Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.11
"You Really Got Me Now"
Guest Writer: Todd McGowan
Monday, May 28, 2012
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capitalism
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inclusion
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Mad Men
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Mad World
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prostitution
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Todd McGowan
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You Really Got Me Now
by Unit for Criticism
“You Really Got Me Now”
Written by Todd McGowan (University of Vermont)
The term “the other woman” is almost necessarily pejorative. But this episode of Mad Men takes as its project a redefinition of its titular expression. The other woman is not the mistress or even the car that the man cannot have (as the Jaguar ad campaign suggests) but the woman who cannot be bought, the woman who resists the very logic of exchange, whom no man can have. This is Peggy at the end of the episode. The fundamental idea of the episode is that it is only by adopting this position of the other woman in the way that Peggy does that one can challenge the universalized prostitution that capitalism demands of its subjects, especially women.
The episode “The Other Woman” explores the link between prostitution and capitalism from beginning to end. We prostitute ourselves or employ others as prostitutes, the show suggests, out of social or economic exigency, and capitalism incessantly produces this exigency. Though prostitution obviously predates capitalism, the relationship between the two is very close. It was Marx who first saw capitalism as a “general prostitution of the laborer” for its insistence that this economic system forces workers not simply to sell what they produce but themselves and their time. In fact, this parallel with prostitution distinguishes capitalism from a barter economy in which one can trade products rather than one’s labor.
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