Mad Men: Favors

The clichés came down so fast this episode that I wanted to put on a raincoat.

You can't entirely fault the episode as a single episode. Everything in it made sense and the story arc was logical. The characters all acted in credible ways. They just didn't act in ways that matched the show they were supposed to be in.

The set up wasn't quite credible. As Raymond Chandler put it once, it is perfectly believable that that all these things might happen to various people at various times. What issn't believable is that they could all happen to such a small group of people all of whom are connected to one another within such a narrow time frame.

But, then again, that's what had to happen if they were going to make the story fit the 1960s mythology. Every businessman at the GM meeting spoke exactly the way they would have had they been cartoon characters, straight out of Doonesbury, rather than real human beings and ..., perhaps the less aid the better.

I said last week that I think the show is using the Dawson's Creek playbook this year and last night's episode had it all. It was certainly there on the surface. The show is doing just what Dawson's Creek did in taking the 90210 teen soap conventions and using them in a more serious way. There were the too cute moments with Pete's mother and then Bob Benson's gay come on to Pete and, most of all, the heavy dramatic irony of Ted seeing the connection between Pete and Peggy and getting jealous.

But there was also the dramatic arc issues. Here's the problem. Shows like this are conceived like novels with a clear dramatic arc that takes characters from their inception to a self- realization and then a conclusion. That's the scheme that Jane Austen set out and pretty much every serious English novel has done since. There is a lot of other Jane-ish touches as well, such as the difficulties faced by families where the father is absent or distant, but I'll leave them aside for now. The problem I want to highlight is that the creators of a television series never know when it is going to end,

A novel is driving towards an end so everything goes to that purpose. A TV show has to keep entertaining people for a middle stretch of indeterminate length. In Dawson's Creek, the arc went as follows:

1. a boy and a girl grow up together, puberty changes their relationship, 
2. he has a bit of a Peter Pan syndrome and wants to keep living in a world where this sexual tension doesn't exist, 
3. his best friend does see the girl in a sexual way and they fall in love, 
4. our hero gets enough distance on the episode to muse about childhood and puberty and the lessons learned and feel grateful for it all which, we realize at the end, was the reason he has been telling us this story as the show is really about storytelling.

Okay, but all that could be covered off in one season or two at most and the show ran for six. As a consequence, you get a lot of episodes in the middle that are pure filler. And then, at the end, it has to get yoked back to the story arc again.The thing that the writers at Dawson's Creek realized is that you had to state the theme early and then keep pulling it back every once in a  while just so viewers could remember what the show is really about. For six years we wondered, Dawson or Pacey? Doing that was incredibly silly but it was at least honest.

Mad Men didn't do that. We got the set up of Don's character but we never got an honest treatment of what was at stake for Don. Perhaps because none was possible. All we knew was that there was this guy who had assumed a false identity and was, sometimes perilously, living it out. The relationship with Rachel showed an odd neediness on Don's part but it wasn't explored at any length.

Meanwhile, another Don Draper and another Roger Sterling managed to sneak in between the lines. The best moments in the entire history of the show were those moments between Don and Roger that first season. Without really meaning to, the show's creators gave us a story about a man's world from a-not-so distant past that was compelling and interesting, much more interesting than the domestic dramas that ran parallel to it. That set of the original Sterling Cooper offices was magnificent, to be sure, but one of the reasons so many people loved it was that you knew you were in for a treat any time the camera panned across those desks. The same was true of most of the flashbacks. Some were deeply flawed, but you knew you were going to get a story about manliness.

To put it bluntly, the filler turned out to be better and more meaningful drama than the intended story arc. a Better artist than Matt Weiner would have realized this and gone with it. For a brief moment with the magnificent Bond-ish ending to last season it looked like he might.

The problem with Mad Men this year is that the story arc everything is being yoked to a story arc that doesn't match the opening. It's all has a sort of wimpy, PC quality. For example, notice how we went from gay Bob Benson to gay Pete. That's classic Dawson's strategy. Handle the sexual issues with great gestures of being open and honest but don't connect them to any of sex's wet and sticky flavour. So Bob makes his pitch to Pete in terms of love and tenderness as opposed to, hey Pete, how do you feel about raw sex with another man? It's as if gay men spent their entire lives feeling vaguely different without knowing what it was that made them feel different. That, as opposed, to getting erections when they looked at other men, which, while honest, would actually force the audience to acknowledge that gay love means means gay sex: you know, two men actually doing things with one another's erect penises.

I know, you'd rather not think about that. But is that honest? I mean, you're so terribly hip and cool and so much more open than those uptight evangelicals. But, if that is really true, then why can't you handle a story in which gay men actually do what gay men do? Which is to penetrate one another in various ways. There was no explicit sex between Don and Sylvia but the show is at least honest enough to acknowledge that Don penetrates her.

As a consequence, we get this deeply dishonest account of the gay love. Try to imagine, for example, how Bob Benson would come off as a heterosexual who just tried to get with a girl by being really nice to her all the time. That he never once told her what his purpose was but that he just hoped that, as Bob ultimately explains it,

Is it really so impossible to imagine ... couldn't it be that, if someone took care of you, very good care of you, if this person would do anything for you, if your well-being was his only thought, is it impossible that you might begin to feel something for him?

Recognize that? It's the nice-guy strategy for picking up girls or, in this case, another boy. You run around being a nice guy—just 'cause, you know—and hope that this magically turns into love. You hate that nice guy. Remember? Women certainly hate him. And he always loses in any half-way credible drama. He loses because there is always another guy who pays attention to a woman but not "just 'cause". This other makes it clear that he is paying attention to a woman because he wants her sexually. And that guy had a name for the first five seasons and his name was Don Draper.

How did he suddenly turn into this pathetic, needy loser? The whole Sylvia thing has a deus ex machina quality wherein it pulls Don into a character that just doesn't fit with the guy we have been watching all these years.

It's like the pathetic, nice guy dweeb got to be a TV producer and now he is going to get his revenge on the guy who actually had sex with the girl his nice-guy strategy failed with by making the more successful guy into some pathetic loser after all. And, in that sense, it fails to live up Dawson's Creek. The Dawson who told us that story was honest enough to admit that Joey chose Pacey over him for reasons that made perfect sense seen from a mature viewpoint. For five seasons, Don Draper was a complex, flawed but manly man whom people watched because he was more interesting than the dweeby losers that television and movies feed us these days. Now, he seems to be morphing into an unconvincing Alan Alda type. Don is no longer interesting and the show is no longer interesting.

BTW: Did you notice the guilty quality in Megan's voice when Sally's friend, a character so boring and predictable she doesn't deserve a name, asked her if she was calling her agent? If that turns out to be an affair, I may vomit all over the screen.

Who is better at separating sex and emotion?

I take it no one is going to accuse me of being sexist for suggesting that women lie about sex. Why am I so confident? Because I remember that all the good, politically correct people insisted that everyone lies about sex during the Lewinsky scandal and the class that is "everyone" necessarily includes women.

In any case, men and women sometimes lie about sex. Perhaps they do it for the same reasons and perhaps they do it for different reasons. Here is one explanation that suggests that they do it for different reasons. Don't read it to agree or disagree but rather to understand the logic. Get inside it. Think the way someone like Dr. Frank Pittman thinks

While there is a common assumption that men and women fall in love at different rates, or that men cheat primarily for sex while women are more likely to be looking for an emotional connection, this may not always be the case. Dr. Frank Pittman suggests that men are typically more honest about the sex than women, perhaps because men are better able to separate the issue of sex from that of emotional attachment. He believes that this is due in large part to the fact that men have their genitals on the outside rather than inside and so men seem to separate sexual response from a lasting and committed relationship more easily than do women.

The line that should jump out at you, because it is so unusual to see men praised for anything these days is, "men are typically more honest about sex than women." That is in direct violation of the Althouse rule that says that it is politically correct to talk about differences between men and women only so long as you do so in a way that is flattering to women.

There is a reason why Dr. Pittman is being critical of women here. It's because he more or less has to be because of the next step in the argument. Admitting that men might be more honest about sex than women allows him to dodge another, even more troubling admission.

In his practice, he says that he has seen many cases where men admit to the sex and deny any emotional connection to the affair partner, while women tend to talk of strong emotions and feelings of love while denying that sex took place. He believes that if a man denies the sexual context of the affair and dwells on the emotional connection above all else, he is probably lying. He finds that women, on the other hand, more easily talk of an emotional connection and the feelings induced by an affair while denying any sexual context to the entire episode.

I've added the emphasis on the words "lying" and "denying" to highlight the dilemma poor Dr. Pittman finds himself on the horns of. Notice that when a man "denies" he is "lying". A woman, on the other hand, is only "denying". So the Althouse rule is allowed to slip in a minor way in the first paragraph I cite in order to save it in the second. Or, to put it another way, Dr. Pittman allows that men are typically more honest about sex than women in order to avoid its obvious corollary, which is that women typically lie about sex.

Before getting to that, let's talk about men. Why would a man be forthright about the emotional connection while lying about the sex? This is not a trick question: he lies about the emotions because he wants to reduce the harm the affair might do to his marriage. In a sense this is crazy because if anything is going to threaten your relationship or marriage it is your wife finding out that you are having sex with another woman. And while that is true, having an affair that involves both sex and an emotional connection is a much more serious risk; it is, in fact, almost certainly fatal to your marriage. Restricting the affair to just sex is safer; you can have a meaningless affair without any risk to your marriage. No, your wife isn't going to see it that way but she doesn't have to find out does she? No, I'm not advocating that. The point is that that is the way the guy thinks and he isn't crazy to do so. An affair that was purely about sex would be the easiest to maintain and the easiest to break off. He avoids building an emotional connect or, if he can't do that, lies to himself about the emotional connection he is building with his lover in order to pretend that this can all be easy.

Remember Sheila, whom we were discussing just the other day? Her affair is like that:

'I love Peter dearly,' Sheila says. 'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that. Sex with Michael is a purely separate thing; it's about erotic abandonment, being seen as just a woman rather than as Peter's wife, or "the doctor" or a mum. Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone. Some of my friends ride, some sing in choirs, I have Michael.'

And it's important to recognize the deep truth here, as hard as you may find it to associate truth with something a cheating spouse said. For the blunt reality is that if Sheila allowed herself to fall in love with Michael she'd put her marriage at immediate risk whereas an affair that is "just about sex" is only threat if she gets caught.

But that is supposed to be the way that only men think, which is what the good Dr. Pittman meant when he said men are typically more honest about sex. But, you know, I don't entirely believe that. Yes, there are some men who are very good at separating sex and emotion. Notoriously so. But most men aren't like that. Most men tend to fall in love with the women who have sex with them. I know I do. In fact, I have tended to be deeply in love with women long before any sex happened.

And the man who can separate sex and emotion could also be described as the man who is unable to connect the two. In fact, he usually is loudly denigrated for this. The only time men are praised for being able to separate sex and emotion and, therefore, to be more honest about sex is when it is necessary to provide cover for women.

Now there are good evolutionary reasons that I won't go into in any depth here why women, all the talk to the contrary, might actually be very good at separating sex and emotion. To give just one example: women typically live longer than men. Being s strong widow who can care for and raise children without a man is a good trait to have in evolutionary terms. Not all women will have this trait but most certainly will.

Men, on the other hand, have considerable reason to bond emotionally with women they have sex with. Your children will have a much better chance of surviving and passing on your genes if you stay with her and help her raise the children. That's one approach. The alternative is the shotgun approach where a man tries to impregnate as many women as possible thereby increasing the chance that some will survive to pass on his genes. And, yes, there is a small subset of men who become notoriously good at having lots of partners while avoiding emotional ties with any or most of them. Less often discussed, there are women who are good at tying one man down emotionally while having lots of affairs. But most men and women will bond with the partner they have sex with and will see continued good sex as part of that love.

There is, however, no reason at all to believe that women are less likely to be good at separating sex and emotion. Again, don't take my word for it: who is it that typically insists that love in a relationship doesn't have to be connected to sex? It isn't usually the man.

There will be more ...

Nothing is ever women's fault, a continuing series

In the book, Bergner ... lays out a diverse body of research that threatens to disrupt all the modern stereotypes of female sexuality: That women are not visual creatures; that their sex drive is lower than men’s; that they’re aroused by love, not sex; and that they’re naturally fitted to be sexual objects, not agents.

And who is to blame for this? If you guessed men, go to the head of the class.

If society didn’t realize all of that before, Bergner writes, it’s because the men who run it didn’t want to. “Women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force,” he concludes. In the Middle Ages, it was constrained by the idea that “lust-drunk witches … left men ‘smooth,’ devoid of their genitals.” In the last century, it was constrained by Freud’s theory that women have “a weaker sexual instinct” than men. Now, it’s constrained by modern evolutionary psychology that says that “women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.” Across culture, Bergner writes, “with scientific or God-given confidence, girls and women are told how they should feel.” Mostly, they should feel comfortable sexualizing themselves, but not men.

That doesn't pass the smell test.  Men don't want women to recognize their own sexual desire? Does that sound even remotely credible?

Consider, for example, the Facebook app called "Bang With Friends". Created by men, the app allows users to anonymously pick people from their friends list whom they'd like to have sex with. If two people both pick one another, the app lets them both know and they can have sex. Notice the strategy: straight to sex with no complicated social ritual to go through first.

That's not the way all men think all the time but it is the way a lot of men think a lot of the time. Women occasionally feel like that too but only a disgusting pig of a man would go so far as to make a computer app to make it actually possible. To turn around and claim that it is men are telling women that they should not feel these things is bullshit.

And who is it that always insists they want love and not sex?  Or, the dread of it, who insists that they don't want "just sex"? Those are things women say and yet we are supposed to believe that this happens because men are scared of women's  "desire—its inherent range and innate power". That is bullshit on stilts.

No, I don't know why women keep saying they want things they don't actually desire. I don't understand why women fall in love with men they desire and then allow the way they think of him to change so that they no longer desire him. Perhaps they can't help it.

Whatever the reason, Its! Not! Men's! Fault!

The problem needs more careful analysis than what the author of the piece I cite above, Amanda Hess, has given it. For starters, look at stereotype #1 from the list above.  Who is it that tells us that women aren't turned on by visual things? It's women. That tells us that women have, at the very least, internalized the notion that they are not visual creatures when it comes to sex. Or, to put it more baldly, women really believe it when they say they are not turned on by erotic images. But they are aroused by them.

This has been proved by repeated studies in which women were monitored by devices that measure their sexual response while being shown images. And women are not exactly subtle about what they do respond to:

The only strong preference Chivers found among her female subjects? When she presented straight women with photographs of human genitals, their blood “rushed much, much more when an erection occupied the screen” than when a flaccid penis or a female “crotch shot” appeared.

Well, I'm not surprised by that. Any man who has had a reasonable life has had the wonderful pleasure of watching an aroused woman go gaga over his erect penis and marveled at how very, very different that is from the public image she presents. But ask any woman you know if she'd be interested in looking at porn featuring men with erections and the odds are that she'll say "no". She'll deny that such a thing could possibly do anything for her.

(If you conducted a study where women kept under secret surveillance while left alone with porn, I'm certain that the vast majority would spend some quality time with the porn. And then they'd turn around and lie about it. If forced to admit the truth, a good number would then insist that their reaction that day was unusual and not a reflection of what they are really like.)

Part of the problem is that people, such as the author of the piece I cite here, confuse desire and want. There are lots of things that I desire that I do not want. I might desire to have sex with Hillary but I'm married and so is she and I want my marriage and respect hers whereas I merely desire her body. I don't even know that she'd be interested. Likewise, I may sometimes have a desire to tell my friends certain blunt truths about them but I want their friendship more than I desire to blurt out whatever it is that is bugging me so I don't.

The real problem women have, and it's something right in Bergner's book (although he apparently can't grasp the importance of it), is that women don't understand their own desires. In his book he discusses a study where men and women were show potentially erotic images and their arousal was measured objectively by measuring blood flow to their genitals. At the same time, the test subjects were given a keyboard to record their subjective sense of their arousal. The men's subjective responses were 100 percent in accord with what the objective measurements indicated. Here is what happened with the women:

... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord.

Notice the phrase "especially the straight women". For everyone knows what the cause of the problem is. Women tend not to understand their own desires because they don't want to understand them. More to come in tomorrow's post.

Mad Men: the ratings

I was wondering if anyone else was noticing haw bad this season was. Turns out lots of people are. The show lost one million viewers over the first three episodes. As of this week, it has not won them back.

Meanwhile, you have to wonder how many people there are who, like me, hate this season but are holding on in the hopes this gets better.

Another image: What is it selling?

This is why feminism is so hard.

We'll start with the grammar because that, at least, is straightforward. The marker on the right should read "My friends are smarter than me," or "My friends are smarter than I am" and not "My friends are smarter than I". Of the two grammatically correct options, the second is slightly preferable because it implies that the woman holding the drink is smart but perhaps not so smart as her friends are, which is better than, "I'm no challenge", the intended subtext of the actual message. "My friends are smarter than me" says "I'm dumb" whereas to use the subjective form of "I" where "me" is required says "I'm dumb and trying too hard." Now combine that with the picture which tells us that women would want to be sending this message to men and you'll see the problem.

I take it that the drill here is obvious. The markers have the beginning of a thought, such as "Known as ..." or "My friends are ..." above, and each person is supposed to finish the thought. It is supposed to be fun but the actual feeling is like being handed a birthday card and told to write something terribly witty or deeply moving on it as if such things poured out of you with great ease. Party guests dread such things.

But the sales pitch is not aimed at the guests. It is aimed at the hostess or, more likely, the group of college women or a couple of women who are recent college graduates making their way in the city who are having the party.  They are keen to have boys over and they want those boys to feel that they really want to be at the party and they think a good way to do that is to present themselves as easy to talk to. And the makers of this product are pretty certain, with good reason, that their customers will assume that "easy to talk to" = "not too smart".

The only question is who do we blame? The standard line is to blame the seller for burdening women with negative stereotypes when selling the product. The problem with that is that they aren't going broke. No one has ever gone broke underestimating the desire of young women to appear unintelligent for boys.

Mad Men: Tale of Two Cities Metacommentary

I have to dash off to the doctor's this morning so I'll just give you a bit to nibble on. This is from Tom and Lorenzo:

We wondered a couple episodes back, when the two characters were reunited, if Peggy was going to have a problem with Joan’s ascent to partner and how she got it. Turns out, she kinda does – and that’s perfectly in character for Peggy and perfectly understandable given her own story. We know Joan and understand her the way the viewers outside a story can understand a character, but to Peggy – and to everyone else in the story  – Joan is someone who slept her way into a partnership, and that’s not something most people – then or now – could call an admirable act. Peggy would naturally have an especially tough time handling it, given her own history with Joan – and all of that came beautifully roaring to the surface in their argument.

These guys are among the better analysts of the show but I think they really miss it here. Peggy's remark that she never slept with Don comes in response to Joan's claim that Peggy let Don carry her to "the deep end of the pool". It's not driven by resentment of how Joan got to be partner but by resentment at all the aspersions others have made about how Peggy got to be a writer. (Added: Joan, of course, understands it as a dig at her because she is just as wrapped up in her defensiveness as Peggy is in hers.)

That's the brilliance of it. Neither woman is taken seriously for her talents. And thus they dig at one another. As I've said before, one of the things the show gets no credit for is how realistic it is about how women really do behave.

Speaking of which, this sentence from T&J is a little bit mealy-mouthed:

Joan is someone who slept her way into a partnership, and that’s not something most people – then or now – could call an admirable act

It's true enough that most people would not call it an admirable act  but that is because it isn't an admirable act. Joan sinned against herself mostly but also against all women in the office when she did what she did and she should be called on it. This is a recurring theme here but one of the things our culture does vis a vis women over and over again is to not hold them responsible in sexual matters. It's high time we did.

Okay, have criticized them for a few paragraphs, T&J also blunder into the truth:

But here, have a theme anyway:

“They don’t know our name because we don’t know our name.”

Jim Cutler’s admonition about the tenuousness of the newly merged agency is as good a choice for a theme as any other in this largely themeless episode.

Actually, it's better than that. Think of the Dickens novel that gives the episode its title here (as I get to below, the writing in this episode and the use of the novel is right out of the Dawson's Creek playbook). Sydney Carton is the not very good man who is a doppelganger for Charles Darnay.  It is precisely because no one knows Carton's name that he can make the great sacrifice at the end of the novel. Not having a clear name gives you a certain freedom. A point that is underlined by Don deciding that "Don" is not his real name at the party in LA.

Ultimately, the solution for the name of the firm is for a whole lot of people to remove their name from the masthead! You surrender your identity for a greater cause. It is a far, far better thing that I do et ecetera.

Now we can go back to Joan and Peggy and understand what really happens. These are both strong women but strong, pre-feminist women. What happens in the hallway is driven not by Peggy's resentment at how Joan rose to partner (no one knows that Joan has real skills better than Peggy) but by Peggy's realization of how much she shares in common with Joan. So she helps her out.

Final thought, the theme and the way it was handled had a very Dawson's Creek feeling about it. In fact, this entire season has been very reminiscent of Dawson's Creek both in the way it is written and in the slightly too cute way it handles serious issues sometimes. I'll probably have more to say about that as we go ahead.

PS: Well, that's a bit more than a bit to nibble on but I don't have the time to edit it down. While I'm at it, if you read the bit about Don above and thought, "but it's not his real name, I say, "Who cares?!!!!"

Mad Men Quickie: No, Megan isn't Sharon Tate

Update: This post was intended to be more tongue in cheek than serious. I suspect that Mia Farrow inspired the creation of Megan but I don't think it changes our way of understanding the show if it is true. This post is a protest against the over-analytic approach to characters on the show that we've seen this and every other season. Repeat after me: Don Draper isn't Jay Gatsby, Bob Benson isn't Nick Carraway, Megan isn't Sharon Tate, the Chevy account isn't a symbolic stand in for Vietnam, the real truth is neither Freudian nor Jungian. Just watch the show people! (Or, given how crappy it has been this season, don't watch the show.)

There is a lot of talk floating around about a tie-in between Megan's character and Sharon Tate. As Tom and Lorenzo note, the model's for characters rarely draw directly from how they are dresses.

Besides, as I've said many times before, the obvious actual character model for Megan is Mia Farrow.

The evidence for this is painfully obvious if your paying attention:

• Mia Farrow played in the television version of Peyton Place.
• In a TV movie version in which Farrow does not appear, the character associated with her has an illegitimate child named Megan!
• An older man representing the style of a passing era (Frank Sinatra) surprised everyone by impulsively marrying Farrow.
• Then, in 1968, Farrow stars in Rosemary's Baby, a movie in which she spends a lot of time alone in a spooky New York apartment building because her husband leaves her alone. 
• Her husband has odd connections with another couple in the buidling.
• There is a meeting in which Farrow's character meets another woman in the laundry room!
• There is a "666" on the side of a building visible from the lobby of the office in the Time-Life building and a scene from Rosemary's Baby was shot in the Time-Life building.

I mean, how much more obvious can it get?

And Don and Roger get more and more like Frank and Dino with every passing episode.

Finally, if you were paying attention last night it was pretty obvious that Danny Siegel was the Roman Polanski type. (Apropos of nothing, a favourite joke of mine from the 1970s: Roman Polanski is a five-foot Pole you wouldn't want to touch anyone with. And you wouldn't, I mean yechhhh!)

Special added bonus: Here is some actual footage of the Mad Men recap team at Slate meeting to discuss this season's episodes: