Fantasia, who most famously won the third season of American Idol in 2004, has gone on to have a pretty successful career: Four of her six studio albums peaked in the top ten on the Billboard 200 chart. She recently released her sixth album and first Christmas album, Christmas After Midnight, and that’s also doing pretty well, having peaked at No. 5 on the Top Holiday Albums chart. That said, there’s one eyebrow-raising moment on the record, especially in light of the current pop culture climate surrounding sexual harassment and assault.
The album features Fantasia’s takes on 12 holiday tunes, and one of them is “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a classic but controversial song written in 1944 that is now widely interpreted as normalizing date rape. Fantasia is far from the only singer to cover the song in modern times, so the primary issue here is her duet partner.
She teamed up with CeeLo Green for this recording, which is an absolutely confounding move on Green’s part, since in 2014, he plead no contest to felony ecstasy possession after giving the drugs to a woman and then having sex with her. Shortly after that, he took to Twitter to give a questionable definition of rape, saying that an unconscious person can’t be raped. It’s baffling that Green would put himself in a position where the world is reminded of his past misdeeds, especially when victims of sexual assault feel more willing than perhaps ever before to come forward and call out people who have assaulted them.
The context surrounding the song was perhaps best explained by a viral Tumblr post from last year, in which the writer gives some background on the song and its history, and says that while the song is a product of its time, that doesn’t excuse it entirely:
“So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes… which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.”
