By Maria Padhila
So I’m poking around on the Internets, waiting for the conference call to start, and since it’s a Monday morning I check out the always fine Molly Lambert Mad Men recap on Grantland. If you don’t know this U.S. TV show, it’s a drama about the advertising business in the 1960s (and a great look at how it grew into a monster that got us into this mess, if you ask me).
I’m reading about ketchup and Dante’s Inferno and that handsome Don Draper, the lead character, who’s always catting around:
Don thinks sexual liberation means a traditional marriage with extracurriculars behind closed doors, and only for the man. His values may have been somewhat avant-garde (‘European’) in the buttoned-up ’50s and early ’60s, but they’re totally retro with regard to feminism and free love, doomed to put him entirely out of step with the forthcoming sexual revolution. … Don would hate polyamory because he gets all of his deviant kicks from lying.
Ha-ha, yeah, you can say that again, I’m thinking. He’s been such a jerk this season, with not wanting his wife to work, and not supporting the women at the agency even as little as he did in the past seasons —
Wait.
Just one minute, there.
Did you see it, too? OK. And first, let me tell you that Lambert is a sort of mainstream writer. I even looked her up to make completely sure that she hadn’t done a book on poly or something and I’d missed it.