By ABBY FINKELMAN
Women’s Initiative

On April 6th, the website Jezebel published a post called “This Is How Much It Costs to Own a Vagina: An Itemized List”. Tracie Egan Morrissey was inspired by the contraception coverage debate to look into various expenses women have. On March 15^th, Lea Goldman at Marie Claire published a post called “Why Women Pay More” about how the same products and services for women cost more than for men”.

Both came to unhappy conclusions. Morrissey (unscientifically) comes up with tampons (9 boxes/year) equaling $61.11 a year and pads $59.43 – if you buy the cheap ones on drugstore.com. If you go to a store, or want your fancy Tampax Pearls, it will be more. Goldman, meanwhile, informs us (scientifically) that women’s deodorant is on average thirty cents more per ounce than men’s, even when the only difference is whether it smells like a meadow with sunshine and unicorns. My nearest stick of deodorant is 2.6 ounces, or 78 cents more than a comparable one for a man.

78 cents may seem trivial, but it adds up: in 1996, California found that “women paid about $1,351 annually in extra costs and fees”. And taxes: women’s items are often taxed higher than men’s (though it is sometimes the other way around).

Admittedly, a lot of the things mentioned in Morrissey’s post are optional (Brazilians) or, hopefully, sporadic (Monistat). But here is one that is very not optional: toilet paper. They come up with $143.88 a year for toilet paper (again, drugstore.com), and estimate that men spend half as much. That’s a whole lot of money to be spending on something that I think we can all agree is necessary.

Jen Doll over at the Atlantic Wire chimed in to point out that then there are “the ‘woman’ costs that go beyond this list: Like makeup, cosmetic treatments and surgery, clothing and handbags”. The societal costs, we can call those, the things we do not have to do for basic survival, but may have to do to feel comfortable or get ahead. (Not optional for many of us: bras. A good bra can cost $25, $30, upwards of $50. I could buy a small island with all the money I have spent on bras – and build a little underwire house on it.)

All of this is exacerbated by the wage gap. You knew that at best (estimates differ) women are still only making 77 cents for every dollar men make, right? And 68 and 58 cents for black and Latina women, respectively. So we are paying more and making less.

But there is something we can do about this. It is an election year – a brutal one. The “women’s vote” can be a powerful thing; President Obama just shot ahead in the polls because women were turned off by the Republican attacks on reproductive rights. Marie Claire created a handy little “contact your representative” link: marieclaire.com/womenpaymore. Various state officials around the country, the entire House of Representatives, and roughly one-third of the Senate are all up for reelection. (Nearby: CT, Lieberman is retiring; ME, Snowe is retiring; MA, Brown is up; NJ, Menendez is up; NY, Gillibrand is up; VT, Sanders is up.)

Every 2, 4, or 6 years, these people care very much what women think. Tell them. Tell them you want to ban gender pricing, equalize import tariffs, establish equal pay, and while we are at it, subsidize tampons – and chocolate.