I'm with Erika.

I miss the more multi-dimensional Betty we saw in the first two seasons. And I hope they swing back in that direction.

I liked Dr. Faye, but that's from a modern perspective. She was largely in the show to show exactly who Don could NOT be with. The very issues he had with Faye (her honesty, her ethics, her self assurance) are the same kind of frictions he's now experiencing with Megan. Megan is younger, but also wants to be treated with professional respect, and honesty and kindness.

That violent side of Don has always been present. He shoved Betty rather roughly when she challenged him, and his finger-bang of Bobbie Barrett was dark stuff too.

Having grown up on the other side of the 2nd Wave of the Feminist revolution, I don't think people who grew up afterwards realize how condoned/expected/tolerated a certain amount of physical domination/violence was expected from men in that era. Backhanding your wife for mouthing off would not get somebody a label for being a "wife beater."

It fell somewhere in the same cultural space that validated beating your kids with a belt as punishment. There were even plenty of cultural indicators that you were less of a man if you didn't.

Men and women expected it, which is why you had songs like The Crystals "He Hit Me And It Felt Like a Kiss." (used recently in the closing credits)

To be clear, I'm not validating that POV at all, or defending Don or anything like that. I'm just reporting what I remember.

Yep, pretty much the way I remember it, too.

There was even an I love Lucy about that once, which was totally weird, I guess it gets left out of most of the syndication runs(with good reason, as it plays totally creepy to a modern viewer whose initials are me) but anyway, Lucy has some goofy accident and gives herself a black eye. But the whole apartment building thinks Ricky did it and Fred's all "Better buy some flowers and make it up to her," and the sad old lady that does nothing else but babysit whenever offers marital advice, and it ends just like a regular ep, with the hugging and the 'splaining and all that.

I totally missed this until FAQWife pointed it out: One of the women at the LSD party (I think the one who seemed to live there) was the mom on My So-Called Life -- Bess Armstrong.

I thought that was her!

Backhanding your wife for mouthing off would not get somebody a label for being a "wife beater."

It would have gotten my dad the label "missing and presumed dead."

I totally missed this until FAQWife pointed it out: One of the women at the LSD party (I think the one who seemed to live there) was the mom on My So-Called Life -- Bess Armstrong.

I got to point that out to JZ and she's the biggest MSCL fan ever.

Okay, that episode was much better when I wasn't falling asleep during it.