As soon as you said you'd read a collection of icky stories by Megan Lindholm I wondered if "Cut" was in it. I vaguely remember that story being up for a Nebula, and being utterly horrified by this. I had completely forgotten the anti-abortion-polemic aspect; mostly I remember being appalled by the worldbuilding. It's suggested in the story that FGM was an implication of the law no one had thought about beforehand.
I live in Minneapolis, which has the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. When this group first started arriving, I believe there was a child protection case where a family took a child back to Africa and had it done; on their return to the U.S., the child was taken away and the parents were charged with abuse. Since then, so far as I can tell (and I have a RL friend who is a pediatrician and treats a lot of Somali children; she would not talk about her affection and respect for her Somali parents if they were doing this to their daughters) the Somalis coming in the U.S. simply accepted that if they wanted to live in the U.S., they were going to have to discard that part of their culture. Period.
Anyway. This is where I am coming from, geographically and culturally, and I looked at that basic premise -- no one looked at this law and said, "are you fucking kidding me? have you ever heard of female genital mutilation? NOT OKAY" -- and rolled my eyes. Adult women embracing FGM as some sort of extreme bodily modification thing? Ew, but OK, I can buy it. Senators not seizing on the chance to bash Muslims? HAHAHAHAHAHA.
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Date: 2011-12-09 09:26 pm (UTC)I live in Minneapolis, which has the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. When this group first started arriving, I believe there was a child protection case where a family took a child back to Africa and had it done; on their return to the U.S., the child was taken away and the parents were charged with abuse. Since then, so far as I can tell (and I have a RL friend who is a pediatrician and treats a lot of Somali children; she would not talk about her affection and respect for her Somali parents if they were doing this to their daughters) the Somalis coming in the U.S. simply accepted that if they wanted to live in the U.S., they were going to have to discard that part of their culture. Period.
Anyway. This is where I am coming from, geographically and culturally, and I looked at that basic premise -- no one looked at this law and said, "are you fucking kidding me? have you ever heard of female genital mutilation? NOT OKAY" -- and rolled my eyes. Adult women embracing FGM as some sort of extreme bodily modification thing? Ew, but OK, I can buy it. Senators not seizing on the chance to bash Muslims? HAHAHAHAHAHA.