What is with the New York Times Magazine? First they publish a 7,000-word essay without a drop of cultural analysis in it as a cover story. Then they deliver an equally lengthy look at "Mad Men" that entirely misses the point of its subject. I guess that's what happens when you send a woman to do a man's job--or send a woman who doesn't get men to write about what men want. In theory, the piece offers up a look behind the scenes at the TV story of ad men in the early '60s from one of the guys behind "The Sopranos." But writer Alex Witchel, whose husband Frank Rich wrote an equally vapid, keep-the-story-at-arm's-length-at-all-times piece on the adult film industry years ago, just doesn't get it. "Mad Men" is man porn--the pornography of manhood--and not in the pejorative sense. At its heart, "Mad Men" works not because it's about the culture of ad execs in the sixties; it works because it's a fantasy about the time before feminism, when men were men, period. "Mad Men" works for the same set of reasons that "The Sopranos" worked--by painting gender roles in black and white--and the result of transgressing into this bawdy, martini-ed, lying, cheating, dirty, loving life is pleasure. I don't know what's up with the so-called gender wars these days, but whatever's going on, it's a mess. The New Jezebels act like the girl in "The Exorcist," their heads forever spinning because they can't make up their minds if they want to spend all their time trashing men, whining about how oppressed they are by magazines, or blogging about how many times they got fucked last night--so they end up doing all three at the same time. That'd leave men kind of... confused, wouldn't it? No wonder the international mobile porn business is fast becoming a $20 billion a year business; men have to have something to look at that's not so fucking complicated. The shortcomings of "Mad Men" are few and far between, but what it lacks it lacks because it isn't hard enough, likely because it's on AMC, not HBO. Either way, men will take their pleasures where they find them. Anything's better than listening to the endless stream of static coming from the mouths of 21st century women who can't decide if they're feminists or freaks.
