Don Draper is a contemporary fantasy

I have a shaming confession to make. Like Lucy Vickery, I am in love with Don Draper. Not in a sexual sense you understand, but I am infatuated with an image of masculinity that has never existed.

Improving gender equality is one of the post-war period’s crowning achievements. And now that most of the barriers have been removed, girls beat us boys at everything. They mature faster; they get served in pubs younger; they master the art of sex and flirting eons before we do (and in that regard, most twenty-something males are still simpering in the corner at a teenage party). Worst of all, they thrash us at exams. Granted, English, art and languages seem the sort of subjects a girl should be good at – requiring sensitivity, thoughtfulness and consideration - complexities beyond most adolescent boys. But damn it, Aristotle, the co-founder of Western philosophy no less, wrote that ‘Man is a rational animal’, and there were all these girls wiping the floor with us at maths and science. They even trumped us at that most manly of disciplines: woodwork.

Coming second to an entire gender can get you down, create an inferiority complex. Add metrosexuality’s insistence that men articulate their emotions to all and sundry, whilst exfoliating and pondering which scent to wear, and it provokes even the weediest of Tarzans within. Not that there’s anything one would want to do about egalitarianism in seriousness, except imagine, in a moment of absurd self-indulgence, what it might be like to be a fictional character who himself is a fiction.   

Don Draper is an antidote to reality. A creation of intense, selfish and triumphant chauvinism - a projection of masculinity where a man is a man and everything else can go hang. That all men imagine themselves to be Casanova underneath is a cliché too well established not have some truth to it, so I will leave Draper’s sexual antics to one side. In any event, it’s his privacy and emotional repression, maintained through prolonged silences, disappearing acts and alcoholism, which appeals to me most. Today, if one were to try and flee to a free-love colony in California, mass-communication and society’s urgent need to be ‘in contact’ would catch you before you’d glimpsed the bus stop. Therefore, this nation of drunks drinks life’s problems away; only the whopping duty on booze ensures that your psyche receives a puddle of scotch, rather than the Draper Ocean.

Part of the drama of Mad Men, and its great conceit, is to exaggerate 1960s gender relations to illustrate how much has changed, and for the better. Don Draper and the permanently ‘on shore-leave’ Roger Sterling are fantasies. But they are a contemporary fantasy, not a historical one.