Baby, It´s Cold Outside.
In 1944, Frank Loesser and his wife Lynn Garland wrote a song that eventually became known as Baby, It's Cold Outside. After Frank sold it in 1948, unbeknownst to his wife, to MGM, it even won an Academy Award for Best Original Song and became the central theme music of the soundtrack of the romantic comedy Neptune's Daughter (1949). The song originally served the purpose of a private performance by the couple at various parties, and gradually became very popular for that very purpose. In truth, it was both a ticket to society for the writers and a voucher for champagne and truffles, as Lynn said in an interview.
John Legend and Kelly Clarkson came to the decision in 2019 that Baby, It's Cold Outside needed to be reworked because it didn't fit the current perception of the world. And there has been a reworking of the text in terms of gender equality and removing the sense of sexual harassment and coercion. Essentially, passages that are not in line with the theses of #MeToo were deleted. In fact, the original content is a pretty accurate representation of how the roles of men and women were set up half a century ago. That is to say, men were in charge, determined and demanded, but at the same time they were responsible for the security of the family and the protection of women and children. They were by and large the active and initiating component. Women were not inferior in principle, but their position was determined by circumstances and it was not easy to buck the trend. Although many of them did not even seek to rebel.
There are 75 years between the two versions of the song. In the interim, the song has been re-sung countless times. Among the most famous performers are Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Olivia Newton-John, Lady Gaga, Rod Stewart, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones and many others. Virtually all versions are pleasantly frivolous, relaxed, taken with a grain of salt and conducted along humorous lines. A solid, only a little tongue-in-cheek version of the story is the Czech version (Marie Rottrová and Jiří Korn, 1988), which is also a possible solution to the problem raised, as seen by the pair of Legend and Clarkson. For in the last verse, the roles are reversed and the person who wants to stay becomes a woman using the same clichés and similar tricks as the man before.
The story of Baby, It's Cold Outside is perhaps an illustration of the evolution of human society in recent times. What was perceived by men and women alike (it's a duet) more than fifty years ago as a sing-song, slightly irritating conversation with witty content and ingenious phrasing is now seen as undignified, unbalanced and gender skewed. However, memoirists will confirm that a kind of gender imbalance used to be the source of a form of social stability. There were always, as today, excesses that were beyond the edge of acceptability. It's just that the line was a little different and its shift in today's terms is fairer. I don't feel it is right to rewrite texts and wash away earlier prejudices and preconceptions. History is not to be rewritten. And the song Baby, It's Cold Outside is an endearing and artistic history, representing its time with all the pros and cons.