It took me 9 episodes to realize that I really liked the show "Mad Men."   We've been renting the disks through NetFlix, and initially I watched with a kind of horror of recognition  -- all those super-well-groomed men in charge of everything; everyone continuously smoking cigarettes, and what was wrong with all those women?  It was fascinating in a train wreck sort of way, but I didn't like any of the characters. So in true rubber-necking fashion, we kept watching, not realizing that eventually, it was going to become...compelling.  Along about the ninth episode, after Peggy has started to assert herself and write copy—even though she is female—we see a tiny, tiny glimpse of the future where women are no longer chattel, and where white middle- and upper-class men are no longer in complete control of everything.   Thank goddess. After that, I was really struck by how true to the times were some of the exchanges between the characters.  The writers and actors on that show have really nailed the complexities of relations between the sexes at the beginning of the sixties. I had forgotten, but I can remember now, how poorly men treated women; how women believed they had to kowtow to men; how there was this expectation of deference, of submission.  I'm a bit astounded things were really that different not so very long ago. I remember my mother accepting that inequality between the sexes as "just the way things were."  I remember how men and boys used to treat me and other girls.  I didn't like it then, but it was...just the way things were. I'm so glad things did not remain that way.  When I was little, I never imagined they would change.  I say "Hooray" for the upheavals of the sixties and early seventies!  What a time to grow up!  I'm actually glad I didn't miss any of that, even the early years; otherwise how would I know how much better things are now? Oh, yeah...perhaps by watching "Mad Men."   Though that might be giving the show too much credit.  I think if I hadn't lived through a bit of those times, I wouldn't believe it was ever really like that—watching it on TV, that whole period seems like such a caricature of any possible reality.  But the insights revealed on the show evoke recollections of a time I'm glad has gone by. Now, I can't catch up with the previous episodes fast enough to begin watching season four in real time.  I can hardly wait to pop the next disk in the DVD player and watch how they portray (hopefully, with laser-like accuracy) the unfolding of the time in which society and I grew up.