Because I enjoy frustration and really bad customer service, I called Rogers. They informed me they could fix it, but not for six days. Six days! But, I was missing Gossip Girl! Panic set in. I worried about what kind of trouble the Real Housewives would get into without me. I imagined the anxiety caused by  being the only person on Twitter on a Sunday night not in on the Mad Men jokes or snark about Girls. What if some racial diversity suddenly showed up on Girls and I missed it? What about the dreaded plot spoilers? Rogers didn’t care.

I curled up on my living room floor and threw the best only-child in-a-world-that-is-unfair-woe-is-me- temper tantrum I could muster. I sulked and imagined my life without TV. Would I have to read books? Enjoy nature? Get a hobby? Interact with humanity? Screw that.

My life wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I often chose not to join a regularly scheduled program already in progress. As an avid consumer of pop culture, I sometimes find myself exhausted and overcome with the need to disengage. This has resulted in me avoiding: competitive cake baking shows, Brangelina, Glee, people trying to make Channing Tatum happen for me, and anything to do with the Hunger Games. I also refuse to make macaroons the new cupcake and, no, I haven’t seen the new Avengers movie. Leave me alone!

But when the fatigue really sets in and this pop culture junkie needs rehab, I often take my frustration out on my television. It’s not that I have high viewing standards. Not at all. I’ll watch and hate watch—sadly I’ve kept up with the Kardashians more than I would like to admit—pretty much anything. Except televised talent competitions. I have never watched an episode of American Idol. The terrifying combination of Ryan Seacrest, people breaking into song, and live studio audiences is too much for me.

But Lost was Seacrest free and I still managed to avoid it until season two. I knew it was about an island and a plane crash, but that was about it. Mad Men suffered the same fate. I felt like a feminist fraud when a friend and I were discussing pop culture heroines and Buffy made the list. I had to confess I’d never seen an episode. Battlestar Galactica. Whatever. Space sucks.

Eventually, I come around though. Resistance is futile. I finally started watching Lost and managed to annoy my friends—who were wondering why they were stuck in 2005 all of a sudden—with incessant questions about the hatch and the polar bears. I recently watched the first two seasons of Buffy and wish I hadn’t come late to her vampire slaying party. I now host Mad Men viewings on Sunday nights. No themed cocktails though. I’m far too lazy for that.

When faced with pop culture overload we sometimes just need to regain control and consume things on our own terms. I’ll care about Don Draper when I’m good and ready, thank you very much. It’s not just the watching of the TV. It’s the TV-related tweets. It’s the endless online recaps and media analysis. I had reached my saturation point with Girls before I even started watching it. It’s the friends who make you feel like a total loser if you’re not watching Game of Thrones. I am not watching Game of Thrones, by the way.

While laying on my floor post-Rogers temper tantrum I considered becoming one of those people who doesn’t watch TV. Those smug people I avoid at parties cause they think they’re better than me. You read The Economist instead of watching Jersey Shore. Hooray for you, here’s a smarty pants medal!

Lucky for me I didn’t have to ponder this long cause my cable ended up returning after four hours. Turns out it was just a service problem in my area. I did miss Chuck Bass that night, but made it in time for Shameless. It’s a great show. You should totally watch it.

**Yes, I realize this is a very first world problem. I also realize I could watch these shows online, but really that’s not my preferred method of TV delivery.

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her blog on pop culture will appear every second Tuesday.

Last spring, Dockers launched its stupefying ad campaign based around the core message of “Wear The Pants.” (In a move that nicely reinforced the tone-deaf idiocy of the campaign, it premiered on International Women’s Day, March 8. Classy.) The whole series, which is still running in a slightly diluted form, rests on the premise that there is a crisis of modern masculinity: men are being devalued; technology has usurped men’s evolutionary and industrial roles; masculine traits are slowly dissolving in an increasingly androgynous society; men must take steps to reassert their waning influence. Watch out—we’ve hit Peak Masculinity! It’s all downhill from here as we tumble headlong into a genderless mire of murses, manicures, and manorexia. The only way to save yourself, you little sissy, is by buying these boxy dad-pants.

This gender panic is an inexplicably popular trope among big media outlets: you see it in the Dockers campaign; the popularity of the drinkin’, smokin’, and pinchin’ ad executives on Mad Men; the ludicrous kook science of the “Caveman Diet“; the National Post‘s weird fixation on university gender studies. There’s the hideous neologism of the “mancession.” And more recently, we’ve had the Maclean’s cover story on why boys are growing up to be such a bunch of unemployable doofuses. Most recently, the Globe and Mail is flogging the notion with its “Failing Boys” series of articles, part of its pompous “Our Time To Lead” rebranding.

Enough. This is all—if I can plausibly use such a Marlboro-man expression—horseshit.

My hackles go up when those who are obviously powerful claim they are powerless. It’s a disingenuous rhetorical stance designed to reinforce the status quo. When the leaders of the United States claim that their nation’s existence is threatened by a handful of religious fanatics hiding out in Afghan caves, we know, rationally, that isn’t true. But by inverting our perception of the power dynamic (Al Qaeda strong, USA weak) those leaders justify the exceptional measures that will reinforce and extend the actual power dynamic (USA strong, Al Qaeda weak). The myth of American weakness is the lie the War on Terror was built upon. Yes, there have been thousands of individual American victims, from the civilians who died on 9/11 to the troops killed in action since. But the notion of the United States itself being a victim—instead of the economic, military, and diplomatic colossus it truly is—has no basis in reality. The put-on feebleness allows the same exercise of the same power, only now with the fig leaf of “self-defence.”

Similarly, when men—who demonstrably retain a firm grip on the levers of power in nearly every sector of society—plead that it’s they who are the victims, beaten down by a modern world that hates and fears maleness, tell them to shove it. Take it from me: I’m a middle-class, able-bodied, English-literate, university-educated, white, cisgendered male, and I’m doing just fine, trust me. I consider myself one of the most privileged creatures the planet has ever coughed up. Save your tears, ladies.

The fact that, gosh, there are more female doctors than there used to be, or that some of the educational metrics indicate that boys’ classroom achievements are not as high as we’d like, is not, in any rational universe, a sign of the waning of the economic, political, and cultural dominance of men. Are there lots of boys who find school boring, irrelevant, meaningless, and get poor grades as a result? Yes, and that’s a real concern. But does it indicate that they’re growing up in a world where all the scales are tipped in the girls’ favour? No.

The fact that literally millions of years of male supremacy is even slightly considered to be starting to be maybe, haltingly, partially alleviated is not an indication that men are suddenly marginalized. To say they are is wrong. Statistically, anecdotally, factually. Period.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) speculate on the future of their newly disabled colleague in "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency"--copyright AMC 2009

While most of Mad Men’s devoted fan base was surely whipped into a frenzy thanks to “The Big Reveal” this past Sunday, [Sorry folks, I’m going to be good and keep the spoilers behind the link] with only three episodes left this season, I’ve been noticing something other than the plot.

Technically, disability was introduced as part of the ultra-realistic, ultra-accurate Mad Men landscape in the very first season, when the neighbour kid is invited to Sally’s birthday party at the Draper house and this kid happens to be a polio survivor, walking around on old school forearm crutches.

Back then, viewers got a little taste of 1960s ableism when the mother hens started clucking around the kitchen counter: “Oh, how sad, a child with polio.”… “The father’s a real stand-up guy for sicking it out and staying with them.”…”I don’t know how they do it.” But, It wasn’t until episode 3.6 “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency,” when a British ad exec gets his foot run over by a John Deere during an office joyride, (don’t ask) that I really got the message that creator Matt Wiener was intentionally raising the issue as yet another cultural sticking point of the era.

Below is the scene in the hospital waiting room, once the bosses realize their rising star will have to have his foot amputated:

Joan: I’ll bet he felt great when he woke up this morning. But that’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, and the next, some secretary is running over you with a lawnmower.

Don laughs.

The three British executives enter the hospital waiting room.

Saint-John: I’m heart broken.

Don: It’s a terrible tragedy.

Harold Ford: One that surely could have been avoided. Mrs. Harris, thank you for your quick thinking.

Lane Pryce: You may have saved his life.

Saint-John: Such as it is. He was a great account man. A prodigy. Could talk a Scotsman out of a penny. Now that’s over.

Don: I don’t know if that’s true.

Harold Ford: The man is missing a foot. How’s he going to work? He can’t walk.

Saint-John: The doctor said he will never golf again.

Harold Ford: I’m afraid we’ll have to reevaluate our entire strategy (referring to the reorganization of Sterling Cooper.)

Saint-John: Lane will remain here permanently.

Unlike many of the “isms” that Mad Men explores, ableism isn’t one where we can look back and see many inroads. I would guess there were just as many people who watched this episode, looked at their partner on the couch and said, “Isn’t that awful,” as there were those that said, “They have a point.  In the above fictional conversation, it’s suggested that the disabled man’s life is over because he can’t play golf and golf is everything in business. Well, once again, the truth is stranger.  Casey Martin is a pro-golfer who, in 2001, needed to sue the PGA for the right to use a golf cart on the PGA Tour because of his disability — that was in 2001, not 1963.

Normally, I wouldn’t spotlight a one-off episode tackling disability issues, (countless other shows have done that in the past) but the issue was revisited this week with the introduction of Don’s mistress’s brother, Danny Farrell, who feels socially shunned because of his epilepsy. His admission to Don that he’s not going to their destination to mop floors at yet another job, says it all: “People are nice enough at first, but when you come to [consciousness], having pissed your pants, people step much more gingerly.”

Anyone with a disability who has ever gone to a job interview, where perma-grins seem fused to the interviewer’s face and everything seems just a little too fine, will tell you they often wonder what those people say about them when they leave.  While there are laws now, meant to protect people like Danny from taking to the streets, unofficially, Danny’s reality of being bounced around by a society that doesn’t know what to do with him, is still very much alive today.

Ironically, 1963 was also a banner year in firming up the rights for people with disabilities. Prior to the year this season of Mad Men inhabits, things were still a lot worse.

Institutionalization was the “catch-all” answer for the severely disabled in the 60s, but at least in 1963, lead by the Kennedy Administration, legislative improvements were beginning in America. Some highlights from The Museum of Disability History Timeline can be found below:

1963

• Mental Hygiene Facilities Improvement Fund (MHFIF) bill submitted by Rockefeller and passed by the legislature to fund the construction of facilities through the sale of government “moral obligation” bonds. Re-payment of these bonds was relegated to the families of institutional residents. The ARC of Massachusetts rejected this plan, but failed in their attempts to change the legislation.
• De-institutionalization and community services for people with mental disabilities moves another step forward when President Kennedy calls on Congress for legislation to reduce the number of individuals under custodial care in institutions.
• The “Mills-Ribicoff” Bill amends the Social Security Act to assist states and communities in preventing and combating mental retardation by providing pre-natal care and services for infants born with disabilities.
• The Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Centers Construction Act was signed by President Kennedy, providing federal grants for building public and private non-profit community mental health centers.

Mad Men is a hit. But are its ideas retrograde?

I’m a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which premiered its third season last night. The show has always occupied an awkward cultural space, both fetishizing and pathologizing its subjects: meticulously styled and artfully shot, it depicts a glossy, nostalgic vision of the early 1960s in America, but continually undermines that nostalgia, exposing the cruelties, inequities, injustices, and hatreds that flourished at the time—and many of which still do.

I enjoy watching the show—it’s some of the most assured and polished storytelling on television right now—but I feel ambivalent about it, too. At what point does showing, and commenting on, the retrograde worldview these characters live become an endorsement for it? Can you separate the aesthetic aspects—the jet-age furniture design, the architectural hairdos—from the social, political, and ethical environment from which they emerged? When I hear people talk about the show, it’s the clothes they seem to focus on: Betty Draper’s dresses, Don Draper’s grey flannel suits, the men in hats and trenchcoats, the women in gloves. I think the fashion is the least interesting part of the show; It’s the social context, glimpsed in fleeting but crucial moments, that gives Mad Men its tension, vibrancy, and meaning. The show’s strict adherence to period detail—the black washroom attendants who go tipless as their white clientele glide past; the sad marriage of frustrated closet-case Salvatore; the secretary-pinching and child-slapping and litterbugging; the pandemic alcoholism—often ends up perpetuating, or at least sanitizing, many of the same cruelties it is supposed to be demolishing.

Latoya Peterson has been doing some thought-provoking writing at Racialicious recently on Mad Men, and how the show’s treatment of black and asian characters is nearly as retrograde as that of its characters:

Are people so conditioned to ignore black narratives that any representation will do? And are people so accustomed to commentary about race coming in broad, heavy handed “racial moments” that we will ignore the lack of nuance used to portray the lives of axillary black characters?

There have been a handful of “racial moments” on the show, but it’s of the black elevator-attendant/jewish mailroom boy/sexy-geisha-waitress variety, quick cuts, and often used for comedic relief, since modern audiences supposedly know better than to buy into such ideas. But what it means functionally is that Mad Men is a show steeped—suffocating, sometimes—in whiteness.

There’s also been plenty of chatter about whether Mad Men is “feminist” because it features some women in empowered roles, a kind of prelude to the women’s lib movement that we know is coming down the road. Tom Matlack wrote in the Huffington Post in July:

As it turns out the creator of Mad Men views his show as a feminist show exactly because of its painfully accurate portrayal of the treatment of women in the workplace in the early 1960s. Weiner told me the highest praise he ever gets is when a woman approaches him after a public appearance to say she was a secretary during that era that era and the show got the sexual harassment exactly right. They always thank him for putting a spotlight on what really happened.

I suppose “getting the sexual harassment right” is a kind of accomplishment. Jezebel fleshed out the argument with 15 “feminist moments” from Mad Men. Again, in most of those cases, such as “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use,” are intended as comedy for modern audiences, but again, the ambient misogyny of Sterling Cooper often feels (literally) oppressive.

Having started its story in 1960, Mad Men started with certain necessary qualities: misogyny, racism, homophobia, and so on. I hope, and assume, that the story, now progressed to 1963, is poised to change its tone on many fronts, as the culture wars of the 1960s seep in. The ad campaign for this season, with Don Draper’s office waist-deep in water as he smokes, oblivious, hammers the point home. Frank Rich summed up my feelings in his Saturday New York Times column:

What makes the show powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it’s our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change. “Mad Men” is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next.

That’s why, despite my misgivings about the politics of Mad Men, I’ll keep watching. On the show, as in real life, a change is gonna come.