Entertainment

Hands off Sally

In Hollywood, absolute power doesn’t just corrupt absolutely, it also causes absolute crotch rot.

Take “Mad Men” genius-creator/TV power-lister Matthew Weiner. What in hell is he doing with little Sally Draper?

Whatever it is, I think it requires a call to Child Protective Services to make it stop.

Maybe the parents of the 12-year-old actress who plays Sally, Kiernan Shipka, are too caught up in the glamour of the show to stop the harm it has caused their child — harm that is being played out before the country.

Sorry, but what Weiner has done over the last two seasons to the character of this child smacks not just of Hollywood perversity, but of child exploitation disguised as art.

Take little Sally’s scene this past Sunday night.

In it, she snuck out of her dad’s apartment to meet creepy Glen (played by Weiner’s son, Marten Weiner) at the Museum of Natural History.

When she gets stomach pains she runs to the bathroom, where she pulls up her dress, pulls down her underpants, squats on the toilet and there, in close-up yet, they show her little-girl, white cotton underpants soiled with her first menstrual blood.

Excuse me? That is a violation of a child’s private moment that no man, let alone an entire nation, should see.

But, like other equally inappropriate and gratuitous scenes involving Sally, it did not even move the episode (otherwise the best of the season) forward.

Was it there to shock? Maybe.

Did it? Yes.

But for what purpose?

I can’t help but wonder whether Weiner ever considers if scenes like that excite child sexual predators. Does he care? Surely this must panic her parents — no?

You know that right now, some lowlife creep out there is replaying the scene.

This Sally business isn’t new for Weiner. In fact, by my count, it’s the third inexcusably graphic scene involving her.

Last year, when she was 11, Weiner had the child open her legs, place her fingers under her nightgown and “play with herself,” as her mother, Betty Draper, put it after catching her.

Excuse me? Again, this was a scene that not only did not move the plot forward, in fact, it stopped it cold.

Then, earlier this season, Sally was again pictured going to the bathroom — this time at a fancy catered affair with her father and his new wife Megan — when she walked into a room next to the ballroom and saw Megan’s mother performing oral sex on Roger. Right.

You want to put adults in stupid situations like that fine but leave children out of it.

Remember last year when Larry David, too, went over the line in an episode in which he read instructions to a 13-year-old Girl Scout about how to insert a tampon.

What kind of weirdoes think like this?

I can’t imagine that Shipka’s parents aren’t concerned with doing everything they can to protect their little girl from creepy fans. But when she performs in scenes like these, they expose her to a world full of them.