Mad Men S1E1: "There's Nothing Wrong With a Woman Being Practical About the Possibility of Sexual Activity"

So says Dr. Emerson, the doctor to whom Joan Holloway sends the new hire, Peggy Olson. Yet the good doctor also pushes Peggy to remember that a promiscuous girl doesn't usually land a husband. Welcome to 1960. A young woman's guide to sex is called It's Your Wedding Night.

She's been sent there because she's a new offering to the most dynamic executive Sterling Cooper has. Peggy is more intelligent than anyone really grasps at the moment, yet even she is uncertain as to whether or not she appreciates the attention that the length of her skirt is getting from Pete Campbell. Pete's an asshole, but he thinks she's pretty, and she is wondering which is more important. The greatest twist in the introduction to the world of Sterling Cooper is that Joan tells Peggy that the group to whom she should be most "supplicant" are the firm's telephone operators, three women who, ironically, also encourage Peggy to show more leg.

Peggy wants to succeed and yet is afraid to fail at work, and in love, or whatever passes for love when the goal for every woman, it would seem, is to land a "house in the country," where, as Joan tells her, "she'll never have to work again."

What fascinated me from the outset of Mad Men was the way it portrayed the world my parents inherited. They were poor, smart city kids who met on a subway to night school; my father fell in love instantly and never forgot her. My mother was already in love and instantly forgot my father. Then they met again five years later, this time in an elevator in the building where they both worked - my father as an entry-level executive for Getty Oil, my mother as a Katherine Gibbs School executive secretary for one of the partners of an investment firm. The world they lived in was already changing. They both fell in love this time, and after a few years of incidents and negotiations, they got married. Eventually they bought a house in the country where my mother never needed to work again.

Growing up in that house, I observed that the whole arrangement, guaranteed to make life so clear and simple, was not at all perfect because nothing ever is, no matter how it is advertised. Though Mad Men has always made Don Draper the central core of its universe, I fell in love with the show first because of Peggy. She's an intelligent Catholic girl from Brooklyn, just like my Mom, and it's a strange new world she's about to enter.

What's wonderful is that we see from the start that she has her own mind, and she possibly wins a fan in Don Draper by knowing early on what he needs (to wake him from naps, to give him an aspirin) and yet she has the self-assurance to say that she doesn't really want to keep Pete Campbell busy outside his door while Don assembles himself because, well, Pete is an asshole.

Sex is a simple biological process, but it's complicated for human beings. We possesses both a deep need for inner fulfillment and, as Don's researcher reminds him, a death wish. We want to live fully, we long to die. Peggy wants happiness - the home, the husband, the children. But she also wants happiness as defined by Don Draper, the message that screams that "whatever you're doing, it's OK." She longs to be free from fear of punishment, judgment. Somehow Peggy already knows what Don does - "that you're born alone and you die alone," and the rules that are thrown onto people are intended to make people forget that. So she lets Pete into her apartment even though she knows he's getting married on Sunday. That's the point. So she touches Don's hand, thinking that this is how it's done. Whatever it is Don sees in her, he tells her he will not be her boyfriend, only her boss, and when I first watched the show years back, I thought how unfortunate that was. I thought that because he doesn't take her as his latest offering that they'd someday actually make a great couple. Obviously I wasn't paying attention.

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Consider the characters that are kept in their little bird cages - Peggy, the smart girl who has to admit that she's glad that the typewriter is so simple that even a woman can use it; there's Sal, who has to pretend that he'd prefer not to go to Pete's bachelor party at the strip club because "if a girl's gonna shake it in my face, I want to be alone so I can do something." We don't realize just yet that Don's pretending, too, but there's something great about the little detail of his needing to reassemble the Purple Heart he pulls out of his desk drawer. It almost looks like Weiner's leading us to believe it's a fake; it's not of course, but it is.

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Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) is one of the great characters of Mad Men, and maybe the very best of all of Don Draper's women. I loved her from the moment I saw her, and it was a testimony to Don's potential for depth that he fell in love with her when she set him straight about how she knew her own business better than he. Of course, Don loves women who rebuff him; it gives him exactly the "electric jolt" that he so often says that love - or whatever it is he calls love - gives him.

I don't really know how Don charms her back again to consider Sterling Cooper. Maybe she falls for that cruel arrogance that women like in a handsome man, but she also sees that he's "disconnected." Rachel Menken is the first woman who sees through Don, and this enables him to see women as being much more than what he has socialized to believe about them. It hurts to watch her because you know that after this season, she'll get no more than two minutes onscreen in Season Two. I want her back.

It's a great touch that after his meeting in the night club with Rachel, Don returns back home to his family. Of course he has a family. The man who believes that love is created by advertisers to sell nylons, the man who believes that you die alone, would also have to have a life that would mimic the existence of someone who thinks otherwise. The most powerful image to me in Episode 1 is what Don sees before falling asleep on his office couch; it's one that many of us who sat in doctor's offices and classrooms with flourescent lights remember: the image of a fly trapped inside a ceiling light fixture, in love with the light yet doomed to die up there. We wonder how it managed to get in there and if it will ever get out.