I've been watching Mad Men lately; people seem to have a lot of opinions about it so here are my main ones. It served as mostly uncomfortable eye candy for me, the first six or eight episodes of the first season, (Don Draper is delicious but the women he chooses to consort with *severely* annoy me) UNTIL, Peggy the secretary starts writing copy for the ads after the lipstick situation. After that I became very interested in the show, also in that she was obviously pregnant after those few little rolls in the hay with DORK BOY Pete Campbell (a dick). She can think critically, she is smart and articulate, and has interesting ideas. I know it's still an ideological mess, and that they still mistreat Peggy, patronizingly, after promoting her to a copywriter (I'm only one season in) but it got me thinking.
I have a lot of male friends. A lot of filmy, nerdy, arty, (pervey) male friends. And while I've never felt like I needed to prove myself, intellectually or creatively, to any of them since they're nice people, I know what it feels like to be in that situation. At St. Scholastica, the male to female ratio was about 1:4; in my department, the music department, there were two men in the program (out of nine total). They were nice guys.
At the U, things were . . . different. In some of the more intimate classes, say, 20 people or less, there were some dicks among mostly nice guys. One would insist on calling people out to answer questions whenever he had to lead discussion in a French and Italian film class, and be dickish about their answers. Another, who I've mentioned before in this blog, behaved as if he were the professor and we the lowly idiots who were fortunate enough to bask in his greatness as he pontificated constantly on topics on which I could not disagree more but was too afraid to debate with him (The Sopranos' mediocrity, the low rank of Temple of Doom within the Indiana Jones Box Set, how a ridiculous Zydeco accompaniment added depth and character to his lackluster shots of downtown St. Paul in November for a production project, and so on).
Then there were two others who were not just dickish but downright hostile. Not to me, luckily, but to other chicks. The first guy was from a former Soviet country, goth, and became upset about some damned thing, I can't remember what (it was a Devil in Film and Lit class) but he ridiculed a girl for misidentifying something, out loud in front of everyone else (and not in a teasing way) and continued to insult her under his breath for the rest of the class to his goth friend who sat right next to me so I heard every word. It was very uncomfortable. The other guy was more of a ringleader among several others in a (grad level) screenwriting class who ripped a girl's screenplay to shreds, unabashedly, and caused her to drop the class halfway through the semester. It was very mean, and the professor tried to soften it a little once they really got going, but by that time the damage had been done. I get annoyed just thinking about it, that I should have said something in her defense instead of writhing in discomfort while the dicks relished in their dickish assholery.
Matt has told me stories about critique-dicks from MCAD, how there are some people who are just out for blood just because it's open season. And I know that it's not necessarily a gender thing, since sometimes, dicks are just dicks. But it disturbed me then and it disturbs me now, and the reason I'm relating it to Peggy and Mad Men is that yeah, sometimes a woman still runs into this today. The jerks that were rude to the girl about her screenplay were *never* as rude to anyone else in the class, and believe me, there were several screenplays that were just as marginal that they chose not to roast. Some of them, THEIR OWN. Now, I don't often get self-righteous on here, or try not to anyway, but I was an extremely good film student. It was during my time at the U that I learned to have confidence in myself because I knew that I knew what I was doing. After they tore that girl's screenplay apart I suppose I could have become nervous about what they'd say about mine a few weeks later, but I didn't, because I knew mine was good. I didn't have to prove anything to them, either, but I probably ended up doing so anyway: this is one chick who you're not gonna bully.
I like it when people (who aren't dicks) have success stories. Especially when they come at the expense of dicks.
TEAM PEGGY.
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