ImCrushingYourHead wrote:
Good going, salome. You were paying attention!
Isn't part of the question, WHY does Don cheat on Bets? It has never seemed to be the obvious (sex), as she is generally surprisingly responsive in that area. I think there have been so many references to Don's love-less childhood, that it seems that he is really seeking love & acceptance so sorely missing from his past. And Betty is totally unable to give that love to either him OR the children.
Weiner even played the song "Where is Love?" at the end of a recent episode. What's so sad is that Don doesn't even seem to know that's what he's seeking, and keeps going for the image of family harmony (now shattered) over actual familial affection.
Did anyone else think at first when Don told Joanie that he would need a hotel room, and could she set that up, that he meant a hotel room for him to stay at, i.e., a home? Then, when the gang is all in there, with Trudy being the den mother bringing the sandwiches, Don looks genuinely happy -- is this is his real family?
My girlfriend suggested that Don has always been living two lives: family man and business man. In this season he was threatened with losing both and, ultimately, was only able to salvage the business side. Maybe this will prove to be exactly what he needs, not to be happy per se, but to at least keep control of one aspect of his life. I suppose that the dual spheres of life was intended to be a theme of the episode - he apologises to both his wife and his workers, but his workers are the only ones who accept it. Is loyalty the theme here? IDK
And as to the question why Don cheats, it may be that it's related to why we seem to tolerate him and not Betsy so much. Every male lead on television since, Six Feet Under maybe(?), are flawed and full of a desire they'll never achieve. We understand they're flawed and therefore "human", but we've also been conditioned to accept this as an endearing quality in a character simply because it's all we're exposed to these days! The real question, I think, is do we extend this same kind of understanding to female characters? This is the true test of a gendered double standard. I think of Nate and Brenda from Six Feet Under. If I remember correctly, on this forum we tended to accept Nate's infidelity and cruelty but loathed the same behavior from Brenda, even though we knew all the shit that Brenda went through growing up, etc. So maybe Betsy is different because we don't really know her childhood background, but I really wonder if it might be something more engrained - a latent gendered double standard that we've been socialised to accept intuitively.
