Why do women love the womanizing hero of “Mad Men”?

Mad Men is an American television drama series broadcast on the cable network AMC. Set in New York City, Mad Men begins in 1960 at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on New York City’s Madison Avenue. The show centers on Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the agency’s creative director, and the people in his life in and out of the office. It also depicts the changing social mores of 1960s America.

“Mad Men is more than Don Draper, which is a good thing since for most of last season he behaved despicably” notes a commenter on an article by John Boot where he wonders out loud why exactly females enjoy the character.

While he recognizes that at least in part, the show is fantasy and escape, he acknowledges that the men and women are uniformly despicable.

They cheat on their spouses and stab each other in the back. Don’s wife Betty (January Jones) drives drunk, horrifically mismanages her children, and has an affair of her own with a stranger. Don’s colleague at the ad firm Sterling Cooper, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), denied even to herself that she was pregnant until she was about to give birth, then managed to mysteriously separate herself from the baby without an apparent second thought and return to work. Everyone drinks, smokes, schemes, and keeps secrets.

Mr John guesses that style has a large part to do with the shows appeal to women, pointing out that not only does “everyone look great” but that “style-conscious women can’t stop talking about the sleek craftsmanship of every ashtray and tie clip” and that “At glossy magazines, designers are gushing Mad Men-inspired layouts”.

So is Mad Men just Melrose Place with skinny ties? asks Boot. Not quite.

The deftness and subtlety of the show’s writing and directing, the way characters’ shadings emerge only in scenes of whispery quiet, carries a strong rebuke to today’s confessional culture. Imagine the wordless disgust on Don’s face if you told him you were Tweeting your wedding planning, or your training for the marathon, or your search for your birth parents.

Boot mentions women’s fondness for “fictitious sexy rascals” that has always existed and will never go away but argues that Don’s misbehavior comes as “part of a package that women find hard to resist”.

Women aren’t likely to rise to the top in the working world of Mad Men but “they assume total command of the household” notes Boot. “They may not know where their men are in the evenings when they say they’re at ‘business dinners’ (and frequently are, with young models or foxy department-store heiresses) but that leaves them plenty of time to conduct discreet little flirtations of their own.”

Mr Boot concludes that “the women who watch the show aren’t just sighing with lust for Don. They’re sighing with relief in contemplation of a world that, though unfair and imperfect, is carefully ordered and stable, at least on the surface. Yet Mad Men is a testament to how important surfaces can be when there is a consensus that the unpleasant parts of the past ought to be enthusiastically buried. There’s no monster of the deep so fearsome that it can’t be chased away for a moment or two with a pitcher of martinis.”

What do you think? Do you watch Mad Men? Why do you like it?