“Baby It’s Cold Outside” is the second-most popular Christmas song and the most popular Christmas song among women, according to a user poll conducted by the messaging app MEi released Monday.
The poll asked 4,000 app users in the U.S. over the weekend of Dec. 15 and broke down the results by age, gender and even political party, a MEi spokesperson told The Daily Caller News Foundation Tuesday. It turns out that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is the second-most popular Christmas song among both Republicans and Democrats, with 16 percent of Republicans ranking it as their favorite and 15 percent of Democrats.
Only “Silent Night” surpassed “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in popularity, according to Mei’s user poll.
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” has been blasted this holiday season by critics, who say its lyrics are about sexual harassment. Some radio stations banned it, like Cleveland’s WDOK, which announced the decision on its website. (RELATED: Dean Martin’s Daughter Deana Defends ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’: ‘Get Over It’)
“I do realize that when the song was written in 1944, it was a different time, but now, while reading it, it seems very manipulative and wrong,” WDOK’s Glenn Anderson wrote Nov. 27. “The world we live in is extra sensitive now, and people get easily offended, but in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place.”
But the song’s defenders have come up with some creative ways to show their support.
Jordin Sparks and Jason Derulo perform ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ during a taping for the ‘Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade’ television special at Disneyland on November 9, 2013 in Anahiem, California. (Photo by Paul Hiffmeyer/Disney Parks via Getty Images)
A Kentucky radio station played a two-hour “Baby It’s Cold Outside” marathon on Sunday, alternating between five different versions of the tune.
The song was first popularized in the 1949 film “Neptune’s Daughter” and made into a hit by crooner Dean Martin in 1959.
His daughter Deana Martin defended the song on “Fox & Friends” Dec. 10.
“I was absolutely flabbergasted,” Martin said about the backlash the song has received. “It’s just insane. When I heard it and I said, this can’t possibly be. You know, it’s a sweet, flirty, fun, holiday song that, well, it’s been around for 50 years.”
MEi’s poll let users pick from a 2017 top 10 list of Christmas carols plus “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” Users’ other favorite songs from the list included “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
MEi is a messaging app with a twist — it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze users’ conversations. According to a review on the website Android Headlines:
The AI features will give you a set of scores for different personality traits that it has observed in you through your messages, along with your overarching personality type. It will, of course, do the same for your friends. Based on that and other factors in your messages, it will give you a compatibility score, broken down trait by trait, that tells you how compatible you are with the friends you text.
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