Anyone who knows anything about the world before they were born probably knows this already, but it’s a good example of how most people are utterly inept at understanding their own culture even a few decades removed.

That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Yep! The whole point of the song is the woman telling the man she’s DTF but that ignoring society’s strictures have consequences, and more on her than on him, and she needs to make it appear that she had no choice but to stay the night.

So Amanda Marcotte-style “feminists” get it right by accident — the song is indeed relevant to rape, but not the date rape they idiotically believe is happening, but rather to the larger culture having removed the woman’s agency and ability to make her own choices.

In this way for the time, the song was quite racy which is why it was popular (in addition to having a decent melody).

I think about cultural change a lot, and about the difficulty of understanding other cultures. I’ve seen remarkable cultural change and norm shifts in my own lifetime, alterations that many people deny having occurred at all.

Compared to how we were during the 1940s we are effectively aliens. That’s one of the reasons people have such trouble understanding this song, and many other things from any time before 1995 or so.

I just find it funny that a song that is explicitly critiquing rape culture (before that phrase existed) is denigrated as being about date rape. Makes me wonder what other huge cultural cues, practices and conventions that we all — including me — miss from older media.

Probably a whole lot.