Taxing Women For Being Women

By Jason Zhu

Before the industrial revolution, humans usually made everything that they needed themselves markets were dominated with raw materials and tools that require specialized skill sets to craft. This, however, changed dramatically once the Industrial Revolution started. Clothing, tools, machines, and eventually even food were dominated by autonomic processes. In the modern age, we are surrounded with products that clearly were not manufactured by our own hands (in no world do I see a smartphone being made from scratch by one individual being the norm). This development brought the rise of consumer culture. Consumer culture is theoretically universal; its definition can be applied to anyone; however, as common sense tells us, reality tends to differ from theory slightly. For consumer culture, this divergence was exhibited in the way women seemed to gravitate to it. this was largely due to the fact that women were the ones who spent the most time at home, and expected to take care of the household. Their duties involve making food, cleaning the house, and managing other household affairs. This means that women must by extension complete the purchasing of food ingredients, mops for cleaning, laundry detergent, clothing for other members of the family, so on and so forth. Businesses started seeing this huge, steady customer group, and started devising plans to attract them accordingly.

This sort of culture, where women spent time purchasing things, slowly evolved into more of a pastime/hobby than a utility, which is what we see today. However, nowadays, this sort of expectation is becoming a thing of the past, though businesses, of course, don’t want that. Where would their profit come from? Thus came along a new form of persuasion, instilling anxiety. Rather than using the social role of women as the leader of the household, they utilize the still-thriving ‘need’ for women to appear attractive. Think about brands that sell lipsticks, makeup, shampoo, toothpaste, etc. they all use models who look unrealistically appealing to implant the thought that “wow, maybe I can look like them if I use this” . Anxiety is, proven time and time again, the most powerful tool of persuasion. Of course, there must be a preexisting anxiety or thing to be anxious about for it to work, which in this case comes in the form of beauty standards and norms. Brands capitalize on most womens’ fear of looking unattractive. This characteristic of society has made beauty products oddly inelastic in demand, and when demand is inelastic firms are more free with their pricing. That, it seems, is the most simple and surface reason for the ‘pink tax’ .

Unless the beauty standard of the world changes, there will always be a pink tax. In the west, the beauty standard for women is fair, smooth skin, while for men, it is much laxer. Men can look rugged, they can look refined. A man can have messy hair, pockmarked skin, and creases in their skin and still count as ‘attractive’ by mainstream society. But that is not the case for women. If a woman has creases in her skin, or is overweight, they will be mocked and belittled. Voices that are fighting against this sort of expectation are getting more and more prominent in our society today. However, is it possible for a social norm that has been in existence for nearly a millennia to be eradicated in a mere century?