Much to the dismay of my friends and family, I’m a cultural pusher. When I get really into a book or author or band or TV show or director or whatever, they are going to hear about it. Constantly. Among the worst and most lasting of these cultural obsessions started when I first got into The Wire. To this day, if I find out a friend, family member, or person sitting next to me on the train has not seen it, they will be immediately subjected to a long-ish argument for why they must drop everything in their life, go rent the first disc of the first season, and spend the next week or two holed up in their living room doing nothing but soaking up the complete and utter brilliance that is The Wire. (On a completely unrelated note, if any of you reading this have not yet seen The Wire, you should drop everything in your life, rent the first disc of the first season, and spend the next week or two doing nothing but soaking up its complete and utter brilliance.) I am telling you this in the interest of something like full disclosure. Part of the reason I want to write about Mad Men is simply to try to push this show on any of you that haven’t seen it. This is particularly a must-watch for anyone reading this blog, as I’m not sure I’ve seen a show which so thoroughly and interestingly explores gender issues (on which more below). So, yes, go watch it now. It’s really not that long. You have time. And if you don’t, just stop sleeping, like me.
With the obnoxious cultural pushing out of the way, let’s get down to business. As I alluded to above, one of the things Mad Men does so well is gender issues. However, so much ink (or pixels, as it were) has already been spilled on the topic of feminism and gender issues in Mad Men, that I think it is probably useless for me to try to say too much on the topic, because most everything that can be said about it already has, and more intelligently than I could. So I am just going to restrict myself to one small point which I think sometimes gets overlooked in this discussion.
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Most of the discussion of gender in Mad Men has been in the service of analyzing the gender dynamics of that world, particularly as manifested in the differences between the career strategies and outlooks of Peggy and Joan, and through the repressed life that is Betty Draper. Though occasionally the show falls back into essentially just laughing and poking fun at the ridiculous sexism of the era, at its best (and this is most of the time) it makes you sympathize with and understand all the characters involved, even when we disapprove of and/or cringe at their words and actions. (In this respect, Matt Weiner, the shows creator, clearly learned a lot from his three years on The Sopranos.) And though Weiner and the entire team at Mad Men can’t be praised enough for so ably transporting their viewers into the mindset of characters who in some ways are so alien to us (itself a testament to how far we as a society have come in terms of women’s rights), it does more than just that. In virtue of being a piece of historical fiction, I think it gives some viewers a window into the subjective feeling of sexism as it exists today that would be hard to attain in a show set in the present.
I’m not sure that makes sense, though, so let me try to explain. I’m pretty sure I’m not a very sexist person. I know I’ve done and said some things that were sexist at various points in my life, and held (and maybe even hold) views that were sexist in ways I didn’t/don’t realize or appreciate. But all things considered, I feel like I’m pretty much where I should be gender-wise. Further, all of the women in my life are strong, independent women—not the kind of people who are going to take any discrimination sitting down. The only problem with this is that in some way it gives me a distorted idea of how the world is. As human beings, we kind of naturally expect other people to more or less act like us, particularly people living in the same society as we are. So when I hear, for example, of sexism in the workplace from a friend or family member, my instinctive reaction can often be to try to play it down, because, after all, I would never do something intentionally sexist, so why would other men? It therefore must just be a case of misunderstanding—a misinterpretation of a word or gesture or what have you, right? I know that sounds ridiculous, because it is. But I think it’s also an unfortunately natural way people process things like this. My hope is that I’m sufficiently aware of this tendency to not allow it to distort my thinking in any serious way, but I think it still puts some barriers on my empathetic abilities.
This is where a show like Mad Men comes in. In virtue of being removed from a contemporary setting, it allows one to turn off the tendency to see things through ones own eyes. And this allows the viewer to subjectively experience sexism in a more unfiltered way, and to then consequently understand better what women go through in the present. I’m not suggesting that by watching this show I now Understand Women or anything like that, but it helps. (It is also worth noting that this may not be the case if the setting were so removed from contemporary society that it seemed completely alien. If, for example, it were set in Renaissance France, or early 20th century Japan.)
I’ll try to illustrate this point with an example, though one that is admittedly a bit on the extreme end of what I am talking about. (Really most of the interesting gender stuff has to do with Joan and Peggy and gender issues in the workplace, which this is example is not about.) There is a scene in the show where Betty Draper—the young, good looking wife of the main character—is driving at night when her car breaks down. She flags someone down and asks them to send a mechanic. Pretty soon a slightly creepy man from a local gas station or whatever arrives to help fix her car. She naïvely acts a bit flirtatious with him, and there is an awkward exchange about payment, because Betty doesn’t have enough money for the part that needs replacement—she thinks they are just bargaining, he clearly is expecting something like sexual favors. Luckily, it ends without event, and she ends up just driving home, blissfully unaware. For the viewer, though, the whole scene is incredibly tense, as one completely feels the power differential the whole time, and the combination of Betty’s naïveté, the darkness/isolation, and the payment issue amplify exponentially all that tension—throughout the whole scene I just wanted her to run away or for another car to drive by and was constantly in great fear that she would be molested or raped or something awful. Now, had the scene been set in 2009, I think I still would have felt that tension, but to a lesser degree, because on either a conscious or unconscious level I would have been projecting myself onto the man—the thought that, “Well, I would never do anything evil, so she shouldn’t be worried,” would be more present watching a scene set now than in 1960. But after watching that scene, it suddenly occurred to me that it could have just as easily been set in 2009. By putting me in a scene where I’m not inclined to project my own personality, I was able to better grasp the subjective experience of sexism and power differences between genders. And this kind of thing happens a lot watching Mad Men. Again, it’s not like I’m suddenly realizing things aren’t perfect in 2009—I obviously know all the horrible things that happen to women today in those kinds of situations, and would never dream of suggesting that such problems have been solved—but it allows me to understand the feeling of sexism better, in whatever admittedly very limited way I am able to do that.
In other words, like most great historical fiction (hence the “not-so-original” above), Mad Men doesn’t just transport you to the past, it circles right back to the present in a profound way.
- Torff
This is a response to Eric’s abortion article. I am relating it to feminism in that I think that proper sex ed is an indispensable way to prevent teen pregnancy, thus preventing abortions.
