Baby It's Cold Outside: A Guide To Wholesome Flirting?

Malcolm and Simone discuss the classic Christmas song "Baby It's Cold Outside" and how it demonstrates wholesome flirting using plausible deniability. This allows romantic interest to be signaled while preserving both parties' ability to save face if unrequited.

They contrast it to more recent "slutty Christmas" songs conveying entitlement and transactional attitudes. The importance of picking up on social cues is highlighted - autistically interpreting the song as nonconsensual misses the contextual flirting.

The breakdown of traditional dating rituals due to liability risks and progressive social norms is explored. However, Simone pushes back against solely blaming women or feminism. The root cause is dominance hierarchies enforced by bureaucratic power structures that hurt both genders.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] for our Christmas episode right now.

Simone Collins: Baby, It's Cold Outside is a guide to dating. It's what flirting used to look like.

And what makes this song even more wholesome is that it was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser who was. So saying it with his wife, Lynn so like, this is something also that like, this is demonstrative by the kind of interplay that led a husband and wife to get married. Like this is the kind of behavior that leads to lasting.

Long term pair bonded relationships

Malcolm Collins: it's very interesting if you contrast it with other songs that are, that are Christmassy. Like the the two songs that both have the same theme of I'm a big slut. So

Simone Collins: last Christmas I gave you my heart and the very next day you gave it away. And Ariana Grande is singing, you know. I don't want to give it all away if you won't be here next year.

Malcolm Collins: But it's important to remember that the enemy isn't women. It's the cultural group that has enforced these norms that have made it impossible to date women.

Would you like [00:01:00] to know more?

Simone Collins: Did you

Malcolm Collins: read that loud enough for me to use it in the

Simone Collins: recording? I can read the thing. Their Troublesome Crush by Zan West. In this queer polyamorous male female romance novella, two metamors realize they have crushes on each other while planning their shared partner's birthday party together.

Ernest, a Jewish autistic demiromantic queer fat trans man submissive, and Nora, a Jewish disabled queer fat femme cis woman switch. Have to contend, with an age gap, a desire not to mess up their lovely polyamorous dynamic as metamores, the fact that Ernest has never been attracted to a cis person before, and the reality that they are romantically attracted to each other all while planning their dominant partner's birthday party and trying to do a really good job.

Malcolm Collins: So it looks like from the cover, the woman is much older than the man, obese and with a cane. So

Simone Collins: yeah, the [00:02:00] cover is, I mean, I would say the cover is well done in that it seems to be fairly accurate. We have the two overweight people dressed in classic, I don't know, progressive style standing in front of what I believe is a cupcake counter looking extremely awkward and unattractive.

Oh my gosh. Well,

Malcolm Collins: here's a reddit thread that really got me when I read it because it aligns with so much of what we've been talking about on the channel. Yeah

Simone Collins: Oh, the 20 year old dating one?

Malcolm Collins: My 20 year old son doesn't date. His friends don't date. My friend's kids don't date. What's going on? When I was in my late teens and early twenties, life for my friends and me revolved around meeting girls.

My son and his friends, who are athletic and outgoing, don't seem to put a lot of emphasis on dating. They play a lot of online video games and have boys outings.

Once in a while, one will hook up with a random girl they met on an app. Rarely does one have a girlfriend. This seems to be the norm for [00:03:00] my friend's kids, too. What's going on?

Simone Collins: Well, and then when you go through the responses, there are some recurring themes. A lot of people just say like, there's no reason to do it anymore.

You know, there's, there's no point. Other people say that it is too expensive and they can't afford to date anymore, or they bemoan the loss of affordable third spaces, basically places that aren't your home or your school or work where people can hang out. And then a lot of people just talk about like not having game and then one, one interesting comment that I thought was, was astute was balkanization of cultural touchstones. And what they meant by that was that like in the past, if you were both into gaming, you played like the same three games. If you were into anime, you watched the same three anime.

Now, even if you are into a specific sub genre, like you weren't necessarily into the same thing. So there are fewer people. Who share affinity networks really closely and I

Malcolm Collins: question [00:04:00] that push back on that one I think that they are because I remember when I was in high school it was all about the bands that you know that no one else knew about or the games that you yeah

Simone Collins: No one else played.

It's a dominant hierarchy thing to show how obscure and advanced interests

Malcolm Collins: are in a dominance hierarchy that's affiliated with this specific thing. It's typically by showing how extremely affiliated you are with that thing. And so people would front their dominance hierarchy by pushing that. And in this to note, this is not like a isolated phenomenon.

We'll put some graphs on the screen here, but. The rates of sex that people have been having while they're in high school has been dropping really dramatically over

Simone Collins: the last So many people have worked hard to make happen. I mean, I remember being in high school and they were like, the rates of sex are so high.

I mean, mission accomplished.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Mission accomplished. No one's having sex anymore. There you go. Um, well, I mean, and, and rates, it's, it's interesting. I think our generation, sometimes they can look at the younger generation and think of them as so sexually free. You know, like, Oh, look at all this stuff [00:05:00] that's allowed now.

Like I would be allowed to have like 10 girlfriends at once and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When in reality, no, just nobody's getting anything right. Like, the, the, the level when we talk about like dating and sex markets being broken, cause it's not just dating markets. It's not just marriage markets.

It's also sex markets. It is, it has gotten very hard, I think for both males and females and. for our Christmas episode right now. One thing that I was really meditating on in regards to this topic is the song baby. It's cold outside cause I've been listening to it recently. And

. Depending on the intonations and tonality used by the singers, like there are ways to sing the song. If you really want to make it sound rapey, you can do that. But generally speaking, the song doesn't come off that way at all.

It comes off just like. hitting on a girl from the past. Right.

Simone Collins: And it reminds me very much of like many traditional dating methods, mechanisms, and [00:06:00] mannerisms. They're designed around plausible done and deniability, making it more comfortable for people to make advances at partners in a way. One, it didn't make the other partn