I admit that when I heard Mad Men was going to premiere just as I was starting this TV guestblogging gig in the otherwise rather deserted month of August, I breathed a sigh of relief.  If there is one television show that not a one of my communist, death-panel-supporting, child-killing liberal feminist friends is ashamed to admit to loving, it is Mad Men.  Mad Men, in short, has an acceptable television pedigree.  In my particular case, and I am not kidding about this, I started watching it because it was recommended to me by none other than Joyce Carol Goddamn Oates at a talk I attended a long time ago at the NYPL.  Talk about your "I-don't-even-have-a-tv" bookworm street cred.  And Feminist bloggers love Mad Men too.  In fact, it's just about the only television show that gets universal coverage in the feminist blogosphere, and all week, everybody's been gearing up for the Big Event.  DoubleX is live-tweeting it.  Some other prominent feminist bloggers, including Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte, are having a salon about it at RHRealityCheck.  And pretty much everyone I know who loves Mad Men loves to talk about how very, very feminist it feels to have so many nuanced portrayals of women on a single television show.

I, too, think that there is a lot of feminist merit in Mad Men - more on that in a second post this weekend, and I'll have thoughts on the premiere next week, it's gonna be a Mad Men heavy guestblogging experience - but I find it really problematic as a show to recommend to people who aren't feminists, or who aren't, at the very least, what I would call ready for a serious discussion of gender roles.

"It's like AskMen.com but with fewer readers!"

Touted by its editors as "Your Daily Dose of Counter-Theory," the folks at Men's News Daily strive to unveil the truth about what it means to "be a man." By reading their mission statement, I learned a great number of things about both men (the "direct sex"...I'm not really sure what this means...when I Googled "the direct sex" my first results included a "Live Video Chat with Hot Girls" and instructions on how to direct a sex scene) and women (the "fair sex"). For instance, did you know that...

--"the entire world—with its roads, buildings, places of worship, homes, medicines, appliances, and scholarship—was forged and crafted almost exclusively by male hands"? Yup. No men = no mosques, nowhere to live, and certainly nothing of use in either the medical or engineering fields.

--if you consider yourself a 'radical,' you probably are fond of pretending that "the birth of every boy is the moment in which a potential Manson or proto-rapist has entered the world"?

--"males are told that the only route to salvation is feminization"? Additionally, men "must parrot the traits, aspirations, affectations, and behaviors of the fair sex even though their moods are conspicuously less rosy than our own." What!? Men are supposed to be like women in every sense even though everyone knows women are bitches!? I had no idea.

--socialism is to blame for the current state of affiars (i.e., the marginalization of men in society). You know what that means: that gosh darn no good socialist Barack HUSSEIN Obama is behind the winding "road to serfdom" modern Western men find themselves traveling upon.

The mission closes with the following words of real HOPE and CHANGE:

"MensNewsDaily.com was founded in 2001 and remains a sanctuary for men. It is one of the few remaining places where a man can be a man without apology. We thank you for visiting, but encourage you to join us in our mission. Welcome brothers!"

Where a man can be a man...MND, you aren't affiliated with Ketel One Vodka, are you?

Image from susanphotography at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

I am just about the only person I know - and certainly the only feminist - who has been religiously watching Showtime's Nurse Jackie (In fairness, Jezebel started out covering it but seemed to lose interest very quickly, and the only regular commentary I see on it is Jacob's excellent recaps at TWoP.)  Maybe I should be generous to the fools people who don't watch the show. Perhaps the neglect is due to the unfortunate dead end of July and August.  Perhaps it's because the show has the unfortunate timing of airing whilst we are all salivating at the imminent prospect of a new season of Mad Men (more on that tomorrow, by the by), which happens to be everybody's favourite feminist-food-for-television thought nowadays.  Perhaps it's because most people I know only watch television shows once they are out on DVD anyway, so all first seasons on cable are kind of a wash, popularity-wise.