From the Chicago Tribune:
Former ‘Mad Men’ writer accuses Matthew Weiner of sexual harassmentOkay, but both of you do realize, don’t you, that the show you were working on, Mad Men, was basically a softcore porn soap opera?Former “Mad Men” writer Kater Gordon has accused series creator Matthew Weiner of making a sexually charged remark to her while she worked on the series.
According to a report published Thursday by the Information, Gordon alleges while working together late one night in 2008, Weiner said she owed it to him to let him see her naked. A PR rep for Weiner reiterated the statement he gave to the Information: “He does not remember saying this comment nor does it reflect a comment he would say to any colleague.”
Granted, it had nice nostalgic camera work and art direction. And it was adept at pushing the buttons of women in the media in the 21st Century in ways that their college majors hadn’t quite prepared them to understand. But still … the basic point of the show was to depict office colleagues making sexually charged remarks to each other and then encourage the audience to gossip about it, as in this 2009 Gawker story:
Why Did Matthew Weiner Fire Mad Men’s Kater Gordon?Did life imitate art or art imitate life? Perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising by this point that that’s a common question?
It’s not like Weiner pretended all that hard to be a feminist. As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine in 2009:
Weiner, who has a wife and four sons, is at least aware, however, that he finds feminism a hoax. (This same heresy added interest to the 1980s television serial about the advertising business, thirtysomething, which was created by two otherwise liberal Jewish family men, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.)The ism that actually energizes Matthew Weiner, the one that one helps him get up in the morning is anti-gentilism. As he explained in numerous interviews in 2015, what Mad Men is really about is all the anti-Semitism that he was the victim of while growing up in the vicinity of the Hollywood Hills in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally wreaking vengeance upon those anti-Semites infesting Coldwater Canyon who wouldn’t let the Weiners join their country club is what motivates him. I wrote several blog posts analyzing the interviews Weiner gave because they were rather illuminating about one of the more influential mythmakers of the 21st Century:Consider the interview in Variety in which Weiner is asked a standard question: “How much of the show’s take on gender roles is rooted in your own upbringing as someone born in 1965?” In response, he wanders around for 867 words trying to explain, without being so lucid that gets himself Larry Summersized, that he’s learned—the hard way—that feminism is flapdoodle. In his strained verbiage, though, there’s one cogent sentence that explains much of Mad Men’s appeal to contemporary women:
“What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.”
- Matthew Weiner on How “Mad Men” Is Driven by His Resentment of WASP Country Clubs
- Matthew Weiner Explains “Mad Men” Is About “White Power”
- Mad Man
- Matthew Weiner Gets Worked Up Over Country Clubs Some More
- Flight from White: Matthew Weiner Thinks Jews Are “Of Color”
- Reforming Stuyvesant HS Admissions: Should Blacks & Whites Team Up Against Asian Grinds?
