Back in the time frame of this show, there wasn’t as much of a taboo on men of Pete’s age chasing after 17-18 year old girls. Heck, half the pop-songs that came out around that time are about the practice.
Oh, no, there has been plenty of spilling beans on both sides of my marriage, and such experience and its unpleasant fallout informs my reaction. Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Bitter experience has told me that even when you are proud and excited, when you are in the company of business colleagues, you watch what you talk about.
Which is even more reason not to bring it up. Being embarrassed in front of your office acquaintances and bosses can have serious consequences.
Yeah, even more reason to keep shtum. Pete is dangerous and vindictive. You don’t let that kind of guy in on your personal life, regardless of how proud and excited it makes your spouse.
What’s a grown woman? Legal age of consent seems the best measure to me.
The lusting began long before any marriage.
You’re making them sound even more alike to me.
One thing I liked about the Lane/Joan scene was Joan’s reassurance to Lane that he’s not like the other partners. I don’t know how true that is, but it has been a running theme this season that it’s simply difficult for outsiders to relate to people like Pete and Don, whether it’s Megan embarrassing herself at Don’s party or Lane’s reaction to everything that happened with his friend.
It’s something that we actually saw with Ken at the end of last season when he refused to jeopardize his personal relationships for his job. It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that the main characters of the show are all blindly ambitious, miserable, unpleasant basket cases.
How do you know I don’t have any problem with those other guys, exactly? Roger and Don are both generally repulsive scum when it comes to their interactions with women.
I thought Don was a skeeze when he was hitting on Anna’s niece last season, and I thought Harry was a skeeze at the Rolling Stone’s concert. Middle-aged men hitting on teenaged girls is gross.
The ultimate skeeze was drunken horse’s ass Roger playing giddyup with one of the twin models, in her underwear, in the office after hours. That was a truly vomitous scene. In real life the actresses were 18. But according to some, that’s perfectly fine because they were over the ‘age of consent’.
Do you have a problem with the actresses performing that scene, or the portrayal of the characters? (By the way, I may or may not disagree with your opinion either way, but will respect it regardless–just to get that out of the way.)
My opinion of the real-life actresses doing that is it’s nothing, they’re actresses. It’s no different than an actor portraying a slave or serial killer. I’m reminded of the answer Werner Klemperer gave when someone asked how he could portray Col. Klink (and I’m paraphrasing from memory, no direct cite): “I’m an actor. It’s a part.”
Now, what that scene portrays is pretty despicable, vile, and vomitous, because it’s degrading to women. That doesn’t mean the actresses were any more degraded in real life than Levar Burton was in Roots when he wore a collar around his neck and was “whipped” for the program.
And remember also, Roger was in blackface at his Derby party, which was damned offensive as well in reality, but in the context of the show, it served to portray the character as a real sleazeball, only reinforced by the scene you’re offended by (I don’t remember which came first, but my point is the character of Roger’s a racist, misogynist asshole, but that doesn’t mean the actor(s) have to be).
There were a lot of degrading things about that scene, probably the actual riding was the worst. I didn’t think the girls’ ages were a significant issue.
…No. The minstrel number at the Derby party was NOT to show Roger as a sleazeball or even a racist. It was partly just one of those classic “Mad Men” things used to be like THIS! moments, but it also was to show how Don and Pete were different from the others in attendance. They were the only two not laughing along. Arguably for all their own issues those two are the most progressive male thinkers on the show.
I think the exchange was a bit of a wink to us viewers with knowledge of the future. Why would Wilt Chamberlain want to lay down? I can think of 20,000 reasons.
Lying down inside a stereo cabinet doesn’t work as a “has a lot of sex” joke to me.
Ditto. It was simply Pete bragging about how big it was, just because bigger was better. Wilt Chamberlain was the epitome of “big”, so it was natural to compare it to him. He was
Peggy is a writer. She clearly wants to write more than just ad copy. Some envy and such over Cosgrove’s success was quite visible. There is a hint that this might encourage her to start writing on the side. She seemed to like the SF that Cosgrove wrote. Could she actually end up being a rare (especially in the 1960s) SF writer?
They brought up Pete’s gun. He is on yet another down cycle. I think they are implying he might go postal, but I don’t think they will actually do that.
Pete thinks he’s God’s gift to the universe. Everybody must respect and admire him. All women must want to offer themselves to him. In his mind, he is perfect.
He is not without some skills and such, so he’s not a total loser, but the gap between his expectations and reality come thru from time to time. This season is building on that.
No Betty, no Sally.
I was wondering last week, when I at first thought the Chicago killer was Whitman, if they’d play with that. Just a little bit this week. What if Dick Whitman was related to Charles Whitman and there was a news report mentioning his relatives. And what if Pete sees it? Or Betty?
It was a plot point in the novel The Lonely Polygamist a couple of years ago.
The scene with the prostitute, as she’s running through various ‘personas’ was brilliant. I thought he’d like the ‘innocent virgin’ one, given his attraction to the student, but clearly it’s the ‘master of his world’ bit that gets him going.
It was also a reminder of how nowadays everything is smaller.
I do not believe that will happen, but I wish to point out that Bert, Megan, and Faye also know Don’s true identity.
I didn’t get that at all. She was just irked when she thought Ken was seeing potential clients behind her back. She was interested in Ken’s writing once she found out what was going on, but I think that’s just because she likes Ken and she’s curious about things generally. I don’t think we know that she’s written a single thing outside of ad copy, and I don’t think she has that ambition.
The thing about Pete is that while he’s a slimy, egotistical jerk, he’s not a total loser. In business matters, he’s right most of the time. SCDP wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for him, and he’s not wrong about things like Roger being useless, the benefits of advertising to blacks, doing business with the Japanese, or Lane not being able to handle sealing the deal with his friend.
That scene had me tripping down memory lane. My dad had a virtually identical stereo, and he always bragged about what a beautiful piece of furniture it was. He didn’t care much about the sound quality when he played his Mantovani records.
Not potential clients, but potential future employers.
This was a great episode, especially in contrast to last week’s which might have been the worst ever. As usual, we got lots of little references between scenes, the best of which was the story of the robot unfastening the bolt because that’s the only free action in his life and the valve tightening/loosening scenes with Pete and Don. Pete is too tightly wound and Don is finally beginning to loosen up. And humiliation is the order of the day for almost everybody - Pete, Laine, the English guy, Ken, their wives, the prostitutes.
Oddest line was from Don, who talked about having grown up in a whorehouse. That’s not what we know. His mother was a prostitute but he was brought up on a farm. Maybe that’s where he spent his missing years and that’s foreshadowing for future developments.
As for hitting on the high school girl. We’re talking about a time when the average age of first marriage for women was 20. Marrying straight out of high school was the norm. Society getting more permissive only fed into that and the attitude here that it’s skeevy for older men to think about nubile (which means of marriageable age) girls is something newer than 1966. That they weren’t married would have been more condemned than her age. Just like Jerry Lee Lewis’ third wife was far more condemned for being his cousin than for being 13.
Ken’s writing f&sf felt wrong. You can’t imagine today how much everybody looked down at the f&sf magazines. Nobody who had been published in Harper’s would condescend to that level, even if his writing was as Vonnegutian as it was made out to be. I can’t think of a single case of that happening. That’s more anachronistic than anything else in the episode.
Wilt Chamberlain was 7’1". He wouldn’t fit.