Peggy Olsen sure has grown up a lot on Mad Men from the mousy frumpy secretary who was madly obsessed with Pete for some reason and rejected the advances of both Ken and Paul (remember him? he was the Orson Welles looking guy that disappeared after the third season). She had a secret baby, sexual tension with Tom Hank's son, and a rather sorry affair with a man named Duck.
Now she's dating some faux-socialist 'writer' who's actually attractive (Charlie Hofheimer) having lesbian tendencies and hooking up with strangers in the movie-theater a la PeeWee Herman. Perhaps she's absorbing all of that mid to late 60's sexual awakenings and experimentation, but what I think is happening is that she's becoming a man at heart. She's becoming her mentor Don Draper who's sexual ambivalence gives him basically 'the power'.
In the last episode before tonight's, Peggy opened up to the new receptionist at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce that she feels like a man sometimes, and that's of course what's to be expected considering she's in a man's world, in a still very repressive world for women, and one of sexual cautiousness. She's had to conform; now she makes men come to her rather than take late night booty calls or quick romps in the office after hours, and they do. In a sense, Peggy has grown to be the most sexual apparatus on the show that is female rather than Joan who's promiscuity is merely a facade. Joan falls in love, Peggy would never allow herself to go there. She's become the one in control, and the master manipulator. And guess what, we love her for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment