Roger knows it’s his. It’s better for Joan (and for Roger) if he doesn’t acknowledge this. Joan doesn’t have a particularly fancy lifestyle, and she was doing fine on her own. She’ll go back to work and her mom will take care of the baby. If Joan divorces Greg, he’ll have to support the child – he’s legally the father – and the military will make sure he does.
As for Betty and her sudden weight loss, if she did have a thyroid problem and it was corrected, those pounds might drop off fairly quickly.
Um, sometimes people are very unambiguously raped without suffering any major short or long term physical, mental, or emotional effects. That doesn’t mean that they don’t believe that they were violated, and their failure to curl up and cry suitably for the audience doesn’t mean that other people should believe they weren’t violated.
As for why Joan married Greg after the rape - society at the time dictated that Joan needed a husband, Greg, on paper, was the perfect catch, and I don’t think she regarded what Greg did to her as “rape,” or particularly unusual. Joan is smart and strong, but she doesn’t exist outside the confines of her world. She did everything she was supposed to do with Greg, even though every step she took (marrying Greg, leaving Sterling Cooper, working in the department store) made her more and more unhappy.
And also, I don’t think Joan hated Greg. I think she genuinely liked, and maybe loved him most of the time.
One of the major things we know about Joan from Season 1 was that she was desperate to be married well and that she considered herself nearing “stale on the shelf” status.
They didn’t need to show us any such thing. People can be nuanced and subtle and so can shows.
We don’t know that Joan “unambiguously believed he raped her.” She may not have used that word at the time.
The long term effect: The ugly event was still preying on her mind years later, while she was considering what do do about her marriage. It helped her decide to kick him out.
He probably made a wild guess that she didn’t follow through some time after she gave birth.
As someone else said, I also thought that Joan was referring to the fact that he normally had trouble getting it up when she made the “real man” comment.
Yep. Also, I don’t recall the timing, but I think Joan had strong feelings for Roger and was disappointed when he married that young secretary. That’s another thing that would have pushed her toward settling for Greg.
She lost respect for Greg fairly quickly. Didn’t he get turned down for a prestigious surgical position and whine like a baby? Then he forces her to play the accordion in front of people. It’s one thing to sit down at the baby grand for guests, but an accordion? Plus, he didn’t want her to work. But most of all, Greg didn’t put Joan on a pedestal – rather, he tried to knock her off, showing that he didn’t respect her very much either.
But finally, knowing that your husband would rather be in Viet Nam than home with a hot wife and a new baby? Nuh uh. Whatever feelings she might have been able to dredge up so she could make peace with her situation, she couldn’t live with that.
She made a comment about his not being a “good man.” I think she was referring to the rape (or aggressive, non-consensual fiancee sex), not the fact that he couldn’t get it up.
Pete Campbell and the au pair? Don’s “negotiation” with that comedian’s wife/manager? This ain’t a Doris Day movie.
And sadly, there was some ambiguity. Prior to this, we’d never seen Joan in an overtly sexual situation. Suddenly, she’s in two of them, back to back, and we are definitely intended to compare them. In the decades before “Take Back the Night” and “No Means No,” there was a lot of interpretational wiggle room between “I don’t want sex with you” and “You’re mussing my dress and makeup.” And fifteen years before John and Greta Rideout, spousal rape was a pretty murky gray area.
I don’t buy that it’s rape if there’s no major physical, mental, or emotional effects to it. Where is the crime there? That’s at worst, a sexual assault of some degree. People can have sex that they maybe didn’t want to have at the time, or woke up the next morning and regretted, and it’s not always rape. And yes, I believe that date rape and married rape and all that exist. But kinda sorta maybe not wanting to have sex one night but not making a scene over it and the other person wants it so you give in is not rape.
Let me ask you this:
What if my husband comes to me, wants sex, I say “no, not tonight” once or twice, not very forcefully, and he won’t leave me alone and we end up having sex. Is that rape?
Does your answer change if:
a) I wake up the next morning feeling mildly pissed off at him for not leaving me alone, but not so pissed off that I do anything beyond saying “you were a jerk last night”
or
b) I wake up the next morning thinking to myself “boy, I didn’t think I wanted to have sex last night, but he really blew me away! That was great!”
But your scenario is not what happened. What happened is that Greg overpowered Joan with physical force and forced himself inside of her, ignoring her pleas for him to stop and taking advantage of her wish not to be humiliated by being found by someone else. The reason she was not injured is because he was sufficiently stronger than her that he could restrain her without having to hit her.
I should go back and watch the scene, because, I admit, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember it being that forceful. What you describe is absolutely rape.
What I was reacting to was not the scene itself, but what DianaG posted. And I’m going to stop posting about it because regardless of if it’s rape or not, it’s definitely a thread hijack.
I think that Joan will go to Roger and tell him she and Greg have split up and allow him to draw the conclusion that she needs more money, and he will arrange a raise so she can support herself and his son. (Even if he has to somehow supply it out of his own pocket under the guise of a raise.) I don’t see her coming right out and asking him, but this seems like a logical turn of events.
I figured the writers were just being clever; by him calling Joan his baby.
I figure he just assumed she was fucking her fiance in tandem. I certainly would have in his shoes.
Ahh, this clears up a lot. I’m still not 100% sure Roger knows, but if he does it makes perfect sense that neither would acknowledge it. Although…he only has one daughter, correct? It is 1965 and men still care about reproducing men, so he could start caring later. I see a potential story seed planted…
I am totally baffled by any confusion regarding the scene in which Greg raped Joan. Over her protests, he physically restrained her and forced her to the ground. Nearly sobbing and clearly frightened, she tried to get him off of her unsuccessfully, and finally she accepted what was happening and basically just left her body (which is a reaction I’ve heard is common among rape survivors).
That is completely unlike Don and Megan’s sub/dom games, or whatever, and it is certainly not a case of Joan deciding later that she shouldn’t have done it. She had zero choice in the matter and had the options of either submitting to the rape, or shouting for help. The latter option likely would have been even worse for her.
Again, it is not at all clear to me that Joan at the time realized that she had been raped. Given societal standards and laws at the time, this might not have even been that unexpected or unusual.
