Do the women of Amer­i­ca real­ly want to go back to 1963? Or the men, for that mat­ter? Rid­ing on, and imbib­ing, the con­trails of Mad Men, two new TV shows, Pan Am and The Play­boy Club, seem to think so. That we can even have a show based on, and nos­tal­gic for, Play­boy Clubs speaks vol­umes about how accept­able it is these days to traf­fic in, and even cel­e­brate, sex­ist depic­tions of women in the media.

Pan Am and The Playboy Club promote the seductive but preposterous notion that women's power comes from their sexuality.

Both shows are set in the ear­ly 1960s and, as a devot­ed fan of Mad Men, I can say, ​“I know Mad Men, and you are NO Mad Men.” For Matthew Wein­er, the deeply admired cre­ator of the show, one main pur­pose was to expose all of the inequities and frail­ties of white male patri­archy cir­ca 1963: the sex­ism, racism, homo­pho­bia and anti-Semi­tism. While it is true that the show evinces a fond­ness for the peri­od, Wein­er has always deft­ly walked a tightrope between nos­tal­gia and con­dem­na­tion of the prej­u­dices and oafish (or worse) male behav­ior that dom­i­nat­ed the era. Indeed, the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ters on the show are the women, poised just on the brink of a women’s move­ment that they are con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly help­ing to forge.

Pan Am and The Play­boy Club–both dread­ful, by the way, even with­out the sex­ism – seem to long for the days when women could be freely and open­ly objec­ti­fied. Yet at the same time, those respon­si­ble for the shows do know that it is 2011, so they inject com­plete­ly ahis­tor­i­cal ele­ments to make it more palat­able to depict women in bun­ny out­fits or get­ting their ass­es slapped in stew­ardess uni­forms. Play­boy Clubs, it turns out, were actu­al­ly lib­er­at­ing, pro­vid­ing a haven for strong-willed women who want­ed to make some­thing of them­selves. In a voice-over from none oth­er than Hugh Hefn­er him­self, we are told that ​“bun­nies were some of the only females in the world who could be any­one they want­ed to be.” Gee, that’s just what Glo­ria Steinem assert­ed in her path-break­ing exposé of work­ing as a bunny!

In the sec­ond episode, when the bun­nies wait anx­ious­ly to see who is going to be cho­sen for the magazine’s cov­er, we learn that the cri­te­ria include ​“brains and self­less­ness.” Right. The men in the show – well, the good ones – are avowed­ly anti-sex­ist and hate the exploita­tion of women. In the show’s pre­mière, a new bun­ny is harassed and then assault­ed in a back room by a creepy patron. As she fights him off (and, in a real­ly believ­able way, stabs him to death in the neck with her spike heel), she’s aid­ed by anoth­er male patron meant to rep­re­sent the alleged chival­ry and anti-sex­ism of most men back then. For­tu­nate­ly, and in pos­si­ble tes­ti­mo­ny to the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, the show’s first episode came in third behind its oth­er net­work rivals (Cas­tle and Hawaii Five‑O, both fea­tur­ing strong women as cops or detec­tives) and bless­ed­ly, was can­celled after just three episodes.

Like The Play­boy Club, Pan Am also roman­ti­cizes the past, sug­gest­ing that being a stew­ardess was a step­ping stone to more weighty jobs. To excuse the show’s long­ing for the sup­pos­ed­ly less com­pli­cat­ed gen­der roles of the past, the women are secret­ly involved in pol­i­tics of one sort or the oth­er. One of the flight atten­dants reads Marx and Hegel on the side (and knows the dif­fer­ence between the two). Anoth­er works under­cov­er for the CIA, and in an espe­cial­ly pre­pos­ter­ous moment, the Pan Am crew helps res­cue sur­vivors of the Bay of Pigs fias­co. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this show – with its Des­per­ate House­wives lead-in – opened to strong ratings.

Why care about either of these pro­grams? In addi­tion to roman­ti­ciz­ing the sex­ism of yore, they con­tribute to the ongo­ing amne­sia about the dis­crim­i­na­tion that prompt­ed the women’s move­ment in the first place. They sug­gest that sex­ist insti­tu­tions like Play­boy Clubs were the source of female empow­er­ment and strength, when in fact they were exact­ly what women rebelled against as exem­plars of female con­fine­ment and exploita­tion. And they fur­ther pro­mote the seduc­tive but pre­pos­ter­ous notion that a woman’s real pow­er comes from her sexuality.

When the media gloss over, or delib­er­ate­ly mis­re­mem­ber, women’s his­to­ry and what it was like before the mas­sive changes of the 1970s and beyond, they nur­ture the notion that fem­i­nism is unnec­es­sary. The Play­boy Club​’s can­cel­la­tion shows how far we’ve come; the fact that net­work exec­u­tives green-lit it reminds us how far we still have to go.