Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s.Ā
So. Hereās the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying todayās worldview to the song, yes, youāre right, it absolutely *sounds*Ā like a rape anthem.Ā
BUT! Letās look closer!Ā
āHey whatās in this drinkā was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that thereās actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dudeās house. In the 1940ās, thatās the kind of thing Good Girls arenāt supposed to do ā and she wants people to think sheās a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what sheās really concerned about: āthe neighbors might think,ā āmy maiden auntās mind is vicious,ā āthereās bound to be talk tomorrow.ā But sheās 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 ā unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. Thatās the joke. That is the standard joke thatās going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says āhey, whatās in this drink?ā It is not a joke about how sheās drunk and about to be raped. Itās a joke about how sheās perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because sheās living in a society where women arenāt supposed to have sexual agency.
Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject menās advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore itās normal and expected for a ladyās 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 wonāt be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than āIām staying because I want to.ā (Thatās the main theme of the manās 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, heās pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and sheās using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but canāt say so. She states explicitly that sheās resisting because sheās supposed to, not because she wants to: āI ought to say no no noā¦ā She states explicitly that sheās just putting up a token resistance so sheāll be able to claim later that she did whatās expected of a decent woman in this situation: āat least Iām gonna say that I tried.ā And at the end of the song theyāre singing together, in harmony, because theyāre both on the same page and they have been all along.
So itās not actually a song about rape - in fact itās a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But itās also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. Itās a song about a society where women arenāt allowed to say yesā¦which happens to mean itās also a society where women donāt have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.
2087
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