It was a pretty easy trap to fall into. Like many men of my generation (X or Y or maybe Z?), we've realized the words of Tyler Durden are never more true, in that we're a generation of men raised by women. In other words, men not raised by men. Many of us striving for manhood have to figure out what the hell we're doing when 43% of us don't have a steady father figure. Luckily I have had that, but as a culture, many of us have not. And in a country where the average one of us watches 28 hours of television a week, we find our examples through the magnifying glass of an HDTV, filled to its borders with mediocre sitcoms, trash reality shows, and over-hyped sporting events.
I needed someone to save me from it all.
Prime-time sitcoms certainly weren't doing it for me. We're told that a forty-year old man whose best friends are a laugh track and a wardrobe of 32 bowling shirts can lay girl after girl and not be considered a) ridiculous or b) creepy. Until his personal life becomes the lowest common denominator that his fake life always was. Likewise, we have men who in any other period of our country would actually be contributing to society, getting plastered and arrested on a New Jersey beach and getting paid millions of dollars to do it, because really, we want them to do that. And in a sport where young men are glorified as young gods, we act appalled when they celebrate excessively, but will watch repeat episodes of SportsCenter that highlight the obnoxious, selfish, and unsportsmanlike behavior.
To rebound from all that, we overcompensate on the definition of a man and forget the irony of Fight Club, so that the fastest growing sport in America is one where men cover themselves in tribal tattoos and attempt to brutalize another person in an octagon cage. Flip the coin, and even those of us who strive to escape the man-boys around us end up having to schedule a month in which to grow a beard and watch YouTube videos on our iPads on how to change a tire. I'm not judging, I'm part of this 99 percent. I read Esquire on my iPhone, through Twitter, to read a recipe, in a section called "How to Eat Like a Man." While eating Oreos and milk. I'm still a boy.
We're all still boys, and in this decade we needed a savior, someone who wasn't our father, but could teach us to act like how our father was or always wanted to be.
In came the good ship Mad Men, a vessel that could finally rescue us from the circling sharks of bumbling sitcom husbands swarming off the tequila drenched shores of Bro Jersey. At its helm, the no-nonsense, pressed-suit wearing, Old-Fashioned downing Don Draper- a breath of fresh, secondhand, Lucky Strike air.
At first glance, Don Draper is the quintessential man. In the last few years, he single-handedly revived classic cocktails, showed American men how to wear suits without looking like a Vegas casino manager but without looking like a Brooklyn hipster, and destroyed every anti-tobacco campaign by smoking cigarettes like they were a healthy three square meals. New York City, the greatest city in the world, is lucky to have him. For God's sakes, he works in an office and loves it (of course, having Joan Holloway around helps). He demands respect from other people who demand respect. And he gets that respect. He's the textbook modern man.
That's how I fell into the trap. One episode in, I was taking furious notes on how to be that person. Two and a half seasons in, I was taking notes on how to forget.
In the beginning, it was easy to love everything he embodied. Then there was a little cheating. But maybe it was just a mistake. Then there was a lot of getting wasted and showing up to work hungover. But maybe he'd pull it together. Then there was being a terrible father. Maybe he'd wake up. But he continued to embrace his shovel of increasing power and wealth, and continued to dig a bigger and bigger hole into his life, without any remorse whatsoever.
So I started pulling things away from him, to see where he'd stand without his assembly line of cocktails, clever quips, and tailored suits. At that point, he suddenly became a mere boy to me. A boy somewhere in between adolescence and adulthood. That period where we begin to make so many serious mistakes (i.e. drinking WAY too much, wrecking cars, breaking someone's heart), but are still allowed to learn from them before we're catapulted into our careers, marriages, and adult life in general. The problem with Don Draper is that his life is a spin-cycle of that period, without ever moving forward. On most nights, when he can embrace the childhood of his kids, he prefers to indulge in the pleasure of excessive drinking and/or excessive adultery. When he can embrace his long-lost brother, he disowns him. When he can repair the marriage that he wrecked without regard to his entire family, he runs away to California. At every turn, change seems inevitable (because who can go on living like that?), but it never comes. While everything except his job continues to crumble, he blissfully ignores the consequences his actions have on others, and the repercussions never come.
In the end, those repercussions, and what we learn from them, are what make us men. As weak as it is, we only become our best when the imperfections of our life and the process in which we learn from them begin to patch one hole after another until hopefully we're only a slow-leaking sieve. I am surely not perfect. I have enjoyed too many a cocktail too many a time, and it does not make me a man. It makes me want to eat Burger King the next day, but it does not make me a man. What makes me a man is what happens in the moments when it's me against myself, not me against Johnny Walker. Instead of entertaining thoughts of other women, I try my best to divert them towards the woman I love, who unconditionally loves me back. I try to avoid vices, and many times find myself resorting to them, but I at least know where I am and know where I need to go to, and that is reassuring.
As far as Don Draper and the rest of Sterling Cooper go, I couldn't keep watching the show as they all continued to free-fall through a life of unchecked balances. I wanted to believe in him and his co-workers as men, but the outstanding lack of remorse in the show made me stop.
For now, I'll stick to re-runs of Friday Night Lights and Coach Eric Taylor, or the upcoming season of The Walking Dead and Sheriff Rick Grimes. They're the best we've got going for us.
We're still a generation of lost men wandering around in a desert, trying to find water in anything that will moderately resemble manliness. I don't know if we'll ever find that fountain of post-youth. It may be that our relief will only come through holding onto virtue and knowing that while we will forever fail in most of our endeavors, we try to be better. That's all I ever wanted from Don Draper. Just try to be better. Be just, be upstanding, and be honest. But he never delivered.
That said, after going on about this for a whole essay, I suppose I should practice what I preach. To be honest, the real reason I stopped watching Mad Men is because it makes me want to smoke every cigarette in the whole wide world. And I don't have enough money to buy all of them.
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