Rant on TV's Mad Men and Female Sexuality

Warning: Contains minor Spoilers for season 4 of Mad Men :)


I love Mad Men—you know, that show about the ‘60s Advertising firm with the hot redhead and all the smoking? I love the drama, the costumes, the excessive drinking… but more than anything I love the female characters. Unlike many TV shows and movies around, the women aren’t just two dimensional props to the male characters; these are roles you can sink your teeth into. There’s Peggy, the shy mousey girl rising in the ranks, from secretary to copywriter in four seasons, who is constantly making naïve mistakes which could ruin her; the aforementioned red haired bombshell Joan, the hospitality manager who knows exactly what to do in every eventuality, and yet struggles to manage her strained relationship with her husband; and of course glacially beautiful Betty, the perfect repressed wasp with one hell of a temper.



The show deals with plenty of women’s issues too—the obvious one being sexism and the state of women’s lives in the 1960’s, but also rape, contraception, prostitution, divorce, motherhood, adoption and depression… the list goes on.


But one issue in particular came up in the latest episode, which really surprised me—not least because of the character they used. Don’s daughter, lisping, cherub faced ten-year-old Sally Draper was caught masturbating. This, in itself I didn’t find particularly shocking—nothing was explicitly shown of course. Nor was I surprised by her mother Betty’s reaction—to tell her never to do it again, even in private, and to eventually pack her off to a child therapist—after all, this is 1965, and Betty’s parenting choices are usually pretty infuriating to the modern day observer.


What did surprise me—though perhaps it shouldn’t have—was the viewers reactions to the scene. Being a bit of a geek when it comes to films and television, I regularly rush to check the forums on http://www.imdb.com/ after each episode. Internet forums are possibly not the best place for my blood pressure, so I’ll try not to rant too much. Of course, the subject of little Sally Draper’s ‘self-abuse’ was one of hot debate. The reactions in general seemed to be: ‘What the hell?! She’s way too young for that!’ or ‘she was probably just confused and didn’t know what she was doing.’


It’s worth mentioning that the first reaction was largely from male posters—and I don’t blame them. It’s still fairly taboo in some circles to acknowledge that a grown woman masturbates, let alone a pre-pubescent girl. But let me clear this up; no, she is not ‘too young for that’. Babies masturbate. Anyone who’s had to deal with children under five knows that toddlers touch themselves too, male and female. This is not necessarily masturbation with the intention of having an orgasm—it’s often just for comfort, and because it just feels nice to touch yourself there.


This does not mean that Sally Draper, or any child who masturbates, wants to have sexual intercourse, or can even comprehend what that is. It simply means that they experience arousal, or just pleasant feelings which they associate with their genitals. And what on earth is wrong with that?


The second reaction; ‘she was confused!’ annoyed me perhaps even more. If Sally Draper had been a ten year old boy, touching his penis because he saw an attractive woman on TV (Sally was watching ‘60s television spy show ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E’ and apparently had a crush on the lead actor), would we assume he didn’t know what he was doing? Or would the message boards have been flooded with guys reminiscing about the first time they whacked off to Emma Peel watching ‘The Avengers’? But, because Sally was a girl, she clearly had no understanding or concept of her own sexuality.


This is something which angers me in general, and which I will happily rave about to anyone who will listen; the idea of girls’ sexuality being decided for them. It’s almost as if young girls have their sexual selves confiscated from them until they are supposedly ‘ready’: ‘No, you can’t have that, it’s inappropriate for you.’ And of course ‘ready’ means ready for sex, ready to reproduce. How is that healthy at all?


What are girls really taught about ‘touching themselves’? Is it ever as acceptable or acknowledged in the same way as young boys doing it? There isn’t even a slang word for female masturbation; wanking, tossing off, jerking off, whacking off, tugging—these all apply to men, and what do we get? ‘Frigging’, ‘Fingering’… what do they even mean? It’s been very well documented that most women prefer to masturbate by stimulating their clitoris—not by shoving their fingers up there and wiggling them around, and yet these are the only words we are given, and explains why there is so much confusion around the subject for young girls who think they are strange because they are not having ‘vaginal’ orgasms (thank you very much, Freud) only clitoral.


This isn’t even just about masturbating. When it comes to young girls and sex they are told; ‘boys will want sex’ or ‘be careful, boys only want one thing’, ‘make sure he wears a condom!’ When are girls ever told that actually, they might want sex too? That sex is not, in fact, something which is ‘done’ to you, but a joint activity. That you need to be aroused for it too?


One of the great things about Mad Men is that it shows us Feminists how far we’ve come already with regards to the workplace, expectations, divorce and our own choices. But I still believe that when it comes to female sexuality we have a long way to go before we are allowed to own it ourselves.

By Louise MacBean