Good job, Culture Vulture.

I’d say your Lacanian analysis of the newest episode of Mad Men was pretty strong. You did miss out on an interesting aberration in the psychoanalytic schema, that being Bettie Draper. 

This woman has no mirror, no ‘Ideal-I’, as Lacan puts it in his impossibly dense treatise on “The Mirror Stage”. She represents aesthetic perfection. For this reason, she has no ideal to strive towards or to imitate.

Lacan cites that a baby’s physical coordination comes from the mimicry of her reflection. This is both necessary and problematic; the ego is formed from the mirror but is therefore based on a tenuous, superficial inversion. As human beings mature, they use other human beings as both mirrors and as ego-Ideals – something to imitate. Bettie seems never to have matured past the preliminary mirror-stage, and has perhaps never gone through it at all.

She fondly remembers her days as a fashion model, wishing to return. She still sees herself as the model, the “Ideal”. In fact, Bettie sees the model on the Playtex campaign as an ersatz version of herself, not the other way around. The creators of the show exemplify this with the bikini scene. Even to viewers, Bettie is prettier and slimmer than the women modeling the suits at the Country Club. Because she has no suitable mirror, she has no way to establish her ego (false or not) in her reality. She is clumsy and uncoordinated, like a baby pre mirror-stage. 

This reminds me of a story by Henry James called “The Real Thing”. A middle aged couple representing the ideal of English Gentry come to an artist to work as models. Past their prime, Ascot-going years, they cannot get employment anywhere because they are woefully unqualified. The artist is at first thrilled to have such perfect models for his illustrations on English nobility, but discovers that these models are too perfect for the job. The drawings come out awkward and monstrous. On the other hand, the drawings he produces from his short, non-descript, even ugly, models come out marvelously. 

The artist cannot imitate perfection from an ‘Ideal’ form. The canvas – another sort of mirror – is a poor duplication for the ‘Real-Thing’. Yet, the ‘Real Thing’ or the ‘Ideal’ has little use in real life. The couple is reduced to making tea for the artist and his models. Likewise, Bettie Draper is reduced to making breakfast for her husband and children.

I used to want Obama to win  (while it still mattered in the primaries, but then I voted for HRC)

I HATE Sex and The City

I will come up with better ones soon.

I just picked up this great game from New York Mag’s Vulture blog- they’re calling it what’s your cultural secret shame?, and this post totally needs to turn into the chick-lit version of it. 

Here’s how it works:

You pick a category-for example, books-, then each player has to admit which book they’re embarassed to never have read etc. Whoever references something that the MOST people have read is the winner. 

I”ll start-

Never have I ever read a Judy Blume novel, nor have I seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s…

“The past few months have been like an extended consciousness-raising session” – Amanda Fortini

This quote from this week’s New York Magazine’s article titled “The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the fourth wave” iterated a feeling that I have been having since my friends burst into my room and asked me to do this chick lit special topics with them at the beginning of the semester. Two of these girls stated to me just a few weeks earlier that they defiantly were “not feminists”. But recently, they seem to have come around – as one sloganeer put it, you’ve come a long way baby.

It’s not that they weren’t feminists,

it’s just that they didn’t need to be, that they didn’t realize what it entailed and that the structure of their whole lives was based on the idea that they were just as good as their male counterparts, if not better, and that they deserved as much choice, if not more, than their male counterparts. Amanda Fortini, the author of this article, claims that the Hillary Clinton run for president has resparked this burn-the-bra urge in American females who missed the second wave. As for my friends, I think maybe that the fact that these feelings started creeping up has more to do with the fact that we are about to graduate. We are about to enter the working world where everything is not 50-50 men/women the way it is in college that my friends and the young female population in general is coming around to the word feminism.

Still, It is nice for once that “legitimate” news sources are actually covering a woman for something other than flashing her vagina or for getting attacked by fellow soldiers (see my other blog). And although I am extremely skeptical of the news, I admit it has a strong affect on our psychologies. By showing images of a woman in a serious role the media, probably unwittingly, has made it ok for us to talk about women as serious people, not just in Victorian terms as victims or nymphomaniacs. Unlike the women of Lipstick Jungle who are successful professionals in their own right but who are too sexualized to be taken seriously, Hillary Clinton exudes seriousness and sexiness doesn’t get in her way. But I digress..

There is a feeling of strength that has resulted, I think, from this resurgent sisterhood. Sitting around talking about a recent scandal at school involving drag, misogyny and robot wars one of us remarked that this was an interesting discussion because we were all smart and had different opinions on the matter, and indeed the feeling in the room seemed to be tending toward the revolutionary. Fortini says of this new sisterhood, “it’s exciting”. It reminds me of the confidence, pride and swagger that comes when you play for a team, and I am sure the men of our school probably felt this fervor in the glory days of Frat hood or Freemasonry.

Freedom for women in the western world seems to be something that requires constant maintenance and care. Fury for the cause seems to surge at moments of important political change i.e. Abolition, Vietnam, and then once gains are made it goes dormant again. These dormant periods, such as one we just experienced, seem to be the toughest to go through, because the struggle of every day life turns inward and a woman cannot talk about sexism without receiving the wrath of her male and female counterparts. Perhaps this is a cycle we have to accept, but it feels nice for now to have the conversation out in the open, shared feelings voiced and a sense of collectivity palpable.