Retrosexism: TV’s obsession with an era when women were expected to know their place

As it happens, Laura isn’t looking for a husband. She has just run out on her wedding in favour of the giddy freedoms offered by the airlines. Laura, in other words, encapsulates the Pan Am stewardess dilemma: she is fleeing domesticity only to serve dinner to gawping businessmen, and live the kind of life embodied in Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 self-help book, Sex And The Single Girl.

Pan Am is set in 1963, just as Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique: an iconic feminist examination of the unhappiness of a generation of American women, and their desire to be more than housewives and mothers. Later in the series, one of the first officers will rave about the book and its iconic opening line: “Gradually, I came to realise that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today ...”

So does Pan Am offer an intelligent examination of a moment in history when women began a flight from domestic desperation? Not exactly. For while the show pays lip service to social analysis, it is more concerned with delivering a neatly packaged airline tray of glamour, cheap sexism gags, and, according to its producer, “wish fulfilment”. Pan Am is the latest in a series of US dramas which appear to be cynically exploiting an appetite whetted by Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, the critically lauded show set in a 1960s advertising firm. Mad Men contains archetypes of 1960s women – frustrated housewife Betty Draper, Sex And The Single Girl-style pioneer Joan Holloway and career girl Peggy Olson – struggling in a world of brutal, archaic sexism.

Pan Am inhabits the same period as Mad Men, and is shot through with the same retro-fashion, retro soundtrack and, most importantly, retro-sexism. In similar vein, The Playboy Club – set in Chicago in the early years of Hugh Hefner’s club and not yet broadcast in the UK – throws bunny tails and cleavages at its viewers like they had paid for gold membership, while trying to suggest that selling sex to men is empowering. Like Pan Am, which soups up its plot by making one of its characters a CIA courier, The Playboy Club uses all the tricks of the trade, including a murder plot-line, to create interest. But its cheapest trick is to portray itself as a tale of liberation. Its tagline, “where men hold the key but women run the show”, says it all.

One character explains her choice of job: “My husband hates it that I work here. I just tell him the money is too good. I’m making more money than my father.” We are also told, via a Hugh Hefner voiceover, that “bunnies were some of the only females in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be”. Just imagine the industry pitch for that one: “Let’s do girls in bunny suits, Mad Men style. We’ll make it a tale of empowerment – the ladies will love it.”

Is there an appetite for this sexism nostalgia? And if so, does it correspond to a genuine pining for a time when wives and hostesses served men the tea, and women were treated like brood mares? One question has always lingered around Mad Men: how much of its popularity relates to the powerful scripting and social analysis, and how much to the cool dresses, the smoking and the sexism nostalgia? According to the commentator Nelle Engeron, many female viewers – far from reacting with gratitude that such repressive attitudes have passed – watched, thinking: “Those fashions are cool! God, Don’s hot! Are you a Joan or a Peggy? Let’s dress up like them, have a Mad Men party and drink martinis!”

With Mad Men, it’s hard to tell if the programme is critiquing sexism or promoting it. The term “retro-sexism” was invented by Judith Williamson, a former professor of cultural studies who fears that, despite the persistence of gender inequality, sexism is being presented as a feature of our past. The word “sexism” is falling into disuse, and where the attitude does surface in advertising or television it is styled “as a kind of 1960s or 1970s phenomenon, to be enjoyed as kitsch, rather than as a contemporary problem to be addressed as unjust”. The effect, she argues, is to sweeten the associations of overtly sexist products and institutions, making them seem like good, old-fashioned fun. The increasing acceptability of lap-dancing clubs is a case in point, as is Spearmint Rhino, a chain of strip clubs whose name has a 1970s vibe, of a combination of spearmint gum and Rhinestone Cowboy.

Back in 2009, a Virgin Atlantic advert which showed a group of glitzy air-hostesses strolling through an airport terminal while men ogled blatantly, triggered 29 complaints of sexism to the Advertising Standards Authority. “Still red hot,” was its pay-off line. With its glossy retro feel and knowing political incorrectness, the ad seemed like a very pure example of retro-sexism. Pan Am has a similar feel. The series name-checks feminist icons such as Friedan. It features one air stewardess character who reads Hegel and another who works for the CIA. But it could still be accused of making chauvinism more palatable by presenting it as an ironic, old-fashioned joke. When Christina Ricci’s character, Maggie Ryan, sticks a fork in the arm of a passenger who seedily lunges at her, we laugh because she’s giving 1960s bad behaviour the skewering a 21st-century woman feels it deserves. “I am not included in the price of your ticket,” retorts Maggie, as the show jets along in its camp, jolly way, encouraging us to feel it’s all farce from the past.

But as we giggle in the smug knowledge that the world knows better now, the bitter truth is that, even if that’s true, its behaviour is only slightly better than it was in the 1960s. As recently as 2005, a survey of 2000 women employed by a national airline found that more than one in five had suffered sexual harassment from passengers. Meanwhile, misogyny and sexism are still commonplace across the service industry.

One important difference between Pan Am and The Playboy Club and that Virgin Atlantic advert is that their retro-sexism is pitched at women, who are the prime target audience. In America, Pan Am was scheduled straight after Desperate Housewives, in the hope of picking up the same viewers.

Perhaps Pan Am’s female audience are not pretending sexism doesn’t exist, but are viewing the programme as a critique of our own enduringly sexist culture. Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner has stated that the show is really about now as much as then. In other words, the sexism it portrays is challenging precisely because it is really only a notch above what we experience now. Pan Am could be viewed similarly, as a story of our times. We laugh when Laura is put on the scales and told off for having put on weight, or when she has her girdle spanked, as if this really belongs to some distant stone age. But in the back of our minds, we know it doesn’t. We know that in our image-driven culture, beauty remains the prime yardstick of a woman’s existence. The majority of magazine covers, like that issue of Life featured in Pan Am, are still populated by unknown, predominantly white, beautiful women. Today, many flight attendants are male. But an overweight, unattractive or older woman would still struggle to be accepted for a job, as was demonstrated in 2005 when Virgin Blue was found guilty of ageism against women in its recruitment.

Another recent drama to be compared with Mad Men is Abi Morgan’s The Hour, a political thriller set in the BBC during the 1950s at the time of the Suez crisis. In it, the battles of producer Bel Rowly (played by Romola Garai) against the patriarchal establishment seem less like gags played for laughs and rather more as sadly unavoidable authenticating period detail. Indeed, Morgan has said that when she researched the period she was shocked by the levels of sexism in the 1950s. “I couldn’t believe how bad it was,” she said. “I know half the world today is still very patriarchal but, as a relatively independent woman who has been able to combine a career with raising a family, I couldn’t relate to it. I did my research but kept thinking: is this too much? Were they really like that? I asked my mum and she said it was normal to be felt up by your boss in the lift and nothing would be said about it.”

The Hour dealt with the sexism of a past era, without being guilty of retro-sexism itself. The problem with Pan Am is that it seems to float, lighter than a cloud, through its feminist airspace. Unlike Bel Rowly, a character at the vanguard of feminism in attempting to work as an equal in a man’s world, the Pan Am girls are women who have been allowed into the party so long as they smile and serve the coffee. As Natalie Wilson writes in Ms Magazine, “the show accords with a ‘sexy feminist’ vision of female empowerment, one that toys with issues of oppression only to make light of them”. The programme, she adds, “seems to be saying, ‘Ah, look at the glamour, the adventure, the fun’, rather than, ‘Yes, the role of stewardess awarded women certain freedoms, but also involved exploitation, objectification, sexualisation and cowed subservience’ – not to mention classism and racism.”

But here’s the twist in this television tale. As it turns out, the ladies didn’t love The Playboy Club, nor did the Parents Television Council, which put pressure on advertisers to drop out of its commercial breaks. Meanwhile, ratings figures were so low the series was cancelled by the third episode. Pan Am has also been a flop – its ratings suggest cancellation could be just around the corner. One could draw several conclusions from this. Perhaps the quality of the writing simply isn’t good enough – and perhaps the retro-sexism fad lacked the sophistication demanded by viewers of Mad Men.

The historian Stephanie Coontz described Mad Men as “television’s most feminist show”. If that’s true, it’s precisely because of the bleak, relentless honesty of its depiction of the treatment of women, at a time when the term “sexual harassment” hadn’t yet been coined. The shocking infantilisation of Mad Men’s female characters, and the extraordinarily casual ways they are demeaned and humiliated, are what make it feminist. “What do you do around here besides walk around like you’re trying to get raped?” a male office worker asks Christina Hendricks’s character, Joan Holloway.

Nor does Mad Men pander to the fantasy notion that having sex with powerful men, or working in a man’s world, could liberate women. In Pan Am and The Playboy Club, the subtext seems to be that casual sex and a job will bring freedom from oppression. For this reason, it’s impossible to laugh too loud or too lightly, or to pretend that there is anything remotely cool about an old-fashioned slap on the bottom or an off-the-cuff rape gag.