Le maudit Mo D.

Mad Men OMG!

Being fond of skirts of a certain length and colleges that deny undergraduate admissions to people with dicks, I am also a gigantic fan of period dramas, so it was with great anticipation that I popped in my Season 1 DVD of Mad Men. Ad agency in 1960? Mindboggling sexism? OMG, bring it!

If you haven't seen this show, you really should, especially if you absolutely love 20th Century American cultural history. Assuming that everything I saw in these episodes was historically accurate, the viewer is treated to a radically different world than the one I happen to be used to. Everyone, even pregnant women, smokes and drinks, there are no seatbelts in cars, a child is allowed to run around with a plastic bag over her head, a stripper has a lush size-12 body, and black folks are treated like they're invisible.

And the sexism?

Watching this show made me really understand what The Feminine Mystique was REALLY about. I mean, I had to read it in Women's Studies class b.i.t.d. and yeah, I had a conceptual idea of how crappy it must have been to be a housewife in midcentury America. But there are just some things that you don't notice until you see it, and you notice it because it has never been a part of your daily reality.

For starters, the women on the show are treated like their either stupid or sluts, or both. Infantilization of women, tacitly or overtly, is the rhetorical norm here and having known nothing else, the women are complicit, especially in those master/servant/boss/secretary dyads in which the secretaries aren't even called secretaries. They're called "girls." There are a few rare female characters who hold positions of authority, but even they are condescended to, with even more contempt. The ladies get no respect and are either whores, the help, or nattering nitpicking wives to be cheated on.

Then, the women treat other women like total shit! When a divorcée moves to the suburban neighborhood with her kids, the neighborhood wives talk serious smack about her behind the back without even getting to know her, all because she's (gasp!) divorced. No one on the street wanted to befriend her and when she is finally invited to a party, the women gather in the kitchen to rip her apart and then play nice to her face. So much for the sisterhood! As a child of the '80s, shit, EVERYONE, including my parents, got divorced, and no one really iced you out for it, so it was a surprise that divorced women were treated like shit by other women. Damn!

The divorced woman character reveals herself to be a Mount Holyoke grad, and then you find out the protagonist's wife went to Bryn Mawr, and then I recalled the utter frustration that college women of that era struggled with: get an education and then cram it up your ass and make your husband a martini. There were plenty of women who bucked that, joined the workforce, had fab careers, but you kind of get the feeling that they were roundly crapped on for that, dismissed as unattractive grinds, constantly asked when they were going to leave to get married.

I do envy a bit the way the men got to behave. Like kings with servants! Sit with your knees far apart because you own the whole freakin' world! A home-cooked meal awaits you when you get home from your day smoking and drinking with the boys at the office! And you can smack your secretary's ass and fuck her because all women (at least the ones you find attractive) are sexually available to you (no sexual harassment laws, and if a woman tried to report it, uh...good luck! Everyone thinks you're a stupid child or a whore!) You have to hand the feminist movement credit for undoing that bullshit! Thank you, Bettye Goldstein Friedan '42 and every other woman who helped pave the way for less assholish men, better treatment for women, and sexual harassment laws! Thank you!

Mad Men: compelling as hell, a social history education in every episode. Viva.

Posted by Zerd at July 26, 2008 11:18 PM