History of controversy

Age of the Geek Column: It's cold outside, but you might not hear about that on the radio.
Well, statistically, you probably will, but let's just go with it for a moment.
December may be slowing down the news cycle, but fortunately there's a new Christmas controversy to keep those page views up. Starbucks is off the hook this year. The new hotness is a national debate about the classic Christmas song, "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
First off, let's put this controversy in a little bit of perspective. As near as I can tell, only a couple stations across the nation have attempted to pull the song from their holiday playlist. Or, at least only a couple make the mistake of publicizing it. Namely, WDOK in Cleveland followed by KOIT in San Francisco and KOSI in Colorado, the latter two of which put the song back on the air after receiving negative feedback.
A national epidemic of social justice gone wild this is not. Like most of these kind of controversies, it's a relatively small group of people stirring up a ruckus while the masses trip over themselves to condemn it.
That said, while the controversy is definitely overblown, the underlying mentality is still an interesting phenomenon to explore.
Taken at face value, the lyrics of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are uncomfortable in a post-Cosby world. I don't think there is much argument about that.
The argument instead is more about what the appropriate action should be when confronted with this uncomfortable reality.
For most people, the solution is pretty simple. Don't take the song at face value.
Acknowledging historical context is not difficult. It's something we do all the time. It's something that should be expected from rational adults. In middle school I recall performing a concert of classic television themes, including the theme from "The Flintstones." We all giggled like the immature kids we were at the prospect of publicly shouting "We'll have a gay old time," but even then it was obvious that the changing context over the decades was nothing more than a triviality.
This extends far past songs as well. Pick out any of Grimms' Fairy Tales and you'll find stories that are extremely problematic when examined through a modern lens. Even their sanitized Disney incarnations aren't free from such critiques. Who hasn't made the Stockholm Syndrome connection to "Beauty and the Beast" or pointed out the problems with consent with "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty."
Sure, you can make those observations, but that always has to come with the caveat that you're applying standards and subtexts to the tales that were never intended.
The same goes for "Baby, It's Cold Outside." The sinister implications of the song are only there when you take the song out of context, either deliberately or through ignorance. It's not a critique that can be taken seriously, whether the reason is the former or the latter.
Nevertheless, here we are. Seventy years ago, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" was written as a song about encouraging women's autonomy, empowering them to make decisions that aren't overly influenced by societal shackles. Today those shackles have apparently been so utterly undone that there are people that have forgotten they ever existed in the first place.
And while a controversy over a Christmas song may not be a big issue, the inability for people to see outside their immediate bubble is.
It's ironic that in an age where information is more accessible than at any other time in history that we've become a culture that is too adept at curating our reality. People choose who they see on Facebook and Twitter. They frequent news sites that only tell them what they want to hear. We're all guilty of it to some extent.
At some level it makes sense. There is so much out there that you need to filter some of it out by necessity. But we're kind of getting too good at it. Living in the present is one thing. Willfully ignoring the past is another thing entirely. The morals and behaviors encouraged by stories and songs that may be deemed problematic today served, in their time, an important function.
This is not to say that we should aspire to be more like we were generations past. We are better today than we were back then. Just like generations in the future will be better than we are today. That's kind of the point of improvement.
But improvement can't mean the erasure of history because, as the old saying goes, that's a surefire way to repeat it.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and has a fondness for the John Lithgow/Bebe Neuwirth version of the song.