Apparently, Life not only imitates–it follows–Art in the AskMen.com’s list of Top 49 Most Influential Men of 2009.
Based on the votes of 500,000 visitors to AskMen.com, fictional "Mad Men" ECD Don Draper came out on top, beating the living and breathing nominees like President Barack Obama, Brad Pitt and George Clooney.
Deemed the top five most influential specimens of manhood were (1) Don Draper, (2) Olympian Usain Bolt, (3) US President Obama, (4) Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and (5) American Idol’s Simon Cowell.
Perhaps suffering from the fallout of his controversial health reform plan, President Obama went down from being No. 1 in last year’s index to No. 3, losing out to Draper, who literally came from nowhere.
AskMen’s editors had this to say about our favorite TV creative guru:
"Don Draper may be a fictional character on AMC’s Mad Men, but he’s just as real as any other public personality you can think of. Celebrities are brands, with carefully constructed images, and most of us are just as likely to have a beer with Don Draper as with anybody else on this list.
"What matters is that Draper’s hardass 1960s persona represents something about male identity that is enduringly captivating but has nonetheless vanished. The man that Don Draper is — value-driven and thoroughly masculine — is the product of a bygone era; without him, there would be no contemporary figure to represent it. Yet, as removed as his persona may be, it is also contemporary and familiar. He’s a postwar archetype, both a brilliant career man and a temptation-swayed philanderer who sincerely wants to be a family man. Like most men, us and our fathers both, Draper is permanently conflicted over how to reconcile his morals and his desires.
"Draper illustrates old-school values even though he often fails to meet them himself. His human flaws are what make him so relevant to men today. He is by turns a chain-smoking, drinking-in-the-office emblem of a bygone age, and an unusually real, earnest human being who illustrates the struggles modern men know all too well."
To read up on the 48 other most influential men, visit www.askmen.com.
AskMen.com is one of the leading Internet sites in the men’s lifestyle space, though it still trailed ESPN.com and other websites in terms of total reach within the male segment on the Web. It has one of the highest concentration of males online, according to Media Metrix’s @Plan. It ranks #822 on Alexa ranking’s of websites.
