WASHINGTON – Megan Draper’s cutting line to Don lands with the swoosh of a Samurai sword.
“You’re too old. I don’t need an old person.” – Megan Draper, “Mad Men”
The new Mrs. Draper proclaim’s aloud, when she throws a party everyone wants to go home and have sex afterward.
Betty would be appalled. She would also be insanely jealous, but she has no one to blame but herself, because it’s not as if she doesn’t have the same talents and tools.
Can’t wait until the two Mrs. Drapers meet.
Marriages splitting up at mid-life.
Men marrying their secretaries.
Women’s post-fertility battle in an era where women were seen as mother and wife, but never vixen (except in Rome). It’s no wonder Betty saw a shrink.
Then came the Megan Draper generation. She’s at the heart of the sexual revolution around which Hugh Hefner said he built Playboy, because good girls like sex, too.
Way back when I was teaching ladies of Los Angeles the language of love in personal ads, at the height of the very lucrative online dating game in the mid-90s, the hardest thing to get through their heads was that describing themselves as hot, sexual femmes actually attracted the cream of the man crop. No! That can’t be possible, I’ll only get creeps, was the first reaction every time. Until they tried it and found out it was true and rarely failed.
It’s why Joan wears figure-hugging wardrobe that accentuates her curvaceous positives that resound to her benefit, all the while she torments herself over the stereotypical reactions she elicits, because she mistakenly lets it bother her.
Juxtaposed against analysis that utilizes the politics of today and the war on women to explain “Mad Men,” the purity of Megan’s character proves she requires none of that and neither does the show, which stands alone in the time that birthed it and the struggles that will remain with us as long as we live.
Nothing reveals this more clearly than the breakout moment of Megan Draper’s surprise birthday party for Don, then watching what ensues.
The original “Zou Bisou Bisou” is a 1960s French classic. Jessica Pare, who plays the character Megan Draper, makes it her own singing “Zubi Zubi Zu,” which AMC has now released on iTunes.
From the Daily Beast, a translation:
Oh! Kiss kiss
My God, they are sweet!
…Oh! Kiss kiss
the sound of kisses
…Oh! Kiss kiss
…That means, I confess
But yes, I love only you!
But it’s how Megan Draper loves Don that captures the sexual revolution that set women brave enough to embrace it free.
Seeing the new Mrs. Draper’s unabashed boldness in sharing her vulnerability honestly, it’s feminine confidence we haven’t seen.
In the last season, when Megan and Don Draper have their first flirtation, she says to him that kissing him, having sex with him in his office, has nothing to do with work. She just wants him right now.
In the 5th season opener, when Megan Draper undresses to black panties and bra to clean up their wrecked abode after Don’s surprise 40th birthday party, it is perhaps the quintessential modern woman’s sexual emancipation proclamation.
“You don’t get to have this. Go sit over there. All you get to do is watch,” Megan taunts, after all hell breaks loose over reactions to her performance.
Needless to say, no one watches, but instead they devour each other on the destroyed white carpet, which will have to be replaced.
Nothing is recycled in “Mad Men.”
Megan Draper is a grenade thrown into the midst of restless humans whose insatiable appetites are colliding with a collapsing social structure dependent on one gender’s control over the other, especially where sex is concerned. Her entry as Don’s wife feels like that moment when your last cocktail high is at its peak, before dropping you with a thud back into consciousness and you start wondering what it will take to get it back.
The obsession begins.
Even Peggy Olson has succumbed to her sexual hunger, when a renegade writer who unwittingly insults her with a sonnet becomes so entranced with her that she becomes smitten herself. Her inner kitten unleashed, because of his vulnerability that made her swoon.
It’s the sex.
People can attempt to draw correlations to today, but it just sounds silly, because the tale is timeless.
It’s simply the sex, the spark that unleashes us to one another, which in the age of “Mad Men” hadn’t included women… yet.
The Megan Draper character introduces that the more of our sexuality we own the more in control we are. It’s about confidence and knowing the power we have, which is beyond fertility if we understand that sexuality is eternal.
It’s why when Joan is called a “madam from a Shanghai whorehouse” in last season’s “Tomorrowland” it trips up so many feminist analysts, because as usual they think it’s about Joan. When what it’s really about is the man who can’t have her.
Joan and Peggy don’t get that, Megan Draper does.
Taylor Marsh is the author of the new book, The Hillary Effect – Politics, Sexism and the Destiny of Loss, which is now available in print on Amazon. Marsh is a veteran political analyst and commentator. She has been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her new media blog.