Betty haters

I made it through Sunday night, the first without Mad Men, but it wasn't easy. I felt the pain.

January Jones' stint on SNL has been mocked/panned/dissed. It's just more Jan-Jo/Betty Draper hate.

There are two categories of disses--those related to the actress, and those related to the character of Betty Draper.

Here, a diss in the Atlantic about how "clumsily" Jones portrays Betty.

Or here, Gawker calls Jones/Betty "the worst part of Mad Men.

Pretty harsh, bros. I think she sucked on SNL, true, but the rest of the hate is unwarranted.


Because Weiner did not initially think we'd be seeing much of don's home life, Betty was, in the beginning, not very fleshed out. This season, we've seen that she is a canny political operative (kind of kidding here, a bit) with an anthropology degree who speaks passable (fluent?) Italian. She's learned that when you don't have power, you have to delay. She tells don what's what.

So why do people hate on her? Sure, she's kind of a pissy mom. But let's see. Joan is a racist. Don is a philanderer and just generally a dick to everyone. Pete Campbell is whiny and rapey. Roger Sterling is a racist philanderer. Bert cooper is a big Ayn Rand fan. Peggy Olson is generally pretty cool, but she's got that whole secret abandoned baby thing and is kind of assy to people sometimes.

Hating on Betty for being "mean" to her kids, or being bland and boring, or putting up with Don's shenanigans is unfair, and I think misses the point of her character. betty IS peevish. She DOESN'T have anything interesting to say. but it's because her life is constructed in such a way that she can't. Henry Francis finally suggests to her that there is "another way to live." We can tell that if she keeps going down the Betty Freidan road, she actually COULD be a fun, interesting, pleasant person. I'd be pissed too if i were in my mid-late twenties, ignored by my husband, sexually frustrated, intelligent but stuck at home all day with nothing to do but turn to the washing machine for a good time. Maybe people like to hate on Betty because it's easy to feel superior to her (and to all of the characters). it's maybe letting loose some schadenfreude. People like hating her, they like listing her foibles because they don't want to like a beautiful, privileged, perfectly polished blond woman.