The Invisible Counterpoint

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is one of those Christmas songs that really has nothing to do with Christmas — it’s just about cold weather, and also sexual coercion. Famously, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” written by Frank Loesser in 1944, tells the story of a man and woman indoors on a snowy night; the woman repeatedly tries to depart for home and is repeatedly told that it’s too cold for her to travel. The woman, famously, asks, “What’s in this drink?” In the original score, the male part was denoted as the “wolf” and the female as the “mouse,” a predatory view of sex whereby the man must not woo but win that suffuses the entire song. “No” is never “no” over the course of the song. The song has been defended as a narrative about a woman constructing her own excuses, as it was difficult for a woman in 1944 to stay over at a man’s house because she wanted to. However, it was also difficult for a woman in 1944 to say “no” and be heard; the song’s repeated covers over the years simply in...

Writing about the viral “Diane in 7A” story — a “Bachelor” producer’s story, told on Twitter , of his dealing with a rude airplane passenger on Thanksgiving by harassing her via passed notes — Salon previously noted “Nothing about Gale’s story passes the smell test.” And, indeed, Elan Gale has admitted that he made Diane in 7A up. So concludes a saga that “ won Thanksgiving ” even despite the creepy, sexist valences of a man telling a woman, via repeated notes, “Eat my dick”; Gale tweeted, last night , a picture of “Diana [sic] sitting in a chair.” The chair was empty. Though Gale’s been praised for “brilliant writing and execution” even in spite of the fact that the long, convoluted saga of Diane would seem not to have happened, there’s very little substance behind the story that caught the imaginations of Twitter users over the Thanksgiving holiday. All the reader had to go on to presume Diane deserved a series of notes telling her off was Gale’s own point of view. The follo...