Controversy over Bo-Tax

Entitlement to
cosmetic surgery has become a feminist issue, writes New York Times
columnist Judith
Warner. A provision in the health
care reform bill includes 5% levy on cosmetic surgery. This so-called
Bo-Tax treats these procedures as a luxury good. Somewhat
surprisingly, the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest
American feminist group, strongly opposes the tax. Standing up for
the right of American women to feel good about themselves is part of
the contemporary feminist agenda, says NOW president Terry O’Neill.

Warner was amazed.
“Could this be the same feminist movement that in 1968 filled a
‘Freedom Trash Can’ outside the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic
City with bras, girdles and false eyelashes to protest the ‘ludicrous
“beauty” standards we ourselves are conditioned to take
seriously,’ as Robin Morgan, an organizer of the protest, put it at
the time?”

Perhaps, writes
Warner, journalist Alex Kuczynski was right when she wrote that
“Looks are the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics”. Perhaps
women do have an inalienable right to botox, tummy tucks and breast
augmentation.

Whatever the merits
of the tax as a revenue-raising measure, NOW’s objection does
suggest that cosmetic surgery is more about consumerism than health.
– New
York Times, Nov 29; New
York Times, Dec 3

Michael Cook
consumerism
cosmetic surgery