Note: Don't read this if you don't want to know (albeit in a vague manner) what happens in Seasons One and Two of Mad Men.
1.
About ten years ago, upon serving on a jury, I became aware that Americans hate women—perhaps nobody more so than women, themselves.
Though this may be a bit of an overstatement (and without getting into the particulars of the lawsuit), I left feeling as if the plaintiff—a woman—was the recipient of some weird pent-up ire that was in total disproportion to the particulars of the case. People turned her into the accused, in what was like a more opaque (and less traumatizing) instance of blaming the rape victim for the rape.
And no one was harder on her than the women.
It was awful, and I left feeling as though my half-jokingly entertained suspicions had been confirmed with quick and humorless authority: my opinions on things were the exact opposite of those of the average person.
It’s a strange realization to come to—that not everyone has read Laura Mulvey and Margaret Atwood.
When I was a sophomore, my mulleted female college counselor with unshaven legs and a penchant for swearing at her eight-year old daughter over the phone suggested I take a feminist film theory course. Sure, I figured; I didn't know from feminism. I mean, as a sixth-grader, I was surprised to learn (though I had suspicions) that girls pooped. That's where I came from.
But I enrolled in the class, and it floored me. I felt like everything I had been taught or instinctively thought about women was a lie. It kept me awake, panicked, at night. And there is was—right there this whole time, staring me in the face, so obvious. It was as blatant as seeing Southern Blacks endure the weight and thrust of fire hoses wielded by the purveyors of injustice: here was indisputable evidence of social discrimination so ugly, you'd be a fool to not recognize its wrongness.
Finally, I owned it. I made earnest but laughably cryptic attempts (i.e., out-of the-blue phone calls from an ex-boyfriend somberly professing I'm so sorry if I treated you with anything other than the respect you and other members of your gender deserve—is that weird?) to apologize to those who may have been affected by the older, less-enlightened me. And I recast women in my worldview as strong-willed, capable and independent.
So you can imagine my confusion when my future wife, while we were visiting a friend's house, asked me to go downstairs and fetch her a Popsicle.
2.
One of the things a liberal education affords you is an inflated sense of the fairness and goodness of other people out there in the real world. Most of whom, as it turns out, either: (a) haven't been exposed to the material that you have; or (b) if they have, don't scarcely give a fuck. Ultimately, for the rest of your life, you find yourself nervously avoiding eye contact in the actual real world, where you realize that maybe we actually haven't gotten past this.
I carry suspicion in my pocket (next to my keys, the longest of which is usually sandwiched between my index and middle fingers in case I need to jam it into an assailant’s eye on criminally short notice) and I pulled it out to process the severious demonization of presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton, which somehow managed to best the previous demonization of senatorial-candidate Hillary Clinton, which bested the previous demonization of first lady Hillary Clinton, and so forth. People, for some reason, just hate her—is it because she's assured and educated?
I felt similarly suspicious of the public’s reception to Sarah Palin.
Look—I am not, in any way, insinuating that Palin is Clinton’s intellectual equal. That would approach the absurd. But what I am suggesting is that that they do have something in common: the generally encouraged vehemence of their detractors.
Interestingly, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed addressed the public’s disdain for Ms. Palin (and Ms. Clinton) in her September 17, 2008 entry in her column, under the incendiary banner Revoke My Feminist Card:
There is a danger in suggesting that feminism as an ideology is whatever you make of it, and open to limitless interpretation: it makes it easy for educated dudes to pretend that visiting a strip club is encountering female empowerment in action, rather than encountering titties in action.
However, measured dissent against the majority and its dominant tenets is all too rare these days on the liberal side of things. It's the kind of thing that keeps people on their toes and, at the very least, affirms their own identity within a cause, group or ideology.
Hell, in the same column, Sneed asks: “what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion—even though I believe in freedom of choice?” That's batty!
In the next day’s column, she wrote:
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a big fan of Palin's. I do, however, find her a pinch more appealing than her male equivalent, Ted Nugent, primarily because she doesn’t write terrible songs in addition to discharging ridiculous-looking weapons.
Her troubling policies, values and ignorance are only slightly less troubling than the scary, down-home, outdated survivalist mentality of those whose cauldrons she stirs the bubbling violence in. (See picture: Really? You want to kill people because of their politics? Joke or no joke—that's fucking scary.)
But I don’t buy that she was chosen merely to appeal to those obviously closeted-racist Hillary Clinton supporters who, upon Obama’s securing the nomination, found themselves on the fence (?!!!) in deciding between McCain and Obama. Though that's certainly part of it.
I’m guessing she wasn’t picked because she had never been out of the country before. Or because she has a pregnant, unmarried teen-aged daughter. Or for her inability to summon up a single Supreme Court case besides Roe v. Wade.
No matter what anyone says, Palin is a woman of accomplishment—she's Governor of Alaska, after all. And that is, no doubt, admirable. But tell me—what did you find more impressive when you watched the Vice-Presidential debate: her political prowess and grasp of the issues? Or how good she looked, having giving birth just a few months prior?
Imagine if we put her running mate up to such scrutiny.
I think that McCain and his sleazeball campaign put her up for the slaughter. Not only did she take the fall for the Republicans, she did it with the majority of the male population ogling her. And I think that John McCain and his advisors are total bullshit for that.
In the October 18, 2008 edition of The New York Times, Mark Leibovich, in his article Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule, writes:
3.
I remember, as a college student, watching the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne sleeps with Jordan Catalano behind best friend (who has a devastating crush on JC) Angela’s back. I remember thinking—Christ, why would she do that to her best friend? It seemed so unlikely; I thought it was merely a side of drama hastily whipped up by the writers to go along with the story-arc cut of meat, until I recalled instances where girls I knew in high school did the same exact shit.
In these situations, guys of this age will, basically, sleep with a girl because he’s able to and his hormones are on high alert. But girls will sleep with a guy to hurt another girl.
I had always chalked this type of undertaking up to manufactured, overwrought teenaged dramatics. But, now, it is particularly disheartening to consider the dynamics of young women hurting another over some guy, not least of all because few of us are as brooding and attractive as Mr. Catalano—the Jackson Brown of dyslexia.
Being a man (or, more accurately, the opposite of Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy, a Boyish Man), I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman at any age. Each age seems to be fraught with new societal pitfalls: in grade school, the boys are mean to you; in high school, the girls are mean to you; and in college, the boys are, again, mean to you.
Then the pressure cooker really starts to rattle: get married, have children; ignore any maternal instinct to stay at home with your young child(ren) in order to pursue a career, even if you decide that you no longer want to; and try to stay thin, youthful and attractive.
If you stay single and independent, you are envious of your married friends with kids. And if you are married, you are envious of your single friends. The song Single Girl by Ruby Vass—a standard that knows a few variations and has also been recorded by The Carter Family (as Single Girl Married Girl), among others—seems to pointedly take the side of the single girl:
Pulling off the character of Peggy Olson, both in the writing and acting, is quite a nifty trick, indeed. Peggy is meant to represent the unlikeliest of archetypes—one that has never really existed, nonetheless—without playing like one.
At first, as a viewer, if you think you know what Peggy wants, it’s that she just wants to be left alone. You feel sorry for her. She seems utterly powerless and victimized. But as her character develops, so does her power. And then sometimes you feel sorry for the people she comes in contact with. Not because she’s vicious, but because she leaves unprecedented amounts of wreckage in her wake.
She is initially bombarded with inappropriate come-ons from the men and criminally bad suggestions from the women (namely office manager/goddess Joan) involving contraception and the importance of showing a little leg in order to snare a husband—with undisguised sexism the ruling party in both camps.
Peggy gets pregnant after a frivolous roll in the hay with he of the snap-together aristocracy: the smirking-when-he-isn’t-pouting, pear-headed Pete Campbell. When she is pregnant, she is ridiculed because everyone thinks she is fat. She has the baby, gives it away, suffers the possible damnation of the Catholic church to which she belongs, and certainly of her much older, afghan-weaved sister, who is charged with taking care of the child.
Peggy longs to be part of the boys’ club, yet she is clearly riddled with guilt about it. And as she makes headway at Sterling Cooper it is, to some degree, at the cost of her womanhood.
Femme fatale Joan is seemingly happy being the plaything of the conservatively perverse Roger Sterling—the Sterling in the fictional ad agency and centerpiece of the show, Sterling Cooper—until she meets and gets engaged to a coveted doctorial candidate. Scenes of the two fiancés together at home suggest a new side to Joan previously unseen. She is tolerant and nurturing, wounded but trusting, eager to please and intelligent. And at work, she shines while assisting Harry Crane, “head of the television department.” And just when you’re feeling really happy for her, Crane replaces her, and it’s just devastating.
And then her fiancé rapes her.
And what to make of the mess that is Betty Draper as played by January Jones? It is thoroughly unpleasant to watch the former model—who has given her all to be Mrs. Donald Draper only to be repeatedly cheated on and lied to—begin to unravel. But the following reading of her character by Erin J. Shea in an October 22,2008 article from metromix.com (and appearing in the Chicago Tribune offshoot Redeye) would never have occurred to me:
What's with the acidity?
The women on Mad Men are made to suffer, not entirely unlike women in a Lars Von Trier film. Sure, the men are made to suffer, too. But it’s a different type of suffering: their suffering is directly related to the guilt of how they treat the women in their lives, and they are allowed to cope with it by drinking obscene amounts of old-fashioned cocktails and smoking ludicrous amounts of unfiltered cigarettes. And sleeping with other women. And being gone for days at a time.
Conversely, the women are raped. Or have to give up their babies for adoption. Or be a mother and sole caregiver while the men are gone.
And when Betty wants to get back at Don for cheating on her, she has anonymous sex in the back office of a bar. Not out of desire or lust, but because of the pain it would cause her husband; it seems to have more to do with him than it does her.
Mad Men is immeasurably less about advertising than it is about gender roles. It is not accidental that it takes place on the cusp of The ‘60s as cultural event, counting on the audience’s by-now ingrained understanding of the term and the social and societal changes implicated therein.
A man’s responsibility, as Don Draper understands it, is to be an earner, to provide a comfortable lifestyle for his family. His obligations, largely, end there.
Betty is expected to be forthcoming in the bedroom, to cook and clean and take care of the household and kids while remaining elegant and attractive—but not too revealing so as to not satiate the desires of the wrong element. And, when Mad Men begins, in the middle of things, that’s exactly what she’s doing. And then things start to crack, slow and hushed, all around them.
Don Draper represents the last gasp of a very particular lifestyle. There are peripherals of change to come all around him—the beatnik crowd surrounding fever dream Midge Daniels; buffoonish ascot-wearing Orwell understudy Paul Kinsey’s black girlfriend and their march in Mississippi; the drafting of openly gay “European” Dylan fan Kurt as a fresh, youthful perspective within the firm—and Draper advances as if he is impervious to them.
Draper serves as the link between masculinity before World War II (the Great War) and after Vietnam (the lousy one). He will be the last of a generation whose men fought wars, shaved daily and struck their women when they were “hysterical.” Men like Roger Sterling wouldn’t change—their ideologies die with them; but a man like Draper is present for the unspooling and all of the confusion it awakens.
As is Betty, and as things start to fall apart, they still clutch on to the way it was supposed to be. That’s all they know how to do.
Single Girl Married Girl? Here there’s no discrimination; they’re both severely punished.
4.
So the second wave of feminism (the first wave being, primarily, the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the century) hit in the 1960s and lasted into the 1980s. Forty years isn’t enough time to render the playing field equal. Kate Lorenz of CareerBuilder.com writes:
Equality is the only ideology under which true harmony and freedom can be achieved. But nobody's really certain how to divvy up the duties any more. Now everybody works and nobody wants to do anything when they get home. Everybody does everything.
Men are no longer providers, and women are not housewives: my wife makes more money than I do; I sure as hell never fought in a war; and I cook more than my wife does, and not because I'm some sort of gourmet chef or something.
And who would want to go back to the way things were? Oh yeah, that's right: like half the fucking population.
I think that the only way to achieve true equality in the workplace and at home is to be a fabulously wealthy couple, where both work and just pay other people to do everything for them. Which means, ostensibly that equality is a concept that can only be enjoyed via the oppression of others. Who's driving the car? Why, the driver, of course. Who's taking care of the children? Why, the children's caretaker, of course. Who's washing the dishes? You get the point.
More and more, I feel like maybe, in order to wear the hats we’ve been fitted for, we’ll evolve into one species, not unlike Marilyn Manson on the cover of Mechanical Animals. Only browner and, hopefully, with a couple extra arms and more manageable hairdos.
1.
About ten years ago, upon serving on a jury, I became aware that Americans hate women—perhaps nobody more so than women, themselves.
Though this may be a bit of an overstatement (and without getting into the particulars of the lawsuit), I left feeling as if the plaintiff—a woman—was the recipient of some weird pent-up ire that was in total disproportion to the particulars of the case. People turned her into the accused, in what was like a more opaque (and less traumatizing) instance of blaming the rape victim for the rape.
And no one was harder on her than the women.
It was awful, and I left feeling as though my half-jokingly entertained suspicions had been confirmed with quick and humorless authority: my opinions on things were the exact opposite of those of the average person.
It’s a strange realization to come to—that not everyone has read Laura Mulvey and Margaret Atwood.
When I was a sophomore, my mulleted female college counselor with unshaven legs and a penchant for swearing at her eight-year old daughter over the phone suggested I take a feminist film theory course. Sure, I figured; I didn't know from feminism. I mean, as a sixth-grader, I was surprised to learn (though I had suspicions) that girls pooped. That's where I came from.
But I enrolled in the class, and it floored me. I felt like everything I had been taught or instinctively thought about women was a lie. It kept me awake, panicked, at night. And there is was—right there this whole time, staring me in the face, so obvious. It was as blatant as seeing Southern Blacks endure the weight and thrust of fire hoses wielded by the purveyors of injustice: here was indisputable evidence of social discrimination so ugly, you'd be a fool to not recognize its wrongness.
Finally, I owned it. I made earnest but laughably cryptic attempts (i.e., out-of the-blue phone calls from an ex-boyfriend somberly professing I'm so sorry if I treated you with anything other than the respect you and other members of your gender deserve—is that weird?) to apologize to those who may have been affected by the older, less-enlightened me. And I recast women in my worldview as strong-willed, capable and independent.
So you can imagine my confusion when my future wife, while we were visiting a friend's house, asked me to go downstairs and fetch her a Popsicle.
2.
One of the things a liberal education affords you is an inflated sense of the fairness and goodness of other people out there in the real world. Most of whom, as it turns out, either: (a) haven't been exposed to the material that you have; or (b) if they have, don't scarcely give a fuck. Ultimately, for the rest of your life, you find yourself nervously avoiding eye contact in the actual real world, where you realize that maybe we actually haven't gotten past this.
I carry suspicion in my pocket (next to my keys, the longest of which is usually sandwiched between my index and middle fingers in case I need to jam it into an assailant’s eye on criminally short notice) and I pulled it out to process the severious demonization of presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton, which somehow managed to best the previous demonization of senatorial-candidate Hillary Clinton, which bested the previous demonization of first lady Hillary Clinton, and so forth. People, for some reason, just hate her—is it because she's assured and educated?
I felt similarly suspicious of the public’s reception to Sarah Palin.
Look—I am not, in any way, insinuating that Palin is Clinton’s intellectual equal. That would approach the absurd. But what I am suggesting is that that they do have something in common: the generally encouraged vehemence of their detractors.
Interestingly, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed addressed the public’s disdain for Ms. Palin (and Ms. Clinton) in her September 17, 2008 entry in her column, under the incendiary banner Revoke My Feminist Card:
Hmmm. Maybe . . . I am not a feminist after all.It's a gutsy thing to write—even if it's borderline insane—and, though I usually find something cringeworthy in her column, that Sneed (itself a cringe-worthy moniker) would stand front and center in direct opposition to the rest of Obamaworld (p/k/a the Land of Lincoln) to support another woman, was pretty, oh, I don’t know—radically feminist. Like how when Blake Schwarzenbach sang: You're not punk and I'm telling everyone/Save your breath I never was one was, like, totally punk.
Maybe . . . working in a man's world for 42 years and busting my butt to beat them up the ladder deletes me from the feminist category.
Perhaps . . . struggling to be a good single mom in a very married world—yet meeting my five-day-a-week column deadline—doesn't earn me a feminist handle either. . . . [I]f appreciating a woman who chose a husband who supports her ladder-climbing skills puts me in the non-feminist category, well maybe that's where I belong. . . . She is real. She is rural. She may not be a brilliant tactician, but she's got street sense. Palin is so unlike the very controlled Hillary Clinton, who would never be caught dead in red heels.
Thus, it now appears Palin has emerged as ‘everywoman’ to a huge portion of our female population; a woman never really identified with what we thought was our quintessential role model—a highly educated woman who wears tailored suits, whose voice is never shrill and who has a husband who makes more than she does.
There is a danger in suggesting that feminism as an ideology is whatever you make of it, and open to limitless interpretation: it makes it easy for educated dudes to pretend that visiting a strip club is encountering female empowerment in action, rather than encountering titties in action.
However, measured dissent against the majority and its dominant tenets is all too rare these days on the liberal side of things. It's the kind of thing that keeps people on their toes and, at the very least, affirms their own identity within a cause, group or ideology.
Hell, in the same column, Sneed asks: “what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion—even though I believe in freedom of choice?” That's batty!
In the next day’s column, she wrote:
. . .Hillary Clinton ran for president and was hit with more sexist barbs than St. Sebastian had arrows.So here's a hard-nosed, well-respected, old-school Chicago female reporter who felt the need to write a defensively apologist article for supporting the woman attempting to lay claim to the second-highest seat in the land—I mean, isn't that just fascinating?
And when John McCain chose (gulp!) a good-looking woman from Alaska named Sarah Palin as his running mate, the liberal pundits threw every red shoe at her they could find. . . .Being first and fair was my journalistic baptism in the tumultuous 1960s.
Unfortunately, fairness keeps getting redefined.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a big fan of Palin's. I do, however, find her a pinch more appealing than her male equivalent, Ted Nugent, primarily because she doesn’t write terrible songs in addition to discharging ridiculous-looking weapons.
Her troubling policies, values and ignorance are only slightly less troubling than the scary, down-home, outdated survivalist mentality of those whose cauldrons she stirs the bubbling violence in. (See picture: Really? You want to kill people because of their politics? Joke or no joke—that's fucking scary.)But I don’t buy that she was chosen merely to appeal to those obviously closeted-racist Hillary Clinton supporters who, upon Obama’s securing the nomination, found themselves on the fence (?!!!) in deciding between McCain and Obama. Though that's certainly part of it.
I’m guessing she wasn’t picked because she had never been out of the country before. Or because she has a pregnant, unmarried teen-aged daughter. Or for her inability to summon up a single Supreme Court case besides Roe v. Wade.
No matter what anyone says, Palin is a woman of accomplishment—she's Governor of Alaska, after all. And that is, no doubt, admirable. But tell me—what did you find more impressive when you watched the Vice-Presidential debate: her political prowess and grasp of the issues? Or how good she looked, having giving birth just a few months prior?
Imagine if we put her running mate up to such scrutiny.
I think that McCain and his sleazeball campaign put her up for the slaughter. Not only did she take the fall for the Republicans, she did it with the majority of the male population ogling her. And I think that John McCain and his advisors are total bullshit for that.
In the October 18, 2008 edition of The New York Times, Mark Leibovich, in his article Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule, writes:
It is not unusual for fans of Sarah Palin to shout out to the Alaska governor in the midst of her stump speeches. It is noteworthy, however, that the crowds are heavily male. ‘You rock me out, Sarah,’ yelled one man, wearing a red-checked hunting jacket as Ms. Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, strode into an airplane hangar here on Thursday. He held a homemade 'Dudes for Sarah' sign and wore a National Rifle Association hat. Kenny Loggins’s 'Danger Zone' blared over the loudspeakers. . . . While there are plenty of women, including wives and daughters of male fans, at Ms. Palin’s appearances, they acknowledge they are outnumbered. 'This is not a ladies campaign,’ declared Linda Teegan at a rally in Weirs Beach, N.H., . . .'There seem to be lots and lots of guys here,' she said. 'I’d guess 70-30, maybe 65-35, men to women. It’s quite noticeable to me.'In other words, Palin was chosen, in a last-ditch effort, as the pharmaceutical Sildenafil citrate needed to pump some much-needed blood into the flaccid penis of the Republican Party.
The dudes tend to make themselves noticed. 'You tell ’em baby,' a man yelled out at a rally Wednesday night on a high school football field in Salem, N.H.
3.
I remember, as a college student, watching the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne sleeps with Jordan Catalano behind best friend (who has a devastating crush on JC) Angela’s back. I remember thinking—Christ, why would she do that to her best friend? It seemed so unlikely; I thought it was merely a side of drama hastily whipped up by the writers to go along with the story-arc cut of meat, until I recalled instances where girls I knew in high school did the same exact shit.
In these situations, guys of this age will, basically, sleep with a girl because he’s able to and his hormones are on high alert. But girls will sleep with a guy to hurt another girl.
I had always chalked this type of undertaking up to manufactured, overwrought teenaged dramatics. But, now, it is particularly disheartening to consider the dynamics of young women hurting another over some guy, not least of all because few of us are as brooding and attractive as Mr. Catalano—the Jackson Brown of dyslexia.
Being a man (or, more accurately, the opposite of Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy, a Boyish Man), I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman at any age. Each age seems to be fraught with new societal pitfalls: in grade school, the boys are mean to you; in high school, the girls are mean to you; and in college, the boys are, again, mean to you.
Then the pressure cooker really starts to rattle: get married, have children; ignore any maternal instinct to stay at home with your young child(ren) in order to pursue a career, even if you decide that you no longer want to; and try to stay thin, youthful and attractive.
If you stay single and independent, you are envious of your married friends with kids. And if you are married, you are envious of your single friends. The song Single Girl by Ruby Vass—a standard that knows a few variations and has also been recorded by The Carter Family (as Single Girl Married Girl), among others—seems to pointedly take the side of the single girl:
Single girl, single girlAnd TV’s Mad Men explores this dichotomy in splendidly over-melodramatic fashion; particularly in the character of Peggy Olson, portrayed heroically, as having an unlikely combination of perseverance, earthy elegance, irresponsibility and callousness, by Elisabeth Moss.
Goes to the store and buys
Oh she goes to the store and buys
Married girl, married girl
She rocks the cradle and cries
Oh, she rocks the cradle and cries
Single girl, single girl
She's dressed in silk so fine
Oh dressed in silk so fine
Married girl, married girl
Wars just any kind
Oh, she wears any kind
Single girl, single girl
Goes where she please
Oh, she goes where she please
Married girl married girl
Baby on her knee
Oh, got a baby on her knee
Pulling off the character of Peggy Olson, both in the writing and acting, is quite a nifty trick, indeed. Peggy is meant to represent the unlikeliest of archetypes—one that has never really existed, nonetheless—without playing like one.
At first, as a viewer, if you think you know what Peggy wants, it’s that she just wants to be left alone. You feel sorry for her. She seems utterly powerless and victimized. But as her character develops, so does her power. And then sometimes you feel sorry for the people she comes in contact with. Not because she’s vicious, but because she leaves unprecedented amounts of wreckage in her wake.
She is initially bombarded with inappropriate come-ons from the men and criminally bad suggestions from the women (namely office manager/goddess Joan) involving contraception and the importance of showing a little leg in order to snare a husband—with undisguised sexism the ruling party in both camps.
Peggy gets pregnant after a frivolous roll in the hay with he of the snap-together aristocracy: the smirking-when-he-isn’t-pouting, pear-headed Pete Campbell. When she is pregnant, she is ridiculed because everyone thinks she is fat. She has the baby, gives it away, suffers the possible damnation of the Catholic church to which she belongs, and certainly of her much older, afghan-weaved sister, who is charged with taking care of the child.
Peggy longs to be part of the boys’ club, yet she is clearly riddled with guilt about it. And as she makes headway at Sterling Cooper it is, to some degree, at the cost of her womanhood.
Femme fatale Joan is seemingly happy being the plaything of the conservatively perverse Roger Sterling—the Sterling in the fictional ad agency and centerpiece of the show, Sterling Cooper—until she meets and gets engaged to a coveted doctorial candidate. Scenes of the two fiancés together at home suggest a new side to Joan previously unseen. She is tolerant and nurturing, wounded but trusting, eager to please and intelligent. And at work, she shines while assisting Harry Crane, “head of the television department.” And just when you’re feeling really happy for her, Crane replaces her, and it’s just devastating.
And then her fiancé rapes her.
And what to make of the mess that is Betty Draper as played by January Jones? It is thoroughly unpleasant to watch the former model—who has given her all to be Mrs. Donald Draper only to be repeatedly cheated on and lied to—begin to unravel. But the following reading of her character by Erin J. Shea in an October 22,2008 article from metromix.com (and appearing in the Chicago Tribune offshoot Redeye) would never have occurred to me:
The long-suffering and disturbingly evil Betty Draper typifies every wretched stereotype of the early ’60s housewife, including how she treats her children.I was very confused by this, as I have consistently found Betty to be a sympathetic—albeit thoroughly damaged—character. And I would be remiss if I failed to point out that this assessment of her character was written by a female, though I’m not entirely certain that it's the sole determining factor. But it was so decisively different from my own interpretation of the character that I had to wonder: is this a specifically feminine reading?
What's with the acidity?
The women on Mad Men are made to suffer, not entirely unlike women in a Lars Von Trier film. Sure, the men are made to suffer, too. But it’s a different type of suffering: their suffering is directly related to the guilt of how they treat the women in their lives, and they are allowed to cope with it by drinking obscene amounts of old-fashioned cocktails and smoking ludicrous amounts of unfiltered cigarettes. And sleeping with other women. And being gone for days at a time.
Conversely, the women are raped. Or have to give up their babies for adoption. Or be a mother and sole caregiver while the men are gone.
And when Betty wants to get back at Don for cheating on her, she has anonymous sex in the back office of a bar. Not out of desire or lust, but because of the pain it would cause her husband; it seems to have more to do with him than it does her.
Mad Men is immeasurably less about advertising than it is about gender roles. It is not accidental that it takes place on the cusp of The ‘60s as cultural event, counting on the audience’s by-now ingrained understanding of the term and the social and societal changes implicated therein.
A man’s responsibility, as Don Draper understands it, is to be an earner, to provide a comfortable lifestyle for his family. His obligations, largely, end there.
Betty is expected to be forthcoming in the bedroom, to cook and clean and take care of the household and kids while remaining elegant and attractive—but not too revealing so as to not satiate the desires of the wrong element. And, when Mad Men begins, in the middle of things, that’s exactly what she’s doing. And then things start to crack, slow and hushed, all around them.
Don Draper represents the last gasp of a very particular lifestyle. There are peripherals of change to come all around him—the beatnik crowd surrounding fever dream Midge Daniels; buffoonish ascot-wearing Orwell understudy Paul Kinsey’s black girlfriend and their march in Mississippi; the drafting of openly gay “European” Dylan fan Kurt as a fresh, youthful perspective within the firm—and Draper advances as if he is impervious to them.
Draper serves as the link between masculinity before World War II (the Great War) and after Vietnam (the lousy one). He will be the last of a generation whose men fought wars, shaved daily and struck their women when they were “hysterical.” Men like Roger Sterling wouldn’t change—their ideologies die with them; but a man like Draper is present for the unspooling and all of the confusion it awakens.
As is Betty, and as things start to fall apart, they still clutch on to the way it was supposed to be. That’s all they know how to do.
Single Girl Married Girl? Here there’s no discrimination; they’re both severely punished.
4.
So the second wave of feminism (the first wave being, primarily, the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the century) hit in the 1960s and lasted into the 1980s. Forty years isn’t enough time to render the playing field equal. Kate Lorenz of CareerBuilder.com writes:
According to the AFL-CIO, the average 25-year-old woman who works full-time, year-round until she retires at age 65 (if that's when she's able to retire) will earn $523,000 less than the average working man?Maybe by 2050 things will start to make a little more sense. As it is now, every time I see a man hold a door for a career woman, I take it as a personal affront to the women’s movement: you'll never bridge that salary gap if you keep playing the subservient role.
At the current rate of change, working women will not achieve equal pay until after the year 2050. That's almost 100 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, prohibiting discrimination based on sex resulting in unequal pay for equal work.
Equality is the only ideology under which true harmony and freedom can be achieved. But nobody's really certain how to divvy up the duties any more. Now everybody works and nobody wants to do anything when they get home. Everybody does everything.
Men are no longer providers, and women are not housewives: my wife makes more money than I do; I sure as hell never fought in a war; and I cook more than my wife does, and not because I'm some sort of gourmet chef or something.
And who would want to go back to the way things were? Oh yeah, that's right: like half the fucking population.
I think that the only way to achieve true equality in the workplace and at home is to be a fabulously wealthy couple, where both work and just pay other people to do everything for them. Which means, ostensibly that equality is a concept that can only be enjoyed via the oppression of others. Who's driving the car? Why, the driver, of course. Who's taking care of the children? Why, the children's caretaker, of course. Who's washing the dishes? You get the point.
More and more, I feel like maybe, in order to wear the hats we’ve been fitted for, we’ll evolve into one species, not unlike Marilyn Manson on the cover of Mechanical Animals. Only browner and, hopefully, with a couple extra arms and more manageable hairdos.
