I have so much to say but if I don't write something now I'll probably not come back and do so, so I'll make it the bullet points. You're totally right that Pete's "you don't say congratulations, you say best wishes" is killer. Don marrying his secretary is hilariously cliche, and what I love is how powerful a demonstration this is of how far he's fallen: he was always a chauvinist, self-involved prick, but he had rules, however arbitrary that he used to follow. He turned down Peggy's advances in episode one, and not sleeping with his secretary ruled for three years. And then this season, like everything else, it went out the window. He's losing his arbitrary constructed identity; he's on continued decline
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I'm okay with Betty being unsympathetic, I just feel like the bad mommy/child tension results in sexist contemptuous dismissal of her.
Really, why are Betty and Joan so different? They define themselves by their romantic relationships; they rely on their beauty and ability to play femme - rational in the context of the era, certainly, which is why they both do it. They're hard and closed-off. They cling to and reliably abuse whatever interpersonal power they have (with Joan it's the other secretaries from the first few minutes of the pilot; with Betty it's obviously her kids and Carla) to compensate for what they don't get to decide for themselves, and because they can't imagine a world not based in a vicious pecking order. Betty was just a little more sheltered and a little more risk-averse (married at 21), and picked a profession with a slightly shorter shelf life, so she ends up in the suburban house while Joan is the glamorous Manhattan girl, and from that tiny sliver of difference one of them is a hateful monstrous failure,
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Really, why are Betty and Joan so different? They define themselves by their romantic relationships; they rely on their beauty and ability to play femme - rational in the context of the era, certainly, which is why they both do it. They're hard and closed-off. They cling to and reliably abuse whatever interpersonal power they have (with Joan it's the other secretaries from the first few minutes of the pilot; with Betty it's obviously her kids and Carla) to compensate for what they don't get to decide for themselves, and because they can't imagine a world not based in a vicious pecking order. Betty was just a little more sheltered and a little more risk-averse (married at 21), and picked a profession with a slightly shorter shelf life, so she ends up in the suburban house while Joan is the glamorous Manhattan girl, and from that tiny sliver of difference one of them is a hateful monstrous failure, ( ... )
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