Today I came across some pictures of January Jones, an actress who plays Betty Draper on Mad Men, and I found them a bit jarring. The pictures are from an upcoming issue of GQ magazine.
January Jones is a good-looking 31-year-old actress, and these aren’t scandalous or anything by current standards; every month, GQ and similar magazines each turn out something like this. So why do I find these jarring?
I think it’s because I’m only familiar with Ms. Jones as Betty Draper, the young housewife she plays on TV.
Betty, feminists like to complain, is a Repressed Housewife in the Stifling Milieu of the early 1960s, contrasted by the Liberated-To-Varying-Degrees Joan, the office manager who Uses Her Sexuality To Her Own Ends, and Peggy, the former secretary, now copywriter, who’s effectively Liberated before people talked about women being Liberated.
This is an accurate if thin description of the three characters, and frankly I think the contrasts between these three are the most interesting part of the show.
But while Betty may be Repressed and Stifled, she’s also undeniably an adult, something that the partly-clad woman in the pictures above does not seem to be. As Repressed and Stifled as she might be, she is confident within her own domain, and at least relatively certain of how she should be treated by her husband, her friends, and the world in general — and relatively certain of what behavior is expected of her. This is, in short, the mark of the adult: knowing what to do, and having the autonomy to do it.
How ironic that picture of the character Ms. Draper at left would be considered ‘family friendly’, while the childish pictures of Ms. Jones the actress above — showing her fine figure and features, but nothing of character or will or agency whatsoever — are considered ‘adult’.
