all of history. Women weren't even allowed an education so how on earth could people have always expected them to be teachers? That didn't start until the mid part of the early nineteenth century for most girls. If you were wealthy you were always taught certain subjects by a male tutor, things worthy of a girl to know like French and music and dance, but never geography or sciences, sometimes history was OK. But with allowing all girls to attend schools (sometimes they were only schools for girls), they had an education in "appropriate" things only until a certain age because then they'd need to learn to take care of a house, or else they stayed and trained as a governess or a teacher. Doors didn't really open for women in the work place until about the 1930s like I said. More positions for secretaries, nurses, and teachers were available. Does it mean it was easy? No. Does it mean that the women were readily accepted into these roles by their male co-workers or bosses? No. Most people think that sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace is something new. Since the first woman started work as anything (doctor, nurse, teacher, secretary, owning her own store, store clerk) she's been subjected to a position as less than a man. Less than the man that would have once filled that role. Besides the fact that for the most part these women had to choose. It was career or marriage and never both. If she had a career before finding a beau, then you can be certain he'd insist she give up the career to cater to him. This is not some old fashioned, way out of date way of thinking; from times when women wore corsets. This way of thought and training of and for girls continued well into the 1980s. Sure things weren't as strict, nor were they that strict in 1949 as opposed to twenty, thirty, or even fifty years before. But the same basics were still in place. You must be a virgin before marriage. Don't cheat on your husband (if he does, just look the other way). If a man is mean to you, he loves you. Your children and husband are your fulfillment; they will be everything you are living for. Don't discuss your personal problems. What happens in the marriage bed, stays in the marriage bed. Do everything you can to trap a man. Your entire worth is wrapped up in finding a man to marry. Your husband is always right. Don't agitate him. Do things to please him. Sure there were more women in the work force in the 1980s and any girl could get an education through high school as well as at university. Her wardrobe wasn't restricted to ankle length skirts and blouses that covered everything. Things were more open for women, and had been for these mothers during that decade who were still teaching their daughters the way they had been taught, which were the exact same damn things that were taught to the women in their lineage back in the forties, the twenties, the eighteen eighties, and all the way back. You're nothing without a man. You need a man. The man is always right. You change yourself for the world that is man. Please man. Your whole entire worth an livelihood is man. That's a terrible way to treat someone. It is no different than the masses being ruled by an out of touch monarch. You're treated as less than human, not an equal. Why should I have to bow to this person when they wear gold and I don't even have enough to eat. How can they tell me what to do when they know nothing about me. I'm a person too, damnit. I'm human just like the people with money. Females are humans. They're not play toys or slaves or baby making machines or pleasure palaces for someone else. Females have thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams too. We're given a brain to utilize with reason, logic, and education just as a man. Yet for the longest time, our lips were sewn shut and our brains turned into mush because of male egotism and harmful training to be the Stepford Wives that mean thought they wanted. This is going somewhere, but if you don't understand the basics, how are you to understand the statement that comes next. There has always been rape and sexual predation, but women were not allowed to talk about it. Not allowed. If you've read anything before that last paragraph, then you should have some inkling as to why were not allowed and why this isn't some rash and fanciful statement. When you train people from childhood to adult, that training pretty much sticks. Don't believe me then think about how many times you've touched a hot stove or stared directly into the sun since you were a kid... on purpose. Young girls are still, for the most part, being trained thusly. Without a man you are nothing. You need a husband. Men are right. Men know best. Trust men. He is allowed to do things that you are not. You're not smart enough to do what a man does. You're not clever enough to do what a man does. He hurts you because he loves you. Don't wear clothes that tempt men. Don't be alone with men. Don't do anything to make man angry. If you're not virginal, you are ruined. No man will want you if you're giving the farm away for free. Women are irrational and hysterical. Lie to get a man. Do all these steps to trap a man. You neeeeeed a man. You can't be alone in life. You neeeeed to have children. Children will fulfill you. A husband will fulfill you. Be a proper lady. Don't flirt. Don't be coy. Flirt and be coy to get a man. If there are problems with a man, don't discuss them. The man can do no wrong. What did you do to upset or anger him or make him cheat? Be ashamed. Be afraid. Don't know your own body. It doesn't matter if you feel pleasure during sex. If the man did something then it's your fault. It's your fault. What did you do? Why would you do that? Everything about you is shameful and wrong. You have shamed us and yourself. You are wrong. It's all your fault. We're never taught that men are at fault. Men are never taught that they are at fault. We're only ever taught that we, the females, should feel shame and guilt and everything is always out fault; everything about us is wrong. Until we are accept by a man. When you're raised this way, if you were sexually assaulted or raped or beaten... would you speak up? No, you wouldn't. 95% of women, throughout history, have never spoken up, because of this same damn conditioning that girls still receive to this day. I don't even think most people realize what they're doing when they enforce this conditioning. I do believe they are just following the motions. All of it is seen as so normal and acceptable that why would one buck the system really to stop and think... "Wait a minute... this doesn't seem right." That doesn't mean to say that events like this don't bring forth rage or depression or sadness. They feel they have been wronged. They feel that the event wasn't right. But also... it's difficult to get away from the conditioning of "shame, wrong, and personal fault." All of the women I know, including myself, who have been raped knew that this was a horrible event, and yet they also felt shame and that there was something they did wrong and not one of us reported the event to someone who might have helped. I only know, because the great shame welled up to the surface and exploded in almost a hushed whisper. My grandmother hated this song and she hated stormy nights. She'd withdraw into herself when there was a storm and somehow become diminished and hollow, wild eyes darting around the room. You think you can't trust someone who has a mental illness, but in certain times you can. My grandmother was pretty stable and when she'd have a bought of the schitzophrenia she'd scribble notes for days; random things that made absolutely no sense. Things like "Jill is in the fireplace" or "The plant in the flying box will kill me." in such chicken scratch that you know they deranged. However, when someone comes out of a stupor and looks glassy eyed into the future and in complete sentences tells you a story, you can bet it's something that really happened that they've kept hidden for years upon years. She wasn't screaming or playing with imaginary items or blurting out "They box! Kill! Window glass! AAAAAAHHH!!!! Pillow fight hufflelumps!" No, she was telling it all because the walls of propriety had slipped away. She was telling of a horrid event that happened to her. She was recounted an event that she'd kept buried for seventy years. Something that made her feel great shame. She was at university and walking home from class. It was dark. A bad storm was coming. He raped her in the bushes on her walk home. We didn't figure out who it was because my aunt was uncomfortable with what was being said and shushed it away as lunacy, breaking my grandmother from her entranced story, reeling her back into reality and back into crazy land. I know she wasn't making it up and I know she wasn't spouting out some random fear from crazy land. This is a thing that had happened to her and it explained why my grandmother was so crazy over torrential incoming storms or why anything to do with sex or girl things sent her on a tirade. It wasn't madness. She was calm though nervous while she spoke, (unlike her normal self or when she was in a fit) almost like she was remembering and relating it to herself. I don't think she realized people were there. The damn just broke and it all spilled out. I'm not saying the even made her crazy as crazy ran in her family. But she never reported it and never warned her daughters and was miserable and felt shame for seventy years over something a man did to her and the training that told her it was all her fault. Since she's been dead for the past thirteen years it doesn't feel awkward to relay her story, but I won't relay the names or stories of the people I do know. Only one of them has no problem stating the fact that she was raped, or recounting the story, because she either never had shame from it, or overcame it. It's important to her to not have that truth covered up and hidden away like all women are taught to do. I've not known her forever, so I did not know her before the incident and it's been a long while since it happened. I don't know what she may have struggled though before exposing the incident, if she struggled at all. Perhaps she reported it and raged about it from the get go? Perhaps it took her a long time to come to terms with it and speak? I don't know. But for myself, I'm trapped between two worlds since I was raped seventeen years ago. I've gotten to the point where I will write about it in a blog post, but I can't tell a person face to face. It's not my fault and I didn't do anything wrong, but the conditioning of shame is very, very strong. I never reported it. I tried to fight and tell him no, and when he didn't listen I stopped fighting and cried. All I could think about was the conditioning. My worth wrapped up in a man. This guy I knew and whom I thought liked me, but if he was doing this horrible thing to me and not listening, then he never liked me at all and I'm unloveable and what is the point in my life if I'm not wanted by a man. The spell was broken by a friend flipping on the lights and I shoved him off of me, ran to the bathroom and locked myself in. I cried for hours and took three hot showers, practically scrubbing my red and burnt skin off. I retreated into my room and into myself and didn't care if I lived or died and basically tried to eat myself to death. As in continuously shoving food into myself so that I couldn't feel... and if I died then it would be OK. I hated him and I hated myself. I hated my mother. I hated sex (which I'd never had before). I hated men. I hated everything. I ended up telling someone close to me and we cried because she'd been raped too. We shared all our hurt, all of our torment and shame. Crying for ourselves and for each other. We were in some club now. A club neither of us had ever wanted to join. Women who were survivors of something horrible, afloat on the sea, with barely enough conviction and strength to keep a hole of the flotation device that we were clinging to. After that I was better with it and wrote a post on Livejournal. I was OK with my friends seeing it. Well, I thought so. I figured it was out there and if they read it, well, it's out there and off my chest and I wouldn't need to know. However, they let me know they'd read it. No one confessed a thing, but there was so much emotion wrapped up in their responses that how could they not also be a part of this horrible club in some way. There was no simple, "Oh, I'm sorry. That seems terrible." from any of them. All of their worlds held meaning behind them. You could tell something had been done to them or they'd witnessed something being done to someone else. There was a knowing there. It wasn't the skinny girl who knows nothing of being fat trying to offer comfort on a subject she has no knowledge of. All these girls had been fat at one point or another, if that makes sense. These weren't automated responses of 'Well, I don't know what she's going through, but man I bet that sucks.' These were, 'I know. I feel. I do understand.' Years later, at the most inopportune time while out to dinner, it just came out. It was a somber and low roll of voice that stated, "I was raped." My sister already knew and just gawked at me wondering why I had just announced this to our mother. I didn't know why I was telling out mother because I never discuss things like this with her. My mother turned and looked at me with sad eyes. She believed me, but there were no words. She'd been conditioned to not speak of such things and how do you break that to comfort someone? I have never told my father. I probably will never tell my father. I almost did the other day in the car and it was all I could to not cry because I didn't want to tell him. Tell him, his slight was hurtful. His dismissiveness was cruel. I was trying to tune the radio to a station that plays Christmas music which is when he piped up with the story he'd read about this entire blog post. "Oh the radios aren't going to play that song Baby It's Cold Outside because the #MeToo people are offended." A cold reading of that doesn't say much, but it was the way dad flung his hand out in the air while saying "the #MeToo people" as if they are pariahs on society, a bunch of bored girls making up lies and creating chaos on the smooth seas he and others are trying to sail. I wanted to shout "Fuck you!". I wanted to shout that his youngest daughter driving him to the store is one of the #MeToo people that he's so blatantly casting aside. I wanted to tell him that he's an asshole for hating women who dare to say a man had hurt them. I wanted to hit him. But all of that would have entailed me relating to my father that I had been raped. I couldn't do it. He probably wouldn't blame me or hate me and would be heartbroken and sad to know that, but he'd look at me differently; keep his distance. It's the type of person he is. I don't want him to look at me differently, treat me differently because something sullied and unwanted as happened to me. I don't want his pity or him to suddenly be on tenterhooks around me. I'd immediately regret the decision to come clean and try to bridge the gap spanning between us; knowing that now I'll never be able to. I tried not to cry because of what happened to me, that women are always dismissed and treated as second class, and also because I knew my father would back away from me if he were to know. And because I knew that we still live in a world where I have to keep my shame hidden way, swallowing it until it destroys me. This shame that shouldn't be shame, simply because I am a women born into a mans world, but a thing that is still shameful anyway because 2018 isn't so much different from 1918. It's great that women are speaking up for themselves as that is how change happens and it's great that there are men who believe and support them. That there are other women not hiding under learned propriety and trying to shame these women for the same thing that has happened to them, something they wish they could state, but can't bring themselves to do anything but deny anything is amiss. Change will happen, but I doubt I'll see it in my life time. But personally, in this moment here and now, it's not doing me any bit of good. I live with my family and while my dad may be following an ill wind, he is not a bad man nor an evil one. I love my dad to bits and pieces and I can't bear the thought of him weighing anchor and charting coarse elsewhere while leaving me to bob up and down alone in the ocean because in the world we live in, I'll be too different for him to comprehend and things like that are best left over there, far away. I'm using a lot of nautical terms but basically my father will leave me, emotionally, and there will be no way for me to get him back. I'll be fatherless. He won't ask me to pop popcorn anymore or talk about science fiction. I simply won't exist. Because we've all been conditioned that this thing makes women into something else entirely like a monster who will eat mens souls if they venture too closely. He'll have no personal regret, because while he's not perfect, he's done nothing of the sort and he's not the type of lecherous man who is overly fond of his daughters, if you understand. There's nothing sexually unseemly about him. It's just that I know the knowledge would break his heart knowing his daughter was hurt, but there'd be no moving past it and he'd simply run way and that would be the end of everything. And I cry because this stupid cycle is so old and so cruel and hurtful and still rampant that my own really swell father would abandon me because of something I didn't do wrong, but of which society has deemed makes me tainted and something to be avoided at all cost. Then I cry because I'm not the only woman who has ever had to go through this, nor the only women to still face this. Fuck you male dominated society and your evil poisoning of everyone. Fuck you. And for the record, that song isn't simply from another time (just a time when women had to swallow all of their sorrow and laugh along at the joke), those are terrible lyrics, women were the same in history as we are now, women are people too, he is trying to force her to have sex with him knowing she'd be found out and ruined and he's probably not intending to marry her, it's not just the lyrics, even Esther Williams is wondering if he slipped her a mickey, and you don't have to have walked in a persons shoes just have some fucking compassion goddamnit!
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AuthorA girl from South Mississippi who finds herself in exploration. Archives
November 2019
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