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November 28, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Good daycare? Equal pay? No, working gals need tax-free tummy tucks

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — As a longtime feminist, I am always cheered when I hear some powerful group or individual not associated with women’s equality stand up and decry an example of gender discrimination.

(The infrequency of such declarations means I tend to look for my cheer in other venues.)

Over the decades, however, I’m afraid I have learned to be careful when I encounter this sort of unexpected affirmation. What might seem at first-glance to be a sisterhood-is-powerful statement often turns out to be exactly the opposite.

Take, for example, the recent rush to defend a woman’s right to obtain a facelift or breast augmentation without paying a 5 percent federal tax.

Dubbed the “Botax” — as a play on the popular injectable wrinkle chaser, Botox — the proposed tax is the work of Senate Democrats who are searching for ways to fund the colossal price tag on health care reform. Surveying the multibillion-dollar cosmetic surgery industry, which gives no indication of expanding anywhere but further up and out, the 5 percent tax advocates saw a deep, rich vein to mine.

Enter the nation’s plastic surgeons and manufacturers of age-erasing serums like Botox. Rather than carp honestly about how a 5 percent tax will single them out and cut into their fat, yummy profits, the docs and chemical makers are working to transform the issue into a woman thing — and a working woman thing, at that.

In an Associated Press story earlier this month, the president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons offered several of the talking points the group’s lobbyists have been hammering on for months.

“The common misconception is that this is going to tax wealthy, suburban Republican women,” Dr. Phil Haeck told the AP. In reality, he said, a 5 percent federal tax on cosmetic surgeries and procedures will most hurt middle-class females.

You see, 86 percent of all cosmetic procedures are performed on the faces and bodies of women. Of that huge majority, Haeck said, the annual incomes of 60 percent of these women are between only $30,000 to $90,000.

Even more unfair, the doctor added, this tax would fall on those presumably hard-working gals at a time when, as AP put it, “many newly jobless women [are looking] for ways to make themselves more marketable to prospective employers.”

Said Haeck, “They’re competing with people 10 to 15 years younger than them and they want to look better.”

The last time I read a similar quote about women needing plastic surgery to feel better about themselves, it was a Miss California pageant official explaining why contestants are not only allowed, but sometimes financially helped to “enhance” their breasts, butts, thighs and faces with surgery and injections.

For all of women’s professional and monetary gains over the past half-century, we still exist in a very lop-sided society when it comes to the physical appearances of females and males.

Sure, some men outside of the entertainment industry dye their hair, some have wrinkle-erasers injected into their foreheads, some have their eyes and chins lifted, and some have their body fat suctioned out.

And, yes, the United States of America is a youth-obsessed culture, in general, that pretends to revere age and experience in both sexes but, in truth, views the natural process of aging as a disease to be avoided.

Still, women have it much worse. Otherwise the gender breakdown for percentages of cosmetic procedures would be 50-50, instead of 86-14. Or facelifts, tummy tucks and cosmetic injections of muscle paralyzers would be a small, niche business instead of a mega-industry that has increased more than 500 percent over the past decade — with the accompanying increase in Washington lobbyists.

Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox, is on a pace to realize sales of $1.3 billion for that drug, alone, for 2009. That would amount to more than one-quarter of the big pharmaceutical company’s total revenue.

About 11.7 million cosmetic procedures are performed each year in this country at a cost of some $13 billion. Close to 800,000 of those procedures are done on patients in their 20s (most of them females), but the largest group that elects to nip, tuck, suction or inject are age 40 to 54 — about 5.3 million (most of them women).

One more telling statistic: Approximately two-thirds of all plastic surgery patients are repeats.

In the Associated Press story about the proposed 5 percent federal tax on elective cosmetic procedures, a spokeswoman for Allergan called the attempt “a random hit on an easy target” and “unnecessarily punitive on people who have merely decided to enhance their appearance.”

Dr. Haeck, of the plastic surgeons society, skipped the mere enhancement argument and reemphasized the injustice such a tax would inflict.

“These women come in, they’ve lost their jobs, they don’t have the money for a facelift,” he said.

Oh, yes. By all means, let the national insanity continue.

Then again, perhaps the surgeons and drug manufacturers will translate their outrage and pity into sacrifice and put their feminist hearts where their black bottom line is: They can choose to eat that 5 percent by discounting their goods and services the same amount. After all, it’s about justice for women, right?



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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