Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s.Â
So. Hereâs the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying todayâs worldview to the song, yes, youâre right, it absolutely *sounds*Â like a rape anthem.Â
BUT! Letâs look closer!Â
âHey whatâs in this drinkâ was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that thereâs actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dudeâs house. In the 1940âs, thatâs the kind of thing Good Girls arenât supposed to do â and she wants people to think sheâs a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what sheâs really concerned about: âthe neighbors might think,â âmy maiden auntâs mind is vicious,â âthereâs bound to be talk tomorrow.â But sheâs 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 â unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. Thatâs the joke. That is the standard joke thatâs going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says âhey, whatâs in this drink?â It is not a joke about how sheâs drunk and about to be raped. Itâs a joke about how sheâs perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because sheâs living in a society where women arenât supposed to have sexual agency.
Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject menâs advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore itâs normal and expected for a ladyâs 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 wonât be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than âIâm staying because I want to.â (Thatâs the main theme of the manâs 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, heâs pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and sheâs using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but canât say so. She states explicitly that sheâs resisting because sheâs supposed to, not because she wants to: âI ought to say no no noâŠâ She states explicitly that sheâs just putting up a token resistance so sheâll be able to claim later that she did whatâs expected of a decent woman in this situation: âat least Iâm gonna say that I tried.â And at the end of the song theyâre singing together, in harmony, because theyâre both on the same page and they have been all along.
So itâs not actually a song about rape - in fact itâs a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But itâs also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. Itâs a song about a society where women arenât allowed to say yesâŠwhich happens to mean itâs also a society where women donât have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.
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