So I’ll admit that I’m not a huge TV person. I grew up in the woods, where cable was nonexistent. I spent my childhood watching only NBC, so unless it’s Saturday Night Live or a rerun of Friends chances are I’ve never seen it. I have, however, just moved into a house with a roommate who has an extensive cable package, so lately my horizons have been broadened. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve spent an embarrassingly large amount of time watching TV lately, but it turns out I just might have something to show for it.
I was watching Mad Men on Netflix with my roommate yesterday (yes, I realize that by now this show is old news, but its brand new to me, okay?). If you’re like me and haven’t seen it, it’s a drama about business men in the early 1960s. The plot involves mostly work drama and relationship drama. What I was most interested in was the portrayal of women in the show. Now I realize that Mad Men is set in the early 60s, so with that comes a serious difference in the way women are treated, both at home and in the workplace. In the show women usually play the role of the nagging stay at home wife or the sexy temptress who shows up at the office for one reason or another. Now because of the time period the show is set in, it’s no surprise the female characters are expected to have dinner on the table when their husbands get home, or that they spend most of the time cleaning the house and caring for the kids. I’m not even sure I’m angry at the way women are represented in the show, after all it is historically accurate.
Before I get into my problems with this kind of television, I want to mention another similar show: The Playboy Club. This gem of a production aired on NBC for about a month before it was cancelled. While the premise is slightly different than Mad Men, it’s also a drama and is set in the same time period. Now this show is a little more blatant in it’s negative representation of women; it’s a super sexy thrill ride of a drama (can you sense my sarcasm here?) set in the original Playboy Club in Chicago. The show also features an endless amount of sexist jokes that have no crucial role in the plot, but are just kind of there. Again, I understand the shows obligation to historical accuracy, but now I fear I may be giving both shows a little too much credit.
Here’s the issue I have with these kind of period dramas: the sexist mentality and objectification of women in these shows isn’t merely an aspect of the plot, but it serves as the draw of the entire show. It seems to me that the creators of shows like these use the need for “historical accuracy” as an excuse to write sexism into their scripts. Sadly, shows with plots like these draw in tons of (mostly male) viewers.
So what do you all think? Are shows like these excusable, or are they just an attempt to appeal to the sexist notions of their viewers?
ShoutOut! James Madison University 
I guess I should preface this by saying that I”m a history major which probably gives me a more desensitized view of shows like Mad Men, because this is a time period I study so the sexism doesn’t bother me as much. That being said, yeah, the female characters of the show are 90% of the time victims of sexism. However, if you continue to watch Mad Men, a lot of the portrayals of women show how women found empowerment in their own ways. Take the character Peggy. She has a really rocky start at Sterling Cooper, however, by asserting herself and making her intelligence known, she gets promoted to copy writer. Yes, the men push her around but she consistently stands up to them. And she makes it abundantly clear throughout the series that she is in no way interested in marriage or childbearing-she is a career woman, through and through. Betty Draper, who gets utterly destroyed by Don every chance he gets, manages to find the inner strength to leave him (and make close friends with the washing machine). The creator of Mad Men, Matt Weiner, actually considers the show to be feminist. And as a feminist I agree with him. They address things on that show that a lot of people today won’t, like abortion and harassment. Unlike the Playboy Club, Mad Men doesn’t try to say that degradation was empowering to women. They are all about historical accuracy (although they do get a LOT wrong when it comes to women’s work in the advertising world-at this point they were way more empowered) which is hard to find in television and I appreciate that. Plus 13 of the 15 writers are women. Heck, even feministing appreciates it (they do a weekly Mad Men fix when the show is running). Just keep watching, get through Season 2, and you’ll see what I’m talking about, I promise. I think you bring up a really valid point about sexism in the media, especially in light of the Playboy Club and Pan Am, but I think Mad Men requires a little more consideration.
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I totally agree with you, femistorian. I think that Mad Men has such a devoted following of smart people who watch it because it portrays a complicated version of gender instead of the T&A, nostalgic sexism I can smell coming off shows like Pan Am and the Playboy Club (which I admittedly boycotted).
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