As I said in my previous post, I have recently found myself hiding from things, from real life, binge watching series on Netflix, Amazon or the BBC. There have been a few since I went into lockdown on my own, and a couple of weeks ago I started Mad Men, the slick 60’s set drama centred on a Madison Avenue advertising agency.
Like so many others before me, I was captured by the idea of it, the period feel and the glimpse it gave into both a different world and a different time. The dialogue was smart, the settings beautifully realised, the storylines multifaceted and interesting, and, at first anyway, I enjoyed its sexy undercurrent. But, as I worked my way through season after season, it started to wear on me and I found myself watching out of habit; watching because watching was what I did when I needed distraction, rather than for any real sense of enjoyment.
Initially, I couldn’t work out why I approached it with less relish than before, but I came to realise that what was wrong was the sex and the relationships. For the first few seasons, I had accepted the abusive way the male characters treated the female ones as fitting with the period being portrayed: the dirty office jokes at women’s expense; the clear role separation between the male executives and their female secretaries; this is how we understand things were in that less-enlightened, less equal time.
But I increasingly became uncomfortable with what I was watching. I wondered if the 60’s setting had become an excuse for the producers to pornographise this constant abuse, to titillate us with it. There was a rape, lots of casual and less casual, consequence-free violence against the female characters, and the office manager was paid to have sex with a car company client to support a bid for a contract. What an ugly, ugly thing to portray in a main-stream TV series.
It was suggested that the behaviour of Don Draper had its roots in his brothel upbringing, but I found it hard to excuse him. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to.
It might have been easier to take if there had been consequences for the awful behaviour of the lead male characters, but they largely seemed to exit each season unscathed, leaving a succession of traumatized women in their wake. Only two women, Peggy Olson in a large ad agency and Jean Harris with her own business, emerged from the series in a stronger position than they started it.
I’m not a prude. I like to watch dramas that are spiced up with nakedness and sex, and I recognize that, in a period drama, that sex might appear different from what we would expect in one set today. But where should the line be drawn between that and the constant pornographisation of the abuse of women in a mainstream TV series? I am not at all sure the 60’s setting gave the producers adequate justification for what they did with Mad Men, and I finished it feeling sullied by the experience.
