"Most recovery houses offer transportation services following surgery, often a minivan with the passenger seats reclined to make space for an inflatable mattress..."

"... where patients, who are not supposed to sit down or lie on their backsides for at least two to four weeks, can lie on their stomachs during the ride. When they arrive, the beds they’ve booked — usually two to a room — can cost anywhere from $80 to $400 a night. Some recovery houses have nurses on site who can check vitals and provide massages that they claim help with healing. But some women complain that they have experienced poor service and unsanitary conditions at recovery facilities, like toilets that don’t work and inedible meals.... A whole host of things can go wrong; most notably, the repurposed fat can travel through veins in the buttocks to pulmonary arteries and chambers of the heart, causing fat embolisms. Transferred fat can also migrate beneath the muscle, tearing gluteal veins. According to some recent surveys, for every 13,000 B.B.L.s performed in the United States, one results in death."

From "Butt Lifts Are Booming. Healing Is No Joke. Beauty, pain, race and money play out in Miami’s post-surgical recovery houses" (NYT).

Lots of photographs at the link. All of the women pictured appear to be black, and the reader is assumed to find this puzzling, because we are offered this explanation: "For Black women, many of whom have always possessed a version of the B.B.L. body, it is difficult to square this popularity with the fact that their natural bodies have been denigrated for generations." But "the B.B.L. body" is in style and seen on social media, and "Black women aren’t immune to wanting a seemingly quick way of acquiring the figure that defines desire today." 

We're not told if white women are getting this gruesome surgery in the same proportion, so it's hard to think in terms of feminism, but I see that the top-rated comment blames men: "Yet another example of how men convince women to engage in body dysmorphia to meet their approval." Can women take some responsibility for their approval-seeking... if that's what's happening here? And isn't this approval-seeking a matter of women trying to get the jump on other women? I'd say more, but since the article is exclusively about black women going for this horrible surgery, the present-day convention is to mind one's own business. 

And yet, if I'm supposed to butt out of this butt butchery, why is The New York Times presenting all these close-up color photos of the sliced-up, bloody butts of women of color? For titillation? To boost the egos of its white women readers? The article writer, Sandra E. Garcia, appears to be black, so I suppose it is not my place to detect systemic racism.