The period piece. An artistic genre dedicated to reviving, reliving, and reimagining earlier times. One of the most noted of recent years has been the Mad Men series. The series succeeds in a myriad of ways, but one of the most apparent is how it subconsciously invites the viewers to compare and contrast their own lives, set in the early 21st century, with the lives of the show’s characters, set in the 1960's. Mad Men pulls us into a world where men wear three-piece suits to work, drink whiskey during meetings, have mistresses in the city and wives in the suburbs. It’s a world without cell phones, where men can be unreachable and untraceable. Business is conducted during private lunch meetings in dimly lit corners of local bars. Men had personal assistants called secretaries that sat outside their rooms, answering phone calls, picking up lunch, and running errands. What a strange world.

The show centers around the character Don Draper. Don is a man’s man, but not the kind you see in Chevy commercials or old Westerns. He is headstrong and commanding, yet dark, complex, creative. He’s frequently given over to concupiscence, yet remarkably genuine and sensitive. You loathe him and sympathize with him. He wreaks havoc in his own life yet resolves much of the havoc in others. Don is a transitional character, and he addresses many deep and sustaining questions about masculinity transitioning from the 20th to 21st century. Most notably, it begs us to wrestle with the contrast between what we accept as masculine then and now. Don’s adulterous behavior is detestable, but, and I intend this in both a literary and moral way, can we say that his actions are a flaw of character? The editorial direction of the show seems to suggest that we are to accept his sexual adventures as a subsidiary of his virtuosity. He’s not for lack of moral awareness, he’s just wired to romance women. We are forced to separate his work, from his family, from his existential development, from his personal identity, from his social habits. Don gets to be a man divided because we allow him to be. We tolerate his hypocrisy, his deceitfulness, his egotism, because we tolerate it in ourselves. A man is not a singular whole, but rather, a conglomerate of competing passions.

If Mad Men is a period piece, then Don Draper is a period character. He is a man anchored in a time, a place, and a mythology. As viewers, we get the feeling that the Don Draper’s of the world have come and gone; that Don is a relic. If he exists today, it’s as an archetype. So then, what happened? What changed? There’s a clip from season 4 that may give us an answer:

The traditional model of masculinity is that a man’s identity and character is fixed. “Being a man” means remaining unchanged, unhindered, unencumbered by his surroundings. Rugged individuality. John Wayne and James Bond. A man is the same wherever he goes. But, as Don narrates, the world isn’t perfect. Sometimes life takes the man. Sometimes, in spite of all of his efforts, a man’s life is not his own. Sometimes, he forgets where he is going. We speak of a man as being “of the times” and we mean it as an description. We witness the man who acquaints himself with the trends and moods of his surroundings, as if he were initially independent of the things that have come to identify him. Yet, the clip hints at an alternate perspective. A man is defined by his circumstances. Control, is an illusion. We are granted some of it when we are young and from time to time as we age, but eventually cause and effect catches up with us.

So then, what about our circumstances? I’m reminded of Edith Shain. If you’re not familiar with the name, you are definitely familiar with the photo:

What about this photo makes it feel like we are looking at an image from a bygone era? Certainly nowadays soldiers are coming home all the time and kissing their loved ones. (Maybe not so forcefully). But the cultural conditions of something like this are not bound to a singular era. So why do we feel as if they are? Why do we feel that things like this aren't happening any more?

It has to do with a mythology, closely attached to a historical moment. That moment? The end of World War II. More specifically, V-J Day, August 14, 1945. We beat the Germans and the Japanese. The mythology? We saved the world. This photo, in all of its simplicity, encapsulates this moment. What is most intriguing about the photo is that the two embracing had never met prior to that moment. Edith Shain, the women in the white dress, was working at a local hospital and had come out into Times Square to celebrate. According to an interview given with Ms. Shain years later, the sailor simply approached her, and given over to the weight of the historical moment, “figured I might as well let him kiss me since he fought for me in the war.” The moment, frozen perfectly in time, summons something deep within us. It’s as if we long for a time when sailors were coming home from wars and kissing young women in white dresses in the middle of the street.

Now, once again, I do not mean to say that men are no longer randomly approaching women and stealing kisses from them. What I do mean to say is that something about this photo feels different. There’s some kind of romance to it that carries with it a sense of loss; as if Man and Woman are no longer understood in such a way that these kinds of exhilarating moments can happen anymore. It’s a funny feeling really, but it’s there.

Greater Times & Lesser Times

We’ve come along way since the days of Edith Shain. How far have we come? Well, for starters, all the wars we’ve fought since then haven’t come with the same “weight” as did WWII. We view war very differently then we did back then, in part, because war has changed. Men aren’t charging into battlefields quite like they used. Instead, they’re pushing buttons and staring at video feeds. Consider this: we’ve lost 4,487 soldiers to the Iraqi War. This seems like a lot, and cause for serious reflection. Yet, ready for this, over 400,000 were killed in WWII. Breathtaking. It’s two different worlds, separated by just a single generation. Those were greater times it seems. History hung in the balance. Civilizations were rising and falling.

Masculinity has changed. Not because men have changed, but because our view of the world has changed. We think we live in lesser times. We live in an age of wide-scale apathy, slothfulness, and selfishness. “Low-T” is on the rise. Men are rushing off to go sit in front of screens all day. The prevalence and pervasiveness of easy sex, whether in person or by computer screen, is rewiring the very fabric of male-female interaction. It seems there’s less to care about, it’s easier to live comfortably and not work hard, and our social technologies are teaching us how to be remarkably narcissistic. The list could go on and on. Our living in lesser times isn’t so much an indictment of history than it is an indication of our indifference.

So then the question remains: why is masculinity bound by time? Biologically, not much has changed with the male gender for thousands of years. Certainly we can consult our ancient manuscripts and find significant overlap between their idea of masculinity and ours. It’s hardly a social construction. The famed poet Robert Bly once said that “the structure at the bottom of the male psyche is still as firm as it was twenty thousand years ago.” Bly’s comment appears glaringly true, yet, I wonder, why must he have the phrase “structure at the bottom” before he gets to the psyche? Why the vagueness?

If masculinity is simply the presence of penis, both physiologically and existentially, then obviously it is not dependent on historical context. But of course this would be an irrational simplification. Masculinity is not the same as maleness. Biology is not destiny. Bly’s “structure at the bottom” implies there’s a superstructure way above, closer to the surface; out in the streets. This is the real masculinity. The kind we can see. The kind that women fall in love with. The kind that is surrounded by history, both personal and social. The masculinity I’m concerned with is the one derived from the times.

As I stated before, Don Draper is anchored in a specific historical time, but he is also a transitional character. He represents the passing of the times, from one mythology to the next. Like the breaking of your childhood dream when you discover your father is not infinitely strong nor infinitely wise, Don Draper represents the breaking down and redefining of masculinity in modern times. The show begins with him as a paragon of the old-fashioned kind of masculinity. A high paying job, a beautiful wife and adoring children, admired by his coworkers, with the freedom to come and go as he pleases. But the methods and behaviors that got him there in the first place begin to twist their way back on him. His history catches up to him. He is a man with great resolve but little resolution. He experiences remorse, shame, depression, sometimes in the same scene he is exerting his will over another. He is a heroic because he is true, not because he is good. This new idea of masculinity seems to embrace more of the man—his contradictions, his shortcomings, and most importantly, his context.

Chival-what?

Chivalry began with knighthood and knights were warriors. Defenders of the king. Their armor was shining. They stabbed other men with swords. They jousted on occasion. They were protectors of the weak and defenseless. They went on crusades. They had a code of honor. If this is the model of masculinity we’ve inherited, then we have certainly come a long way. We may ask: what about chivalry when there are no crusades to go on? What do we do with acting noble and virtuous in times that have no clear definition of either? If our version of masculinity has moved to a place of greater acceptance of a man’s shortcomings and weaknesses, then what kind of standard should men adhere to?

I think it begins with romance. In the words of the acclaimed sociologist Robert Bellah, love is “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves.” Maybe romance isn’t about the object of our affection—the woman—but rather the endless recapitulation of our own childhood dreams. The task of selfhood, which begins in our youth as a maze of uncertainty, winds its way into adulthood as a daily battle. We enter into love to discover ourselves. Men chase after women because they are still chasing after themselves. Chivalry then might entail a kind of crusade. We fight, not for God and Country, but for authenticity. And as Bellah states, it is an infinite crusade.

What is most compelling about Don Draper is not his actions or lifestyle. Rather, it’s the chore he’s been burdened with of discovering himself. We witness him go through several seasons of birth and rebirth, discovery and mystery, confusion and clarity. The Mad Men series can be reduced in many ways to the narrative of one mad man, whose checkered past wends and winds its way through his life, to which he works out both in principal and practice with the world he’s inherited. In season 4 episode 7, we witness Don break down in front of Peggy, his old secretary. Don had just received news that his first wife, Anna Draper, had died from cancer. Don confesses that “she was the only person that really knew me,” revealing that the loss of Anna is not simply the loss of another person, but more so the loss of part of himself. She knew him as Dick Whitman, his former self. She knew him before he was the executive of a big advertising company. She knew him before any of the facade. Don is a compelling character because he is a moral failure who remains remarkably true to himself; true to the task of figuring himself out. We want him to succeed because we’ve been pressed with the same burden.

Should I be opening doors for women?

There’s a lot of rules out there on what it means to be a man nowadays. Here’s one bit I’ve gone back to a few times, both in jest and earnest contemplation. My favorite rule from the list is: “Never stay out after midnight three nights in a row… Unless something really good comes up on the third night”, or, “find a Times New Roman in the streets and a Wingdings in the sheets. She exists.” There’s a man-code, but it’s not the kind you’ll find in ancient texts or cleanly written psychoanalytical manuscripts. Rather, the code is derived from experience, street life, walking the line, running in circles, building and breaking habits. It’s the code men are writing all the time, shared in bars and cubicles. The code is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure, in which men, pressed by the circumstances to which they are given, must blindly navigate through life’s many corridors before finding what they are ultimately looking for.

One of the codes I’ve often questioned is whether or not I should be opening doors for women, most specifically car doors. It feels quaint and old-fashioned, and in some ways kind of silly. Why though? We assume it is a nice thing to do because men should treat women in a specific way, which is based on a really outmoded idea of femininity. Women are fragile and can’t fend for themselves. They are delicate creatures and shouldn’t exert too much energy. Men drive the cars and women ride as passengers. Granted, there are many women (and men) who still embrace this perspective. But, for the most part, we as a society have done away with a lot of that. Yet, there might be another reason to open doors for women that doesn’t require the old fashioned perspective.

If love entails exploration, as Robert Bellah states, than it must also entail mystery. The opening doors thing is less about the woman and more about me. It’s me asking myself whether or not I have what it takes to truly love someone. It’s me wondering if I can tolerate the silly stuff enough to let the serious stuff back in. It’s like unlocking the latch to the upstairs attic where your dad stores all of his old collectibles; getting to the treasured things. Mystery is the occasion for romantic affection, and as we see with Don Draper, his romantic pursuits are in fact the methods of his self-disocvery.

The best kind of masculinity is the harshest form of self-criticism. Men have conquered kingdoms, sent themselves to the moon, built structures that scrape the sky, but have yet to conquer themselves. We measure success in all the visible ways, and often fail to comprehend all the millions of secret things that determine how the man is made. This is where all the discovery is to be had. We begin to pick and prod through all the details, wondering where the chivalry begins and ends. Every man is comparing himself to another, wondering what integral details went into building the man he admires or the man he detests.

So, masculinity in the 21st century is less about cultural convention and more about self-discovery. But, all of the conventions are still there. I often reflect on my self-identity as a product of my will, but recognize that much of what goes in to me is the accumulation of extrinsic influences. I want to be a man of the times, embracing the historical moment to which I live and the history in which I was built. Romance is then the method of my discovery, and opening doors for women, just one little dimension of the larger mystery: are we living in greater times?