Our talk on Tuesday about hipster psychology as a response to the sustained crisis of the cold war primes us for the first and last episodes of the contemporary TV drama, Mad Men.
Please be sure to read the poems by Frank O'Hara that provide the season its framing metaphor, while also connecting us to our Russian hipsters by claiming a common ancestor in Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lenny Bruce gave us the set up for the Cuban Missile Crisis last time, so let his line We're all gonna die! hang over your head while you're watching, too.
From Emma Soglin: After watching the two Mad Men episodes, reading the Frank O'Hara poems and reading the magazine article on the swift decline of the American male, I think that it is only appropriate to talk about gender, masculinity and sexuality in today's class. The most prominent example I can think of is in the role of the female in the workplace. Most of the females in Draper's office are secretaries, and they have very little power in the office. However, there is one woman, Peggy, who has somehow managed to move from a secretary's position to one with decision making questions and real sway. She is on a team as the only female, and is constantly forced to deal with the sexist remarks that her co-workers are saying.
ReplyDeleteThis brings up the idea of the "token" woman (or black person, or disabled person). This concept is that having one member of the minority (all though women aren't really minorities, as pointed out in the magazine article), in the workplace or friend group in order to look like you have a diverse array of opinions. How do the men in her group demoralize Peggy and make her ideas seem unimportant? Finally, has the role of the female in the workplace shifted to a power role? If so, is it possible for women to maintain their femininity while still being in a place of elite power
From Grace Jones: In "The Decline of the American Man," we see several examples of double standards of genders. There is astonishment over the idea that both genders should be satisfied after sex as well as over the fact that women are developing the means to decide against conceiving children (although the article says, in its least sexist sentence, that the decision to conceive children should be a joint one). We can read this article today and laugh at the blatant sexism, but the truth is, many people still think like this. People still fear the idea of a family being raised by a homosexual couple, citing a similar idea to that of Dr. Milton J. E. Senn on page 14 that, "Boys, to grow into masculine men, need to see what masculinity is like. They are thwarted if there is no male figure around and if the female takes over." So, how far have we really come? What other parallels can we draw between the sexism of this article and today's gender stereotypes and double standards?
ReplyDeleteA parallel I drew would be the recent debate over the health care bill and thy some talk of negotiation sayin that if women's reproductive care was taken off of the bill, then an agreement could be made. I was thinking of this when the article mentioned the development of birth control and I was stunned by continuation of this mindset despite all the social change that has occurred since the article was produced. Given my background and other classes (as well as attending a small seminar given by planned parenthood last night) I definitely went into the article in a more "feminist" lens and
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I could not write more/delete anything I wrote so sorry for the abrupt ending.
DeleteIt seems to me that the basis of these attitudes can be traced back to the phenomena the article mentions on the fifth page: "that the girl regulates all physical contact", "when the oral pills now being developed become available, women's confidence in sex relations will increase and men will have *still less control* over contraception", and "he is no longer to concentrate on his own pleasure; he must concern himself primarily with satisfying his wife". The first thing to notice here is the reactionary attitude- it upsets the power dynamic of the home for women to gain more control within a marriage. This is the case as the article defines the adversarial roles which pit the husband against the wife in a struggle for control over oneself, and control in a marriage.
DeleteI agree with this--I think that the last episode from Season 2 of Mad Men really exemplifies this attitude. When Mrs. Draper talks about her "options" with her doctor after finding out that she is pregnant, his response is that because she is married, she has no reason to seek out an abortion. This attitude (common not only in the sixties, but also frighteningly prevalent today) reduces women to the role of child-bearer and caretaker. The idea here is that when a women has children, that becomes her full-time job, meaning that she has no income of her own and is entirely dependent on her husband. When Mrs. Draper asks about obtaining an abortion, she is operating in a relatively powerful way, and when her doctor tells her that it is nonsense he effectively tries to take that power away from her.
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