A change for the better?

11:47am Monday 7th April 2008

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ANYONE who has watched the brilliant new BBC2 drama Mad Men about the goings-on at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early days of the 1960s will thank their lucky stars for equality.

Actually, scrub that. Not everyone will be grateful for the progress that has been made in the last 40 years or so.

I'm sure there are some men watching with misty-eyed longing as the advertising execs drink and smoke their way through their working days before returning home to tea on the table, a spotless home, squeaky clean children with razor-sharp partings and freshly scrubbed apple cheeks and wives willing to bend over backwards (both literally and metaphorically) to meet their husband's every want and need.

There may even be some women gazing on the ad men's wives and their afternoon cocktails, barbecues and flattering frocks with a degree of envy.

But I can't imagine there are many - if any - women who would actually want to swap places with these desperate young housewives, most of whom seem to be teetering on the brink of hysteria while struggling to maintain a constant air of Betty Crocker-like perfection.

Their hair has to be perfect, their clothes have to be perfect, their food has to be perfect, their manners have to be perfect. They have to be the perfect hostess, the perfect mother and the perfect mistress, depending on their husband's mood. But their own lives are far from perfect. In fact, they are perfectly awful.

Thankfully, however, things have changed and women no longer have to pander to prejudice and repression. Those of us who were born in the Sixties (I managed to sneak into the decade only three weeks before the arrival of the surreal Seventies) feel free to be who we want to be.

If we want to be domestic goddesses, that's great. If we don't, that's great too. But what about our daughters? What about the children of the children of the Sixties?

I can't help but worry about the young girls we are raising now, young girls who obsessively worry about their weight; who are sold provocative clothes and encouraged to experiment with make-up when they are barely out of nursery; and who seem to view life as one long popularity contest.

A recent addition to the things that particularly rile me is the range of computer games peddled to young girls these days.

Most are just mind-numbingly dull, involving "adventures" that are about as taxing as throwing a computerised Frisbee for a computerised dog or petting a pixellated pussy cat.

Some are ridiculous throwbacks offering girls the opportunity to "cook with Momma" or "clean up the house", inevitably featuring a cutsie little computerised character with over-sized eyes and a waistline that makes a willow-the-wisp look weighty.

But others are downright disgusting. If you have a moment today, why not pop into Bimbo City and play a while with Miss Bimbo as she gorges on diet pills (actually I've just checked online and the Miss Bimbo team have reluctantly withdrawn that fun gaming option), has a boob job, gets a fake tan and goes about her vacuous life with blank-eyed abandon.

This online game has been designed with young girls in mind. It is all pink, fluffy nonsense on the surface, but with a dark and disturbing heart - a bit like a Barbie doll gone bad.

The game's creators - two upstanding young chaps whose mothers, I'm sure, are very proud of them - don't deny it is aimed at young girls but they claim it's just a tongue-in-cheek joke and that pre-teens are not going to get anything from it but fun.

But Miss Bimbo's message is crystal clear, especially to highly impressionable pre-teens: thin girls with fake tans and enormous breast are winners. Even the Mad Men of the Sixties wouldn't have tried to sell that one.