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Speaking of wordplay, we’re once again being told that Baby, It’s Cold Outside is actually an ode to date rape. As so often, the umbrage-takers display a remarkable level of tin-earedness regarding the sentiment of the song, and a joke about feigned intoxication as an excuse for behaving as one might wish. And as noted in the comments over at Instapundit, “There was a time progressives would have said it was about a woman who obviously wants to have sex, but is being oppressed by slut-shamers through fear.”

Update, via the comments:

From the Huffington Post piece linked at Instapundit:

You’d think that self-styled singer-songwriters would be able to deduce things from lyrics, arrangement and intonation. And it’s interesting how the rather sour, supposedly progressive interpretation, wheeled out every year in near-identical articles, assumes that the woman in the song is somehow passive and a victim, rather than an equal and willing participant. As Darleen puts it in the comments here, the song is in fact a kind of lyrical tango, “an intricate dance where each partner consents to play a part.”

And from a related CNN article, where the point of the song is, again, spectacularly missed:

Somewhere, Mr and Mrs Loesser, the writers of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, are rolling their eyes in unison.

Inevitably, and in keeping with tradition, Laurie Penny also misses the point:

Don't get me started on 'Baby, It's Cold Outside.' A jolly festive tune about ignoring women's sexual agency. I've heard it twice today.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) November 30, 2015

Readers are invited to ponder which party – the songwriters or Ms Penny – is actually “ignoring women’s sexual agency.” A demonstration, were one needed, of how rote feminism can bleach away any trace of subtlety.

To my ear, and plenty of others, the woman in the song is far from passive and is listing the customary reasons for leaving, almost all of which are external social pressures and proprieties – gossipy neighbours, maiden aunts with vicious minds – while very much wanting to stay. The crude feminist reading of the song, illustrated above, is of him trying to coerce her. It’s actually about both of them, together, very knowingly, pushing against the social conventions of the time. Which is probably why the song was once considered somewhat risqué.

Still, one has to marvel at how the default progressive line is not only tin-eared and wrong, but actually an inversion of the songwriters’ intent.

The song isn’t about ignoring or overriding the woman’s preferences, or indeed drugging her – but quite the opposite. Throughout the song, they’re both thinking of ways to delay her departure. Half a drink, another cigarette. And despite the woman running through the list of obstacles to her passion, and saying that she “ought to say no,” because social convention expects her to forego her own preferences, the song concludes with the woman deciding that she’s “gonna say” that she tried to go home but was thwarted by the blizzard.

The two of them then agree, in unison and in harmony, that the weather outside really is terrible.

I bring you art. Twelve minutes of it. In which Ms Eames Armstrong and Matthew Ryan Rossetti thrill onlookers at the 2015 MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival with a terribly radical rendition of music from Les Misérables. As readers will no doubt be aware, the MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival is where gathered artistic juggernauts “create queer experimental media through an ever-changing constellation of means.” The participants, we’re told, “make art for ourselves and our community, not for markets or museums.” Consequently, the festival is a “decisive launching pad for emerging talents.”

No skipping ahead to the good bits.

The festival, including the soul-engorging splendour of the piece featured above, was sponsored by both the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. An earlier performance by Ms Armstrong and Mr Rossetti, in which Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, um, enhanced and made transgressive, can be found here. You lucky, lucky people. 

Robert Tracinski on socialist Venezuela and the imaginings of John Lennon: 

Before you judge Venezuela’s looters, consider what you would do if your children were starving. So much for “no hunger.” What about the “brotherhood of man”? Not only is looting soaring in Venezuela, but so are all forms of crime. It has gotten so far out of control that mobs of vigilantes are burning people alive in the streets over petty thefts. It turns out then when people are starving, there’s not a lot of brotherhood. Instead, they fight like dogs over a bone.

Mick Hartley quotes Nick Cohen on Venezuela’s leftist cheerleaders: 

Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination.” What more could a breathless Western punter ask for? Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. […] The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war.

Theodore Dalrymple on charity and welfare: 

Charity given as of right, for that is what the welfare state does, favours the undeserving more than the deserving, in so far as the undeserving have a capacity and even talent for generating more neediness than the deserving. (They also tend to be more vocal in their demands.) The welfare state in fact dissolves the very notion of desert, because there is no requirement that a beneficiary prove he deserves what he is legally entitled to. And where what is given is given as of right, not only will a recipient feel no gratitude for it, but it must be given without compassion — that is, without regard to any individual’s actual situation. In the welfare state, the notion of a specially deserving case is prohibited, for it implies a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.

And Katherine Timpf on sartorial innovation in the name of “social justice”:

The New Hanover County School System in North Carolina has proposed a ban on wearing tight pants in its schools because apparently “bigger girls” are getting bullied for the way that they look when they wear them.

Snug jeans and leggings would only be permissible if a looser secondary garment, say, a long shirt or dress, “covers the posterior in its entirety.” Freddie Mercury and Sir Mix-A-Lot could not be reached for comment.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Some festive fingering courtesy of Ms Luna Lee and her mighty gayageum:  

As is the custom here, posting will be intermittent over the holidays and readers are advised to subscribe to the blog feed, which will alert you to anything new as and when it materialises. Thanks for over a million visits this year and thousands of comments, many of which prompted discussions that are much more interesting than the actual posts. And particular thanks to all those who’ve made PayPal donations to keep this rickety barge above water. Ditto those who’ve done shopping via the Amazon UK widget, top right, or via this Amazon US link, which results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. It’s what keeps this place here and is much appreciated. Curious newcomers and those with nothing better to do are welcome to rummage through the reheated series.

To you and yours, a very good one. 

Avert your eyes, readers, and shove things in your ears. This cultural appropriation may corrupt your mind.

See here for more of Ms Luna Lee and her gayageum blues stylings.

For readers of a certain age. 

Further to the second item here, a musical interlude by Oberlin College Choir.

Via College Insurrection. 

More niche sorrows from a certain newspaper:

If punk is the ultimate anti-establishment scene, why is it still run by all these white men?

And so we find “would-be musicologist” and transgender punk musician Alyssa Kai pining for a cartoon scene that reality can’t live up to: 

DIY punk – with its self-released music, non-corporate labels, cheap all-age shows in basements – embraces those things not as means toward corporate success, but as intrinsically worthwhile tools to build authentic rebellion and powerful community.

She wants none of that “corporate success,” which entails “getting signed, getting famous, getting a world tour,” terrible things like that. No, Ms Kai wants “authentic rebellion” and the purest of motives. Inevitably, disappointment looms:

Our authenticity [is] built on false premises of what it means to be “true” to punk in a messed-up, still-exclusionary scene made up of mostly white, abled middle-class men who make and buy most of the music.

Yes, too many punk musicians – and too many of their fans – are white, male and able-bodied. Will the horror never end? Apparently, our “would-be musicologist” is unfamiliar with the genres afro-punk and queercore, to say nothing of Pussy Riot, Pansy Division, Dinah Cancer and of course The Slits. 

And then it gets worse.

Without warning, in the audience or on a stage, I’ll hear someone say, “This song is about feminism,

Yay. Girl power.

which means: How hard it is to have a vagina in this world!”

Oh dear. Major gaffe. Ixnay on the v.j. 

And I’m suddenly… excluded from the supposedly ultra-inclusive community I’m trying to build.

Because feminist punk that doesn’t nod to transgendered women and their pseudo-vaginas is just no punk at all.

How to detect speech in the vibrations of a crisp bag. Watched from a distance through soundproof glass. 

Via Nerdcore.