Michelle Goldberg on cosmetic surgery, taxation, and the beauty myth:
Late last month, Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, came out against a proposal for a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery to help offset the cost of health care reform. Speaking to The New York Times, O’Neill argued that for some women, plastic surgery can be an economic necessity. “They have to find work,” she said. “And they are going for Botox or going for eye work, because the fact is we live in a society that punishes women for getting older.”
O’Neill’s stance was dispiriting, a sign of capitulation to unfair and unattainable beauty standards. But as a summation of where women stand at the end of the decade, it wasn’t unrealistic. More than four decades after the famous feminist protests at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, few remain under the illusion that they can escape our culture’s ever more exacting physical ideals. Shortly after the Times piece, a Forbes.com story reported what many women already know: “Women who advance most at work, studies agree, are more attractive, thinner, taller and have a more youthful appearance than their female colleagues who are promoted less often.” The ultimate example of this was Sarah Palin, whose beauty seemed to be her primary qualification for the vice presidential nomination.