Men as Raindrops

At a recent Christmas party, I had a chance to once again hear the Weather Girls hit, It’s Raining Men. This got me thinking about some questions I’ve had over the years about this song. I must admit it’s a catchy tune, and I’ve noticed that it never fails to get people up on the dance floor. However, I am still bewildered after all these years about the lyrics and the overall philosophy of the song.

First we should consider the performers themselves and their target audience. I’m guessing that the women are extremely desperate for male companionship. They have probably not had any contact with a man in months. It has probably been so long that they’ve forgotten what a complete disaster their last relationship was, and what a complete jerk their last boyfriend was. The topic of guys as jerks will have to be put aside for another blog entry.

Okay, so we have the very desperate Weather Girls singing praises that there are so many men available to them now that they are falling out of the sky. They are so filled with joy that they actually use the word hallelujah. Okay, ladies, get hold of yourselves and come back to reality. Hallelujah is not a word to be taken lightly. It should be reserved for such lofty occasions, such as when a deity makes an appearance to mankind, or you find an unopened bottle of Heinz ketchup hiding in the back of your pantry.

Also, the use of this word in my experience has no basis in reality. There have been times in my life when I was with a group of women who may have forgotten I was present, and began talking about the men in their lives. At no time in these conversations did I ever hear any one of these women use the word hallelujah to describe the men in their lives. I will go out on a limb here and guess that when women do get together and talk about their respective men that rejoicing is the furthest concept from their minds.

Now, let’s consider the main action of the song, namely dropping a male body - flesh, blood and bone - from a cumulonimbus cloud at a height of, say, 10000 feet...without a parachute. The body would fall like a raindrop, gravity increasing its velocity as it descends faster and faster to the ground below. We can express the consequences of a falling man mathematically. In the following equation (my own formula), we will let X be the weight of a falling man:

X multiplied by 32 ft/sec, squared = SPLAT!

Or we can modify this equation to reflect the consequences of anyone or any object on which the falling man might land:

X multiplied by 32 ft/sec, squared = SICKENING THUD.

These equations clearly demonstrate why I majored in history and not mathematics.

So let me get this straight: the Weather Girls are so desperate for a relationship with a man, that they’re willing to pick up the first broken body they find on the ground? Yeech! I won’t go into any graphic detail, but I assume that the resulting sight is not very pretty.

Of course I realize that this whole song is a fantasy and not to be taken literally. Still, you have to wonder how much it influences each of our expectations about the opposite sex. Is she a nice girl, a slut, or a bitch? Is he a nice guy, a stud, or a jerk? In all probability we can be any one of these to the opposite sex at one point or another in our lives. Certainly, each one of us has been a broken-hearted body lying on the ground at least once in our romantic history.

The final lesson we should learn from this song is this: carry a very sturdy umbrella the next time rain is in the forecast.