Helen Gurley Brown, Joan Halloway, and the Legacy of the Cosmo Girl

Helen Gurley Brown was not boring. She was a self created wonder who had as much a hand in creating the second wave of feminism as anybody, though nearly all the second wave feminists would be appalled to think so (as, likely would be Brown herself). In some ways, I think Brown is responsible for both the best and the worst about being a woman in these United States at the dawn of the 21st century. She is, in other words, a titan.

The best is what she accomplished for herself and her part in sexually liberating ordinary women in the United States. She grew up poor in Arkansas, moved with her family to Los Angeles as a teenager, worked in factories, and then held many secretarial jobs. Her big break came, much like Peggy Olsen's did, when she was promoted to copywriter at an ad agency. In some ways, I find it sort of risible, that in five seasons of Mad Men, Brown has never been mentioned. Her book "Sex and the Single Girl" was unleashed upon the world in 1962 and sold millions and millions of copies. I own a 1963 edition (see above) and it's a pretty remarkable piece of work. Remember, in 1962 married men and women weren't permitted to be shown sleeping in the same bed in movies or television (the first television couple shown doing so were Herman and Lily Munster!).

I think perhaps Brown is never mentioned in the Mad Men universe because the Joan Holloway of the early seasons is, in many ways, Brown's book made flesh, though Joan, unlike Brown, is both beautiful and college educated. Brown wrote that her readers should have jobs and careers, because money equals freedom, and having a career gives one something to be. Removed from its pink, exclamation point strewn trappings, these are radical and essential statements of self actualization. Brown made these ideas palatable to women who couldn't afford to take time off to find themselves, who had roommates and no college education and had never read Virginia Woolf. Brown told these women, in no uncertain terms, that wanting things is okay, that being single is probably a better time for most women than being married, and you can have sex (with multiple partners if you want!) and still be a lady. The Cosmo Girl was born. Bless her heart.

That said, Brown isn't perfect and is not only a product of her time but probably a great influence on some of the more unfortunate trends in ours. Brown was all about upward mobility, which is fabulous, but she was also all about avariciousness. In true Ad Man fashion, she was focused on surfaces and she liked those surfaces shiny. She scrimped to dress well on the way up, and advocated dressing for the job you want, something I've certainly advised, as well. But she focused on these surfaces, placing their importance above whatever was going on inside of one's head. Brown was also a dinosaur in terms of her views of the workplace. She didn't see any problem with sexual harassment, and thought women's problems with it ridiculous. In her view, any girl worth her mettle should be able to stave off unwelcome advances with aplomb and wit, much like a character Katherine Hepburn would play in the movies. Sadly, this doesn't always help. Also demonstrated by Joan as she is quietly raped on the floor of Don Draper's office by her fiance. Not everything can be solved by a saucy remark and a disdainful flip of the hair.

Brown was profoundly apolitical. She wrote of a world of her own creation and it's a remarkable place. She said you don't need to be pretty (and used herself as an example) to get men or jobs or have a great life - But you should help nature along, by surgical means if necessary. Just, no, Helen. I saw her in person in the ladies' room at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center about 20 years ago, and she looked both terrifying and twice her age because of the amount of work done. At least a small part of the blame of this society we now have, in which perfectly ordinary women are shamed into thinking they have to look like supermodels belongs to her.

Helen Gurley Brown's legacy is complicated, indeed. The most lasting part of it, I hope, is her joyful insistence that women are sexual beings, and that the best way to please a man is to enjoy oneself. That single women aren't simply women who haven't gotten married yet, or have been left behind. That their lives should be fun and exciting and, most importantly, their own.

Mad Men Season 4: With A Whimper...

Mad Men's last episode until next July (Tomorrowland) was an odd disjointed piece of work. It felt a little soap opera-y, i.e. it felt as if it was just about what was going on with the characters, rather than about something larger or something else, you know, like in art. I'm not sure what they're doing with this. I hate the idea of "shark jumping" as I pretty much reject the idea of one moment from which there is no coming back (me: an optimist! I must be in love or something.). But this has reduced me to a state of listicle again. Some thoughts:

1. The editing and pacing were sloppy as hell. Particularly compared to episodes such as the John Slattery directed The Rejected or the Sally and Miss Blankenship-centric The Beautiful Girls, which were perfect little movies and this... felt like an episode of a television show. Below is Sun Times blogger Jim Emerson's short tribute to The Rejected's use of office architecture:



2. The scene with Betty and Don in the kitchen of the house they used to share was really nice. I miss seeing them together. Not in a fan-ish, "ooh, I wish they were together" sort of way. Just that there was always something so interesting about their interactions, and I miss that exploration of a really bad marriage.

3. Which leads me to Betty. Sigh. Why does Matt Weiner hate Betty Draper so much? This season she's turned into a one-note villain without any nuances. I found her story fascinating in the first three seasons, and maybe it's more a sad statement of where I was in my life at the time, but I kind of, like, related. She was so trapped and thwarted and so viciously manipulated by Don. I found it chilling in Season 1 when she was so deeply depressed and anxiety ridden she pretty much stopped functioning. And then she started seeing her shrink, D'Hoffryn - who reported back to Don what she told him during therapy sessions, breaking doctor-patient confidentiality. I also loved that early in the series, contrary to the typical way icy blonde WASPs are typically portrayed, she was shown as a pretty fully realized sexual being. She's always been a complete disaster as a parent (to put it mildly: see below), but she had layers. The degree in anthropology, the modeling career, the fluent Italian, the desperate seeking for something outside of a marriage in which she was treated like a child. The firing of Carla was just awful, but I think my problem is we've seen so little of her story, just her effect on other characters - mostly Sally.



4. There are so few movies or television shows that really interest me, I think I sometimes fall into the trap of wanting the ones I like to do everything. One stop TV shopping. That said, I feel pretty comfortable saying that Mad Men's flirting with, and then dashing away from the issue of race is getting truly problematic. Mad Men's exploration into the lives of women in the 1960s is brilliant. But it has pretty much used its African-American characters (who appear and disappear with very little fanfare) and the Civil Rights movement to show what's going on with a bunch of white men. Which, in a show as interested in the nuances of social interactions and progress as this one is, is extremely unfortunate. From Lane's Chocolate Bunny to Paul Kinsey's posturing to Carla's constant, unremarked upon presence there are so many opportunities for portrayals of depth that aren't capitalized on. The most interesting conversation about race thus far was between Peggy and that cute writer boy she met at the warehouse art party in which they get into a fight about civil rights, women's rights and working in advertising. But it was still a discussion by a couple of white people and it never really went anywhere. Many people on the internets have been dying for a Carla-centric episode. Obviously, after her wretched dismissal by Betty, we will all likely be waiting forever. And I had totally forgotten about this, which is actually kind of remarkable in its way:



5. After all this griping, I'm now going to turn into a Mad Men apologist on the issue of the abortion that wasn't. We can all list the abortions TV characters have had because there have been so few of them. Maud. Six Feet Under. Um... Oh! Tami on The Real World: LA. Party of Five, almost, but they bowed to pressure and copped out (as per usual) with a miscarriage of some sort. Friday Night Lights. I think that's pretty much it. In the entire history on American television. IRL, something like one in three American women will have the procedure. So, yeah, discrepancy. A couple of episodes ago, Joan found out she was pregnant with Roger's child and decided to terminate the pregnancy. She made the appointment, sat in the waiting room and then we saw her on the train coming home. Speculation was rampant: did she or didn't she? We learned in the finale that she didn't. She has told her [rapist] husband that the child is his (he's off in Vietnam), and she's keeping it. Normally, I would consider this a total bullshit development. But. Joan is in her mid-thirties. She's been unsuccessfully trying to conceive for a while. It's the 60s - fertility treatment options were pretty non-existent. She's already had two abortions, and has expressed concern about whether because of this she is capable of getting pregnant (her doctor seemed unexpectedly reasonable and told her there shouldn't be a problem). So, as this particular woman has been written, keeping the child seems like a choice she would reasonably make. I don't have a problem with it (though Roger likely will).

Photobucket" border="0">

6. Who is Don Draper? I've talked about this a little bit elsewhere, but I'm beginning to think that Don Draper isn't really anybody. He's a brilliant ad man, which means he's smart and ambitious and creative. But at its center, advertising is all about insecurity and want and surfaces. Maybe Don is so freaking good at his job because no one has spent more time figuring out how to put a glossy exterior on a pretty unsellable product (i.e. Dick Whitman). No one understands the romance of it all better. As Dr. Faye said as he broke up with her after coming back engaged from a brief working vacation with his children, "And I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things." She's right about Don, and that applies just as well to how America has sold the idea of itself to itself. We like beginnings. They're simple and romantic and they're easy. Day to day is hard. Years are hard. But you don't see any of that in a thirty second clip selling the adventure of stepping on a plane or selling weddings instead of marriages. Don proposes to a twenty-five year old woman he doesn't know at all. She looks right, and seems right, but they've essentially had a vacation fling in lala land, which doesn't sound worlds away from the start of his relationship with Betty. Don is an ad man, i.e. the king of the grand gesture. He's been compulsively unfaithful to every woman we've seen him with. He compartmentalizes to an extent that can only be called pathological. One of the more interesting bits of Tomorrowland was seeing how similar Don and Betty are in their inability to see their lives as a unified whole. They're all about clean slates and fresh starts, which, fine, but fresh starts in the real world always retain some residual odor of what has come before. I'm beginning to think the character of Don Draper is a cipher. A handsome face and a shiny suit standing in for an actual person. There's something... missing. His pitch to the American Cancer Society (Roger's question, "So, did you get cancer?" was priceless) at the beginning of the episode about youth and fear of mortality, explains his crazy-seeming marriage proposal.

7. Peggy's reaction to Don's engagement announcement was the highlight of the episode. The look in her eyes was pure "what the fuck?" and his little speech to her was so completely - albeit unintentionally - insulting, the mind just reels. "She reminds me of you." "She has your spark." The silent part of that sentence was "except she's way prettier and doesn't have my number at all!" And then that completely wonderful little bitchfest between Peggy and Joan.

Photobucket" border="0">

If the two of them become allies and cohorts I will truly be in TV bliss. I am almost tempted to write the most boring fan fiction ever about how Peggy and Joan split from SCDP and form Olsen Holloway-Harris and just kill. I'd also be okay with Olsen Holloway-Harris & Cosgrove. After all, they need someone to head accounts. I think it's become pretty clear that Mad Men has duel protagonists: Don Draper and Peggy Olsen. I recently rewatched the pilot, and Don was an advertising superhero. Glamorous and smart, with a brilliance so hard it was positively chitinous. Peggy was a mousy little secretary from Brooklyn at her first day of work. In the succeeding six years or so, Don's unassailable exterior has greatly chipped away. He doesn't quite know it, but he's in Cheever-land, and possibly on the wrong side of cultural history. Peggy is all youth and smarts and ambition. She's the one at the forefront now, and it's exhilarating to watch. We'll see what happens as the 60s take hold and Vietnam heats up. Will Don Draper finally drop out and move to sunny California? Shed yet another wife for a newer, fresher start and a different kind of life? I have a feeling Peggy will wind up running SCDP one day and is on the road to becoming some kind of legend. It's fascinating television to watch, because these differently packaged creatures have so much in common, and both seem to recognize that. But the chasm that separates them will only widen as the second half of the decade progresses I think.

The Disfunctional Family Pryce

The other night while watching Mad Men, a strange feeling of familiarity crept over me. It had nothing to do with my identifying with Joan or Peggy as I so often do. I looked at Lane and went: "Huh."

Lane is an Englishman working in America who came to these shores as a functionary for a large British concern. He was clearly not particularly valued by his former employers, and really only found some sort of happiness working with a smaller, American company. It is often his job to make difficult decisions for the company, and is sometimes viewed with resentment or dislike, something he is clearly used to. But he's finally starting to make some friends and it's kind of sweet how happy he seems to be included and liked. Lane's happy new life is horribly disrupted however, by the appearance of his disapproving and abusive (and bearded) father.

The entire paragraph above could have been written about Wesley Wyndom-Pryce of Buffy/Angel fame. What is it with the fictional Pryce family of Britain? The only essential difference is that I seriously doubt that Lane Pryce's father will turn out to be a robot. For those who are less familiar with the Whedonverse, having characters turn out to be cyborgs is what the writers do when they want to explore patricidal guilt, without making their lead characters actual murderers (see also: Ted). Unfortunately, Mad Men doesn't have this option in its arsenal, so poor Lane will have to deal with his Pryce family problems the old fashioned way: with seething resentment and custodial arrangements.

Now, I'm hardly the first person to note the Whedonification of Mad Men. With Vincent Kartheiser, Christina Hendricks, Danny Strong and Marti Noxon on board, it's a little hard to miss. I looked at the credits of the actors playing both fathers Pryce, and though Roy Dotrice's (Wesley's Dad) resume is slightly more impressive (having had previous experience playing a terrible father as the elder Mozart in Amadeus), their film and TV resumes bear other similarities. They are both classically trained British stage actors, W. Morgan Sheppard (Lane's Dad) is a former RSC member and Dotrice has a Tony award. They have both worked consistently in television over the past 40 years or so. They have both voiced an impressive array of cartoon villains. But for both, a significant percentage of their incomes has been from appearances in various sci fi and fantasy franchises.

Okay. I know the similarities between the fictional families Pryce are (likely) coincidental. But looking at the long and varied careers of two character actors, neither of which most people would have heard of, is always a worthwhile venture. Both Mr. Dotrice and Mr. Sheppard have well over a hundred credits each on IMDB. Mr. Sheppard is almost 80 and Mr. Dotrice is almost 90 and both are still consistently working in TV, films and voice acting.

(Speaking of fathers and sons, I just realized that Jared Harris who plays Lane Pryce on Mad Men is Richard Harris's son!)

The World Could Use More Humorless Bitches

How much digital ink, I wonder, has been spilled in praise of Christina Hendricks and Joan Holloway, the fascinating character she plays? Gallons of pixels I warrant, and the bulk of them talk about her body. Which is glorious:

Photobucket" border="0">

Look. I'm not going to go off on a rant about sample sizes, or about various body types or parts being in or out of style (short arms are in for Fall!) or any of that, mostly because I want to write about Joan in 1965, not Christina in 2010 (though I do have a post about the fashion of female beauty aesthetics in the works, and may talk more about her there).

What I wanted to talk about was office politics or, more specifically, Joan and Peggy's respective places within Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Don Draper is a partner and the head of creative. From what I've gathered, Peggy is his second in command, hiring mostly freelancers (both copywriters and illustrators). Jonathan was hired a few episodes ago, but we haven’t really seen him since. So, all the young creatives sit around a typical writers’ room, throwing ideas around, bullshitting, the usual. It’s 1965 and the vibe is far more relaxed and laid back and, well, modern than it was at the old firm in the pre-Beatles years.

Joan is the office manager, inhabiting a space I know all too well. Upper management knows she’s invaluable: smart, ultra-competent, a born fixer. But the (mostly male) rank and file behave as if she’s just some fucking secretary who has the gall to think she’s more important than, say, some freelancer out of Harvard who could be replaced in an instant. She’s not management, not staff, not creative, but is instead in some kind of twilight zone in which she is utterly unreplacable, but ill-defined in terms of office hierarchy.

Back to the writer’s room. All of the creative team are men except for Peggy. Their room is separated from Joan’s office by a glass wall. Lots of silliness happens when they are all trying to work through problems and come up with ideas, which is inevitable and good for any creative process. The mid-sixties are far looser and more permissive in style than the 50s and most of us think of that as being a good thing, but inevitably, when certain social strictures are loosened, what comes spilling out isn’t limited to wacky brilliance, ugliness is unleashed as well. One of the freelancers in particular is a total creep. This is a dynamic most women have encountered. You are the only women in the group. Most of the men are pretty reasonable, and than one total asshole starts making all kinds of ugly, hateful sexist jokes and all the previously reasonable men join in. It’s maddening and puts you in an impossible situation. If you let it go, you die a little inside. If you complain, you are a humorless scold. You cannot win. I have personally solved this problem by not giving the tiniest damn if people thing I am a humorless scold. But, I’m almost fifteen years older than Peggy, living in very different times.

Peggy is in a quandary. Then, the creepy, creepy jerk decides he has a particular problem with Joan after she yells at the little boys in creative for screwing with the snack machine, turning their workspace into a pig sty, using her office as a through way, etc. This guy has admitted Mommy problems and goes fairly psycho. Peggy yells at him for being a jerk to Joan, and he (of course) responds by belittling her. Joan takes him aside to have a word, and he says “What exactly do you do around here besides walking around looking like you want to get raped?” This guy is a total jerk, but the thing that struck me most is that within the hierarchy of SCDP he is subordinate to both Peggy and Joan. We have a word for this and it’s called privilege. This is a person whose privilege runs so deep, he is sexually harassing his superiors, and oh my friends, this is a situation I have been in and it’s simply mind boggling.

Finally, the insufferable freelancer goes too far. He draws a cartoon of Joan giving someone a blowjob and tapes it to the window of her office. It’s always struck me how men like that are so adept at zeroing in on someone’s insecurities. Joan is the most competent person imaginable, but her former sexual relationship with Roger Sterling puts her in s slightly unfortunate position in terms of power dynamics. Both Joan and Peggy absolutely lose it, understandably. Joan storms in and tells all the boys that when they get drafted and go to Vietnam and get killed she, for one, will be happy about it. Not nice, no, but her husband is being deployed that week and she’s been pushed pretty far.

Peggy goes to Don. This is where it gets really interesting. He clearly doesn’t think it’s that big a deal and really doesn’t want to deal with it. But in deflecting the situation away from him, gives Peggy some excellent advice. He says: ”Fire him.” When she looks taken aback he says (okay, I’m paraphrasing), “If I fire him, you’ll look like a tattletale. Is that what you want?” Peggy calls the asshole freelancer aside and tells him that he’s behaving inappropriately and that he needs to apologize to both her and Joan. He refuses and makes yet another smart remark, clearly not understanding that he is, in fact, talking to his boss. So Peggy fires him. It’s awesome. He clearly doesn’t believe she has the authority to do so as she’s sporting a vagina and all. So he says, we’ll see what Don has to say about that. She responds, “Don doesn’t even know who you are.” And at that moment her eyes are shooting off magical feminist laser beams of power and it’s just thrilling.

The final grace note of the episode is what really makes it. Peggy is clearly buzzing from the excellent firing and gets on the elevator with the still clearly upset Joan. Peggy obviously wants to share a happy “ding dong the manwitch is dead” moment with her, but Joan is having none of it. She tells Peggy she could have handled it herself by having one dinner with the client and having a private word with him and Peggy, by doing what she did has only proved that Joan is “just some powerless secretary and that she [Peggy] is a humorless bitch”. Poor Joan. She’s basically espousing that age old anti-feminist rhetoric that women can get whatever they want through their feminine wiles and getting men to act for him. And this is a perfect example why I have exactly zero problem with being a humorless bitch. As I discussed in a previous blog post about calling a woman a stupid slut, there are the same three reasons to call a woman a humorless bitch:

1. To shut her up.
2. To discredit what she's saying or doing
3. To humiliate her.
   

What Peggy really needs to do, is to hire more women. Seriously.

I Never Realized The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Was Quite That Exciting

I hate writing blog posts that do nothing but tell you why there are no blog posts, so I hope it will suffice to say that a veritable barrage of posting is on its way.

Also - I don't have much to say about Mad Men last night, except that my obsession with Betty may be waning, and Peggy is still in ascendancy (because, you know, it's all about me). I watched Mad Men obsessively, catching up on three seasons after the break up with my ex last winter. I felt terribly sorry for Betty, and was sort of all invested in her story. But TPTB in Mad Man Land clearly hate her, and are turning her into a monster. But Peggy just gets more and more delightful. I will leave you with this lovely, dreamy, pop-y image:



And poor Sally. She really is going to be a mess, isn't she? Shooting smack in the bathroom at CBGB, maybe? If any kid needs "Free To Be, You And Me" it's Sally Draper. Although they did leave out the song about how it's okay being caught masturbating by your friend's mom at a sleepover while watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

I Love Television (But My Heart Belongs To Peggy Olson)

One of my least favorite bits of typical small talk is when someone (probably me) mentions something about a TV show and the person I'm speaking with is all "I have no idea what you're talking about [peasant. the "peasant" is usually silent.] I don't watch television." And then I really, really want to be like Jules in Pulp Fiction and reply, "But you are aware that there is an invention called television, and on this invention there are shows" and continue on with what I was talking about. Now, saying "I don't watch television" for the purposes of snootiness is no longer just obnoxious, it's also ignorant as hell. As anyone with half a brain has realized, we are in the midst of a Golden Age. Over the past decade television has finally come into its own as the brilliant novelistic story-telling device it has always had the potential of being. Novelistic being the operative word. In other words, the medium is no longer the message. What is currently being done in the maligned medium is nothing short of thrilling. Particularly in light of how dreadful most American movies are right now. The fact that I feel the need to still point this out is ridiculous.

Thus far, the 4th season of Mad Men has been a little slow to get moving. In semi-related news, my high school English teacher made a big point of telling us how most of the sixties were really just like the fifties, and it was only in the second part of the decade that things started to change. In Mad Men Land it is now February of 1965, and things are changing fast and the lines in the sand are being drawn. Those lines aren't yet impassable walls, and clearly one can still travel back and forth across them. It will be interesting to see who lands where, but it's becoming clearer and clearer each episode.

Peggy's role this season has been somewhat downplayed and disappointing. She has a new (creepy) boyfriend who manipulated her into having sex with him, and other than that, hasn't had a great deal to do. But the most telling scene in the first three episodes is when she was discussing the Ponds campaign with Freddie Rumsen and she grows increasingly frustrated with his ideas that she calls "old fashioned". In this week's episode, "The Rejected", she really comes into her own for the first time this season and it made for incredibly exciting viewing. Peggy meets Joyce, a young photo editor at Life Magazine on the elevator and they become friendly. Subsequently, Joyce invites her to a cool art party downtown. It's pretty clear that Joyce is a lesbian and one wonders if Peggy knows this. The party is lots of fun. They get high. Joyce tries to kiss Peggy, who laughs it off and this delightful exchange happens:

Peggy: I have a boyfriend.
Joyce: He doesn't own your vagina.
Peggy: No, but he's renting it.

They watch a friend's experimental film. They meet Cute Art Boy and Pretentious Photographer (who asks Peggy how she can take advertising seriously after Warhol). The cops bust up the party and Peggy hides in a closet with Cute Art Boy, who brags to her about how he was arrested at a sit in. She asks him if he went to jail, and he sheepishly admits, "No, my sister came and got me." Peggy and Joyce run down the street away from the warehouse, holding hands and laughing. It's a lovely little scene and one of the few in the entire series where you see just how young Peggy is and how capable and desperate for joy she is.

Peggy's story is contrasted to great effect with Pete's. He finds out his wife is pregnant and he is thrilled. Happiness aside, it seems to make him grow up right in front of us. He is clearly unhappy and embarrassed by how much his in-laws have done for him financially and career-wise. By the end of the episode he is playing hard ball with his father-in-law, more or less strong arming him into bringing Cooper Sterling Draper Pryce the whole Vicks line. He already looks five years older than Peggy. Her reaction to his wife's pregnancy is so emotionally spot on. At the end of Season 1, she gave birth to Pete's child and gave it up for adoption, and hurt and shock register on Peggy's face that was likely unexpected even to her when asked to sign an office "Congratulations!" card. I hate the phrase "closure", but it sure looks a little like that when she goes into his office and congratulates him herself.

And what about Don? He looms over this episode like a drunken éminence gris. Don Draper isn't a person. He's a fictional character created by Dick Whitman, and as the trappings of the Don Draper construct get stripped away, one can argue that "Don Draper" ceases to exist. He's all glamour and smarts, with a beautiful family and the money to support them and their beautiful life. Don Draper in a dingy furnished apartment downtown isn't really "Don Draper" at all, and Draper/Whitman knows it and is cracking up. He's spiraling badly, and the jokey, glamorous drinking and womanizing of the first couple of seasons is turning ugly. He's aging visibly, and drinking to blackout nightly, and making bad decisions and fucking up. Last night someone referred to him as "a drunk" for the first time. The slick, old style glamour of the post-war years has fallen into decadence and is out of fashion, and I don't know that "Don Draper" as a construct can survive the sea change. Peggy sees it happening, and this might be my favorite moment of the whole episode:



At the end of the episode, Pete stands in the lobby of Sterling Cooper with the suits from Vick. It could be a scene from any point in the previous 30 years. Peggy looks on from the other side of the glass office wall, surrounded by her new friends who couldn't exist in any time other than 1965.

Convenience Food and The American Dream: Don Draper Knows All

How did this happen? How? How did something like Jell-O (tm) salad get classified as something that was desirable, or even edible? How did we as Americans start cooking with condensed soup? Why the convenience revolution? Wait. I fucking love convenience. So why am I complaining?

Many years ago à propos of nothing, a very good friend asked me, "Did your mother cook with soup?" I looked at her blankly for a moment, and then replied, "Yes. My mother cooked with soup." Apparently, her boyfriend's mother did not, and he was horrified when she explained what she meant (side note: his family were very rich WASPs from Connecticut and, though their ways are foreign to me, after having met his mother, I'm willing to bet she did, in fact, cook with soup). Convenience foods are sneered at. They are processed, unnatural, and most damning of all, low class. We jeer at repulsive recipes like Monterey Soufflé Salad and Jellied Bouillon With Frankfurters - and rightfully so, as both hot dogs and seafood should be segregated from gelatin products forever. But I think it might be time to reappraise convenience in light of their interesting historical context.

Okay. Picture this. You have to make dinner for your family. If you are super lucky, it is a family of three or four. Even more lucky (and even more unlikely) you have servants to do this for you, or at least to assist. You must make sure the stove is fired up with either coal or wood (depending on where or when you live), you must go to the market and buy your food as the refrigerator has not yet been invented. If the ice box has, you must make sure you have actual ice to keep things cold. If you live in a city, the ice man comes around and you better hope you can afford to pay him. If you don't live in a city, I honestly have no idea. You might have to kill, pluck, gut, or skin something. Because of the whole refrigeration issue things like cooking fat might be rancid. Nothing (or almost nothing) comes in packages, greatly limiting your meal planning choices. If you have gone completely mad and decide you want a yummy congealed salad (the unappetizing name for salads made out of gelatin before the ascendancy of Jell-O(tm)), it would involve the boiling of bones and feet of dead animals. You may want to review the aspic section of Julie & Julia to get an idea. Basically, the whole cooking process was a messy, difficult, time intensive nightmare.

Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries various products and appliances were invented and marketed, making the whole business infinitely easier and quicker. Part of the quid pro quo of what we usually now jokingly refer to as "labor saving", was the emancipation of women. Wives have always been stuck doing the endless, time consuming, sucky tasks, and things like the blender, frozen TV dinners, instant mashed potatoes, and those handy little packets of Jell-O(tm) must have been just great. The dawn of a new era. Middle class housewives now had the time to take a yoga class. Go back to college. March against the war. Or, like, shop. See, good for everyone and prosperity reigned.

So, what happened to our new Eden made of freedom and astronaut food? The natural food movement happened, hippies happened. Sally Draper came home from Stanford and turned her little nose up at the Ambrosia Salad of her childhood. She worried about her children eating vegetables covered in pesticides. She worried about big agro and corn subsidies. And suddenly, people were plucking and gutting and cooking with whole grains, but this time around all the best people were doing so, and the lower middle class and the working poor were eating convenience food that they would take home on their way back from ten hour shifts at Wal-Mart as they couldn't afford and didn't have the time to prepare the grass finished beef or the organic spinach covered in sand that Sally brought home to her children after volunteering at the co-op.

One day, Sally had her father over for dinner, and after chowing elegantly down on the lime marinated grilled free range chicken breast, quinoa pilaf and wilted bitter greens, he lit up a cigarette ("Daddy. The kids."). He stepped outside and looked at the Manhattan skyline as the sun went down.

"Free range." He said.

"What's that?"

"You bought free range chicken. Why?"

"The antibiotics. And fewer chemicals. It's less cruel."

"That's what everyone says when asked that question. Less cruel. Fewer antibiotics. But do you know exactly what free range chickens are?"

"Daddy-"

"The first person who uttered the phrase "free range chicken" aloud was someone like me, and he did so in a pitch meeting. I'm sure someone suggested "more humane" and someone else said "less cruel" and lots of other people spoke about mangled feet and mass production and about how this product was different. Then, someone in the room, someone like me, remembered that advertising isn't about negatives. It's not even about specifics. It's about the feelings it causes in the consumer. It's about happiness. You say fewer chemicals -"

"There are fewer chemicals -"

"Maybe. But that doesn't matter. You bought this chicken because it made you feel better about yourself. Buying this chicken made you feel, just a tiny bit, like you were a part of a lost America, an America -"

"Daddy, are you drinking again?"

"Ha ha. Think about the phrase 'Free Range'. What does it make you think of? What do you picture inside your head? The great expanses of the West. Cattle. Mountains. A lost vision of farms and settlers and America as we want it to be, an America as it should be. A John Ford vision of a past that never was. That's what 'free range' means to people. That's why people feel good about buying this ordinary, everyday chicken, that was raised in an ordinary farm upstate. Maybe they use fewer chemicals, maybe it is less cruel, that's fine. But "free range" doesn't actually mean anything. It's no different than calling a drink mix 'space age'. They're just words that make you feel better about yourself, and about the world we live in which is cruel, which uses chemicals, in which things die. The words 'free range' make us forget that - for the few short minutes between when you read the label, and when you hand your credit card over to the checkout girl"

"Wow."

"And the product is far more expensive, which lends an air of exclusivity to this pioneer dream. It never fails."

Incidentally, a new season of Mad Men premiers on AMC this Sunday, July 25.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

In a strangely post-apocalyptic turn of events, Caviglia found herself alone in a barren landscape and wondered at the evidence of the hasty - and possibly coerced departure of the picnickers.

"Thank God, I have a martini! Wait...is that a zombie?"

"GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!", replied the zombie.

"I'm out of vermouth, have any extra?"

"GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

Caviglia, sighed. "Straight gin it is! Bottoms up!"

"GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

"You're cute."

Mad Men Yourself