I don't think these teens have an accurate idea of what a traumatic major surgery a mastectomy actually is.

Yes, you're right. Also, they have no idea how common "complications" are in these cosmetic double mastectomies. The complications I hear that happen quite often to these girls and young women include nerve damage that causes chronic or permanent numbness, discomfort and/or pain; muscle damage that leads to limited range of movement in the arms and shoulders; misplacement or total loss of the nipples; keloid scars; damage to lymph nodes and drainage; failure to remove all the breast tissue so that the chest is left looking weirdly lumpy, misshapen and unbalanced; post-op infections...

I often wonder if this willingness to jump into having such traumatic major surgery isn't just due to belief in gender ideology, misplaced trust in the medical establishment and the usual feelings of physical invincibility and exceptionalism - "won't happen to me" - that often come with being of young age.

I have a sense it's also coz most of these young people grew up never experiencing or witnessing firsthand serious physical illness and suffering themselves due to being of generations born at a time when the once-routine or commonplace illnesses that everyone used to get or see during childhood - measles, polio, rubella, mumps, chicken pox, pneumonia, staph, streptococcus (scarlet fever) and other such bacterial infections, etc - have been eliminated due to vaccinations and modern-day antibiotics.

When I was growing up in the USA in the 1950s and 60s, most kids personally experienced bouts of serious sickness that would cause us to be in bed or confined for long stretches - and a fair number of polio victims were still living in iron lungs. Back then, most cancers and forms of heart disease were almost invariably lethal too. Also, back then everyone was well aware of medical scandals like Thalidomide and lobotomies, and everyone was well acquainted with the horrible fates that commonly befell girls and women who had pregnancies outside of marriage, had unwanted pregnancies when married, and who had illegal abortions.

Things gradually got better over the course of the 60s and 70s due to vaccinations, antibiotics, advances in cancer and cardiovascular care, birth control and finally the legalization of abortion. Still, in the 1970s scandals around DES and IUDs occurred, then in the 1980s AIDS came along.... The result was that even after birth control and legal abortion became available, most young females still felt a frisson of vulnerablilty that kept us from believing we were physically invincible the way young males did. When AIDS came along, it really shook many young men out of the sense of complacency, safety and invincibility they'd become accustomed to as well.

By contrast, nowadays, most kids of both sexes in the well-off parts of the world breeze through childhood without ever getting seriously sick, and if they get sick it's for a short while coz of modern-day drugs. HIV, which was once a sure death sentence, is now seen as a manageable disease, and even most cancers and various other diseases are no longer fatal the way they once were.

All this is progress, to be sure. But a downside is that many young people seem to have no idea of how precious and fragile their own health is, and how easily one's good health can be compromised - or lost - due to illness or a traumatic major surgery. Even when major surgery goes entirely as planned it - and the anesthesia used - can have longterm negative effects. And as we all know from shows like "Botched" and the stats on the hundreds of thousands who die due to medical errors in the US each year, very often surgeries and other medical interventions go terribly wrong.