Messy Lives Are Actually Not That Alluring, Katie Roiphe
by Peter Birkenhead
Lock up your daughters: Kate Roiphe is waxing nostalgic again. In her latest paean to the Days of Wine and Date Rape, a piece in Sunday’s New York Times entitled “The Allure of Messy Lives,” Roiphe wonders if the popularity of the AMC series “Mad Men” is a sign that we all secretly miss the “fun” of swapping spouses, harassing employees, and getting blackout drunk at the office. In her usual “I’m just saying” style, Ms. Roiphe allows that “it’s hard” to defend alcoholism and infidelity, (and “harder still” to defend the far greater sin of smoking,) but, in the name of eulogizing the vital “intensity” so many old, rich, white men once got out of abusing their wives, families, livers and lungs, she apparently felt compelled to do so.
According to Roiphe, those of us raised by alcoholic, philandering wife-beaters might think we’re getting plenty of intensity out of, say, our marriages, or throwing dinner parties for our friends or taking vacations with our families, but what we’re actually doing is living deluded, timid lives steeped in a “malaise and alienation” no better than Don Draper’s. And yet we should envy him, for his struggle against “bourgeois ordinariness.” Has she seen “Mad Men”? I’ll admit that there are a few things I envy about Don Draper, but desultory sex in a shit-brown apartment with a hooker who smacks me in the face while my kids eat Thanksgiving dinner at their new Daddy’s place isn’t on the list. And is it anybody’s idea of class struggle? Where does Katie Roiphe get this stuff?
The first answer seems to be: from her mother’s Rolodex. In bolstering her case, she gathers an impressive array of two voices-both from her mother Anne’s narrow circle of literary and media contemporaries-to sing the praises of the fun old days. And not just any voices, but ones that, when it comes to being mad men, make Don Draper look like Don Knotts. First up for the defense is none other than Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the notorious, near-career-killing, 1970’s chronicle of the married father’s own “casual research” into his effusive sexual entitlement.
Sounding like an aging Southern belle wistfully recalling the days of antebellum refinement, he remembers seeing “copy girls” slipping out of offices for trysts in hotels “with more than one man,” and says, “You didn’t have the word ‘exploitation’ then. And mostly it wasn’t exploitation.” Well, I know I feel better. It wasn’t “exploitation,” it was fun! See, if only today’s “copy girls” could shake off their prudish aversion to what Roiphe admiringly calls the “flagrant flirtation and cocktail party atmosphere of Sterling Cooper,” they too might get lucky once in a while. Coercive, gang-bang lucky! Who doesn’t miss that?
And today’s straight-laced guys just need to get over their fear of alcohol-induced comas. Roiphe makes the point that if modern men would give in to “the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior,” they might one day have memories as colorful as Talese’s recollection of “coming back from lunch one day and seeing one guywith his head flat down on his typewriter. No one touched him for hours, and eventually he woke up.” See! He woke up! Eventually. C’mon, you pantywaists-put down that infant son and try something really challenging, like typing with your face.
To be fair, Roiphe does describe modern life as “better, saner, more sensible,” than it was in the early 1960’s, but only to decry the “puritanical frisson” we get from feeling superior to the characters on “Mad Men.” She doesn’t do that argument any good, though, when, she quotes Jerry Della Femina, the advertising legend and publisher. It’s in Della Femina’s stories about the 60’s that Roiphe notices the word “fun” coming up so often, and she worries that we’re no longer “hanging out with the same boozy fluidity… the wild bursts of bad behavior” enjoyed by guys like Della Femina, who recently said about the Tiger Woods scandal, “let’s face it, bimbo-gate is going to be gone and people will forget it…. Every one of these women look like they escaped from the bunny ranch in Nevada.” Tiger was just having boozy, fluidy fun, people. Don’t be such stick-in-the-muds.
Roiphe’s final witness for the defense of terribleness is her mother, whose coming memoir, about “the literary circles orbiting the Paris Review,” produces this lament from her daughter: “I was struck by how much these productive and famous people drank. Today we would dismiss all of these brilliant, narcissistic artists and writers as alcoholics, the word itself carrying its own antiseptic morality, its own irrefutable argument for balance and sobriety, but back then they were simply charismatic.”
See, they weren’t just productive, (by which I mean “until they died very young,”) they were famous. And charismatic. What’s a few marriages compared to an invitation to the Plimptons’? Just look at all the romance we’ve given up by using words like “alcoholic.” It reeks of puritanical compassion for the sick, doesn’t it? And dreary old notions about protecting their wives and children. I mean, how
un-Don Draper can you get?
Roiphe is titillated by a passage in her mother’s book about parties where, “There was a flow to an evening, a sort of dangerous possibility in the air, that would be entirely foreign at the equivalent party now, at which most people go home with the person they are supposed to go home with.” And this to me is the saddest thing about Roiphe’s piece-how, well, sad it sounds. Where has she gotten the positively “Mad Men”-era idea that “embracing the responsibility” of marriage precludes a messy, exciting-sometimes even transcendentally so-life? Does Roiphe not get that, in her creaky old (and exceedingly bougie) critique of “bourgeois culture,” she sounds like one of the be-goateed trust-funders Don meets during the first season of the show? Exactly which “bursts of bad behavior” on the part of “Mad Men”’s characters has she found so attractive? Has there ever been, for instance, a sex scene on the show that wasn’t infused with nihilism, or dread? Has anyone at Sterling Cooper ever lifted a single martini glass in untroubled joy? Does Roiphe watch Betty Draper terrorize her children into gagging on their food and think “I want to be like her!”? I’m sure she doesn’t. So how to explain her head-in-the sand reaction to “Mad Men”?
Yes, there is an ascetic streak running through our abs-obsessed culture, a puritanical strain in our devotion to wholesomeness. But I don’t find Don Draper’s behavior reprehensible because it violates some abstract, obsolete code set down by Cotton Mather on Plymouth Rock. I hate it because it hurts people for no good reason. The Don Drapers of the world, in their pursuit of the “dangerous possibility” Roiphe apparently is incapable of seeing in anything other than the treatment of women as disposable amusements, did a lot of damage, to a lot of people. One of the things that makes “Mad Men” so compelling is knowing that the damage that’s coming for the characters will be redeemed, somewhat, by very brave people who see nothing sexy about suffering, and who doggedly pursue the dangerous possibility of meaningful lives. Katie Roiphe, as the incalculably lucky beneficiary of their legacy, should check out their stories sometime.
Peter Birkenhead is the author of the memoir Gonville.