The realisticness of Mad Men?

Cafe Society
41

The office environment is completely different today - all the way up to the top. Sure, there can still be office affairs - stuff happens whenever you put men and women together. But women aren’t treated like sex objects, and they’re just as likely to be the boss anyway.

In my company, our divisional CEO is a woman, our engineering manager is a woman, her boss is a woman, and we have women in senior roles throughout the company. We are forced to take mandatory sexual harassment training, including upper management. Woe to the guy who slaps a woman on the butt or propositions her when she’s clearly not interested, or tells her a dirty joke, or in any other way makes her feel harassed. It’s a career killer.

Really, corporate life is nothing like it was back then. It’s almost puritan. We’re constantly being cajoled about fitness and charity work, there’s no smoking anywhere, you don’t dare take a drink even at lunch, you don’t tell dirty jokes, and you don’t swear unless the only people around are close teammates and they’re all cool with it.

We even have ‘women’s issues’ support groups and minority support groups. Men are allowed to join the women’s support groups, because otherwise it would be discriminatory. You’re allowed time off from work to attend your support group meetings. Political correctness runs amok.

Before we were bought out by a big corporation, we used to have an employee lounge where we had a half-sized beer fridge. The rule was that you could have a beer after work if you wanted. Never on the job, and never at lunch. But if you were done for the day and you wanted to hang around and chat and have a beer in the lounge, that was fine. When we were bought out, the big company was horrified when they found out about it. The beer fridge was the first casualty of the takeover.

42

IME (working in an office enviroment for several Fortune 500 companies over the past 21 years), I’d concur.

No one has “secretaries” anymore; they’re administrative professionals now. Very, very few do typing anymore (though, at the very highest levels, they still may), since, as Spoons notes, virtually everyone types up their own stuff now.

When I started working, in 1989, my boss handed me a Dictaphone, and told me, “learn how to use it.” Never really did; I far preferred typing my own memos and reports. In the ad agency where I work now, there might be a handful of old-timers who still dictate memos, but they’re the exception to the rule.

We have a fair number of adminstrative professionals who have chosen it as a career (my own assistant, who is my age (mid-40s), has been with the agency, as an assistant, for 25 years). But, the norm is more young people who do it for a few years to get some job experience before moving up to something bigger.

I’ve never been aware of anyone hitting on an administrative professional in any of my jobs. Not to say that there haven’t been plenty of in-office affairs, but they were all between two salaried folks (i.e., not assistants).

43

And all the ads now suck.

44

Well, it must be said that my assistant wishes I’d dictate more often. However, after 20+ years of drafting my own letters and memos, she recognizes that I can probably compose a formal letter faster by typing than I can do the same by speaking; and so is happy to take a text draft of letters or memos in an e-mail. She puts it on letterhead, brings it to me for review, approval, and signng, and we’re both happy. Now, if we could only do something about the senior partners who still (erroneously, in my case) believe that dictating is faster than typing, we’d be fine.

45

So his experience was of 1975 then and the people he knew who had been adults in 1962. It’s still not some kind of definitive proof that “No way X happened in 1962.” Society doesn’t change that fast and it doesn’t change at the same rate in all locations. Hell, there are some workplaces even now that have throwback atmospheres. That’s why there are still “hostile workplace environment” lawsuits.

“Mad Men” has been the subject of extensive media coverage. In one interview, a prominent ad man from the 1960s says “Nah, my ad firm wasn’t like that,” and in a different interview, another prominent ad man from the 1960s says “Actually, it was worse.”

The range of human experience within a society is broad enough that it’s it’s ridiculous to say “There just weren’t people like that 40 years ago.” Forty years isn’t that long. If such people exist now, it’s certain that some of them existed back then.

Some of the criticisms I’ve heard about “Mad Men” along these lines are ludicrous – “Nobody ever went jogging on the streets.” “No teacher would ever have an affair with a parent in 1963.” “No upper class housewife would have dumped picnic garbage on the ground.”

Really? I mean, really? Rudeness would have been called for?

46

They don’t know how people thought in the sixties! I know how people thought in the sixties!

47

Watching Mad Men is this sort of weird (not completely unpleasant) flashback.
MM may be exaggerated and/or inaccurate (my dad loved the Mets, and I can still sing the Meet the Mets song) but I enjoy it.
In 1965 I was 11 years old, and living on Long Island.
My dad commuted to NYC every day, first Mad Avenue, then Wall Street.
I remember the fedora well.
Not to mention those pointy breasts and teased hair.
My parents were big drinkers and smokers, and there was a lot of partying going on, but our world was not exactly Ice Storm material.

48

And, it must be said, they democratized it. Women who were sexually open before the 60s were invariably either on top of the class system or outside it entirely. It was a privilege of being independent of a man’s keep —and that was neither a choice nor a desire for most women before then.

One way in which MM is period-realistic is that married women’s extramarital affairs were much less apparent in the culture than men’s. Yes, they went on, but many more strings were attached - whether children were involved or not, the risk of social ruin was much higher for a wife. Surely a lot of it was not even acknowledged - the idea made people that much more uncomfortable than with a husband.

And I don’t think the show questions that moral stance. Because today, we have somewhat more of a double-standard about infidelity than we did during the hippie era. If comtemporary viewers didn’t resonate to anything beyond the cars, clothes, and cocktails, Mad Men wouldn’t even be on.

49

Yes, because dancing packs of cigarettes was so non-sucky.:stuck_out_tongue:

Most ads sucked back then, too. In fact the greatest ads of the last decade are likely better than the ads of previous decades.

50

-The ad firm gets the contract from a new car firm (Edsel Motors)…to tout their new supercar!
I’d love to see how they would gild that turd!:smiley:

51

  1. Edsel was a division of Ford.

  2. It came out in 1958, before this show is set.

/pedantry :slight_smile:

52

Of course. As I said, I agree with you on this.

53

Also,

I think perhaps the problem is that some people are trying to view the show as some kind of documentary of generic early 60s New York-area middle-class life, taking every element of the show as intended to illustrate archetypal behavior of the era. When, of course, it is actually first and foremost meant to be an entertaining drama, and a show in which no one does anything which isn’t utterly mainstream is not only arealistic, but also hardly entertaining.

54

There are people doing all kinds of things in every era. Usually, though, the atypical ones were very few, very isolated, and usually just ignored, because we didn’t have any internet then, and your quality of life really did depend on what people in your place and social set knew and cared about. Especially after the postwar boom put lots of people on the same page, socially and economically, it didn’t take much to be an oddball.

55

I was one year old in 1960, and grew up in West Virginia, so I can’t say I’m an authority on what Madison Avenue execs did then.

But the audio commentary on the DVDs outlines some great pains they make to get details right. A lot of things are subjective, and hard to know for certain. But I do remember that people expressed racist and sexist opinions that would make people’s jaws drop today.

One of my favorite examples of this is a line by the ficticious comedian Jimmy Barrett, nee Jimmy Brownstein. At a party, Jimmy is telling Betty Draper that he believes her husband Don is having an affair with Jimmy’s wife. The prim and proper Betty appears shocked by the news. She tries to deny it, but seems to realize it’s true. Jimmy’s brash way of breaking it to her makes her feel even more violated, and as she gets up to leave, she sputters to Barrett, “You people are vulgar and crude”, to which Jimmy snarls, “What people? You mean comedians?” Such thinly-veiled anti-Semitism would today be denounced soundly by most people in most circles, but in the WASPy world of 1960 ad execs, Jimmy had to be satisfied with a wisecrack. On the DVD of 1942 movie, “The Lost Weekend”, the bonus materials claim that actor Ray Milland, in preparing for his role as an alcoholic, spent time in drunk tanks in Manhattan, where the attendants told him that they treated a lot of ad execs.

I like how the show ‘gets’ little cultural things. E.g., one episode dealt with one of the execs getting an article published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine. His colleagues treat it sort of like people would today react to someone winning on American Idol: with lots of praise, and a little envy. Today, such highbrow pursuits wouldn’t merit nearly as much praise in most workplaces, and might even mark a person as elitist.

Also on the show, a common response to a parting comment like, “take care” is, “you as well”, vice “you too”. Back then, people were less afraid of sounding effete and thought that using more formal language and “big words” was a mark of distinction.

56

There was an interview with someone from the show on Fresh Air a couple of years ago. They said that they’d received mail from many folks who’d worked in ad agencies in the relevant time period. Some of the people said, “My ad agency was NOTHING like the show!” and others said, “Were you THERE? Because that’s EXACTLY what it was like!”

Obviously they’re not going for an algorithmically derived most-common-experience of working in an ad agency: they’re depicting a particularly weird, dramatic agency. But it sounds as though it’s accurate.

I confess, though, that RealityChuck’s point is totally convincing: it’s physically impossible that anyone made an ironic comment about a baseball team prior to 1983.

57

One little thing the show gets absolutely right is the the use of “girl” (often with the possessive) to describe secretaries. As in “Tell his girl the meeting is canceled”. I had forgotten about that usage and it was jarring to hear it again.

58

I remember employment ads in newspapers advertising for “Girl Fridays”.

Sorry if I am late to this post but I just had to comment about this. My grandfather was a very heavy smoker and he owned this ash tray that when I was a kid was the coolest thing I had ever seen. It was on a pedestal armchair high consisting of a brass hopper and on top a stainless steel disk you would flick the ashes upon. The disk was attached to a gold lever that when you pressed down the disk would be lowered into the hopper while spinning. The harder you pushed the lever the faster the disk would spin. I remember playing with it for hours pumping down on the lever until hundreds of RPMs were reached. It was very well made a piece of furniture. That was how serious smoking was to people back in the day.

59

Sadly, that usage is not dead. My boss is prone to telling clients he’ll have “one of the girls” come in with an estimate or get a blood sample from their pet or whatever. The youngest one of us is 25. One of these days I’m going to tell a client that we’ll send the boy in to go over their pet’s lab results and x-rays.

60

You should have seen my last company. I don’t know how many times we would show up to work hungover or came home at 4:00 after late night bottle service at some Manhattan strip club with the boss. I read an article that management consulting firms had one of the highest rates of extramarital affairs. It’s not surprising. You travel all the time and work long hours.