EA Sports, the video game magnate behind successful franchises like Madden NFL Football and other sports games, announced this week that it will for the first time include international female hockey stars in NHL 13, the newest version of its National Hockey League game. EA included a female body in its “Create A Player” option in last year’s NHL game, but this year, it is going a step farther, adding former Team USA star Angela Ruggiero and former Team Canada player Hayley Wickenheiser to NHL rosters in this year’s game.

Both Ruggiero and Wickenheiser are four-time Olympic medalists in a sport that isn’t widely known but has grown across the world since it was first included at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. The inclusion of women in this game should help bring even more attention to the sport, as Wickenheiser said in a release from EA:

“The EA SPORTS NHL franchise took a big step last year by including female characters to create a more inclusive experience for female hockey fans,” said Hayley Wickenheiser. “I’m excited to be a part of NHL 13 and hope that the addition of women’s hockey legends will encourage greater participation in hockey from young women everywhere.”

EA, for years, has included female golfers in its Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf games, and it is facing a petition drive to add women’s teams to its series of FIFA soccer games after the success of the U.S. Women’s National Team, and the sport in general, at the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics. EA now says it is “inevitable” that women will appear in the soccer game, even if it is too late to include them in the 2013 version.

A cynic could take the view that this is all a marketing ploy — other companies have found success by increasing their marketing efforts to young girls — but I’ll take the opposite view: in a world where women’s sports are becoming more visible, in a world where more young women are playing the games, in a world where we more often talk about the gender issues that permeate the sports world and the successes female athletes have despite numerous obstacles, EA is acknowledging not just the fact that women and girls play sports, but that they play sports video games and should have the same opportunity to participate in the gameplay experience men have every time they sit down in front of their XBox or Playstation.

I don’t normally pass along public service announcements, but I was really struck by this spot Amy Poehler cut for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers, and aims to win them the recognition the same recognition available to employees who work outside household settings:

There’s something exceedingly refreshing about seeing the kind of woman who’s held up as a model mother state frankly and without pretense that there’s no way to work the way fully employed actresses do and also keep house to a high standard without paid help. And this ad, and the campaign it’s in support of, are a reminder of a bizarre double standard that treats work done in the home as if it’s not work at all, whether it’s performed by the women who occupy those homes, or the women who are paid for the duties they perform in the homes they visit.

By Tony Palumbi

Every so often I get a twitching in the long finger of my right hand. It’s happened enough that I know the reason and the cure: Bayonetta, released in 2010 by the wild-and-wacky Platinum Games. Fast-paced Japanese action games have always been a personal favorite dating back to Devil May Cry on the PlayStation 2, and Platinum, helmed by DMC creator Hideki Kamiya, has built a reputation for action titles with personality. Bayonetta was successful on release—reviews praised its kinetic combat system, its visual design, and mind-blowing boss battles. At the same time, they scratched their heads at the confusing plot and uneven dialogue. Many frowned at the hyper-sexualized protagonist: Bayonetta has two pistols strapped to her stiletto heels and carries another pair, contorting into sexually gymnastic poses or finding conveniently phallic objects to pole-dance around while she deals hot death to her foes.

Lead designer Kamiya didn’t help matters, admiring Bayonetta’s sex appeal and declaring “women are scary” with a mix of misogyny and adolescent confusion that’s not uncommon in Japanese gaming culture. Bloggers pounced, taking strident issue with the poses, the orgasm sounds released by certain female enemies, and the lollipops that grant temporary power-ups. They really hated the lollipops. What’s the difference, the critics asked, between this and a thousand other sexpot gaming characters? Mocking condescension of the hapless male lead and relentless violence does not a feminist make. Lara Croft was always more than the guns (I refer to her pistols, but take “guns” in that sentence however you like). Given the flimsy story and dialogue, isn’t Bayonetta just a brunette Barbie with leaner proportions? Opinions differed, but from my perusal of the debate a solid consensus emerged: Bayonetta is a really excellent video game, but it’s too exploitative for the feminist label.

I knew all this going into my most recent binge. But it didn’t ring true to me. Maybe it’s my good fortune to grow up surrounded by amazing women, but I just couldn’t see Bayonetta as a victim. The critics, I felt, were wrapped up in a confining vision of the liberated female: one where sex needn’t define any part of a woman, and flaunted sexuality is inherently a concession to the male gaze. Which, it seems to me, still appropriates sex as something controlled by men. As somebody whose fiercely independent sister takes the stage in rock bands dressed like (I mean this in the best way) a tart, I felt this was wrong. But I needed to play the game again to figure out why it was wrong.

Writers suffer from a very particular arrogance: we believe we control the world. Not the world of reality and cold sores, but the worlds we build ourselves. Wielding the power of creation, we can make something amazing or something terrible and own it completely. It’s tempting to apply this to fictional forms like games; Tom Bissell has written extensively about his frustrations in the industry. Writers hear the cringe-inducing dialogue in video games and question the missing links in their plots. We could do better, they always think. But video games crush this special writerly arrogance more than any other fictional form. Games succeed when they cede control back to the player. Tiny details of design, hammered out through relentless testing, have powerful impacts on the audience without words and within moments—achieving subtle narrative feats in spaces so small even Kafka would have thrown down his pen.

Which is to say that for the purposes of my critique, the plot isn’t terribly important. Sun-themed male Lumen Sages oppose the Moon-themed female Umbra Witches, a child is conceived in forbidden love, and Bayonetta is the product. She plows through the patriarchy like a wrecking ball, teaming up at the end with a fellow witch to summon a demon that punches God into the Sun. These things are feminist in the same way that pole-dancing animations are misogynist: superficially.

I posit that Bayonetta is an unsurpassed experiment in radical empathy, the ultimate act of putting yourself in another’s shoes—absorbing their feelings, experiences and desires. You become another person, if only for understanding’s sake. It seems to be what most feminists really want from men: to think for a moment about the female experience as lived by women. Bayonetta achieves this kind of radical empathy in a way nobody could expect and I’ve never seen articulated. Through colorful moments and flawless mechanics, it locates the player inside Bayonetta’s physical person and unlocks her weird, wonderful personality. There are no moral lessons here, just good fun—.
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Hero Complex has a long interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who is writing Marvel’s new Captain Marvel book which has a woman, Carol Danvers, taking on that mantle. In a particularly interesting section towards the beginning of the conversation, DeConnick goes back and forth on the question of whether, though Danvers was conceived of as an explicitly feminist character, she is writing a feminist book:

I don’t think this is new to my interpretation of Carol. I think that she’s an incredibly driven individual. The single line that I use for her off the top of my head is: Crackerjack pilot races to prove dead daddy wrong. I think Carol’s wound comes from …. well, she comes from a family of three kids, two younger brothers. Her dad was an old-fashioned construction foreman who loved her very much. This book was conceived as an unapologetically feminist book. It happened in the ’70s during the feminist movement and that was very much what the book was about. We’re much more skittish about that today, interestingly. Well, her dad opted not to pay for her to go to school and thought it’d be better spent on her brothers. That’s why she enlisted — to get her education paid for. I think that hurt her, and she’s always been trying to prove to her dad that she’s worthy. But her dad’s gone now, so it’s not a thing that she’s ever going to be able to get closure on…I’m not trying to write a feminist agenda. This is part of who the character is. And I’ve heard people question the Absorbing Man thing, like ‘Since when is the Absorbing Man a misogynist?’ That wasn’t my intent. My intent with him was that he was pushing her buttons. It wasn’t that it was a particular thing with him. Although he is a very old-fashioned character, and I think it’s hilarious. It was trash talk in a fight.

I’d argue that given that the first lines that are spoken in DeConnick’s take on the character are Carl Creel’s snarl “Lucky me! If it ain’t Captain America’s secretary, Mrs. Marvel,” and that he goes on to clock Carol, declaring “I’ll show you smarts, lady!” and to tell to Cap, “You lettin’ the little missus give the orders now? Wouldn’t catch me getting bossed around by no broad,” she’s probably writing a feminist comic. When someone brings gender (or race or sexual orientation or religion) into trash talk, they’re not just joshing someone, they’re setting up a hierarchy where whatever characteristic they’ve singled out is disqualifying, and that someone allied with their target will suffer a worse loss because they’ve inverted the gender heirarchy, etc.—they won’t just be defeated, they’ll be degendered.

Feminism isn’t just about getting women into positions traditionally occupied by men. The second half of the DeConnick response I’ve quoted there is in response to the question from Hero Complex, “We’ve already seen some dismissive behavior from Absorbing Man in the first issue. Will her proving herself as a hero in a male-dominated super-landscape be an ongoing theme?” Feminism is also about what happens when women get there, about the fact that earning the job is often the first step in dismantling sexism, and sexists don’t exactly roll over and die when women obtain positions of power. And fighting sexism isn’t solely women, or superheroines’ purview. Part of what’s thrilling about reading DeConnick’s version of Captain Marvel is watching Captain America joke with Carol about Absorbing Man’s sexism mid-fight and afterwards to encourage her to take up the Captain Marvel mantle, saying “Bottom line is this: you have led the Avengers. You have saved the world. Quit being an adjunct.” Their conversation is just the superheroic version of a mentor encouraging a female mentee to give herself credit instead of deferring it, pitch more ambitious stories, or to ask for that raise.

In other words, just because we’ve moved from one phase of feminism into the next isn’t a reason to abandon that as a framework as a character (or for an actress like Melissa Leo, whose work is clearly feminist, to declaim the label). Sexism isn’t over, in the superhero world, in the real world, or in the places that they intersect. And that sexism’s become more diffuse and complicated just means there are more ways to use gender dynamics to tell fascinating, complex stories about how people, male and female alike, construct their identities and understand their relative positions in the world.

A critic friend pointed me to Molly Haskell’s 1997 essay on the cognitive dissonance of The Godfather, which I in turn wanted to pass along to all of you. It’s an amazing meditation on the movie and the environment in which it was released, and I think it’s directly relevant to the conversations we have about culture as provider of comfort and repressive nostalgia in a time of great social change. She writes:

If we had a split screen we would show opposing images: On one side, the sun shines and the music plays on the veranda during Connie’s lavishly traditional family wedding in 1945, while in the darkness of Don Corleone’s study, petitioners and those who pay homage file through and the Don (Marlon Brando) dispenses favors and justice. Fathers arrange marriages for their daughters, revenge on their enemies. Hulking in the shadows of the house, Luca Brasi, one of Corleone’s enforcers, practices the tribute he will pay when he gains an audience with the Don: ”May their first child be a masculine child.”

On the other screen: In 1970, the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, a commemorative march down Fifth Avenue, with 50,000 women pouring out of office buildings in spontaneous support. Also in 1970, Kate Millett publishes ”Sexual Politics” and her portrait, by Alice Neel, is on the cover of Time. In 1971, the year-end issue of New York Magazine announces the birth of Ms. magazine, whose first issue will appear in July 1972. The Supreme Court legalizes abortion in 1973.

I’m trying to think what the modern equivalent is: the superhero as acclaimed protector? the slacker dudes claiming their manhood? Either way, it’s a striking piece, and a critical reminder that our fantasies don’t always move us forward.

“Every woman adores a fascist.” -Sylvia Plath

“We drove past the hatchery, / the hut that sells bait, / past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall’s Hill, / to the house that waits still, / on the top of the sea, / and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.” -Anne Sexton

I’m not going to Comic-Con this year, but I have been reading a lot of comics lately, plowing through 2000 AD’s editions of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files and Savage She-Hulk #1-25. They’re wildly different comics projects—Judge Joseph Dredd is the main character in a long-running futuristic comics saga that doesn’t reboot, letting a year pass in his life for every one of ours, while She-Hulk is a mid-level character in the complex Marvel Comics universe. And even more important, they explore wildly different values. And over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why, as a feminist and a civil libertarian, I like both a fascist cop who originated as a British satire of American authoritarian tendencies and a green feminist defense lawyer who was created to preempt a television rip-off of both the Hulk and the Bionic Woman so much.

In coming to terms with the cop, it help that Dredd is a satire of the yearning towards authoritarianism, and that the writing is often very funny. In a confrontation with the Dark Judges, undead villains dedicated to eradicating all life, Judge Fear attempts to drive Judge Dredd mad by telling him, “Gaze into the face of fear!” “For a moment the icy chill of terror courses down Dredd’s spine,” the comic tells us. “The shock of this gaze can kill an ordinary man. But Dredd is a judge—and Judges are not ordinary men!” His response? A solid punch, delivered with the retort: “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” In another story arc, called Block Mania, Mega-City One’s inhabitants, cramped into massive apartment buildings with strong internal identities, are drugged with a chemical that leads to city-wide riots. Dredd leads the response, but ultimately gets hit with a heavy dose of the substance himself. It’s hilarious watching this highly controlled man go as bonkers as his neighbors, hollering at the Judges under his command, “Now there’s just one thing I gotta know. I’m with Rowdy Yates Block! Who you fighting with?”

The comic also regularly punctures Dredd’s stoicism, particularly with regard to Walter, his lisping, worshipful robot butler who is an obvious stand in for stereotypically gay functionaries. Walter adores Dredd, and embraces subservience and slavery (something that causes him real psychological struggle down the line). But even though Dredd finds Walter irritating, Walter often inadvertently saves him. When Dredd is infiltrating the inner circle of a corrupt Chief Judge, the leader of the Department of Justice, which lead a coup and now rules Mega-City one in a dictatorship, Walter helps him sneak through a secret passageway in the Hall of Justice. During the Apocalypse War arc, Walter, who is trying to help Judge Dredd’s landlord Maria get cured of her Block Mania, finds out that invaders from East-Meg One, the nation that’s replaced the Soviet Union, are flanking Dredd’s forces and about to destroy them. Walter’s decency ends up being more crucial to Dredd’s survival in that moment than Dredd’s competence or authority.
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I can’t even bring myself to embed it here: some trogolodytes have created a game that lets players beat up Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist video blogger who’s been subject to an unremitting campaign of harassment since she created a Kickstarter to support a project to explore tropes of female characters in video games. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anyone who thinks that feminists who push back hard against online harassment are being oversensitive needs to understand that we’re all trying to keep ourselves from becoming Anita Sarkeesians. No matter how strong you are, and no matter how much support you have, this kind of concentrated campaign of harassment affects the targets of it. And the goal of these campaigns is to terrorize people into silence. It’s not disagreement. It’s not creative trolling. It’s deployment of a weapon.

And even though it’s frightening, ugly stuff, the campaign waged against Sarkeesian illustrates the fundamental cowardice and weakness of the people attacking her. If you so lack confidence in your ideas, if you’re so uncomfortable defending your appreciation for problematic things (which, by the way, is tricky but not that tricky) that you can’t even put your hands over your ears and sing loudly and ignore them, that you have to actually go out and try to prevent anyone from from saying anything that could make you remotely uneasy, you are a coward. That’s cold comfort to folks like Sarkeesian who have to go through this now. But it’s why, long-term, angry, petty sexists are going to lose, and why it’s important to throw up bulwarks against trolls who try to venture out of their holes and take over mainstream conversations. These ideas don’t stand-up to discussion and debate. And sexist trolls can’t shut down all of those debates, no matter how hard they try.

I called my mother on my way home from a dinner party last night to let her know that Nora Ephron had died. Or at least, if she already knew Nora Ephron had died, to reassure her that I still had her copies of Crazy Salad and Wallflower at the Orgy, books that I’d sneaked off her shelves years beforehand, and that followed me to college and to Washington, DC. Lots of people are remembering Ephron’s movies, and I’m watching Sleepless in Seattle as I write this, but I knew Ephron as a writer and reporter on media and the women’s movement before I knew her as a screenwriter and director, and it’s hard for me to see her movies in any other context than that writing and reporting.

Ephron wrote powerfully about the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Doing the former, covering the activities of the National Women’s Political Caucus at the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami, she captured something about the subordinate position of women in left politics that persists to this day when she wrote that “In a sense, the major function for the N.W.P.C. was to be ornamental—that is, it was simply to be there. Making its presence it felt. Putting forth the best possible face. Pretending to a unity that did not exist. Above all, putting on a good show: the abortion plank would never carry, a woman would not be nominated as Vice-President this year, but the N.W.P.C. would put on a good show.”

She could turn anecdotes into a powerful litany, as she did when writing about the feminist self-help movement in health, which in some cases advocated for untested technologies Ephron found unnerving, even as she said that women had legitimate cases against the doctors who treated them. “Ever week, it seems, I hear a new gynecological atrocity tale,” she wrote. “A friend who asks specifically not to be sedated during childbirth is sedated. Another friend who has a simple infection is treated instead for gonorrhea, and develops a serious infection as a side effect. Another woman tells of going to see her doctor one month after he has delivered her first child, a deformed baby, born dead. His first question: ‘Why haven’t you been to see me in two years?’”

She gutted executives who made dangerous so-called feminine hygiene sprays for injuring women when they couldn’t even say the word vagina. Her assessment that “Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up” is still one of the most cutting one-line portraits of the nation’s capitol, and one that remains more than a little true. And her profile of Barbara Mandel, the wife of the governor of Maryland who, when her husband decided to leave her for another woman, refused to depart the governor’s mansion in an act of defiance is an amazing meeting point of the domestic, the political, and cultural theater.

One of the reasons I write about culture is because of the way Ephron did it. She profiled the first woman to get close to becoming a professional baseball umpire, in a piece that begins, “Somewhere in the back of Bernice Gera’s closet, along with her face mask and chest protector and simple spiked shoes, is a plain blue man’s suit hanging in a plastic bag. The suit cost $29 off the rack, plus a few dollars for shortening the sleeves and pants legs.” The rest of the piece examines the real price of that mostly unworn outfit. In a visit to the Pillsbury Bakeoff, she wrote about a dated institution’s attempt to jump generations: “There was a lot of talk at the Bake-Off about how the Bake-It-Easy theme had attracted a new breed of contestants this year, younger contestants—housewives, yes, but housewives who used whole-wheat flour and Granola and sour cream and similar supposedly hip ingredients in their recipes, and were therefore somewhat more sophisticated, or urban, or something-of-the-sort than your usual Bake-Off contestant. There were a few of these—two, to be exact: Barbara Goldstein of New York City and Bonnie Brooks of Salisbury, Maryland, who actually visited the Los Angeles County Art Museum during a free afternoon.” In Ephron’s remembrance of reading The Fountainhead, she recalls that “I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, and architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect.”She understood that cultural details didn’t mean everything, but as with New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff’s stinginess with Christmas bonuses and preference for serving dry roast beef sandwiches to guests, they signified something, and were worth examination.
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We’ve been having a lot of conversations on the blog about feminism this week, and a reader wrote in asking for suggestions of non-fiction if he wanted to give himself a basic primer on feminism as intellectual tradition. Lots of you wrote in with good suggestions, so here are my favorites and the books that were recommended most often by the masses.

1. Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft: The foremother of feminist philosophy, Wollstonecraft used this piece to push back against arguments that women should only receive domestic education, and to lay the foundations on which other women would build the argument for equality between the sexes.

2. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf: Woolf is arguing for educational access and economic independence as necessary preconditions for women who want to write, but her arguments are applicable to women seeking self-determination in any manner of arena.

3. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan: There’s no question that Friedan is a problematic figure, particularly given her attitudes towards people of color and lesbians, but her analysis of the gap between what society wanted women to aspire to and the happiness it actually brought them played a critical role in the national feminist conversation of the last century.

4. Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde: Friedan’s flaws are Lourde’s triumphs: a black woman, a lesbian, and the child of immigrants, Lourde’s work makes a major contribution to a vision of feminism that isn’t the sole preserve of and salve for the wounds of white, heterosexual, middle-class women.

5.Gender Trouble, Judith Butler: Butler’s critique of the idea that femininity is natural rather than constructed is a perfect introduction to gender theory for first-timers.

6. Justice, Gender, And The Family, Susan Moller Okin: Reccomended by philosopher friends, Moller Okin takes the concept of justice from public life and applies it to the private sphere.

7. The Second Shift, Arlie Hockschild: A landmark examination of how domestic labor is divided in families where both parents work.

8. This Bridge Called My Back and Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa: The former is an essay collection including work by Anzaldúa and other women of color, the latter a collection of prose and poetry by Anzaldúa, recommended to me by Chicana friends in college and vital reading.

9. Ain’t I A Woman?, bell hooks: Another critically important book about the intersections of race and gender, examining the magnifying impact of sexism on slavery, sexism in the black community and racism among feminists.

10. Backlash, Susan Faludi: Particularly valuable context on the War on Women, which is not precisely new.

11. Crazy Salad, Nora Ephron: Lots of folks think of Ephron solely as a creature of Hollywood, but her reporting on the women’s movement as it came into flower in the twentieth century is vital, and funny, and very much gives a sense of what it must be like to have lived through the contradictions, victories, and failures of the moment.

My affection for the finale of Mad Men has increased the more I’ve thought about the episode, even as I wonder if I might look back on it as a better series finale than jumping off point for anything new. For a show that’s been blunter than previously about its themes in any given episode, the fifth season of Mad Men is a fairly subtle look at how and why men of a certain era failed to anticipate the rise of feminism, or to recognize that a rearrangement of gender roles could do anything to ease their lingering discontents.

The end of the finale emphasized, as clearly as was humanely possible, that Don Draper is a limited person. That’s not to say he’s incapable or weak, but that he’s settled deeply into certain patterns and is profoundly bounded by certain desires and fears, which really may be a way of explaining that he’s feeling middle age hard. When Megan gets drunk and tells Don “This is what you want, isn’t it? For me to be waiting for you? That’s why you won’t give me a chance,” she’s partially right. Don wants not to want that, but he can’t help himself. The stay-at-home wife who he failed to satisfy intellectually or emotionally left him. The work wife he nurtured professionally moved on without him. Don may be at peace with Peggy’s departure—”I’m proud of you. I just didn’t know it would be without me,” he tells her before the beginning of Casino Royale. But his privilege means he’s never developed the capacity to work his way through personal situations that are difficult for him. Of course he only likes “the beginnings of things.” Everything else requires skills Don doesn’t have. And the finale of the show seems to emphasize that he will never develop them.

We can see that fundamental, but it’s an uncertainty that’s invisible to many of the men around him. Don’s walk off Megan’s set and towards the bar begins with a nifty bit of lighting that transforms him briefly into the silhouette from the credits sequence, a featureless archetype of masculinity. Don Draper may be an individual, but he’s a role model to the men around him, and he may be a void, but they see the strong, clean lines, the cut of the suit, the swoop of the hair, the success.

That archetype’s always been appealing to Pete Campbell in particular, a man who’s always looking for someone to emulate. Pete is somewhat closer than Don to articulating why he’s unhappy, and more active in pursuing alternatives, whether it’s his vigorous attempt to eclipse Roger at work, sleeping with a prostitute at a classy brothel, or pursuing an affair with his neighbor’s wife. When Beth returns to his life, Pete’s reaction is a combination of an attempt at Don-like suave and something new. “This is not a joke,” he says in an evocation of Don’s California reset button. “Let’s go to Los Angeles. I’ve been there. It’s filled with sunshine.” She’s not buying it, and Pete’s attempts to stand up for her autonomy don’t stick a landing either. His insistence that “Howard can’t make you do this. He can’t control you. He’s a monster,” doesn’t acknowledge that Beth might want shock therapy. Instead, his real goal is keeping her sexually available to him. He didn’t like the idea that she was ignoring him or had forgotten him voluntarily after their first encounter, and the prospect that he’s literally been erased from her memory permanently drives him into a rage. “You are the most disgusting person I’ve ever seen,” Pete spits at Beth’s husband on the train, provoking the first of two fights he’ll lose within five minutes. “You just couldn’t wait to get her in the hospital and erase her brain.”

Unlike Don, who sees only the newness of things as they come into their lives, Pete’s ahead of the curve only in that he sees the disappointments immediately. He feels Beth’s distance immediately after sleeping with her, but he can’t seem to process that Beth’s treating him like men in this series often treat women: she wants to sleep with him and then make him disappear. When Trudy, lured in by Pete’s story of how he got his injuries, relents and decides he should be allowed an apartment in the city, he’s ceased wanting it before they’ve even signed a lease: he doesn’t have an idea of who he wants to have an affair with there anymore. But whether he can see the rot earlier than Don is doesn’t mean that Pete’s gotten the shock that would make him realign his goals and values. The incentives to stay within the protective shell of patriarchy, to retain the right to blow off Joan in partners’ meetings and cheat without getting caught, are simply too great. If anything, the man who got the sharpest shock this season, aided by LSD and Pete’s condescension, is Roger Sterling. And the closest he comes to progress is an affair with an age-appropriate woman who sets her own terms for their encounter.
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