It has been my experience as a woman, that women are aggressively socialized against saying “no”. We’re taught to think of other people’s feelings over our own, to the extent that we try to find polite ways to tell people no. You can see it in every demurral in the song, she’s trying to gently turn aside his advances because she’s been socialized into thinking that a gentle tone of voice is expected. Women are taught, first and foremost, to be people pleasers. It’s not only, as BB says, that she has to be a mind reader to know what level of polite and gentle “no” he’s going to respond to, it’s that she may have trouble reaching for the forceful “no” when push comes to shove. And, as has already been pointed out, the consequences of getting him angry could be severe, as he most likely outmasses her by a great deal, adding an extra level of taboo for the woman on using the forceful “no”.

Meanwhile, I can’t imagine that men aren’t at least somewhat aware that women are socialized into being gentle with people’s feelings. We’re so often praised for being gentle, kind, conciderate, selfless, etc. So his continued overriding of her protests, in my opinion, cannot be interpreted as him reading her demurrals as flirtation. I think it’s disingenuous to pretend that he’s not using her own conditioning against her.

I ought to say no, no, no sir. (Mind if I move in closer?)
At least I’m gonna say that I tried. (What’s the sense of hurtin’ my pride?)

He basically says “You’ll hurt my feeeeeeeelings.” He knows that she’s expected to think of his feelings before her own.

If the analysis of the song makes one person from one of those regions re-think what tradition has handed to her or him, it’s done a great service.

Hey, that’s why we blog, isn’t it?!

If the analysis of the song makes one person from one of those regions re-think what tradition has handed to her or him, it’s done a great service.

I got to see only a little bit of the movie Elf (or rather, I managed to not avoid seeing it) where Will Ferrel’s character is sitting outside the shower and the woman in the shower is singing it. She doesn’t know he’s out there until they hit the chorus and he sings too loud, which added a whole level of creepy stalker to the song which I personally didn’t need.

The way she suspiciously says “What’s in this drink?” has always been the clincher for me. Way “back in the day” there wasn’t GHB, but one could still make a drink a lot stronger than it needed to be in the hopes of “lowering inhibitions”. I’ve never heard a version of this song where the woman didn’t sound a little nervous and/or scared. She tries every way she can think of to say no and he doesn’t take the hint. It’s not cute, it’s not flirtatious, and it certianly doesn’t put me in the holiday mood.

Anyway, both the point he made and the point you made are why I try to limit what I get mad at from the past to what truly seems abhorrent in context, yet why I also try to participate in some consciousness-raising to stop such things from being repeated in the present.

But, yeah, even when trying to raise awareness and say to my friends:

You shouldn’t play this song at swing dances anymore because even though it may have been written imagining negotiation, we in society have been getting people to stop negotiating like that anymore, so implying that the activities described are still harmless by playing it at a “harmless” activity like a swing dance sends the message that such activities, despite what we’ve been trying to say about them for decades so everyone can come away from negotiations happier, are negotiation rather than coercion.

Now that people have had the chance to hear better ways to negotiate, going back to these ways is just coercion. Here’s this quote to clarify that it wasn’t always–you’re right when it comes to that hunch of yours. But please understand that now that we have better alternatives, you just can’t say that this inferior way of “negotiating” is really negotiation anymore. And if you keep popularizing the song, that’s what you’ll be saying.

Thanks much, friends & fellow DJs!

I think the analysis of this song is largely in the right direction, and I’ve always had a creepy feeling about it for the reasons you give. But there’s also a lot of deliberate ambiguity in the song: most of the female lines are tentative or evasive (they give reasons why she should leave - “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow” - not indications that she is trying to); every firm rejection she offers (”The answer is no”) is followed by a more ambiguous implication of willingness (”At least I can say that I tried”); there’s an obvious flirtatiousness to the song that makes it plausible as a willing seduction. The song does not describe an assault, or even really a seduction; it is a negotiation.

At the same time, it’s sexist and somewhat coercive. The seduction ploys he uses are overbearing and manipulative, and they depend on an understanding from both parties that “No” does not mean no. They also imply a kind of male presumption (”hurting my pride”), and the whole Wolf/Mouse, pursuer/prey scenario is creepy and a good example of why 50s attitudes to sex are fucked up. But within the 1950s perspective, this was not unusual or offensive. It was not coercion or assault. It was the kind of denial and pretense that “respectable” men and women used - and to some degree had to use - to engage in sex without acknowledging themselves as “that kind of man/girl”.

Nice moderate, balanced view that, with use of qualifiers about time periods and such, encourages keeping the questions going yet channels them so they won’t spin off into unjustified (of the not-considering-others’-points-of-view, even if “others” are just “people in the past”) rage.

Hope people have some cool comments here based on what he said. No one replied to him in the original thread.

On that subject, though, over at the Feminist SF blog Ide Cyan has a post called Timeless that addresses that issue in SF writing. I think it bears some relevance to this conversation, as well.