Mad Men Gets Kinkier: What Don Draper’s New Fetish Says About Ours
New York Magazine
The season-four premiere of Mad Men didn’t just introduce SCDP’s cute new office and Peggy’s adorable new haircut, it set up what could be this fetishistic show’s kinkiest sexual relationship yet: Don Draper, the “son of a whore,” is regularly sleeping with a prostitute — and asking her to slap him, too. As far as mainstream TV dramas go, this is fairly unprecedented stuff: Masochism is typically treated as joke (Desperate Housewives) or as prelude to grisly murder (CSI). On Mad Men, however, Don’s shocking but brief, slap-happy sexual interlude is not just stratospherically, nakedly Oedipal, it makes sense — both for him, and as a kind of mirror of fans’ obsession with the show. Weiner could kill this story line at any minute, but it will be fascinating to see how far he pushes it — and us.