Caution: McCann Erickson May Be Hazardous To Your Hard-Fought Advances Against The Patriarchy.
Mad Men begins with an image of a man falling from a skyscraper; this week, it's the ladies' turn. Whatever advances they had made in the past decade at SC&P are gone, as the McCann Boyz Klub presented itself as a crudely implacable foe:
"guys you usually encounter only on workplace training videos about sexual harassment."
Meanwhile, the men adopt old habits: Roger drinks, Harry's a dick, Pete and Ted accept their fates, Don flees, and Bert shows up in his dreams. But by and large, this week was about how women who had earned so much respect lost it quickly.
Below the fold, I'll let some smarter people than me explain it all.
Libby Nelson:
For all her looks and competence, Joan is constantly thwarted. She's changed dramatically over the course of the series, from the queen bee of the secretarial pool to a wiser, kinder, astonishingly competent businesswoman.
But every man she encounters seems to see her only as a vehicle for his own desires. Her ex-husband is an incompetent doctor who raped her. Her coworkers encouraged her to sleep with a client to land the Cadillac account. Her last proposal of marriage was from a closeted gay man. Joan knows what she wants, and she pursues it, but it always eludes her. This is true until the end: she's denied both the moral high ground of a high-profile lawsuit and the financial satisfaction of getting the money she's owed.
In other words, Joan's life is an extended argument for Why We Need Feminism. But for all the wealth and power she's gained, she's in some ways still imprisoned in her 20s, when she was the sexiest woman in the secretarial pool. Joan's first task at Sterling Cooper was to instruct Peggy on how to fit in and succeed, and she'd bought into the patriarchy fully.
A decade later, she's still degraded and not taken seriously based on her looks, as if she's paying for how she presented herself in her early career. Maybe the full flower of the feminist movement just came too late for Joan. Or maybe Mad Men has a happy twist for her hidden somewhere up its sleeve.
Margaret Lyons:
Lots of Mad Men episodes retell or re-contextualize ideas from previous episodes, and aspects of "Lost Horizon" seem to shadow season five's "The Other Woman," which explores the way Joan experiences her own objectification. In the episode, Joan earns her partnership by being one of the savviest employees at Sterling Cooper, but she actually gets her partnership by having sex with Herb Rennet of Jaguar. In "Lost Horizon," Jim Hobart wonders if Joan simply inherited the role. (Is one of those worse?) The partnership was in fact Lane Pryce's idea, sort of to help Joan, but mostly to cover his own ass so no one would notice the accounting discrepancies he was responsible for. If it's a decision Joan regrets, it doesn't appear to be one she dwells on, and as Jim tells her in "Horizon," "Your status has changed." Indeed it has, but not the way Jim sees it. Joan didn't sleep with Herb just for the money, or even mostly for the money: Joan slept with Herb because she was trying to redefine herself by mimicking aspects of the society she's a part of, namely the SCDP folk. And it worked completely. She became a partner, and despite Harry's sniping, an important one. Joan now has a status and identity she's comfortable with — but she's still part of a broken system.
One way oppressive systems stay oppressive is by habitually demonizing oppressed classes. In "Lost Horizon," we see a conference room full of men instantly agree that the most off-putting idea to a man would be any kind of feminization: "diet" beer? Don't say "calorie," that's for women, and women — bleh. Another way is by pathologizing resistance. By identifying behavior like Joan's as "hysterical," say. By depicting solidarity as "crazy" or alien or shameful or bad. Like when two female copywriters come to welcome Joan to the firm: They invite her out to drinks, but insist that it's not a "women's lib" gathering, and that they won't be raising consciousness, ha-ha, don't look at them askance, this is just a no-big-deal, happy-with-the-status-quo kind of gathering. Except of course it's a women's lib event, because women telling their own stories is a form of radicalism. What might Joan have gained from hearing her colleagues say, "I believe you"? What guidance or support might she herself have been able to offer? What kind of organizing might female McCann employees already be part of? One wonders what would have happened if Joan had gone to that happy hour.
Molly Lambert:
[Peggy] has never been interested in fashion or interior decorating. She cares about other things. Don’s suits are always stylish, but he’s basically wearing a uniform. Peggy would love a uniform — something she can put on without thinking about it and just get to work. That is why, in the future, she will love Hillary Clinton–style pantsuits. Better styling might have made Peggy’s life easier in some ways by making her more attractive to the men around her, but that is bullshit. And the sad, hard truth is that the men really only took her seriously from the get-go because they weren’t immediately distracted by wanting to fuck her (although many of them eventually developed slow-burn flirtations with her after getting to know her). On the flip side, Joan is always dealing with men who talk directly into her boobs. It’s a no-win situation, being desexualized like Peggy or sexualized like Joan. Peggy sometimes has to convince people to treat her like a sex object. Joan has to convince them not to. And for some men, like the new overlords at McCann, there is no convincing at all. They’re too far gone.
.... Roger gives Peggy the best (and possibly the only good) advice he’s ever given anyone in his long history of doling out unrequested counsel, which is that Peggy shouldn’t fear being terrifying to men. The good ones will get it, and everyone else can go right to hell. Maybe doing acid that year really did expand Roger’s mind, because he’s suddenly the Betty Friedan of McCann. He’s right, of course, although given how Joan’s first week went, who knows how that attitude will really go over at the new firm. But best to go down skating like Rollergirl through the halls of power, cigarette a-blazin’, clutching a dead man’s antique hentai collectible in her cool fists. Whatever happens next week when she starts work at her new corporate empire, she’ll always be able to say: She did it her way.
Linda Holmes:
Joan is in a peculiarly brutal moment that arrives in lots of lives: the moment when the anesthesia of low expectations for your life has worn off and allowed in the pain of the unjust impediments to getting what you are finally prepared to admit you want. She now knows she settled for too little from Roger, from SCDP, from her life as part of the brain trust behind a successful advertising agency. She, who began the series by schooling Peggy in how things are, now can't stand how things are. She believed that by going along one last time to get her partnership, she'd be insulated from the effects of all of this, and now she knows there's no insulation thick enough to keep Dennis and Ferg and Hobart away. She learned that you can't build yourself a lifeboat and escape a sexist swamp all alone. Because you're still in a very little boat in a very big swamp.....
Perhaps part of the reason Peggy is feeling better than Joan despite knowing her prospects are dim is that she's never let herself accept the way things were, so she's been feeling this rock in her shoe forever. She feels it when she comes to work, when she goes home from work, when she talks to Don, and when she talks to Joan. She's been working in spite of it. Peggy always believed she could do more. She asked for more money. She even left for more money. She told Don Draper, of whom most of the office was afraid, how to treat her and how not to. When McCann told her to come and sit with the secretaries until she had an office, she said no: she understood the optics. She understands she has to hold out as long as possible, in absolutely every way she can, even though it probably won't work.
Nothing is good. Everything is terrible. What's not cheap and loud is old and rotting. But for whatever reason, other than a man who's literally fleeing into the west, Peggy Olson is the only one who feels all right.
Missing in action this week: the Draper children, Sal, Glen, Kinsey, and Lou Avery (and good riddance!).