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