Women write books about what it's like to be a woman today. They write most of the books about what it's like to be a man, too. (Hanna Rosin's The End of Men and Susan Faludi's Stiffed are, each in their way, more important than any book about masculinity written by a man over the past decade.) Men have another way of dealing with the current realities of our gender: television. There has been no Iron John for our era. Instead we have television's famous Golden Age — The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men — studies of individual men, or groups of men, all of which concern themselves with the changing nature of manhood.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Mad Men may well be the last show that works this way. The demise of Don Draper is particularly relevant to television's study of men. I am assuming, along with everyone else, that he will die. All of his predecessors have. They've more than died. They have hurtled toward destruction. (This does not bode well for the state of men or how men think of themselves in the world.) But while all these male heroes and antiheroes are dying, they have also all remained true to themselves. They have been granted that dignity. By their own lights at least, they have stayed good men, even in their deaths.

More From Esquire

Because each of them stays true to himself, each character communicates a vision of what it takes to be a good man. In The Wire, it was the capacity to see beyond the bullshit of everyday life in America. That was true of all the main characters in that show. They would not accept the lies and hypocrisies around them. Stringer Bell saw beyond the gangster bullshit to the core business of drugs underneath, a business run like any other. McNulty saw beyond the cop bullshit. The journalists saw beyond the politician's bullshit. And so on. That vision of truth-telling manhood was a legitimate virtue, a salve against the all-consuming corruption. "A man must have a code," as Omar put it.

The business of what makes a man has grown progressively darker with each new series. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano was a good man because he took care of his family. That virtue forgave the fact that he earned his living by murder and theft. Breaking Bad played that contradiction to its absolute maximum. The trick with the ending to Breaking Bad was that it was a happy ending despite the fact that it involved the hero dying of cancer in a neo-Nazi basement meth lab. Walter White died doing what he loved and what he was good at. That's the most he could have hoped for.

Walter White was at his best as he died, or at least he was most himself. Tony Soprano died (or ended for us anyway) with his family, remembering the good times and forgetting his work. Stringer Bell was given a chance to say, "Get on with it then," businesslike even while being blown away.

Which is why the decline of Mad Men is so unique. The showrunners seem determined to humiliate Don Draper before finishing him off. They are clearly trying to diminish his sex appeal.

One of the major questions the great shows of the past decade have asked, which can't really be asked in any other medium, is what makes a man sexy. And surely this was part of their appeal. In other media, you can ask what makes a man confident. You can ask how should a man dress to capture his best sides, and how we should work out to get good abs. But what makes a man sexy? It's such an embarrassing question that it can only be asked in fictional dramas on screen. It came out of nowhere in The Sopranos. I assume the writers were as surprised as anyone else that their protagonist was sexy. Tony Soprano was bald, verging on the obese, a moral monster, and a man who screwed every woman he could get his hands on, and yet, somehow, he became "the sexiest man on TV." That's not my opinion. That's the opinion of the editor in chief of Elle.

What made him so sexy? The combination of confidence and vulnerability was unbelievably seductive. But it was also the size of his appetites. Gandolfini intentionally put on weight in later seasons, so that he would thud a bit as he walked. He got sexier the heavier he got. He was glaringly a man who loved to fuck and eat. Don Draper, too, is a man in that mode, or at least he was. He was supremely confident and also supremely vulnerable, right from the beginning. And as the show progressed, his vulnerabilities increased but did not diminish his ability to attract women — his path to self-destruction littered with more and more, and younger and younger bedmates. His appetites were clear enough.

Over the last several weeks, however, Don has lost those traits that made him so attractive. His unweaning pride has vanished. He humiliates himself in front of clients and in the office, regularly. He puts up with Lou instead of blowing him away. He talks with a woman on a plane who is fascinating and beautiful, and then doesn't sleep with her. He submits his business ideas to Freddy Rumsen. His vulnerabilities are no longer so pronounced, either. He is behaving like an adult around Peggy, around the other partners, even around his wife. Where's the fun in that? What's attractive about that? He does have a threesome, when his wife more or less forces him to. Why did she do that? Because she wanted her old husband back, the one who would have asked her for a threesome with her friend. Megan keeps saying, "I know what you're like," worrying that he's cheating. But increasingly that sounds like wishful thinking. The man can't even seem to find a decent suit anymore. What will they put him in next, checks?

The problem is that no matter how unsexy they try to make Don Draper, Jon Hamm is still Jon Hamm. You could put him in Borat's thong and have him lie down in a bathtub filled with baked beans, and the man would be sexy as hell. Still, they keep chipping away. Why the showrunners are humiliating Don will probably make sense when we see the final scene of the show's finale next year.

Part of me thinks that the reason the show is keeping him with hair as dark as it was seven seasons ago, with not even the slightest hint of gray, is that in this final season Don keeps seeing himself that way, the way he was. It's everybody else who sees him differently. That would explain so much. Perhaps he'll wake up in the end, and realize that he's changed. That the worst thing of all has happened to him: He has become boring. That would be the fate nobody expected for Don Draper. It might be enough to have him throw himself off a building.

What do you think?

Trending Videos
20 American Places Every Man Should See Before He Dies
50 Burger Recipes You Need to Try This Summer
The Best JFK Quotes Of All Time
15 Gooey, Wonderful Grilled Cheese Recipes You Need To Try