I was just googling around and found this article from Hilary magazine - not familiar with it but the info sounded balanced and realisic. The link is for accessing the men's comments at the end of the article (it was just too much to include here - so link is there if you are interested.) I couldn't seem to see a date on the article, but assume it's recent. Also, there is a little headline at the end saying that graduation gifts of implant ops are common.
http://www.hilary.com/dating/implants dot html (put in a proper .html when typing into your browser).
How Much Do You Really Know About Breast Implants?
The safety of breast implants has been a controversial issue since 1990, when a Congressional hearing revealed that no studies of human beings had ever been done before the implants were sold to more than one million women.
Although breast implants have been available (without safety testing) since 1962, they became a very popular and very public trend in the early 90's. Millions of women in the USA already have them and hundreds of thousands more, many of them in their teens and early 20s, get them every year. After years of controversy cooled enthusiasm for implants, a new generation of women are buying into the increasingly popular 'look' that this procedure provides--and the speed at which they are doing so has been increasing at a startling rate.
As a woman who has studied women's body image, I have tried to understand this resurgence. Women are bombarded with images of thin Barbie-like models with large implanted breasts every time we visit a news stand or see an ad for lingerie. Even clothing ads are increasingly showing less and less clothing and looking more and more like the artificial, airbrushed Maxim magazine editorials. Very thin bodies with large chests very rarely happen in real life. Despite this, magazines, billboards, models like Gisele Bundchen, and catalogs like Victoria's Secret have made this body type the expected ideal.
In the late 1980s, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons (ASPRS) provided information to the FDA in support of breast implants, and claimed that there was "a substantial and enlarging body of medical opinion that these deformities [small breasts] are really a disease." With no objective studies, plastic surgeons instead quoted their own marketing survey, which reported that ninety percent of implant patients were "very satisfied."
In 1991-92 it became apparent that the estimate of two million implant patients had been based on the implants sold, not the number of women who had undergone surgery. Since most women had at least two implants and many had replacements, there were probably fewer than one million women with implants. This smaller denominator meant that the proportion of patients who were ill was twice as high.
Since then, researchers have published several epidemiological studies on the safety of silicone implants. Most have not evaluated many of the illnesses and symptoms mentioned by implant patients. Most studies have focused on cancer, scleroderma, and a few other classic autoimmune diseases, and found no statistically significant increase. However, the studies have major shortcomings; for example, most include a few hundred or at most a few thousand women with implants, which is not large enough to study rare diseases like scleroderma, which afflict less than one in 5,000 women. Moreover, most of the studies include many women who have had implants for a few months or years, even though these diseases take many years to develop.
Even today, most of the information put out about breast implants are created by the surgeons themselves to ease potential customers minds. For example, there are current studies that use psychological tests to measure self-esteem changes after getting breast implants. Some found an improvement after three years while other tests found no change at all. The tests that found an improvement did not compare the sample group with a control group of people who didn't get surgery, to find out how much people tend to gain in self-esteem just by living. (Usually it's young people who have the most trouble with self-esteem.) So before you buy into a study, check where the information is coming from.
FDA studies indicate that "most women with silicone gel-filled breast implants will have at least one broken implant within 10 years."
When I first spoke to women with implant problems, their stories seemed difficult to believe. They told me about silicone dripping from nipples, breasts so hard that they were embarrassed to be hugged, and breasts deformed by ruptured implants or by the surgery that attempted to remove the defective product. Many young women described feeling like their grandmothers, exhausted by simple daily tasks, unable to recover from flu-like illnesses, or disabled by joint or muscle pain that left them unable to work or care for their families. Virtually all claimed that their doctors did not take their complaints seriously.
So be realistic about what can happen to you after surgery. Any surgery on breasts can, and often does, damage nerves and reduce skin sensation. The extent of the loss in sensation is unpredictable but we know that, however severe, the damage can't be completely reversed. Attempts to reduce this effect have a tradeoff: they increase the visibility of the surgical scar. Complete numbness of the nipple is not unknown. In a smaller number of cases, the side effect is the opposite: painful hypersensitivity to touch.
If you want to know the nitty-gritty of what it's really like to have implants, take it from writer Paul Kienitz when he says that "...breast implants are like stage makeup: they look good at a distance. They look better on you from 50 feet than from 10 feet, better from 10 feet than from one foot, better in a photograph or video than in real life, and better with more clothing than they do with less. They're at their worst when the distance is most intimate."
Think long and hard about what you hope your implants will accomplish for you. Truth is, implants are probably not going to bring you much closer to what you really want. What are you really after? You'd better take a hard look at that question before you act on the assumption that implants will get it for you.
If you want more male attention, implants may increase the quantity but only with a corresponding decrease in quality. You'll get your biggest gains in approval among guys who are most prone to objectifying you, and least prone to treating you as an equal.
If you want to fell more feminine or sexy, the way to do it is to start appreciating the body you've got. If your mindset toward your body is negative, no change of appearance will ever eliminate that! If you think it will, you end up chasing an illusion. When you are in the habit of always finding fault with your body, you will never run out of faults to find... indeed, you'll only find more and more as you get older. It's a trap, and changing your body won't get you out of it -- the one thing that will is to change the fault-finding way of treating yourself. If I treated you that way, I'd be intolerable... so why treat yourself that way?
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(Quote at end of article)
"I'd be dissapointed if my girlfriend's breasts were implants." false: 55%, true: 45%
- Marie Claire magazine poll, Dec 2001
"You can't start a fire without a spark" - B. Springsteen