Steve and I watched the first episode of “Mad Men”’s new season last night, and it hit me: the reason this superbly scripted, superbly staged series attracts intense interest is not, as many folks want to argue, that it shows us so meticulously how contemporary definitions of American masculinity differ from those of post-war America. We’re watching “Mad Men” for another reason altogether: we’re seeking reassurance that, in spite of the hits that the definition of the male sustained in the final decades of the 20th century, things haven’t substantially changed.
Men remain men. And all remains right with the world as a result.
Good history always does two important things. First, it shows us, through a precise simulacrum of a carefully researched moment in the past, that the past is another country. The past is nothing like the present. It’s discontinuous from it.
And so we go to museums to peer at Jugendstil furniture, and we read engrossing novelistic accounts of the period in which art nouveau was born such as A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book in order to reassure ourselves that we’ve changed. We’ve grappled with challenges unforeseen by our ancestors. We’ve overcome some of those challenges (or so we think).
And so, we imagine, we can celebrate as we look back. How can the world have ever been so impossibly different that high-powered men (with a few high-powered gals capable of breaking the male code) started the business day knocking back a glass of Jameson’s and lighting a cigarette? Or smoked in airplanes and yelled sweetheart and baby at the stewardesses they expected to replenish their glasses of scotch? And maintained trophy wives dressed to the nines at home, who waited lovingly for their return from work (or philandering, or both) each evening, cocktail in hand, chicken Kiev prepared by Carla or Celia under the trophy wife’s sharp supervision wafting come-hither scents from the oven?
It was a different world. And we can’t imagine living in it. Those of us who did come of age in that world, and who watch “Mad Men” in part because its replication of the world of our youth is so dead right, remember, marvel, and congratulate ourselves on having overcome. No more smoke-filled airplanes, picnics at which we shake the blankets and leave our mess on the park grounds.
No more baby, honey, sweetheart; no more calling for the girl to bring me another this or that. We’ve arrived. We know better.
But then there’s that whole other aspect of history, which is about continuity and not discontinuity. There’s the irony of history as another country that is both alluringly exotic and surprisingly familiar, the way in which all historical accounts demonstrate both the linearity and the circularity of time. Plus ça change . . . .
Ironically, the more historical studies demonstrate the discontinuity between past and present, the more they simultaneously affirm the underlying similarities between two periods of time that, on the surface, appear utterly unlike. We write history, we engage in the craft of historical reconstruction, not merely to discover our difference from previous cultural moments. We do history in order to reassure ourselves that what it means to be human or civilized or developed (or the opposite of those) somehow remains constant, at a fundamental level, through one period of history after another.
If that weren’t the case—if this were not the presupposition underlying our choice to look back—there would be no vantage points or points of judgment to make sense of what would otherwise be simply a story of chaotic random events. History is a story in which the characters may vary widely at any given point in time. But through it all, they remain characters, recognizable replicas of their wildly variant counterparts at other moments in the historical saga.
And so “Mad Men” and its reassurance that men remain men: watch this series carefully, with an eye not to the obvious discontinuities between American men of the post-war generation and men today, and you’ll be struck, I submit, by the striking continuity between the definition of manliness in our recent past and the operative definition of manhood in our culture today. Plus ça change . . . .
We’re watching “Mad Men” to reassure ourselves that this crucial cultural symbol of stability and power remains essentially unchanged precisely in the face of serious appeals to renegotiate and reframe our understanding of gender and gender roles in the latter decades of the 20th century. The men who rule us today—the men who sit around the tables of corporate boardrooms, who call the shots in the central offices of most churches, who run the military and dominate the Obama White House: those men are, to all intents and purposes, merely an early 21st-century replica of the hard-drinking unconsciously sexist men who intrigue us in “Mad Men.”
Same power suits. Same astonishing sense of entitlement. Same obliviousness to the contributions of women (and gay men), and to the ability of those contributions, if they were ever allowed to shift the central paradigms, to build a more humane society for us all.
Same hair-cuts, same ritual manly gestures and rituals of male bonding, same dearth of emotion, same gangly athletic build, same military entrée to the halls of power. Not much has changed in the world of masculinity in recent years, even as women’s roles have been re-crafted to an extraordinary extent.
And that’s how we want things to remain, I’d propose. Because we believe, many of us, that altering or shifting the definition of what it means to be a man will invite apocalypse, we crave reassurance that, underneath and running through all the social and cultural changes of the latter part of the 20th century—and, in particular, through the social and cultural changes induced by the women’s movement—one thing remains constant: men. And what it means to be real men.
And so we play with all the “differences” we imagine we can celebrate now—the newfound “sensitivity” of some men, the purported (but empirically elusive) willingness of men in long-term relationships with women today to share the duties of housework and child-rearing, the diminution of homophobia among younger men today.
But through it all, we worry—exorbitantly—about what it means for our boys to “lose” “masculinity,” and about the dire consequences of this social shift in our society. Though we have never worried about what it means for our girls to “lose” “femininity.” To the contrary, we’ve welcomed, many of us, the breakthroughs women have made in the latter part of the 20th century, and we’re determined to see those breakthroughs continue in this millennium.
And as we worry, we watch: we watch with guilty delight the glorious spectacle of unfettered masculinity among the mad men of mid-century. And as we cluck our tongues at their excesses and stolid inability to understand the cause of their fractured lives, and as we congratulate ourselves that we’ve moved well beyond these gender definitions, we also reassure ourselves that the model we’ve tweaked remains firmly in place.
Because the world just wouldn’t function otherwise. Not our world. The world of "Mad Men" is a world to which many of us would secretly like to return. And it's a world that many of us have never really left, no matter how loudly we define ourselves as men of a new generation.
