She Stoops To Conquer Do real feminists use their looks to get ahead?

A funny thing happened late last year, as the health-care bill lulled in the Senate: the so-called Bo-Tax, a proposed (but ultimately rejected) levy on Botox, fillers, and other elective cosmetic procedures, was suddenly creating a feminist uproar.

“It singles out women,” surgeons roared. “It’s hurting the middle class,” others complained. Most surprising, though, was the voice of Terry O’Neill, the president of NOW, who suggested the tax was discriminatory toward women. “[Women] have to find work,” O’Neill told The New York Times. “And…the fact is, we live in a society that punishes women for getting older.”

It’s hard to imagine this was the same NOW once led by Betty Friedan, or that these were the same feminists who, to protest the Miss America pageant in 1968, threw their high heels, girdles, and bras into a “Freedom Trash Can,” claiming that women were “enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards.”

How could any woman who calls herself a feminist condone a patriarchal, plasticized beauty ideal?

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