I started watching "Mad Men" recently.
I know what you're thinking: It's been
six years! What took you so long?
The sets? The costumes? The actors
delivering strings of lines that include zingers like: “What you
call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”
Of course, the fact that I remember
(albeit briefly) what it was like to be able to smoke in an office
makes the sexist, alcohol-fueled workplace of the fictional Sterling
Cooper seem as if it were part of my own nostalgia despite the fact
that I was an infant at the tail end of the 1960s.
One would think -- given its subject
matter and my fascination with publishing and advertising, not to
mention my affinity for mid-century Danish modern furniture – that
Mad Men would have amounted to must-see television in our household.
Well, in my defense, I did give birth
to a baby exactly one month before the show premiered in 2007. Not to
mention being so thoroughly engrossed in a competitor's
(commercial-free) offerings that I couldn't possibly give AMC another
hour of my time.
But truth be told, I would still be
watching reruns of The Sopranos if it weren't for my husband, who, on
impulse, borrowed the first season of Mad Men from the library a
couple of weeks ago.
He brought it home with a sideways
glance and the bravado of a man who just filled the freezer with
meat he murdered himself. I imagined him asking “Who's the man?”
as I briefly considered preemptively high-five-ing him and hollering
“You're the man!”
Although … that might have been a bit
of an exaggeration on my part.
We start watching the episodes
together. He drifted in and out of sleep while I stayed up late into
the night watching back-to-back episodes. By the next evening as I
change disks and begin the new nightly ritual, I have to fill him in
on the plot points he slept through.
As expected, the contrasts are, at
times, breathtaking:
When Betty Draper calls for her
children to account for their being too quiet at play, she finds her
daughter Sally wearing a dry cleaner's bag over her head. Before I
can even transfer an image of my own children's labored breathing
against a plastic film, Betty is telling Sally that if she finds the
clothes that had been in that bag on the floor there will be
consequences. The girl skips out of the scene with the bag still over
her head.
As the scene ends, I think about the
warning imprinted on virtually every plastic bag and how it feels
like a revelation.
Yet, the more I delve into the story
lines for my slumbering husband, the more I realize I'm having a
revelation of an unexpected variety:
It's not how much has changed since the
60s, but how much really hasn't.
Sure, most executives don't slap their
secretaries bottoms or drink their lunches, but the fact remains
that, in so many fields, the gender of key movers and shakers is
overwhelmingly male.
Recently, Toys R Us unveiled its
holiday advertising campaigns with a prank-style video wherein a bus
load of kids who were expecting to attend an educational, woodsy
field trip instead wound up at a toy store, indulging in a
pre-holiday spending spree.
The ad strategy tanked with women,
according to Forbes magazine, because its comparison –
placing education and the outdoors in direct opposition to the
consumerism of the holiday – was in direct conflict with their
values. Moms, in other words, didn't buy it.
The more I read about the situation,
the more I came to realize the reason the ad came off so tone deaf to
women – who are the target of such ads – was because a woman
probably had nothing to do with creating the campaign.
The ad agency responsible for the piece
doesn't have a single woman on its web page titled “leadership.”
Moreover, according to the Forbes
article, it seems only three percent of ad agency creative directors
are women, a figure that made me wince.
How is it possible that in this day and
age women are represented so feebly in an area where their money has
so much clout?
Why are women still under-represented
in decision-making roles?
Why is there still a wage disparity?
The only answer that comes to mind is
that it's not part of our constitution.
Literally.
This country never made women's
equality implicit. The Equal Rights Amendment, while passing both
houses in the early 1970s, failed to be ratified by the states and
never became a part of our framework.
Until it is, I can't imagine gender
discrimination will ever be as rare as a smoke-filled office.
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