Sex on Madison Avenue - Jane Maas

Valentine39s Day is approaching and so is the long awaited fifth season of television39s Mad Men So this seems like a good time to think about how Madison Avenue handled love in the sexy and sexist days of the 1960sThe people I interviewed for Mad Women both men and women told me that sex was in the air Maybe it was the early stirrings of Feminism Maybe it was the advent of The Pill which became available in 1960 and made spurofthemoment trysts more possible Maybe it was those famous threemartini lunches which often led to a matinee at a nearby hotel Alumni of Young ampamp Rubicam apparently a hotbed of office sex told me that the Hotel Lexington was a favorite spot It was just a few blocks from the agency and the clerks at the front desk didn39t raise an eyebrow when you asked for a room key at two and returned it at three If you met fellow staff members coming through the lobby you simply averted your eyesSo if women were so liberated how come we allowed men to treat us like secondclass citizens It39s a good question I39m afraid we submitted to a lot of rampant jawdropping sexism as simply the status quo Take pay scales for example A woman copywriter who was at Ogilvy in the sixties complained to her boss that the guy sitting in the next office made twice what she was paid and she was turning out twice as much good copy as he was The boss said quotBut he39s a man He has a wife to supportquot The copywriter told me quotI accepted that explanation as totally plausible and didn39t complain againquotWe had a lot to learn And we39re still learning itJane Maas is a former creative director at Ogilvy ampamp Mather and Wells Rich Greene and was president of the New York office of Earle Palmer Brown Her newest book Mad Women is the real story of what it was like to be a woman in advertising in the sexy and sexist era of televisionamp8217s Mad Men Jane can be reached at janemaasattnetRead all Jane39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at MAD WOMEN the Other Side of life on Madison Avenue in the Sixties and BeyondCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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Sex on Madison Avenue - Jane Maas

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