Mad Men and Good Girls

"Well try and imagine you're newly-wed, and now you have everything - you're beautiful, you're slim, the beloved prize of a handsome man..." Peggy Olson

Mad Men. The beginning of the descent into the sexual revolution of the late sixties. Mad Men who wrap up products in glossy images and clever copy to create enough desire in women that they buy the product and all its wrapping. The desire to be the object of every man's desire. Beautiful, slim, immaculately dressed and ultimately the perfect, good girl, good wife, good mother. Yet everyone, including the men, is a little frustrated, on edge, hungry. Frustrated with all the veneers of success, frustrated sexually, creatively, emotionally. Mad Men are free act out all their "desires" - smoking, drinking, riding young women around their offices like little boys on ponies. And the women look on, working out how it is they need to be in order to stay in the game. By being hot, available and discreet, by being dutiful and submissive, by being clever and like a man. Betty sums up what was expected of women when she says about her mother:

"She wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man. There's nothing wrong with that. But then what? Just sit and smoke and let it go until you're in a box?"

I love everything about this programme. The way it looks, the writing, the themes, the time its set in, the acting. Most of all, I love watching masculine and feminine stereotypes in the slow, on-going state of meltdown. In Heat Wave, Joanie says something about feeling like Doris Day but wanting to be Kim Novak - "1960 I am so over you". The desire to be more, to want more, to express more of themselves shows up too in Peggy who asks for a pay rise and gets it. She celebrates by going home and putting on her Relaxerciser, a vibrating belt worn like underwear. And Betty discovers her own pleasure as she pushes the shaking washing machine back against the wall and fantasizes about kissing the air conditioning salesman having been told off by her husband for allowing another man into the house. Their desire knows there is more to life than the neatly contained roles that have been created for them.