( CNN ) -- I 've long been haunted by a chilling statistic from an old study : 54 % of women 18 to 25 said they would rather be hit by a truck than be fat . When I read it , I was aghast . Who , I wondered , were the women who would choose blood and broken bones over some extra body weight ? Turns out they are my friends -- and maybe yours . And , perhaps , a few men ( more on that later ) . `` How fast is the truck going ? '' my friend Lisa asked . `` How fat would I have to be ? '' `` Does it run over my lower half or upper half ? '' Naomi mused . `` Oh , also , '' she said , chewing on a Japanese noodle as we chatted over dinner , `` you might have to get your jaw wired shut and then you 'd definitely lose weight . '' But women do n't need to wade into traffic to suffer for beauty ; these horrific would-you-rather games are closer to reality than we might think . Many of us endure pain in the service of beauty every single day . We rip off our hair with hot wax , jam our soft skin into modern-day corsets , and burn our scalps with dyes . We ask doctors to suck out the fat in our thighs , pump Botox into our faces and inflate our breasts with silicon . We smush our feet into unholy angles in skyscraper heels , and as medical professionals have said yet again , those fabulous Louboutins cause everything from muscle strains and ligament tears to stress fractures . Are n't we beyond this ? Have n't we come a long way , baby ? You would think that the End of Men might also herald the end of the Brazilian . Hardly . According to the American Society for Plastic Surgeons , nearly 15 million cosmetic surgery procedures were done last year , a 5 % bump for the industry . Botox and facelifts saw the biggest increases . The founder of Spanx recently became the world 's youngest female self-made billionaire , to the tune of $ 250 million in annual sales . At a moment when girls and women have never been more empowered , they are in thrall to ever more ruthless standards of beauty . This is likely not a coincidence . In her 1991 bombshell book , `` The Beauty Myth , '' a young Rhodes Scholar named Naomi Wolf observed that as the women 's movement powers up , the beauty industry clamps down on our self-esteem . Unprecedented billions of marketing dollars have been unleashed to promote beauty as essential to female confidence . Yet beauty is defined in such a way as to be inaccessible to all but an elite few . Still , we buy into it . As our paychecks increase , so does our beauty spending -- and suffering . Is the price of freedom an actual pound of flesh ? Not just freedom , as it turns out , but success . Beauty pays off -- literally . Cornell professor Michael Lynn has found that attractive waitresses make better tips . Daniel Hamermesh , an economist at the University of Texas at Austin , studies pulchronomics , or the economics of beauty . In his book , `` Beauty Pays : Why Attractive People Are More Successful , '' he reports that attractive women are more likely to land a wealthy spouse , and that attractive American workers will earn $ 230,000 more in their lifetimes than their less fetching colleagues . Unattractive women are less likely to work at all than their attractive peers , a phenomenon that does not show up in men . Hamermesh goes so far as to propose legal protection for `` ugly '' people through an extension of the Americans With Disabilities Act . By this logic , is the nearly $ 4,000 a woman will spend on mascara in her lifetime a kind of perverse retirement investment ? Apparently we women have to spend money to make money , though perhaps not in the way we anticipated . Lest the guys think this is yet another unfortunate burden for women to shoulder , think again . Men are showing up in the crosshairs of beauty marketers and under the knives of surgeons . Last year , fewer women had breast enlargements , but `` moobs '' -- that 's man boobs -- clearly caused an unprecedented amount of anxiety . More than 21,000 breast reductions were performed on men , an increase of 5 % . And in Hamermesh 's work , men 's salaries were docked more for unattractiveness than women 's . My friend Lisa ca n't stop thinking about getting hit by the truck . `` The thing is , '' she told me , `` if I got run over it would n't be my fault , but being fat is something other people can blame me for . '' That 's precisely what beauty marketers want us to think : If we cripple our feet in heels , buy the Spanx , and go under the knife , hey , at least we tried . I ca n't help but wonder who we are trying for , and if the extra cash is worth it . The beauty industry is driving that truck , and it 's going to hit us no matter what . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Rachel Simmons .
Rachel Simmons : The first thing I noticed was that the water in my shower had a very strong chlorine smell. Simmons : You would think that the End of Men might also herald the end of the Brazilian . She says there 's a reason why women suffer for beauty and pay to be more beautiful . Simmons : It 's because attractive people are more likely to be successful and earn more .