"Whatever You Want" - A Moment of Marginalization in Mad Men

Meeting date: 11/7
Attendees: Charlie, Catherine, Marshall, Lauren, Charlie, Candace, Clay, Tim
Episode 10: “The Long Weekend”

Episode 10 of the first season of Mad Men reminds the mass media critic of Robert Brookey and Kristopher Cannon’s assertions and ideas regarding sexual marginalization and docility they discuss in their article “Sex Lives in Second Life.” While this article deals primarily with these topics as they play out in online and interactive media formats (they use the popular MMORPG Second Life as their example), a discussion of gender and sexuality marginalizations certainly can be distilled from more traditional forms of popular texts. While many examples emerge from the Mad Men canon, I wish to highlight several poignant moments found in Season 1, Episode 11, entitled “The Long Weekend,” that represent a less saturated and traditional exercising of marginalization that the type found in Second Life. However, given the time and cultural setting of Mad Men and the more widely accessed form in which it is mediated, one may argue for an inherent equality of the degrees of sexual deviation and, hence, marginalization found in these two texts. Despite the obvious difference between Mad Men’s representative nature and that of Second Life’s expressive, an exploration of the relative levels of extremity of the practice in these texts might still evince considerable insight into the status of “queer” sexuality and gender performance in today’s reality and the manner in which it is represented in popular, mass mediated fictions.


In the Mad Men vein, episode 11 provides the audience with an instance of timid, uncertain lesbian sexuality that the show’s creators tactfully build-up to throughout the episode. The moment occurs when Joan’s friend and former college roommate, Carol McCardy, confesses her love for Joan and asks Joan to “just think of [her] as a boy.” While minute plot details have suggested only one other instance of homosexuality in a character, this scene constitutes the first outright admittance of a form of queer sexuality in the entirety of Mad Men. On the other hand, within the world of Second Life, there exists a plethora of openly queer (or faux-queer) individuals, who openly and willingly engage in sexual activity and have established societies and meeting places centered around this sexual activity. Marginalization enters the picture, however, when the ingredient of bestiality is added into the mixture. Characters known as “furries” are not only non-human appearing characters, but are often transgender and homosexually-oriented. For the represented 1960s world of Mad Men, the most extreme form of marginalization occurs when a sexual “deviant,” Carol, submits herself to Joan’s and the bachelor’s marginalization by accepting both Joan’s diversion of the initial conversation and giving in to the bachelors sexual advances, i.e. “Whatever you want.” The secretive nature of the queer sexuality in these two texts is where they diverge. In the interactive, expressive Second Life, both blatant marginalization (“Personal Nullification”) and group self-marginalization occur (“Gay Yiffy Club); but, because in Mad Men, queer sexuality has not been developed in the fabula’s societal setting, only reluctant self-marginalization occurs.


Although Cannon and Brookey argue that the interactive text Second Life only serves to reinforce the heteronormative case for restricting sexual liberation, the very existence of room for performative choice – ie, choosing a male, female, or Furry avatar – in determining one’s sexuality, in Second Life. Meanwhile, the creators of Mad Men can only provide a moment of rupture, to refer to Ralina Joseph, in the ideology of sexuality. Therefore, cited in the example of sexual marginalization, interactive texts allow more room for expression, but do not progress the cause of sexual liberation.