Sunday, October 17, 2010

Mad Men Promoting Macho Role Models To a New Generation [Anthony McCarthy]

I've never watched a full episode of Mad Men, wondering why I needed to watch presentations of post-war, early 6os machismo that I'd seen when it was going on. I was left wondering if these guys were the ones who were going to be putting Richard Nixon in office in a few years, the prospect of a romanticized presentation of them * is pretty revolting. This was the Man's World that Betty Friedan was talking about.

Today's Boston Globe has a good article about the genre that presents the inner life of macho men, as the subtitle says, it's always men that TV looks at deeply. As if we needed that to continue into yet another decade.

What do you think of Mad Men, if you watch it, or the vastly over-examined pathos of the straight, white, middle to upper class male as seen on TV? Do you know of anything like this that looks at the inner lives of women? The article mentions that briefly and says, pretty much, that it's never done in the same way as it is for men.

*As in 24, which promoted torture done by a pretty white man as a positive thing, the presentation of beautiful men doing awful things should be seen as a promotion of what they're doing. Sex sells bad behavior as well as it sells deodorant, good looks cover up things worse than underarm odor.