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.
ALSO literally every “”“gay”“” thing they put in the trailers as pretty obvious bait was no-homoed?? Idk if you noticed but pretty much every single second of Dumbledore’s screentime was used in the trailers, as was every “"gay”“ scene, EXCEPT for the ones that no-homoed them.
Hand holding? Oh, it’s the blood pact!
“I can’t move against Grindelwald” is it because he still loves him? no lol they literally made a blood pact and swore never to fight!
“oh we were closer than brothers” fuck you it’s the blood pact!
and yea obviously if you already know Albus was in love with Gellert you can read these romantically but the casual viewer won’t, which is EXACTLY the goal – Rowling took no risks here, the gay Albus fans will watch it because they want to see his sexuality represented and the homophobes will go watch it because any and every even subtly gay thing was explained.
ps: except for Grindelwald being uncomfortably homoerotic with both his black haired follower and Credence, but that’s a classic example of queer coding a villain which is a homophobic trope so no it super doesn’t count
pps mad props to Jude Law who quite literally saved the movie despite appearing for no more than 4 minutes
ppps yeah y’all could say “but he saw Grindelwald in the mirror!1!1!1111!1” my sister, who’s been a fan of Harry Potter since the beginning, watched the trailer and was like “no obviously that’s not a romantic thing they understand each other like no-one else understands them so Albus longs for the companionship of someone who’s essentially a brother to him” so no that means absolutely nothing to homophobic people Rowling played it as safe as possible and the whole thing ended up being a massive queerbait (as predicted)
This is actually v important and needs to be reblogged
Gonna just share this:
My European Studies professor decided a few weeks ago to take a Friday and instead of following the syllabus, he spent the entire hour and a half comparing Hitler’s actions from a European perspective to that of what Trump is doing in America. He never repeated a single point, and even used video and photos like this to show the comparison.
To make things better, he had us do an in class assignment for participation points. He first played a clip on youtube of one of Hilter’s speeches, subtitled and 3 minutes long. He then played a clip of one of Trump’s rallies. Our assignment? Copy down every single sentence that matched in translation down on a sheet of paper or a word document that wasn’t repeated. The person with the closest amount to what my professor found got a candy bar.
My professor found, in just three minutes of a speech, that Trump matched 65 different phrases/sentences to that of Hitler’s translation.
65 nearly identical phrases used in his speeches. Take a moment to think about that.
Like, according to Trump’s first wife Ivana he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in his nightstand and would read it periodically… so the overlap is not at all surprising given his obsession with Hitler’s propaganda.
“Don’t compare Trump to Hitler though.” – Conservatives
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 