A show needs a cliffhanger? et’s imagine this is a show about tough dudes, and the cliffhanger is that one of them appears to get blown up (or did he???) by a booby trap right at the last frame. Do you show him:

–Walking up to a very clever trap that even his awesome, say, Special Forces skills would not have prepared him to expect?
–Walking stupidly up to a trap he totally should have anticipated, as did your 10 year old niece, in hopes the audience won’t interpret your hero as stupid?

Either you’re concerned about avoiding any possibility of the audience perceiving your character as stupid or you’re not. I have noticed for years that writers worry much more frequently about insulating MALE characters from the possible perception of stupidity than female (because, I suspect, they perceive that women can “get away with” being stupid, poor dears). I think it’s quite well known that a huge number of (ignorant) people don’t believe it’s ever possible for a woman not to realize she’s pregnant. While that is certainly asinine, film and TV makers are conditioned to write the the lowest common denominator – i.e., the least intelligent, open-minded person in the audience. They could have resolved this problem with, for example, two lines of dialog:

Peggy (upon realizing she’s been pregnant and not known it): “How is that possible?”
Doctor: “It happens.” …and rushes her off to delivery.

Then, even if the audience doesn’t buy it, we know the writers think this is plausible, and by the standards of their world Peggy is still no fool. That they didn’t bother suggests a lack of attention to detail in women’s issues – oddly telling in a show that’s meant to deconstruct male entitlement.

This was the same exact lack of detail I picked up on with Betty’s situation, when they invoked the stereotype of the hysterical housewife exhibiting physical symptoms of a neurosis. They probably didn’t mean to invoke this stereotype. They probably just didn’t think through that giving her a symptom of a degenerative disease without the disease would remind some of us of “Mother’s Little Helper” being handed out as the panacea to any complaints housewives had. I suspect the writers were trying to create a visual device to illustrate Betty’s legitimate emotional complaints – i.e., Don’s treatment of her. Great idea, except… don’t they know what a problem women have had getting treated for real physical problems? Didn’t they consider how that would play?

If a show claims to deconstruct male entitlement, but it’s creators don’t even do the basic research to avoid implying The Patriarchy Was Right About Them Whiny Gals, then you can’t argue the problem lies with the audience, or with certain members of the audience.

Bottom line: the fact that there could BE an explanation for Peggy’s ignorance doesn’t excuse the filmmakers not providing one, and leaving viewers plenty of room to conclude she’s an idiot.

I agree to an extent, but it’s also not unreasonable for a viewer to leave room for a possible future explanation.

In season two, it becomes clear that Peggy grew up in a staunchly Catholic house where she bucked all her family’s norms to move to Manhattan and start working as a secretary. Flashbacks to her time in the hospital after having the baby show that she was in deep, deep denial about it. She was raised in a very conservative and religious family, and in her attempt to branch out on her own for the first time, she ended up sleeping with a married dude and getting pregnant. Not exactly what she was mentally prepared for. Plus, she is simultaneously attempting to juggle an unprecedented job move: a jump from the secretarial pool to doing copy editing in a male-dominated field. She has no training for this, no one to talk to, and her family seems to offer little support. She even has to work side by side every day with the man who unknowingly got her pregnant.

A television series is bound to have cliffhangers, and so did Mad Men. We were left wondering about a number of things at the end of season one, and yes, one of those questions we had was whether or not Peggy was psychologically unbalanced, naive, or just an idiot. However, it would be rash to assume that just by leaving the question open for debate they were automatically branding Peggy as an idiot.

Here’s my stance on the problems you mentioned, to add to the opinions of fellow commentors:

Peggy:
argolis makes a good point about denial. While I find it hard to believe that someone could be pregnant without their knowledge, there’s plenty of evidence that this can and has happened (even in this day and age, let alone the 1960s). Moreover, once Peggy found her footing at Sterling Cooper, which she definitely has by the end of season 1, she starts developing a bit of an ego. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that she’s in complete and utter denial about the
pregnancy. Maybe she sort of knows, deep down, but she’s not willing to accept it as it falls so far outside of her worldview and her plans for the future. People have convinced themselves of and repressed far weightier matters.

See this BBC article about surprise pregnancies and this article about denied pregnancies from the Journal of Psychosomatic Research (vol 61, issue 5).

Joan:
I would definitely argue that Joan has power, although I think the ways she has to articulate that power have changed over the past season and a half (this discussion is particularly germane to one of her current storylines regarding her job and its limits…but I don’t want to spoil it in case you’re not keeping up with the show). Peggy certainly unseated Joan’s sense of hierarchy/mastery over the space of the office, but I think she’s gained it back. Perhaps Joan’s power isn’t really feminist, in the sense that she uses her sexuality and is very manipulative, but I think she is a highly respected member of the office, arguably the highest ranking woman, until Peggy, that is. Still, in order to provide evidence for this, I’d have to re-watch all of season 1 and cite lots of tiny individual examples, and I simply don’t have the time (although that’d probably be fun). I’m not even sure I can provide concrete evidence (what would that entail, anyway?) so that’s just the sense I get about her character.

Betty:
Betty is problematic, and I was also flummoxed by the whole housewife hysteria business (I too thought it was going to be some sort of undiagnosed neurological illness). However, I agree with tp that her neuroses were a little more nuanced than lack of cock. I read the whole incident as her suffering from the isolation of housewife-dom, not having an outlet for all her frustration over Don’s philandering, etc., more than anything else. That much inoccupation and loneliness could drive a lot of people crazy, and I’m pretty sure hand-shaking and loss of control could constitute symptoms of an anxiety attack or, dare I say it, hysteria.

I do agree that they did a poor job of resolving that storyline, although I would argue that her symptoms seemed to abet more because of her psychoanalysis (the “talking cure”) than because of sex with her washing machine. Although, who knows. Still, as much as we’d like to believe hysteria is a completely made up and sexist illness, it is actually a documented mental illness with unpredictable symptoms (of course, it afflicts men, too).

From the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine (my emphasis): “Patients with hysterical disorders, such as conversion and somatization disorder experience physical symptoms that have no organic cause. Conversion disorder affects motor and sensory functions, while somatization affects the gastrointestinal, nervous, cardiopulmonary, or reproductive systems. These patients are not “faking” their ailments, as the symptoms are very real to them.”

Also, this article about the history of hysteria and its decline is interesting (I haven’t read it through entirely, only skimmed it, but it’s certainly relevant): “On the “Disappearance” of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis”.

Okay. I’m going to stop now. I hope this is at least of some interest, even if you don’t agree.

I didn’t find the Peggy turn in the last episode of season one remotely unrealistic or in need of any filling in to be realistic. In the scene where Peggy sees the doctor for the pills you can see how little she understands and how uncomfortable even getting them is. The joy of season two, however, is in finding out the details. For the record, my mother was upper middle class in New York and has a bachelor’s degree. People didn’t talk about sex or if they did it was misinformation city.

And I recently had sleepy hands in the morning for a couple of months, causing me to drop things and be unable to grasp things. Yeah, I went to the doctor and had x-rays and an MRI. Turns out it was probably a pinched nerve and it went away on its own and would have even if I’d done nothing. (Although learning I needed cold not heat was key relief!) My point being, it was scary as hell and ultimately, it was nothing. I still can’t believe it was nothing. I was convinced it had to be something horrible and serious. The Betty storyline may have been a bit melodramatic, but I really think the point was how she’s treated and regarded by the doctors.

It seems that you don’t agree with any of my points, so I believe that we’ll have to agree to disagree.

I will point out that one of the texts used in the creation of Mad Men is Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown. I believe there was an interview regarding the election night party episode where one of the writers said that they actual had to back off some of what she’d written because it was so, so much worse than what’s depicted in Mad Men.

Thank you for the discussion! Many interesting points and viewpoints. I *am* clearly coming from a place of love for Mad Men, so there’s that.

DH focuses on the women (I assume) and their own wacky lives in the present day. It did start out partly as satire, which I think is what Mad Men also aspires. I don’t watch either show, but I do wonder if any comparison is feasible or even worthy.

(**Mild spoilers for S2 ahead!**)

First off, Peggy is definitely Catholic, for what it’s worth. I had pretty much the same reaction as Jennifer to the surprise pregnancy storyline – I thought it was soap opera and out of character for Peggy (though, having said that, I don’t see Peggy as one to be researching sex ed in the local library). To give the writers credit, though, they did pick up on it a lot is S2, and, without giving too much away, seem to be heading towards something like MaggieCat’s theory (at least in my opinion).

Joan is someone I’ve always had issues with, but I think that one of the themes of the show when it deals with gender politics is that women can only achieve a certain amount – or certain types – of power before they’re stopped abruptly (and I don’t *think* anyone here would argue with that, at least from a 60s worldview). Ultimately, the women in the show go as far as they can and then have to accept the rest. Is that enough for the show to be telling us? Maybe, maybe not. I’d love them to explore it more, but I think that’s the message they’re trying to give.

Betty. I love Betty. I have to agree that the hand spasms made little to no sense in context, but I think the message was more subtle than “Cock: the cure for whatever ails women”. Betty is desperately lonely and sexually frustrated, but I thought it was made clear that her hand cramps were caused by her mother’s recent death, and the unrealistic burden of perfection she’d loaded onto her daughter – not anything to do with sex (well, one is caused by the other, probably. Betty has a *lot* of different and competing neuroses, which is one of the reasons I love her so much. Heh.)

Thanks for the blog, and for the opportunity to contribute!