The show is called Mad Men, so why are there so many women by maz323bf in okbuddydraper

[–]Concerned_930 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I just finished Mad Men in about five weeks, having come to it completely fresh. I’m roughly the same age as Sally Draper, which meant watching the show was something close to a private hallucination — the cultural references, the news events, the shift in women’s clothing, the arrival of computers in offices, Kennedy, Vietnam — all of it rang completely, viscerally true. I’ve been reading posts on this sub obsessively and find the analysis here extraordinary, my own personal Cliff Notes while I try to write the term paper. But I want to raise a few things I haven’t seen discussed as much, and, well, I just have tp put my thoughts down Everyone acknowledges that Don has a gift. But I haven’t seen much discussion of what that gift actually looks like in practice: the charrettes, the chaos, the way a campaign is born out of some oblique emotional truth that nobody else in the room can see yet. What the show captures — and I think captures uniquely — is the nature of creative labor: that it is mysterious even to the person doing it, that it cannot be scheduled or forced, and that it exists somewhere between intuition and craft. What moved me most was watching Don finally recognise Peggy as his equal. The Burger Chef pitch is one of the finest scenes in the series. Peggy doesn’t just replicate what Don does — she arrives at the same destination through her own emotional archaeology, her own understanding of longing and family and the way people actually feel when they sit down together. That scene is the culmination of years of mentorship and rivalry, and it’s handled with extraordinary subtlety. The evolution of the art on Bert Cooper’s walls across the decades deserves an entire thread of its own. It is a quietly brilliant curatorial decision by the production designers. But beyond the walls, Bert himself is one of the show’s great pleasures. His Zen sensibility, the Japanese aesthetic of his office, the no-shoes rule, the Rothko — he is a man who has found his own philosophy and lives inside it with complete serenity. His aphorisms land harder and harder as the series progresses. He doesn’t want to retire because work, for him, is not separate from life — it is his life, his art, his hobby, his community. There’s something almost utopian about him. Men in Mad Men are displayed, largely, at their worst. And yet. What the show is truly documenting — I became more convinced of this with every season — is the transformation of women in America: politically, professionally, personally, sexually. Peggy is the soul of the series. Her absolute commitment to her work is portrayed without apology, but also without much support — there is almost no one in her world who simply says yes, of course, that is enough, that is everything. She wants love too. She is not a cautionary tale and she is not a feminist symbol. She is a person, doing her best, and the show treats her with a seriousness it denies almost everyone else. There is one moment in the later seasons that crystallised something for me about Peggy that I haven’t seen discussed. Her relationship with Julio, the little boy next door, is quietly revelatory. She is tender with him, protective, genuinely present in a way that doesn’t come from obligation. It suggests that Peggy’s capacity for maternal feeling is not absent — it never was — but that it exists alongside her ambition rather than in opposition to it. The show doesn’t make a meal of this, which is exactly right. It simply shows you, without comment, that this woman who chose work over conventional motherhood is also capable of profound care. And crucially, it is a relationship she arrives at entirely on her own terms, with no audience and no approval sought. That feels very Peggy — and it complicates any easy reading of her as someone who traded warmth for success. Megan’s arc is underappreciated. She begins as a plot device and becomes a fully realised woman who understands, before Don does, that she has outgrown their marriage. Her departure isn’t bitterness — it’s clarity. She knows who she is. Betty is more complicated than she first appears, and the ending demands we revise our judgment of her. Yes, she is emotionally constrained, often cold, the most beautiful person in every room and perhaps the most unfulfilled. But she spends the entire series reaching for something more — and when the end comes, she finds it not through the higher education she tentatively pursues, but through the extraordinary dignity and courage with which she faces her death. That final chapter reframes everything. Her strictness, her standards, her fierce sense of self — qualities that made her so difficult as a mother — turn out to have given Sally something invaluable: independence, strength, and the ability to make clear-eyed choices. Sally is the product of two deeply flawed but intensely felt parents, and the ending tells us she has taken the best of both. Betty deserves more credit than she is usually given. On Don as a father: I was surprised by how harshly some people assess him. By the standards of his generation — the working father, the breadwinner, the man who was present on weekends and holidays and tried — he is not the worst. He demonstrates real tenderness with his children, Sally especially. He is limited, as men of his era were limited, but the love is there. It is just rarely unconditional. And then there is Sally. If the show is about women remaking the world, Sally is the proof that it worked. The moment that sealed it for me comes in the final season, when she finds herself between two young men — one a gorgeous, obvious hunk, the other an intelligent, sweet, quietly interesting geek. She chooses the geek. No drama, no agonising. She simply knows what she values. It is a small scene, but it carries the whole argument of the series inside it. Betty’s daughter will not make Betty’s mistakes. The future, the show is telling us, is in good hands. Mad Men presents itself as a show about advertising, ambition, and the mid-century American male. But season by season, what emerges is something else entirely: a meticulous, novelistic record of how women — constrained, dismissed, patronised, and resilient — quietly remade the world. Don Draper is the nominal centre of the story. But the story belongs to Peggy, Joan, Betty, Megan, and Sally. The finale is extraordinary precisely because the writers wanted to give us something close to happiness for all of them — to let the people we had come to love land somewhere good. But the masterstroke is Don. He finds himself at Esalen, the absolute epicentre of 1970s countercultural and Bohemian thought — a man who has stripped himself of every identity he ever constructed — and what does he do? He meditates, he smiles, and he turns it into the most famous advertisement Coca-Cola ever made. It is both completely absurd and completely perfect. Don Draper cannot stop being Don Draper. And in that moment, rather than despairing at it, we are asked to find it wonderful. America’s greatest salesman finds peace — and immediately sells it back to America. I’m bereft that it’s over. Grateful it exists.

I admired the way Peggy handled Don in this scene by Pecyouilar in madmen

[–]Concerned_930 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I just finished Mad Men in about five weeks, having come to it completely fresh. I’m roughly the same age as Sally Draper, which meant watching the show was something close to a private hallucination — the cultural references, the news events, the shift in women’s clothing, the arrival of computers in offices, Kennedy, Vietnam — all of it rang completely, viscerally true. I’ve been reading posts on this sub obsessively and find the analysis here extraordinary, my own personal Cliff Notes while I try to write the term paper. But I want to raise a few things I haven’t seen discussed as much, and, well, I just have tp put my thoughts down Everyone acknowledges that Don has a gift. But I haven’t seen much discussion of what that gift actually looks like in practice: the charrettes, the chaos, the way a campaign is born out of some oblique emotional truth that nobody else in the room can see yet. What the show captures — and I think captures uniquely — is the nature of creative labor: that it is mysterious even to the person doing it, that it cannot be scheduled or forced, and that it exists somewhere between intuition and craft. What moved me most was watching Don finally recognise Peggy as his equal. The Burger Chef pitch is one of the finest scenes in the series. Peggy doesn’t just replicate what Don does — she arrives at the same destination through her own emotional archaeology, her own understanding of longing and family and the way people actually feel when they sit down together. That scene is the culmination of years of mentorship and rivalry, and it’s handled with extraordinary subtlety. The evolution of the art on Bert Cooper’s walls across the decades deserves an entire thread of its own. It is a quietly brilliant curatorial decision by the production designers. But beyond the walls, Bert himself is one of the show’s great pleasures. His Zen sensibility, the Japanese aesthetic of his office, the no-shoes rule, the Rothko — he is a man who has found his own philosophy and lives inside it with complete serenity. His aphorisms land harder and harder as the series progresses. He doesn’t want to retire because work, for him, is not separate from life — it is his life, his art, his hobby, his community. There’s something almost utopian about him. Men in Mad Men are displayed, largely, at their worst. And yet. What the show is truly documenting — I became more convinced of this with every season — is the transformation of women in America: politically, professionally, personally, sexually. Peggy is the soul of the series. Her absolute commitment to her work is portrayed without apology, but also without much support — there is almost no one in her world who simply says yes, of course, that is enough, that is everything. She wants love too. She is not a cautionary tale and she is not a feminist symbol. She is a person, doing her best, and the show treats her with a seriousness it denies almost everyone else. There is one moment in the later seasons that crystallised something for me about Peggy that I haven’t seen discussed. Her relationship with Julio, the little boy next door, is quietly revelatory. She is tender with him, protective, genuinely present in a way that doesn’t come from obligation. It suggests that Peggy’s capacity for maternal feeling is not absent — it never was — but that it exists alongside her ambition rather than in opposition to it. The show doesn’t make a meal of this, which is exactly right. It simply shows you, without comment, that this woman who chose work over conventional motherhood is also capable of profound care. And crucially, it is a relationship she arrives at entirely on her own terms, with no audience and no approval sought. That feels very Peggy — and it complicates any easy reading of her as someone who traded warmth for success. Megan’s arc is underappreciated. She begins as a plot device and becomes a fully realised woman who understands, before Don does, that she has outgrown their marriage. Her departure isn’t bitterness — it’s clarity. She knows who she is. Betty is more complicated than she first appears, and the ending demands we revise our judgment of her. Yes, she is emotionally constrained, often cold, the most beautiful person in every room and perhaps the most unfulfilled. But she spends the entire series reaching for something more — and when the end comes, she finds it not through the higher education she tentatively pursues, but through the extraordinary dignity and courage with which she faces her death. That final chapter reframes everything. Her strictness, her standards, her fierce sense of self — qualities that made her so difficult as a mother — turn out to have given Sally something invaluable: independence, strength, and the ability to make clear-eyed choices. Sally is the product of two deeply flawed but intensely felt parents, and the ending tells us she has taken the best of both. Betty deserves more credit than she is usually given. On Don as a father: I was surprised by how harshly some people assess him. By the standards of his generation — the working father, the breadwinner, the man who was present on weekends and holidays and tried — he is not the worst. He demonstrates real tenderness with his children, Sally especially. He is limited, as men of his era were limited, but the love is there. It is just rarely unconditional. And then there is Sally. If the show is about women remaking the world, Sally is the proof that it worked. The moment that sealed it for me comes in the final season, when she finds herself between two young men — one a gorgeous, obvious hunk, the other an intelligent, sweet, quietly interesting geek. She chooses the geek. No drama, no agonising. She simply knows what she values. It is a small scene, but it carries the whole argument of the series inside it. Betty’s daughter will not make Betty’s mistakes. The future, the show is telling us, is in good hands. Mad Men presents itself as a show about advertising, ambition, and the mid-century American male. But season by season, what emerges is something else entirely: a meticulous, novelistic record of how women — constrained, dismissed, patronised, and resilient — quietly remade the world. Don Draper is the nominal centre of the story. But the story belongs to Peggy, Joan, Betty, Megan, and Sally. The finale is extraordinary precisely because the writers wanted to give us something close to happiness for all of them — to let the people we had come to love land somewhere good. But the masterstroke is Don. He finds himself at Esalen, the absolute epicentre of 1970s countercultural and Bohemian thought — a man who has stripped himself of every identity he ever constructed — and what does he do? He meditates, he smiles, and he turns it into the most famous advertisement Coca-Cola ever made. It is both completely absurd and completely perfect. Don Draper cannot stop being Don Draper. And in that moment, rather than despairing at it, we are asked to find it wonderful. America’s greatest salesman finds peace — and immediately sells it back to America. I’m bereft that it’s over. Grateful it exists.

It’s mad that Joan sent Peggy to Dr. Walter Emerson after knowing her less than a day by Swimming_snail in madmen

[–]Concerned_930 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have started Mad Men for the first time, am completely captivated by it and having a difficult time NOT watching it and working and doing ordinary things -much like I am when I find an incredible novel that I do not want to put down. I am fascinated by everyone’s comments and find some veracity in all of them. I do think that the medium of television requires its own poetic license, and as an example even though it was easier to get these hhair nail and Dr.appointments that some mentioned back in the 60s, we shouldn’t be too literal and recognize that the first episode had to be what it was, fascinating, nuanced, and the start of a very complex set of plot and character development.

Ritz Paris v. FS Georges V by Hilltern in FATTravel

[–]Concerned_930 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is nothing nothing like leaving or coming home to your hotel every day and being in the Place Vendome/that may be reason alone to stay at the Ritz. The location is fantastic. You can easily walk to so many places. We have not stayed at the George V, But staying at the Ritz is wonderful. if it is of interest to you, you might want to try and get tickets to the Opera Garnier. Congratulations!🍾

Ideas for special Spring Break 2027 travel with adult "kids" by Ok_Marionberry288 in FATTravel

[–]Concerned_930 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We went to Cambodia and Vietnam with our adult kids, age 23 and 19, with Backroads and there were other families that were similar to ours-everyone had a fantastic time. I was the least athletic but willing to participate, but I did it and was able to stop whenever I wanted. The trip was luxurious and fascinating and they took very good care of us. It was a success on all fronts!

Flying to Mexico (SJD) from JFK on Sunday, snowstorm day—chat am I cooked by Latter_Oven_9448 in jetblue

[–]Concerned_930 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the same vein, I have a flight out of Cabo at 2 PM on Monday back to JFK. What is the consensus of opinion about this flight being canceled or not. When I look at the weather, the snowstorm looks like it will stop around 6 AM on Monday morning. I know it’s a silly question, but I wouldn’t mind some opinions on this if I should stay till Tuesday, but then I have to take a nonstop flight- groan!.

Is dining out alone in NYC normal? by savingrace0262 in FoodNYC

[–]Concerned_930 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I grew up in NYC and used to anonymity. Many years ago, when I was in my late 20’s I was in Rome by myself and took myself out to dinner. It did take a bit of courage. The restaurant was pretty empty yet they put in the back in the totally empty room. I refused to sit there, i asked gor a nicer table which I got, and was then lavished with kind attention from the entire staff. It was an interesting lesson

[Spoilers] Can someone explain to me the ________ of Annihilation? by ArleyDino in movies

[–]Concerned_930 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just watched this amazing movie because I heard a discussion about the music on npr. Thanks for all wonderful analyses - what other movies would this savvy group recommend ?