The XX Factor: What women really think.

Reality Catches Up With Don Draper, and It Is Glorious

A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:

Last night’s bizarro Halloween-themed Mad Men episode showed the nudity we’ve all been waiting for since Betts got a hold of her husband’s Pandora’s box: a glorious disrobing of Don Draper's decades-long, self-perpetuated costume. (SPOILER ALERT!) ... (Read the rest of this article at DoubleX.)

Did Pete Campbell Rape the Neighbors' Au Pair on Mad Men?

Slate's incredibly thorough and compelling Mad Men TV Club has a question I'd like to pose to the Mad Men-watching DoubleXers out there: Was Pete's interlude with the German au pair rape, or was it consensual? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Old School Feminism on Mad Men

I'm not as down on this season of Mad Men as Matt, though I agree that Don as well-behaved husband is sadly ho-hum (and therein lies a whole treatise on marriage that I don't want to read). And Matt, you're right that the race/gender messaging is more didactic and less surprising than in sparkly Season One. But I'm finding bits of the messaging moving and real. This week's episode was mostly drifty and even boring (for me, those dream sequences were beyond saving, despite Julia's valiant effort). But Peggy's failed bid to convince Don to pay her what she's worth made me sit up. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, which Peggy referred to (a thrill for the lapsed lawyer in me) absolutely should be her weapon ... (Read more in DoubleX)

Is This the Season Mad Men Falls Apart?

A guest post from my friend Matt Labash, a writer at The Weekly Standard, about this season of Mad Men:

The show is falling apart dramatically. There are two problems, the way I see it. 1) It's getting all message-y. 2) Not enough Roger Sterling ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Tweet Mad Men With DoubleX This Sunday!

Don't you want find out about how Betty will handle her increasingly senile dad? What about Carla's emerging role and the way Mad Men deals with race? And what if Peggy stands up this week and says: "I'm Peggy Olson and I'd like some LSD!"? We're going to be tweeting Mad Men Sunday night and we hope you're there to talk about it with us ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

"Mad Men," Annotated

While watching Sunday’s Mad Men premiere, a very dirty Japanese print hanging on an executive's office wall caught my eye; I knew I’d seen it before, but couldn’t quite place it. But now, thanks to the “The Footnotes of Mad Men”—and to kottke.org for pointing me thataways—I know that it’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, by Hokusai. (NSFW, unless, it seems, you work at Sterling Cooper.)

I have yet to hop on the Mad Men bandwagon, but if this blog keeps up—it only launched a few weeks ago—the annotation-loving nerd in me could very well get hooked. (Read more in DoubleX.)

On Don Draper's Pledge to Be a Better Man

As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, this season of Mad Men has a new tagline—no longer "Where the truth lies," but rather, "The World's Gone Mad." Things seem relatively normal in the early 1963 moment with which the season begins—though by year's end, we know that history alone, not to speak of the tangled lives of Mad Men's ensemble cast, will make a sense of cultural and political vertigo inevitable ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)

The Confusing Road to Manhood

Dayo, I totally agree with your assessment of Esquire's "How To Be A Man" cover story:

This reads like some kind of grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns-jerky, reductive, and obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze, breadwinning). Who talks like that?

Who talks like that? Mad Men's Don Draper and his compatriots, that's who, but definitely none of the guys I know. In the office, Jessica and I have been discussing whether males of our generation lack a sense of how to become men. The ones we know among the educated, 20-something, urban set (not broadly representative, we realize) aren't for the most part off at war or fathering babies or even bringing in the big bucks. Without those traditional cues, how are they to know when they've crossed over from boyhood to manhood?

Thanks to the feminists who came before us (and in many cases, birthed us), females my age have been raised with the constant reassurance that there are many acceptable ways to be a woman. "You can wear pants and still be a woman!" we've been told. "You can play sports and still be feminine! You can choose to be a housewife or choose not to have kids—both are fine paths for a modern woman!" But are guys getting similar encouragement? I'm not saying that the Esquire cover package is the perfect guide to manhood in the 21^st century—it's more a send-up to the male ideal of the Don Draper era. Still, do you think its existence highlights the need among the XYs of this generation for some such guidance? If so, what's the right way to answer that need?