He was dining with friends in a quiet corner of the bar, his broad shoulders hunched over his appetizer, thinly disguised by a pair of nerdy glasses that Draper wouldn't be caught dead in.
Despite his unobtrusive air, Hamm was causing quite the stir. The hostesses stared. The waitresses giggled and gaped at him. Female patrons sized him up like tigresses in heat.
Even the manager was giving him her best seductress eyes. When I told my friends about the sighting, their reactions were similar. Why are we so wild for Draper? By any measure, the character's a cad. He constantly cheats on his wife. He skips town for weeks and won't write or call.
He doesn't talk much, and anesthetizes any feelings with copious amounts of booze. He's an enigma, a locked box of a man who resists, maddeningly, easy explanation. And yet he excites an attraction among womenβparticularly ones my age, women in their late '20s and '30s who were born after the era that portraysβthat seems unmatched by any leading man on television today, with the possible exception of Lost 's con artist, Saywer another strapping scoundrel with a deeply troubled soul.
We describe our obsession in words that, like the show itself, are somewhat retro. He makes me feel like a woman via the TV. A man's man. A virile man. A masculine man. Strong terms. And ones that would make our postmodern gender-studies professors blush. After all, we're the generation of women who grew up beating the boys in math class, reading Judith Butler by choice or by force , celebrating "Grrl" power.
