I Wanna Hold Your Hand: A Short History of Teen Girls in the Beatles Fandom

The Beatles’ music is considered to be more or less universal, with fans all over the world and of all ages. But in my 11 years as a Beatles fan, I have found that the most active participants in Beatles fan culture are still teenage girls. They put up Beatles posters in their bedrooms, collect vinyl records, spend their allowances on the myriad and sundry Beatles memorabilia, and share and trade pictures, stories, and rare audio clips with other teenage fans. The bulk of their interactions happen online, in fan communities or on social networks such as Tumblr, where users can create a personal page reflecting their interest in the Beatles and re-blog other fan’s creations (graphics, gifs, mash-ups, fan art, and fan fiction).

My most formative experiences as a teen girl Beatles fan in the early 2000s centred around online fan-forums and fan-pages, since my peers “in real life” found my new interest weird, boring and alienating. I ventured online to find out more about my new obsession, and I was met with a plethora of Beatles fan sites run by teenage girls. The content was often quite similar to what you might find on fan sites for contemporary groups such as *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys: Top Ten lists, light-hearted humour, and pages and pages of dreamy photos. It was through these websites that I found a sense of community with other fans and learned how to develop critical thinking skills about my favourite media, as a common theme on these pages was the good-natured mocking of the more humorous moments of the band members post-Beatles careers, including Ringo’s stint on Shining Time Station and Paul McCartney’s ill-fated marriage to his much-younger model wife, Heather Mills. The most popular fan sites at the time were run by teen girls and hosted by third-party websites such as Angelfire, Geocities, and Xanga. 

One of the most prolific webmistresses was Sabrina (no last name known) who ran “God Bless the Beatles”, a Beatles fan site which was unabashedly teen-centric in its use of raunchy, sarcastic humour, teen slang, and breathless rhapsodizing on the physical attractiveness of the Fab Four. “God Bless the Beatles” was initially hosted on a single Tripod page, and eventually expanded onto four different Tripod platforms, as the webmistress churned out enough writing and rare photos to constantly surpass the set limit for uploaded content. “God Bless the Beatles” was comprised of a sprawling assortment of themed pages- some devoted to humorous fan fiction, some to Beatle biography reviews, and some tributes to deceased members of the Beatles’ entourage. Also among these were many pages devoted to the Beatles’ former wives and girlfriends, which included information about their lives, photos, and guides on how to imitate their fashion, hair, and make-up style. One could argue that the fan-worship that sprung up for the Beatles’ wives and girlfriends was tied to cultural norms about rock music which teach boys to aspire to be musicians and teach girls to aspire to date musicians. However, I counter that the fan-worship of these women is linked more to young teen girls’ efforts to carve out a niche for themselves in the Beatles fandom, and to create a space that was explicitly feminized, something that would alienate the middle-aged men who, up until that point, had been the most vocal (if not the most active) members of the Beatles fandom in popular media. 

Why did teen girls in the 2000s feel the need to claim a space of their own in the Beatles fandom? Weren’t all the Beatles’ fans originally screaming teenage girls, anyway? They certainly were, and the Beatles’ female fandom persisted throughout their 11-year run as a band, from the following that began when they were playing gigs in their native Liverpool in the early days, to the young girls who stood outside the court house bawling during Paul McCartney’s 1969 marriage to Linda Eastman. Their music grew and changed over the years, and their fan base widened as they experimented with more daring musical forms, but their core female fan base stayed with them throughout the course of their career. 

The Beatles fandom persisted in the 1970s despite the split of the band, and the demand for Beatles-centric discussion and content was strong enough to lead to several different fan publications (newsletters, magazines, and fan anthologies) most of which were published semi-regularly during the decade. Unlike mainstream coverage, which only offered reviews for the separate members’ solo output, these fan magazines focused on the Beatles as a group, placing emphasis on their chemistry and group dynamic and offering speculation on a possible Beatles reunion. Most of these fan publications were either spearheaded by women or contained a majority of content contributed by women. Aside from the reunion speculations, the fanzines also offered interviews with Beatles hangers-on, stories about fan encounters, fan art, and fan fiction. By the end of the ‘70s, the Beatles had become widely recognized as extremely influential in music and gained a large, diverse fan base, but the most active participants within deeper fan culture were still female: women who had grown up loving the Beatles, and young girls who were just discovering their music for the first time. It was not uncommon for a teen girl in the ‘70s to list the Beatles as her favourite group, along with those other teen girl favourites of the ‘70s, The Bay City Rollers and the Jackson 5.

It was not until John Lennon’s assassination in 1980 that the mainstream’s idea of the “typical” Beatles fan began to change. Upon Lennon’s death, fans worldwide were plunged into very public mourning. But the thing about Lennon’s death is that it wasn’t just the hardcore fans who were mourning his death- it was also people who, although not “fans” per se, grew up in the era of Beatlemania and associated his music with their carefree days of youth. Lennon’s death symbolized the end of innocence for many of these people, and, in order to legitimize their mourning of a man they’d never known or met (and who, for a good part of his life, was associated with screaming girls), they began the deification of Saint John Lennon, a radical peacenik, spokesperson for a generation, and “the thinking man’s Beatle”. In contrast, Paul McCartney, whose post-Beatles career was dominated with love ballads and odes to family life on the farm, was “for women”. 

Although the John vs. Paul dichotomy began in the ‘70s, it was certainly exacerbated by Lennon’s death, as male fans began to infiltrate female fan spaces, many of the fanzines folded, and fan conventions began to focus more on the then-typically masculinized pursuits of tribute bands and record collecting. This would continue throughout the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s, and although there were plenty of female Beatles fans out there, both young and old, they weren’t given the recognition that their male counterparts were, often being left out of retrospective documentaries and magazine articles, despite their contributions to fandom and knowledge of the group. 

Things changed in the ‘90s as the internet began to pick up steam, and more and more households began to have working internet access. By the late ‘90s, website-hosting platforms such as Angelfire, gURL.com, and Geocities provided an easy template for teen girls to create a web space of their own, and teen girl Beatles fans, feeling alienated by the rest of the fandom, saw it as an opportunity to re-claim their voice in a fandom that should always have belonged to them. 

The Beatles occupied several spaces in the life of a young teen female fan in the early 2000s. Often, the music served as a link between these girls and their parents or older family member, the shared love of the music bridging the gap between young and old. The Beatles mythos/legend served as a guiding force and stability for teens who lacked it in their lives. And the Beatles themselves were rendered as crush objects, or, to put it more bluntly in the post-Sexual Revolution 2000s- as sex objects. These websites and message boards allowed girls who might have felt disenfranchised among their classmates (but also disenfranchised at male-dominated Beatles meet-ups) to talk about their shared interests with girls who were just like them. As I’ve said, the enthusiasm and approach they took towards the Beatles wasn’t much different from what their peers might write about any of the boy bands du jour. But the internet allowed these girls a space of their own, a place where they could freak out about a band that split up over 30 years ago, a place to be teen girl-y about something that they might be teased for by their teen girl peers at school. 

As an adult, I can now look back on my time in the Beatles web-based fandom as an extremely positive experience. At a time when my life was unsure and unstable, I gained several older female mentors. I learned that it was okay to be crazy over things that YM magazine and MuchMusic weren’t shoving down my throat, and through writing fan fiction and creating fan art of the Beatles, I honed both my writing skills and art skills. 

Men may try to claim the Beatles as their own, but they will always belong to teen girls. It was teen girls that made the Beatles popular, it was teen girls and women that championed them relentlessly, and teen girls will always be there- discovering the Beatles for the first time, and excitedly proclaiming their love for the four lads from Liverpool. After all, weren’t their best songs written for girls?

Shelly Johnson is the unsung heroine of Twin Peaks

Trigger warning: this entry contains discussions of sexual abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse.

When I talk about Twin Peaks, I always feel it necessary to mention that my fascination and obsession with the show lies much deeper than a regard for its moody aesthetics or an appreciation for  David Lynch as a director (although I very much appreciate David Lynch). For me, it is more than just a TV show and cultural icon, it is something very spiritual to me, something that speaks to the dark places of my soul that I thought nothing could ever penetrate.

Twin Peaks is often name-dropped by mainstream media and bloggers as a quirky supernatural detective show, an interesting piece of '90s ephemera, while its more significant themes of abuse and incest are largely ignored in favour of references to cherry pie and saddle shoes. It's not that I mean to be pretentious, as if I'm the only one who loves the show for its dark themes and connects with it emotionally, because many women in the fandom do, but I do feel that certain aspects of the show are overrepresented while other elements of the show (as well as important and meaningful characters) are largely ignored.

With that in mind, I'd like to devote some time to arguably my favourite character in the series, waitress Shelly Johnson.

Unlike the other ladies of Twin Peaks, not much of Shelly's backstory is explicitly stated, other than that she dropped out of high school to marry truck-driver Leo. However, there is much we can infer about her life based on context and clues given by the show and tie-in materials. 

At the time we are introduced to Shelly, she is 19 years old, and she states that she dropped out of eleventh grade to marry Leo, which means that she has been married to him for at least two years. She works at the Double R Diner as a waitress and seems to be friends with the proprietor Norma (who, at 35 or so, plays somewhat of a maternal role towards Shelly).

The biggest question about Shelly seems to be "why is she so alone?". Her parents or any sort of family are never mentioned and she doesn't seem to have anywhere to go to get away from Leo's abuse. She also seems to lack any of the resources that she would need to escape from him: she doesn't have any money of her own (likely because Leo takes all her earnings from the diner) and she also seems to lack a lot of adult life skills, like driving.

None of this seems coincidental to me. I think it is indicative of a history of parental abuse for Shelly. It's important to think about the context here: what would be going on in Shelly's everyday life that would lead to her dropping out of school and moving out to marry a truck driver? Why else would anyone be so desperate to get out of their parents' house? Of course, the sad irony is that because Shelly probably grew up in an abusive household, she would be unlikely to recognize the red flags and warning signs of abusive behaviour in Leo, as she would have become so accustomed to abuse at home that she wouldn't be able to recognize what wasn't normal.

It seems to me that Shelly has known abuse all her life, and that she is not so dissimilar from her deceased peer, Laura Palmer. Shelly is 19, Laura was 17- they would have passed each other in the halls at school before Shelly dropped out, and they knew each other from volunteering from Meals on Wheels. They were both abuse victims and were both involved with Leo Johnson. 

It's clear that Leo intended to murder Shelly when when he tied her up and set the mill on fire, and I have to wonder- would Shelly's death elicit as much mourning and sympathy as Laura's? I doubt it. Everyone in town knew Laura, and everyone knew Shelly too, but in a different context. And that context is what makes the difference. Shelly is "white trash"- a girl from the Wrong Side Of Town who dropped out of high school to marry a truck driver and work as a waitress. It's clear from contextual evidence that the townspeople, even Sheriff Truman, knew that Leo was beating Shelly (and probably raping her too) but no one did anything about it, not even Bobby, who is supposed to care about her. Nobody even offered her a place to stay.

I guess it makes sense for the sake of the narrative, but my heart goes out to Shelly. She's a sweet, adorable girl with a loving heart who makes great pies. She deserves just as much concern and sympathy as any other abuse victim, but she will never get it, because of her class status. I think that's often the way of life though.

I don't mean to lessen Laura's suffering or say that Shelly deserves more sympathy than her, because Twin Peaks is largely a series about the different forms abuse may take and the way it affects all kinds of women (Laura, Shelly, Audrey, Josie, and even Norma to an extent). It's about how nobody deserves abuse no matter if they're a "Bad Girl" or a "Good Girl". I just wish that people paid more attention to this aspect of the show and Shelly's storyline when discussing the themes present in Twin Peaks. 

10 Things Only North American Kids of British Parents Understand

1. The confusion you felt when your friends' parents' record collections didn't have any Cilla Black, Simply Red, or James Last.
2. At school when said your favourite food was mince and tatties, cheese toasties, or bacon butties, and nobody understood.
3. How aghast you felt about the Scholastic versions of the Harry Potter books.
4. Arguing with your teacher about the proper spelling of "omelette".
5. Nobody wanted to share your Enid Blyton books.
6. When people tried to imitate your parents' accents and sounded nothing like what they actually spoke.
7. When your relatives overseas sent you videotapes and they wouldn't play.
8. Watching The Snowman instead of The Grinch every Christmas.
9. Lying to your playmates that you knew the Spice Girls personally due to your British Connections. 
10. When your parents would scold you for using the North American term for something rather than the British term.

Take Your Daughters to See Maleficent

With the release and resounding success of Maleficent, Disney has proved two things: one, that there is a market for big-budget fantasy films with overwhelmingly female casts; and two, that a film can be progressive and feminist without losing its glitz, excitement, and appeal to little girls.

I went to see Maleficent last night expecting to watch a well-meaning but ham-fisted take on a familiar story, and instead, I saw a powerful film about female strength, platonic love, and moral ambiguity. I won't bother to rehash the plot of the film- rather, I'd like to talk about the way women are represented in it and how it surpassed so many of my expectations and made me cry, like, five times.

Maleficent is a truly unique film in the sense that it is a by-the-numbers fantasy blockbuster and yet it also breaks every unspoken rule Hollywood has about the way women, particularly women protagonists, are represented in mainstream film. Undoubtedly this has much to do with the fact that the screenwriter is a woman and that Angelina Jolie herself served as an executive producer. Jolie's role as producer as well as her considerable star power (she is one of the most, if not the most, bankable actresses in Hollywood today) ensured that she had full control over the way her character was represented onscreen.

And that's what I found so very interesting about this film: Maleficent, as you know, was a straight-up villain in the original Disney film, perhaps their best-known villain ever. Although she was given an incredible backstory in Jolie's Maleficent, she wasn't turned into a pure-hearted, misunderstood, sweet character. She remained morally ambiguous, both good and evil, altruistic but selfish, caring and yet still terrifying. She is allowed the complexity and intensity that is normally only given to male superhero characters like Batman or the Transformers protagonists.

Maleficent experiences duplicity and betrayal (in the form of an extremely powerful rape allegory) as well as persecution and pariahdom, yet the film does not make her into a one-dimensional victim. She is powerful, vengeful, and angry, rightfully so, and carries out her revenge in a theatrical, fantastical, and selfish manner: cursing the daughter of the man who mutilated her (the mutilation, in this case, is quite clearly a metaphor for sexual assault.) Like many revenge flicks starring male protagonists, the film does not exonerate or vilify Maleficent, instead, it simply tells us her story fairly and even-handedly.

Maleficent avoids falling into many of the classic Disney cliches: noticeably absent from the film are a male hero-figure, a wedding as a happy ending, or a scary, evil female villain acting as a foil for a sweet and beautiful pure-hearted heroine. Instead, it is a film about women finding strength from themselves and from each other, about fighting one's own battles, and standing up for oneself despite the threat of persecution and hatred.

How great would it be, if, this Halloween, we saw little girls dressed not as Barbies or brides but as a powerful figure like Maleficent? Little girls (and big girls, and women) should see this movie just as their brothers saw Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. They need a protagonist they can identify with, one who is not a tired, reheated cliche but an exciting, captivating, and relatable heroine.

Mental Illness Narratives in Media

As someone who is both mentally ill and a vociferous consumer of popular media, it's rare for me to see a movie or TV show that accurately reflects the struggles an individual deals with when dealing with mental illness. There have been some novels written by authors who also suffer from mental illness, but by and large I have found that most media representation of the mentally ill is inaccurate, unsympathetic, and sometimes downright harmful.

Classic literature has a long history of authors writing frankly about their mental illness, even if it was in antiquated terms: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath. But since film and television are far less personal mediums than literature, they tend to use mental illness as a plot device or an interesting character trait rather than offering a first-person account of mental illness. This is dangerous for several reasons. The first being that film and television are two of the most accessible forms of popular media, and are available to people who may not be blessed with the education level or resources needed to access classic literature and/or academic writing. This means that for many people, their entire understanding of mental illness is based on what they've seen in films and on television. Those who suffer from mental illness but haven't been diagnosed may know that there is something wrong with them, but struggle to identify with the often outrageous and outlandish depictions of mentally ill people that they've seen, and so remain undiagnosed and unable to seek help. Those who do not suffer from mental illness may have seen Jeremy Sisto as Billy Chenowith on Six Feet Under or Glenn Close as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and assume that these are accurate depictions of bipolar disorder, and become fearful of schizophrenic or borderline people. Or it may not be as bad as that: maybe they've seen Silver Linings Playbook and think they understand bipolar disorder, think that their bipolar friend's problems can be solved if they just set them up with some young hottie who likes to dance. Oh, if only it were that easy! The entire psychiatric community would be out of work.

As someone who suffers from depression and is a recovering bulimic, I find it difficult to relate with the characters in film and television who are explicitly stated to be mentally ill and are supposed to represent people like me. To begin with, protagonists who are canonically defined as "depressed" are almost always white men, and usually white straight men. I think that's probably because a mentally ill character is already an "other", so the writer may try to make them as "normal" as possible in every other aspect of their characterization. Unless, of course, they're a villain, in which case they're also often coded as queer, because dangerous craziness and queerness are so often intertwined in popular media! Never mind that queer people are more likely to be depressed due to the oppression and discrimination they face every day- most Crazy Queer Villains are depicted as madmen and madwomen, driven to homicidal insanity by their sexual perversions. This is a trope that was once extremely prevalent and seen everywhere from psychodramas and thrillers to animated children's movies (think: Professor Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, coded "sissy" and violently insane). It is slowly falling out of favour, but it can still be found in popular procedural crime shows like CSI and Criminal Minds.

Even when characters aren't portrayed as villains, they are often written and acted very stereotypically and one-dimensionally, as both the writers and the actors choose to base their interpretation of a mentally ill character on a set of symptoms, rather than portraying their character as a fully-realized person with interests and quirks that exist outside of and irrelative of their mental illness. Personally, I've done a lot of research into the way eating disorders are portrayed in media aimed at teenagers, and I've found that the characters are almost always stereotypical Type-A "Best Little Girl In the World" overachievers. I'm thinking here of endless Young Adult novels, a recent storyline on Glee, and that time on Lizzie McGuire that Miranda stopped eating for one episode but was cured after a pep-talk with her friends. In most teen media in fact, eating disorders are portrayed as a confidence issue that can be cured easily (I could wrte another entire post on how this erases the very real struggles of eating disordered people, who are overwhelmingly girls and women). To my mind, the most well-rounded and developed character with an eating disorder storyline to date has been Cassie Ainsworth from the British teen drama Skins. She has anorexia, and it is a continual struggle for her, but she has character traits that are not related to or attributed to anorexia, a love interest, and is generally quite sympathetic and likeable. When I was at my worst suffering from my own eating disorder, my best friend watched Cassie's episode of Skins and said it helped her to understand me better.

And that's the thing about proper representation: it doesn't have to get in the way of a good story. Cassie's storyline is engaging and interesting even to people who don't have anorexia or bulimia. It's entertaining, but not damaging. The same can be said for the many mentally ill characters on Mad Men (though I'm still waiting to see how Ginsberg's schizophrenia storyline plays out).

All I want is to see people like me onscreen. People who aren't dangerous, or hopeless, or inhuman... just... whole. Because mentally ill people like me aren't broken or incomplete or irreparable, we just want to be understood.

"Young Americans" is the most cynical song of the '70s

David Bowie has long been described by the media as a chameleon of sorts, someone who picks up on social and cultural trends, takes them to their logical extreme, and casts them aside soon after, on to the next thing. While I agree that Bowie is certainly always in tune with  the cultural zeitgeist, I disagree with the idea that his many personas represent a wish to emulate the zeitgeist- rather, I'd argue, his many different public identities come from an intent to parody and comment on whatever trend du jour he happened to find worthy of discussion.

Now Bowie is well known for his gender bending which was obviously intended as  his commentary on the constructed social structures placed around male and female identities. But what I think is rarely discussed is his brilliant commentary on race, colonialism and cultural theft.  this was something explored throughout the "plastic soul" era of his career and most explicitly on Young Americans, both the song and album.

As a Brit who was heavily influenced by American culture, Bowie wrote "Young Americans" as an expression of his distaste with the racial climate in the USA at the time. Stylistically, the song is an up-tempo number in black American soul/R&B style but unlike his contemporaries, Bowie didn't just borrow the musical style for aesthetic purposes. It's intended as a reflection on the cultural theft that he talks about in the song. Quite clever really as at first listen it sounds like another blue-eyed soul number, but the lyrics belie a criticism of "blue-eyed soul" and the willingness of white people to steal from and exploit black culture while still harbouring racist attitudes.

Have you been the un-American?

Just you and your idol sing falsetto

'bout Leather, leather everywhere, and

Not a myth left from the ghetto

Well, well, well, would you carry a razor

In case, just in case of depression?

Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors

Blushing at all the afro-Sheeners

These lyrics express Bowie's feelings about the cultural climate of the 1970s in regards to race relations, and basically what he's saying here is that white (especially male) Americans consider themselves the "default" American, and, as it has been said before "everyone else gets a hypen". Now Bowie is a white male and I am a white female so I don't want to imply that either he or I are the foremost experts on race relations. What I mean to say is that the song is intended as a message to Bowie's white contemporaries. Black music was (and still is!) being imitated by white singers and white bands who were happy to take the fun parts of black culture but refused to engage in any political discourse about race relations or acknowledge the disparity between the recognition they got and the recognition black artists got. "Not a myth left from the ghetto" may be referencing the fact that black culture and black stories were mined by white people for artistic inspiration until we (white people) saw the well as being run dry. Not a myth left because we stole everything.

Performing on the Dick Cavett Show, December 1974

Black music and black fashion are things that we white people are happy to steal but still see as threatening in their original form, so they have to be watered down. Bowie is asking his audience why they are happy to take from black culture without ever really knowing the black experience.  He asks his audience, "You may enjoy the music, but do you understand where it comes from culturally and emotionally?"  At this point I have to state: no. I do not understand the experience because I have never lived it. I'm just a white lady from rural Canada and I'm in no way attempting to speak for black people with my commentary on this song. I think it's telling though that most of the musicians featured on this song are black, including of course Luther Vandross, who played a big part in arranging the song. Bowie, a white man, is singing it, and I think it's very sneaky how he gets his message across, because he knows that many of his listeners will only listen to funk/soul/R&B music if it's played by a white man like him, so he emulates the style perfectly but makes his lyrics very cynical and accusatory, so that  the listeners are initially hooked by the melody and style, get into the song, and then somewhere around the middle, realize that the very song they are in enjoying is decrying people like them (people like us, rather).

I think there's also some interesting commentary here on gender, too: the lyric "ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw" references domestic violence obviously, but it's not an autobiographical lyric, it's a narrative "voice" Bowie uses to illustrate the hypocrisy of the ~enlightened~ '70s man. He loves the fact that the sexual revolution has freed women to engage in no-strings-attached sex, but he is angry at the fact that the women's lib movement has offered them other sorts of autonomy. He longs for an old-fashioned woman he could own and abuse rather than the Modern Woman who asks that a man be accountable for his actions.  

Basically, this song is about the hypocrisy of the 1970s youth: pretending to be so much more open-minded than their predecessors, but still harbouring racist and sexist ideals, just expressing them in a different way, perhaps a more insidious way.

That being said, although Bowie's a brilliant songwriter, the song shouldn't be taken as the last word on race relations: he is after all, still a white man from Britain. I do think though that we white people can learn something from it since we still persist in copying and stealing from black culture. The fact that this song is performed in a funk/soul style is the cleverest thing about it as it allows the narrator (Bowie) to address the issue from within the cultural arena in which it exists. Bowie's always played with personas, image and identity, and although I think he feels free to adopt personas that are based on some aspect of his personality, "Young Americans" is his protest against those who base their image or identity or sound or look on something that is not a part of their life and never will be, something that they will never know or understand. 

Mad Men, or, "Daddy Issues: The TV Show"

So the theme of paternal abandonment continues, both in my life and on Sunday's episode of Mad Men! But, as per the theme of this blog, I'm going to stick to covering Mad Men, with this entry paying particular focus on the interaction between Roger Sterling and his daughter Margaret.

Margaret is an interesting character in that the events of her life are rarely shown through her perspective on the show. Instead they are mostly relayed to us by Roger through conversations he has with other characters. In an early episode, Roger bitches to Joan about the fact that Margaret seems to have no motivations in life, only having dated two boys (one who committed suicide). You'd think that even someone like Roger would be able to extend sympathy to Margaret for dealing with a tragedy like that, but the event is reduced to pillow talk between him and Joan (Joan, lovely Joan, defends Margaret, saying that Roger is too hard on him). In another episode, Margaret's possible eating disorder is hinted at as Roger jokes that Mona stopped cooking after Margaret stopped eating.

And of course, there is Margaret's wedding, the events of which are particularly contentious for father and daughter as Roger is hell-bent on taking his new, much younger wife Jane to the wedding, while Margaret is against this. It's not a huge leap to assume that Margaret is viciously (and rightfully) jealous of Jane for her relationship with Roger. After all, Jane is not much older than Margaret herself.

So as we can see Roger and Margaret have quite the strained relationship, largely due to Roger's failure to provide for Margaret emotionally and to acknowledge her humanity as a daughter. I think this has much to do with Roger's issues with women: he tends to categorize his relationships with women as either sexual and passionate or cordial and distant. For instance, he doesn't appear to have much regard for Peggy as a friend or colleague despite seemingly respecting her work.

Roger doesn't know quite what do do with Margaret, a daughter, because he never wanted a daughter. A son, he could commiserate with and raise in his own image, but with Margaret he's faced with a dilemma: does raise her to be used by men the way he uses women, or does he warn her against such men, which would require some reflection on his part and admittance to misdeeds? The answer that he comes to, of course, is neither. He chooses to give up on parenting Margaret entirely.

Which brings us then to the events of The Monolith, where we learn that Margaret has engaged in her own form of parental abandonment: leaving her toddler behind as she chooses to follow a group of hippies to live on a commune. Both Roger and Mona are shocked and make it their mission to set Margaret straight, travelling to the commune to shake some sense into her, as it were. It doesn't work, obviously, because who would want to leave a life of free love and drugs to go back to New York City with their parents, to raise a child just the same way as their parents did (and have the child grow up to be as miserable and dissatisfied as them?).

It is then we see Roger trying to take on the Cool Dad role: Oh sure I'll have a look around! Yeah, I wanna here all about your cool new life! Far too late to make a difference, of course. And as the day wears on, the similarities between Margaret and the hippie girl that Roger has been sleeping with over the course of the season become too apparent for Roger, and he's faced with the harsh reality of what he's done to the women in his relationships (the "she's somebody's daughter!" dilemma) and what a shitty human being he is towards women. His breaking point comes when Margaret sneaks off from the barn where she is supposed to be sharing a tender moment with her father, to have sex with another one of the hippies, which hits way too close to home for serial womanizer Roger.

Roger doesn't want Margaret to continue the cycle of parental abandonment that he has been perpetuating, and so he flips his shit, attempts to drag her out of there, and lays a guilt trip on her about her responsibilities as a mother. Then, Margaret, in what I can only say is one of the best fictional daughter-to-father fights I've ever heard, truly rips into Roger, handing his ass to him about his own parental abandonment and all-around shitty behaviour as a father.

Roger mocks Margaret (Marigold) about her life in the commune, telling her she's got to step up and face reality, be a mother and stop living for a life of hedonistic pleasure.... but isn't that exactly what Roger did for Margaret's entire childhood? Boozing it up, banging secretaries, spending loads of money and basically doing whatever he wanted? Margaret is clearly still extremely bitter over what she feels was a shitty childhood and she unloads it all on her father, so viciously and so painfully: "How did you feel when you went away to work, Daddy? Your conscience must have been eating you alive. Calling your secretary from a hotel at lunch to pick out a birthday present for me.... it's not that hard, Daddy, I'll be fine."

Roger walks away in his muddied suit, defeated.

The events of Roger's trip to the commune echo Don's own relationship with Sally and perhaps serve as a warning of sorts as to what will happen if Don doesn't get his shit together and be a proper parent. What pains me so much though is that this episode is set in 1969 and there are still girls and women out there with the same complaints about their fathers: they never cared, they were never there, they never had any emotional connection. People like to say that about Mad Men: "oh, weren't things terrible back then?",  they say, but things are still pretty terrible, just not as explicitly. When will they get better? When men like Roger and Don everywhere start getting their damn shit together.