Hey good for you, you’re really good at finding nits to pick in order to stay on your side of the fence. No sense in finding out of course why so many find that opera a racist piece of shit (I’m done with Googling for you – there’s a LOT out there), and also find the swooning that so many people (mostly white) still do over it at best dismaying.
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I’d be worried if anyone liked it for the Cliff song.
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“College student” == “infant,” and “every single point you make” == “nits not even worthy of rebuttal.” Got it. Why are you even bothering to engage in conversation if your responses are brushoffs and snide dismissals? Surely you have better things to do with your time than insult an unwoke racist idiot who doesn’t know what Google is.
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Touché.
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Why should I follow you down your trails of relatively minor points of contention? Especially when it’s clear that you’ll continue ignoring The Main Point? (Rhetorical questions, obvs)
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Well, I’m male and defending it, sort of, so there’s one data point. It’s more accurate to say, though, that I think there is room for more than one interpretation.
The way this song is always presented, it’s clear that she isn’t putting her foot down very hard. (I’m not saying anything about the reality of life in the 1930s.)
I think you’ve got it right. This was the era of “the boy chases the girl until she catches him.” Women were expected to be coy, and so men had to be persistent (respectfully). This gave the man a chance to show that his interest was more than superficial, and gave the woman time to assess the man’s character and work out her own feelings towards him.
This couple is in the middle of the game, not at the start. There is clearly mutual attraction. She dropped in on him, and he had been hoping she would. His only argument is that it’s cold outside, but she manages to find her own excuses to delay leaving - maybe half a drink, maybe a cigarette. She says “I wish I knew how to break this spell”, and I don’t think it means that he’s been using actual sorcery. (He even asks consent at one point - “You mind if I move in closer?” - just like a proper 21st century man.)
Who knows? Maybe just a little necking and heavy breathing. Actual intercourse was still a big deal. Both parties know they are pushing the envelope of respectable behaviour, but only a little at this point.
That line (“At least I’m gonna say that I tried”) could also mean, “I can tell myself I put up an acceptable amount of resistance, so there’s more to this than lust, and I’m not easy”.
And @anon15383236, I agree that there are some lines that don’t go down well in the 21st century. Women now are expected to be clear about what they do and do not want, and men are expected to accept that without pouting, like the earnest young couple in the video that @ChickieD posted. That’s a better set of rules in my opinion, but the song is about a couple navigating the mores of eighty years ago.
Maybe it’s time to retire it as a cultural artifact, but I don’t think it should be utterly condemned. It isn’t Have Some Madeira, M’Dear , which I’ve always thought was an unfortunate lapse in judgement by Flanders and Swann
The links in my earlier post, especially http://bigbutterandeggman.tumblr.com/ analyze the song in more detail.
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Bloke. I dunno whether it’s actually rapey or not and I can see arguments and interpretations on both sides, even if I don’t personally agree with some of them.
But it definitely feels rapey (or at the very least, creepy as fuck) to me and if I never heard it again, I wouldn’t be sad about that.
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Oh, you don’t say! Well thank you, here I thought it came just a year or two ago! /s
Utterly condemned . . . hmmm. I’m thinking about more or less the opposite, “enjoyed.” Seems to me that a lot of men want to enjoy it as an artifact of its time, “rules were different back then,” etc. But that strikes me as lacking in empathy, if a lot of women don’t enjoy it, and feel uncomfortable watching it. If a lot of women agree with @M_M, that it feels “rapey,” it feels like those men who want to defend it don’t much care that a lot of women feel that way. And it’s worse, of course, when some of them go further and say that if women do feel that way, they’re just plain wrong, because “things were different back then, you’re imposing today’s standards on it, and so on.” As if women aren’t smart enough to realize it was made a long time ago.
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