Welcome to our RH Reality Check roundtable on Mad Men, featuring staff writers Pamela Merritt, Amanda Marcotte, and Sarah Seltzer. Sarah kicked off our salon yesterday, and Amanda adds her thoughts below. After the premiere (August 16), we'll start a second round of conversation!
Agreed with Sarah that the mostly-female writing staff of "Mad Men" somehow manages to make the uber-patriarchy of the 60s feel fresh and interesting. I don't know how they do it; it could easily have slipped into, "They were bad then, but it's all better now," but instead we're forced to contend with the fact that all these happenings are related to our culture now.
I think the moment for me on "Mad Men" that made me realize the strong feminist bent of the show was far from accidental was the opening sequence of the masterful episode "Maidenform." You see the three main female characters Peggy, Joan, and Betty getting dressed and see how even Peggy, who is low maintenance by 60s standards, has to go through intense amounts of work just to be considered worthy of stepping out the front door. You also see Joan rubbing her skin where her bra strap cuts into it. True, second wave feminists didn't burn their bras--or their girdles or their garters--but the show argues with this visual imagery, that they probably should have. As the actresses on the show have complained repeatedly, underwear for women then was a potent symbol of how painfully restrained women were, how their personalities, ambitions, desires, and very flesh and to be pinched and molded to fit male demands.
Indeed, for the rest of the
episode, female copywriter Peggy Olson fights to have her male colleagues
take her opinions on bra advertising seriously. You'd think
that a woman's input on how to sell women's personal items to women
would be considered valuable, if your main priority is actually selling
bras. But as the show demonstrates, with surprising subtlety,
the men especially don't want to hear from women on the issue of how
women should dress. They can feel their control over female bodies
slipping, and want to hang on just a little longer.
The male copywriters come up with a campaign to sell bras that basically posits that all women are either Jackies or Marilyns--that is, male sexual fantasies, complete objects. Peggy quietly protests, asking which one she is, and the men are baffled, because they have to admit that Peggy is not an object, because she's a colleague and for some, even a friend. It's only after you flick off the TV that you realize that Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe weren't Jackies or Marilyns, either, but real people with careers, tragedies, and lives. That's the power of the show's deft turn at storytelling.
