Consider Peggy Olson. In this week's episode, we learn that she's been delaying sex with her boyfriend and pretending to be a virgin, so that he'll take their relationship seriously. Of course, it probably also has something to do with the fact that the first man she had sex with got her pregnant, in spite of the birth control she obtained from a gynecologist who threatened to withhold his services if she became a "strumpet." She had to give up the baby for adoption in order to continue to work as Sterling Cooper's only female copywriter, a position which was not as glamorous as it sounded, by the way, because men always asked her to make the coffee, and the office manager stuck her next to the Xerox machine instead of giving her an office, and her bosses paid her less than the pompous stoner whose job she was perpetually saving, even after she brought up the fact that this was illegal, and, and, and... phew. The point is, Peggy has gone through a lot of torment in order to convince viewers that the 1960s were a bad time to be a lady. And she's the luckiest, most outwardly emancipated female character on the show.

Of course the 1960s were sexist. But something about the show's Grand Guignol presentation of discrimination and contempt for women makes it feel unfamiliar: Our own lives, after all, are nowhere near this dramatic. And the fact that it's all being undergone by people in funny, old-fashioned outfits makes it feel comfortably distant. We root for Peggy, but it's hard to imagine being Peggy.

Or maybe not. If we blame Peggy's distress entirely on her era, we risk missing the ways in which her situation is familiar. Girls may not have to withhold sex forever in order to get married, but dating guides still tell them not to give it up too early, lest their gentleman callers lose all respect for them. Fake virginity may be less common, but girls are still warned that participating in the "hook-up culture" will damage their prospects of finding love, and "virginity pledges" and "born-again virgins are not at all unheard of. Last season, Peggy complained that a diet product for women was being sold using a male sexual fantasy—specifically, the sexual fantasy of being semi-melodically hollered at by Ann-Margret—and was told that women want to be whatever men want. We could tsk-tsk this old-fashioned attitude, or we could wonder how many female copywriters worked on this gem, if any, and what they thought of their assignment:

Audience reactions to the show often point out how little has changed. In the show's third season, Joan Holloway was raped by her fiance—a crime that almost certainly wouldn't have been recognized as such in 1963. (It was legal for a man to rape his wife anywhere in America until 1975; marital rape wasn't a criminal offense in all fifty states until 1993.) "What's astounding is when people say things like, 'Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?' Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers," said Christina Hendricks, of fan reactions. Later in the season, Pete Campbell coerced an au pair into having sex with him, and several show recappers didn't know whether to call it rape—which, given that Campbell forced his way into the girl's house, trapped her in her bedroom, and reduced her to hysterical tears, is disturbing.