Why do I care? Because Krupp uses faux feminism to promote it: “It is the ultimate feminist statement for us to be able to look great and to beat the system in this youth obsessed culture,” she says in her Youtube video, after swinging a Le Mystere bra over her head and shouting that it will “lift you higher than you have ever been lifted before!” If by beat the system in this youth obsessed culture she means cave in to ageism at any cost, including Botox, her definition of feminism needs a serious makeover. This is the same chop logic that posited “Desperate Housewives” as a feminist breakthrough for presenting women in their 40s as attractive—because they look like women in their 30s.

There’s a sociology project lurking in the New York Times paperback bestseller list Krupp landed on this summer, joining these women’s titles: Skinny Bitch, Hungry Girl: 200 Under 200, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Naturally Thin, and Cook Yourself Thin. Enjoy your pregnancy. Then work on your diet, fatty. And while you’re at it, decline to age. By comparison, finance expert Suze Orman (at #3) looks positively progressive for writing a bestseller that isn’t about the flesh. (For the record, the suggestively titled Cook Yourself Thin does not involve cooking or eating one’s own body parts).

I see nothing wrong with a book about age-appropriate fashion and makeup, but I’d be more inclined to read it if it weren’t delivered as an insult. With its reproachful title and a subtitle that invokes the timeworn women’s magazine credo that aging is a personal failure that requires a lifetime of uphill remedial labor, this is one for the “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” files.

Now “Mad Men” (whose second season ended in mid 1962) dramatizes the problem. There’s Manhattan copywriter Peggy Olson struggling to make it in a man’s world, and Westchester homemaker Betty Draper, bored cross-eyed with domestic life, whose discontent is treated as a psychological disorder–the twin faces of mid-century feminine malaise.

“Mad Men” is like some new anthropological dig, unearthing, shard by shard, an era buried for decades in myth, nostalgia, and denial. For all its period beauty, it’s ugly as hell and painful to watch, yet riveting—the ultimate history lesson. My sister is showing it to her 16 year-old daughter to enlighten her about prefeminist work life. Not surprisingly, there’s a reason for the show’s unvarnished gender politics: an amazing seven of its nine writers are women (The “Mad Men” corporate ethos isn’t as retro as you might think: only 27% of t.v writers are women, and even fewer write for prime time).

As Esther notes in The Bell Jar, working women of this period are “secretaries to executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.” She imagines marriage and motherhood to be “a dreary and wasted life for a girl with straight A’s.” One Plath allusion has already surfaced in “Mad Men”: in episode six, season two, a country clubber relates the summer heat to the year (1951) the Rosenbergs were executed. (The Bell Jar opens, “I was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs,” and follows with a full page on Esther’s preoccupation with the incident.)

So with “Mad Men”’s spot-on period references and historical accuracy, will the rumblings of the women’s movement rock season three as it advances into the Sixties? Will Betty crack up or spring free? Will Peggy utter the f word? (And while I’m at it, will Julia Child, a pioneer of another stripe, hit the little screen, as she first did in 1963?)