Lust, Caution: Mad Men Recapped
But Betty always gets this way during the summer. At least little Sally is consistent: Playing at home one day with neighbor kid Ernie Hanson, she plants a kiss on him. Bobby commences joke making, and Sally commences a beatdown. She'll apologize for it later, just as she'll entertain her mother's admonition to not go around kissing boys. "Boys kiss you," Betty explains, her own recent experience triggering a flare behind her eyes.
The au pair learns this the hard way after Pete returns with a replacement dress secured from -- wait for it -- Joan Holloway, who apparently now handles customer complaints in her thriving new retail career. Good as it was to see her, and as small a town as New York can seem sometimes (especially in the emptied-out hell of August), the randomness of running into Joan under the circumstances provided the dramatic dud of the year. You expect more from storytellers who saved their "Blackmail Don" card for a year and a half before finally, brilliantly playing it last week. But I digress: The real issue is the dress, which Pete thinks he's trading for sexual favors, or at least a smooch.
What follows is unclear and may yet provoke another Mad Men rape controversy: Did Pete actually have sex with the au pair? He does get a talking-to from her employer, a strapping, mildly intimidating man to whom the girl confessed something or other. Is he just protecting her, or is he her boyfriend? And what, if anything, is consensual about any of this? In any case, Pete should consider a few sessions of Betty Draper's Restlessness Repression Seminar™, because he can't even begin to hide his guilt, shame and remorse when Trudy returns. "I don't want you to go away anymore without me," he tells her. It seems as sincere as anything Pete's ever said, for what that's worth, and thank God, because it gets him far enough off the hook to where he can comfortably follow it with news of launching the world's first ketchup-filled water balloon at work. Jeez, summer -- end already. All this boredom is rubbing off on me.
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at first watch, i didn't think it was rape because she eventually consented and she did have the choice, crappy or not, to ignore his advances and risk losing her job (even though her employer seems to know what a dog pete and every other white male in his building can be). however, reading the jezebel post, the argument is that it was rape because of the power dynamic. I don't know, but I DO know that I was pissed that Trudy accepted the weak "don't leave without me" non-apology/apology. Oh Trudes, did you marry a husband or gain a child?
Yeah, I haven't watched this show because male power-plays about advertising make me uneasy and I just can't believe... have multiple rapes occurred on this show? Is rape now a "sexy" plot device? What was that one soap opera where that woman married her rapist? Popular entertainment that entertains with rape. Phew, that's just -- just crazy, really, I don't get how rape doesn't make people nauseous and furious.
Maybe it's because I'm a woman. Yeah, I suppose, that's my life's great failing. Sensitivity. Oh, and my sexy rape-ability. Oh, and jumping to conclusions, because, like I said, I ain't watched this show, tho' I've read a few articles. I wonder if anyone could justify the rape, both as an age-old act of brutality and its use as a dramatic plot element, so I understand why everyone still likes the show so much?