Watch “Mad Men” some time on AMC and you’ll see what I mean.

These people are detached from reality.  Women like to be oggled.  Just not to much.  Case in point?  A fictitious TV show I like to watch.

QED, you stupid women.  My logic is iron clad.

That does give you a sort-of intellectual high reading it.

A TV show that takes place 50 years in the past.
... I kinda like my presidents to not being 5 decades out of date.

I’m not gonna deny many women like to be ogled, but there’s a difference between, say, still being able to turn a head or two when walking down the street and being howled at by thousands of drunken bikers in a contest that requires you to, at a minimum, flash the ladies to even have a prayer of securing a title named after bison excrement.

It was such an odd, unseemly moment for a presidential candidate.  Shouldn’t McCain being working harder to win over evangelical voters?  Older white women?  What the hell is going on in his campaign?  Are they spending so much of their time manufacturing reasons to be outraged by Obama nobody’s vetting his campaign stops or briefing the candidate?

This is actually one grand social experiment.  Take candidate A and give him stunning good looks, a sterling resume, tons of charisma, and a (D) in front of his name.  Take candidate B and reverse all that.  Then see how many people will continue to pull the lever for the Republican Party.

If McCain wins this election, Republicans can do whatever the hell they want.  Invade Iran, arrest everyone with a Mexican last name, reinstate slavery, nuke the French… just whatever they want.  They’ll have gotten so many blank checks from the American voter, we might as well just surrender and move to Canada.  Democracy will have failed.  Someone will have to come up with a better way to run a government.

This is actually one grand social experiment.  Take candidate A and give him stunning good looks, a sterling resume, tons of charisma, and a (D) in front of his name.  Take candidate B and reverse all that.  Then see how many people will continue to pull the lever for the Republican Party.

In all fairness, I’d probably still vote for the Democrat if the situation were reversed.  I’m a liberal and the Democratic candidate is pretty much always going to be the most-liberal candidate who has a genuine chance of winning any election.  It’d take a pretty appalling Democratic candidate and/or a pretty amazing, relatively centrist Republican candidate to get me to pull the lever for the other side.  I can’t necessarily blame straight-up conservatives for backing, however half-heartedly, John McCain.  The relatively tiny percentage of true swing voters is another story.

I’m trying to imagine the same column being written if the subjects were Barack and Michelle.

I attempted a comment on Surber’s site, suggesting that a picture of Cindy McCain performing fellatio on a banana would be just the thing to bring James Dobson’s mob back into the fold. With predictable results. No contrarians in that echo chamber.

I’m pretty sure women still get oogled when they don’t want to be.  I can’t walk to my house without getting oogled by at least one guy who is 20 years my senior (and don’t get me started on the commentary that comes with it).  The second wave of feminism didn’t single-handedly end sexual harassment.

I agree with commenter Amanda Marcotte.

(is it ogled or oogled? haha)

I’m trying to imagine the same column being written if the subjects were Barack and Michelle.

I imagine the response would be something about how “black culture” denigrates women and how Barack is a pimp.

Funny.  I thought you would support the women and their choice to be ogled.  Maybe it’s a tad too white trash for your tastes but hey..it’s their damn body.  Wasn’t there a bit of hypocrisy over slut-shaming?  It’s OK to sex 500 guys without protection but showing your mammary glands to appreciative, but drunk, men is not OK?

Amanda, the bonding with men is over how fuckable his property is. I’m sure he doesn’t mind humiliating her, but humiliation isn’t the intent; that assumes he thinks about whether she has thoughts or feelings.

Mold, having shown mammary glands to appreciative, but drunk men, on a professional basis: STFU. You know goddamn well this isn’t about Cindy McCain’s “choice to be ogled”.

I’ve actually just discovered Mad Men in the last few days, downloaded the first season, and obsessively watched the whole thing practically back to back to back.

Would LOVE some good feminist discussion, if only just some sort of “OMG can you BELIEVE it was like that????????” fest.  For instance the fact that Don Draper can actually call up his wife’s psychiatrist and get a full report on everything she says.  Or the choice comment made by a male character about his teenage daughter: “I can’t wait till she’s someone else’s problem” (which is probably one of the less misogynistic things out of the mouths of the men on that show). 

Anyone up for it?

Also, re ogling—there’s a difference between dressing up so as to turn a few heads at a special event (which men also like to do, see also that horrid “my new haircut” youtube video and most conversations with my roommate before he leaves the house of an evening), and not being able to live your life without feeling like meat.  Maybe I’m just a humorless feminist, but I have a feeling I’d consider my husband offering me up to a bunch of bikers in a very poorly thought-out act of political theatre more like that latter than the former.

They do this every time McCain does something stupid.  The only thing they can come up with is the shaky defense that it proves he has some vaguely-defined characteristic that might be relevant in a race for dog-catcher, but certainly has no place in one of the most important Presidential elections in history.

Mold the conversation would be very, very different here if Cindy McCain had addressed the crowd saying, “I sure would love to join the competition!” There might be discussion over whether 1. his campaign should effect her decision or not and 2. whether she is freely able to choose to be an exhibitionist in a culture where women are so judged in every decision they make, especially regarding self-exposure.
But a man offering his wife as wank-fodder to gain their approval? That’s like Jeri Ryan’s marriage breaking up over her husband pressuring her to go to swinger clubs and have public sex when she didn’t want to. It’s emotional abuse.
I guess McCain thought she’d slathered on the makeup like a trollop again.

When someone offers their wife up to be ogled on her behalf, that’s another story.  And then, of course, there’s the giant double standard if Obama had said the same thing.

I think Michelle would have smacked Barack on the back of the head if he’d said the same thing.  Not that I can picture him saying it since he actually seems to respect his wife as a person and not just a sidekick.

I also can’t imagine Bill Clinton doing something like this to Hillary in a million years, and he hasn’t exactly been perfectly respectful of her.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the old codger’s remarks. But what does it say about Cindy McCain that she stood there and took the humilliation with a shit-eating grin? Or that she didn’t throw him to the curb after his public “trollop” and C-word comment? Is there anything this “former rodeo queen” would not do to make the WH her ninth (or is tenth?) home?

Let’s try and remember one thing.  “Mad Men” is not reality.  It is a TV show, written for entertainment purposes, not the History Channel.  The sexual politics portrayed in the show are completely over the top and meant to keep viewers waiting for the next outrageous comment or over-the-top behavior.  It’s shock factor does make it interesting and addictive, but don’t pretend that that’s the way it was.

Don’t take it from me, here’s a woman executive who worked in advertising from the late 1950’s on:

http://www.wowowow.com/post/mad-men-mary-wells-advertising-big-life-amc-612?page=0,0

The sexual politics portrayed in the show are completely over the top and meant to keep viewers waiting for the next outrageous comment or over-the-top behavior.  It’s shock factor does make it interesting and addictive, but don’t pretend that that’s the way it was.

Which is funny, because having read the memoirs of second wave feminist activists, and several feminist historians’ works on the lives of women in the first 2/3 of the 20th century, so far it’s been spot on.  Which is part of what I like so much about it. I don’t doubt that the boozing and fratboy behavior depicted is probably a little over the top—supporting characters on the show mention that all the time, and from time to time we see people who aren’t such blatant assholes (for instance that one guy whose wife still has a job, and he actually tells her he drunkenly slept with someone else, and she has the balls to kick him out of the house, and he begs her forgiveness rather than just kicking her to the curb and permanently taking up with the secretary he fucked).  And I doubt Don and Roger are depicted to be Everymen in the world of philandering; even from the perspective of 21st century freedom to be nonmonogamous, their exploits exhaust me. 

But, yes, in 1960 a man really did have full access to his wife’s medical records, including what was said in confidence to her doctor.  In middle class nuclear family households men were expected to take care of the finances, which meant women never so much as saw a bill (and thus had no idea where the money was really going).  I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that it wasn’t until the 70’s that married women were even expected to have access to separate checking and credit, and I can confirm the truth of that in my own experience working upscale Manhattan retail (within the last decade, btw).  We got a lot of elderly female customers who just Would Not understand why they couldn’t use their husband’s credit card. 

OK, clearly nobody else wants to do a feminist dissection of Mad Men.  Hmph.

Oh, and clicking through your link, jaguar, it seems to me that all the woman in question was really saying is that, no, people didn’t really drink, smoke, and mess around nearly as much as is depicted on the show, that people worked really hard, and that obviously Mad Men is dramatized and romanticized just like any other TV show.  Which, duh.  You should see my father the doctor watching Grey’s Anatomy.

She then throws out a lot of blather that indicates that she’s probably never actually seen the show, or at least not more than a few clips.  She doesn’t really seem sure about whether the show takes place in the early 50’s or well into the 60’s.  A lot of what she says about women in ad agencies seems to be talking about the 70’s (the idea that the women’s movement was in full swing, for instance). 

So, you know, whatever…

I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that it wasn’t until the 70’s that married women were even expected to have access to separate checking and credit, and I can confirm the truth of that in my own experience working upscale Manhattan retail (within the last decade, btw).

It’s not that they weren’t expected to get them—stores were legally allowed to deny them credit in their own names (scroll down to “The Legal Status of Women”).  It’s only within the past 30 years that a married woman could get a credit card in her own name.

Excellent point in bringing up Grey’s Anatomy.  Entertaining show, but not very close to reality.  In fact, many colleagues of mine who are nurses hate the show.  Why?  Because the show depicts doctors doing all of the work, dramatically saving lives and the nurses acting as simply wallpaper in the background.  And the reality of course, if you’ve ever spent some time in a hospital, is that nurses do an overwhelming amount of hospital work, and doctors would be nothing without them.

If someone who works in a hospital has a problem with the show, would you discount their opinion because you find the show entertaining?

So why discount the views of a woman who actually worked in the business at the time, saying she must be mistaking the 1950s for the 1970s?  Do you think she’s that dumb?  That the TV show that you like must be correct and this woman obviously mistaken?

She worked during the time of Bill Bernbach, named one of the top advertising geniuses of all time for his 1959 Volkswagen campaign.  The advertising industry was one of the most liberal and progressive businesses in America at the time.  It certainly wasn’t the dog eat dog dystopian dramafest that “Mad Men” makes it out to be.

Yeah, Mnemo, I thought that was the case but didn’t have time to back that claim up with research and went for the slight more conservative angle of women just not being expected to have separate credit/banking.  I’m sure that some women got around that (I mean, if you worked and never married, as some women did even then, I would assume there would have been some option for at least checking, savings, and the like).  Though I know that women were routinely denied credit.

So why discount the views of a woman who actually worked in the business at the time, saying she must be mistaking the 1950s for the 1970s?

Because if you read the link, she says things like “the women’s movement was in full swing”.  Which, in the 50’s, it wasn’t.  The Feminine Mystique, which most histories consider the first or one of the first “feminist” books of the second wave, wasn’t published till 1963.  Thus the second wave feminist movement could not have been at its height 3 years earlier in 1960, when Mad Men begins. 

My point, btw, is not that this woman is stupid, but that she probably hasn’t seen the show and doesn’t know exactly when it’s supposed to be taking place.  Almost the entire article describes major cultural memes of the mid to late 60’s, not 1960.  The ad industry might be forward thinking, but they simply couldn’t have been listening to the Beatles or Bob Dylan, neither of whom had yet released an album in the US, couldn’t have been participating in a feminist movement that wouldn’t exist in any real sense for at least 5 years, couldn’t have been seeing films like Blow Up (came out in 1966).  She clearly either has not seen the show or is confused about what happened when and how things changed the way they did.  Which is pretty easy not to have a handle on, considering how fast things changed in the span of just a few years, and considering that this is all going on 50 years ago.

That the TV show that you like must be correct and this woman obviously mistaken?

The nice thing about period pieces is that they can hire researchers.  And they have months, if not years, to put timelines together (I have actually done this for a living, btw).  And then you have several different departments all doing their own research, trying their best to make sure that everything fits and you don’t have people celebrating the Kennedy inauguration at Studio 54.

A person’s memory of events from 50 years ago, recounted in an article published on a deadline, doesn’t have nearly that level of resources at immediate disposal.

Opoponax,

In case you are wondering, here is the background of Mary Wells:  she started as Fashion Advertising Manager of Macy’s in 1952, Copy Group Head at McCann Erickson in 1953 and then at Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1957.  She was not a secretary, nor was she alone.

She knows her stuff and is not mistaking the 1950s with the 1970s.  She became huge in the 1960s, founded her own firm Wells Rich Green in 1966, and by 1969 was one of the highest paid advertising executives in the business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wells_Lawrence

Here’s more of what she has to say about the show:

Mary Wells Lawrence, who started agency Wells Rich Greene in the 1960s and was one of the highest paid people in advertising, argues the show is a throwback to an earlier era, circa 1950.

By the time the ‘60s rolled around, the creative revolution in advertising had opened the door to women and minorities.

“We felt like we were really changing things,” Lawrence said. “We were having tremendous success.”

The top execs had also moved beyond bedding secretaries.

“The sex aspect is so high school,” she said. “The guys in the advertising business that I knew were very sophisticated about sex. They weren’t having sex with secretaries.”

As for the cigarette in every scene?

“I wish they would put out those cigarettes,” she said. “I’d like to see someone smoking marijuana. That’s the way it was.”

when men ogled women all the time, even when they did not want to be ogled

Ah. You mean like today? When your husband can say this kind of shit in public and people will defend him for it?

One supposes he thinks women want to be ogled unless they come out and say they don’t. Unlike men, who don’t want to be ogled unless they wear a flashing neon sign saying EXHIBITIONIST.