I started the first installment of December technological postblogging yesterday before deciding that I was a bit too spent from the work week to have a hope of finishing it over the weekend. But before giving up (because it was hard), I did some pretty basic things, like finding the big Christmas song of 1953?
Which was Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby, which I'm saving for next week. Have some meta-commentary instead! So then I had a reaction. I'm not offended by Santa Baby. "Sex positive," I remind myself. We're sex positive these days. And it's a Christmas classic, which, I don't know, did we ever get it sorted out whether that saved Baby, It's Cold Out There? And it's not like Kitt invented the idea of putting double entendres in hit parade music. But it's Christmas. It's for the kids! So that was what I was thinking just before I thought to myself, "Speaking of louche things in popular culture, I forgot to make a fuss for the first issue of Playboy when it came out! When did it come out, anyway?"
December of 1953, it turns out. Begun, the louche years have! We are starting down a valley at the bottom of which is the moment when you're not allowed to complain about skin magazines at the front of the corner store, and all the cool high school teachers are sleeping with their students, and the "Me Too" moment, which might be over as a cry for justice, but sure seems like the mood in public culture. We may or may not be back where we started, but this isn't about before it began, some images below notwithstanding, and it's not about where we are now. It's about things that happened in the louche years, and here I'm thinking about that second wave feminist thing about pornography being a way to hold women back. Without going too far down that road, there's a story of images --or, should I say, because we're about technology around here, graphics?The operators know now to use these things. And they're women! The ads, of course, are about the machines; but the subjects of the ads are the woman operators, and NCR in particular hammers the point home by recapitulating the image of the boss looking on with awe and admiration, however paternalistic. I assume that the talented operators could produce pictures on their outputs, because they certainly could and did with typewriters!
Under the Revenue Act of 1948, American taxpayers had a basic exemption of $600, owed 22% on income up to $2000, 26% through $4000, 30% through $6000, 34% through $8000, 38% through $10,000, 43% through $12,000, 47% through $14,000, 50% through $16,000, 75% (skipping 7 brackets!) at the magical $50,000/year, and the legendary 91% for income in excess of $200,000.
It is famously observed that this doesn't take deductions into account, and here's where the irony in this image of women working on, among other things, tax-withholding comes in, because the biggest trance of new tax deductions that cut so deeply into government revenues in 1948 were an attempt to bring community property and non-community property jurisdictions into line/
"The Revenue Act of 1948 attempts to cure the unequal federal tax treatment of citizens in community property and common law states by: (1) Providing for the splitting of income between husband and wife for income tax purposes; (2) Introducing the concept of the marital deduction for estate tax purposes; and (3) The use of the marital deduction in gifts between spouses and the right to divide gifts to a third person between the husband and wife."
The LA Times investigation of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's recent advocacy of a 75% top rate spent a whole lot of time dwelling on the $16,000 rate, which, it tells us, is equivalent to a $150,000 annual income today. To double down on that, the margina rate effective from $14,000 to $15999 was 47%, that for $32,000 was a swinging 65%! As the income brackets widen out, the average rate for the band of income from $16,000 to $32,000 is close to 62%, and the total saving for an income-splitting couple in which the husband earns $32,000 and the wife earns less than $600 is $2400! So: good job on the social engineering there, 82nd Congress. At least, that is, if Daddy makes enough money as a "computer programmer" to support a wife.
Or two. Engineers can get the broads!Fun fact: The Lady Godiva Ride, which roiled my undergraduate with a procession of undergraduate engineers accompanying a naked stripper on a horse, began in the 1960s with a fully clothed female undergraduate from the "allied" Nursing faculty. I can't think of a clearer signal of the faculty's misogynistic culture, and it was getting worse. I can certainly tell you that there was nothing sexy about a naked sex worker riding a horse. I'm pretty sure that the critics are right about sexiness not being the point of public pornography. What I'm wondering is whether the decline in the pornographic arts was coincidentally or causally linked to the rise of public pornography as gatekeeping misogyny. In other words, am I pulling together two deeply intertwined threads, or presenting you with two parallel lines of free association?
No comments:
Post a Comment