Don Draper has always been an odd archetype of American masculinity. He is caught between the self-invention and desire for respectability of Jay Gatsby and the visceral, often frightening sexuality of Stanley Kowalski. Consequently, enlightened female viewers everywhere both despise what he represents and yet still want to fuck him. Not only does this episode explore this uncomfortable comingling of sex and violence but it also investigates the question of Don’s central decency and its relationship to the women in and out of his bed.
We begin with Peggy’s friend Joyce titillating the copywriting team with unpublished images of the Chicago nurses raped and murdered by Richard Speck in July 1966. When she describe details of the naked, bound victims as though she were telling a pornographic ghost story (echoed later in the super creepy narrative Grandma Pauline tells Sally), Joyce appears most interested in exciting Megan, who is clearly aroused. As the previous episode’s naked-cleaning-angry-floor-sex scene attests, a significant portion of Megan’s erotic attraction to Don is predicated on the same qualities that repulse her, which causes her constant pain outside the bedroom as evidenced by her clear annoyance at continually running into his former conquests. Continue reading “Hurts so Good”