I’m not sure that that’s what he’s showing. Sally’s forays into sexuality seem to have arisen on their own, haven’t they? What aspects of their sexuality have Don or Betty inappropriately exposed Sally to?
I agree that there has definitely been increasing sexualization of Sally. Some of it is overt, like her masturbating, or enjoying Glenn’s attention or kissing that boy in an earlier season (although that is more innocent). And didn’t she ask Phoebe if she and Don were having sex, and going into detail about the process (boy pees inside girl)? Some of this is just natural impending adolescence.
I think some of it more subtle, like as posters upthread mentioned, her wearing Don’s t-shirt and cooking him breakfast. She is a very astute child and seems to be picking up on that the women who get most of Don’s attention are romantically or sexually involved with him, and is maybe trying to also wrangle herself somehow into that category.
I actually kind of wonder if this is so abnormal for young attention-seeking daughters of very attractive and charming skirt-chasing men. To sort of emulate a potential sexual partner to get attention.
I didn’t say they might be improper. I’m just wondering what he’s attempting to show. Perhaps it’s just his take on what kids go through when parents are dysfunctional, dad’s a whore-hound and mom’s borderline abusive.
Or maybe it’s just naturally blooming sexuality in the context of the sexual revolution.
I can’t believe a 10-year-old in 1965 had any concept of the sexual revolution. First, almost none of it had happened yet. Second, where would she have learned of it? From the Internet? It wasn’t even a topic for most adult magazines and newspapers. Certainly there would be nothing that a 10-year-old would have noticed.
Whatever first glimmers of the changing world that a few of the adults in the office are starting to confront would have been far beyond an elementary school student. Anything that Sally is going through is because of the life she’s living in her house, not because of the outside world.
She’s 10 in 1965? Hey, she’s a year older than me!
Sexual revolution aside, growing up in the 80s (born 1978) all sorts of sexual rumors flew around when I was an elementary school kid. The man peeing in the woman sounds about like the kind of thing that we would’ve tossed around back then–kinda gross, not entirely right but not completely off the mark either. I know it’s uncomfortable watching this stuff on TV, and I don’t even care to think about how they directed Shipka during the masturbation scene, but I don’t think kids were so hermetically insulated from all things sexual during the early 1960s that it’s unthinkable we’d be seeing this kind of behaviour absent some nefarious explanation.
:dubious:
What does any of this have to do with it? She doesn’t have to be aware of any of this as a concept or as a societal trend and neither does anyone around her.
This seems to be a pretty naive view of a child’s life. She lives in a society. She eschew television. More important than anything else, she goes to school. Interest in talking and learning about sex started way before the age if 10 when I was a kid. And Sally has been shown to be aware of these things to some extent since the beginning of the show. Furthermore there is absolutely zero reason to believe that she has picked any of this up through interactions with her parents. Don and Betty don’t talk about sex in front of her and they certainlly haven’t been shown exposing her to sex and they wouldn’t need tomhave done to explain Sally’s qctons thus far sUsing my own childhood as an example, so far nothing Sally has done seems out of the ordinary.
Well, I think she has a sense of Don’s philandering, certainly through comments her mother has made, and that might make her more “aware” of sex in general than your average ten year old whose parents have boring sex lives.
I’m with those of you who are having trouble telling characters apart. I am having the same problem, with men and women. The only people I can identify right off the bat are Peggy, Don, Bert, Harry, Sal and Roger. I am more comfortable with Pete now but early on he kept blending in.
I honestly scratched my head a few weeks ago when they did those flashback scenes and Roger was with Joan. Not being the hot redhead amidst a sea of “plain Jane” secretaries, I lost track of her.
Duck and Cosgrove? Forget about it. I didn’t have a clue that he was the fellow yelling at the awards banquet. I had no idea that Cosgrove guy still worked for Don. Or does he? There’s the one dude who left and went to dinner with Pete last week and the dude who was in the conference room this week. Bwah?
I really need to pay attention when I watch the show, and often don’t figure out what’s going on until a scene or two later. Or when I come here and read everyone else’s thoughts 
Re: the hugging secretary, I thought that was the girl Don fucked too. I think I didn’t figure it out until it randomly popped into my head that her leaving was a major plot point a few eps back.
TV that makes me pay attention… shakes fist !!!
I just watched all of Sally’s scenes twice, and I’m just not getting any sexualized camerawork. I don’t see long, lingering shots of her thighs (and no shots of her inner thighs or posterior). Mostly we’re seeing her legs from the knees down, and it doesn’t seem particularly sexualized to me.
No need to obsess, friend. It’s just an opinion.
I’m only testing this point because if it’s a show about the sexual abuse of Sally or the inappropriate sexualization of her by the adults around her, then it would seem to be a very different show than the show I think I’m watching, one suggesting things far more sinister. And, frankly, less interesting, too. If Henry, Betty, and Don are sexual abusers of a child, then they lose their position as depictions of realistically flawed people in a nuanced and subtle drama and instead become villains in a thriller.
We’ve seen that Weiner doesn’t flinch when he wants to show sexual assault or other inappropriate or questionable sexual activity. If the Sally scenes are suggesting that Sally is being sexually mistreated then they are well disguised.
I think the thing about character recognition in this show is that the show doesn’t give the viewer all the cues that other shows tend to. Because the show is relatively true to life, a lot of characters do dress pretty similar, have similar hairstyles, and even look like one another (no wonder that secretaries at these places would tend to be young, thin, and pretty). Also, characters tend to show up without much fanfare, often at the periphery. I’m better at distinguishing the men than I am the women, but even I wasn’t sure whether or not I just saw Duck when he dunkenly stood up at the Cleo’s.
Likewise, I think the “sexualization” of Sally is only notable because other shows treat children her age as completely non-sexual beings (for the record, I didn’t register anything remotely skeevy about the way she was shot in this episode).
I think any suggestion that Sally is suffering sexual abuse at anyone’s hands is way, way off the mark.
My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I don’t recall hinting that any of the characters are sexually abusing Sally. Betty has slapped her and threatened her with cutting her fingers off, and both parents have grabbed her roughly, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest sexual misconduct. My only question is about why the writer/director (s) are even exploring pre-teen sexuality unless it’s part of the plotline. The masturbation scene was gratuitous, IMO.
I think part of it is the show just looking at pre-teen frankly (and at all, which is unusual). Sally’s masturbation isn’t at all unusual for someone her age, and that’s an escalation from how she was playing house with and kissing (neighborhood boy, whoever he was) last season.
Sally’s sexual expression seems to be at least partly one of her ways of dealing with what’s going on with her parents.
I felt the same way. I thought “the hugging secretary” was the same one that delivered Don’s keys and was totally confused at first because they made such a big deal about her blow-up and leaving, but not a word that she stayed. So, yes, Allison & Megan look very much alike to me. So there.
But wasn’t the point of that episode that that every woman wasn’t one of two types? With Peggy being a signal exception and Don offering Irene Dunne for her?
Btw, it was the second season: “Maidenform”.
Onto the 4th page already and no one has brought up Don’s backsliding?
I knew when he opened the journal we wasn’t going to write anything. If he wrote, we’d get a voiceover and that doesn’t fit with this episode. And indeed he didn’t write a word.
He went ahead and ate the rum-covered French toast and also started drinking Faye’s drink.
He wasn’t ready to sleep with Faye but forget about all that.
Don Draper is back.
Re: Faye and Sally. Faye is all about control. She knows how to control adults. Kids are a wild card. So she freezes up. What was the line? Something like “Hi Sally, I’m Dr. Faye. Remember me from yesterday?”
Mrs. Blankenship was destined for a short-lived story arc. The scene with her getting moved was great. It fits in nicely with Roger’s frustration about his book being unfavorably compared to Ogilvy’s. Haven’t read that one but I have read Jerry Della Femina’s From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (1971). The Blankenship story would have been great in a Della Femina-style book.
Peggy telling off the writer-wannabe was great. Shows a lot of growth on her part.
I don’t think he ever intended to go cold turkey.
I don’t think he ever intended to avoid sleeping with her forever. Some amount of time has passed. The show doesn’t show us each and every turn. He wasn’t ready then. We don’t need to see exactly when he became ready.