People wonder why some of us are so unimpressed with modern feminism. To those people, I would direct their attention to the news that a Michigan doctor allegedly performed female genital mutilation (FGM) on multiple young girls.
More specifically, I’d direct their attention to the lack of attention feminists have given this horrific story.
The Department of Justice has charged female emergency room physician Jumana Nagarwala with performing FGM in the U.S. It alleges Nagarwala performed the procedures on “multiple minor girls.” Nagarwala is the first person to be charged in the U.S. under anti-FGM laws.
There has been no Twitter storm, no Facebook blowup and no calls for action. Slate hasn’t yet written about it. Salon, a highly-opinionated feminist website, took wire copy from The Associated Press. The Huffington Post wrote two pieces, one which made sure to point out that FGM predates religion, and another that mentioned the doctor in the first sentence, but then proceeded to rant about the patriarchy for six paragraphs.
Shannon Watts, the anti-gun activist and fake feminist who blindly screamed sexism at United Airlines when it had done nothing wrong, has said nothing. It’s a lot easier to claim a corporation is, as Watts put it, “sexist and sexualizes young girls,” than it is for her to fight against actual sexualization of young girls when their genitals are being cut off. Perhaps that’s because with the former, Watts doesn’t need to do anything aside from tweet, and with the latter, she does.
Sarah Silverman and Chrissy Teigen, both of whom declared they would stop giving United their business, haven’t tweeted anything about Nagarwala.
Linda Sarsour, who organized the Women’s March on Washington, was silent until someone brought it up in reply to her tweet saying “Absolute nightmare” about Trump bombing Afghanistan. She offered a lackluster “I sure do” when asked if she wept for the girls in Michigan. Sarsour said nothing else about it, even though multiple people tweeted the story at her.
Loud-and-proud feminists Lena Dunham, Cecile Richards and Ashley Judd have also stayed quiet. “One of us can be dismissed. Two of us can be ignored. But together we are a movement and we are unstoppable,” Richards said at the march against President Donald Trump.
Why isn’t that movement being driven full-force against FGM? As with Watts, screaming into a microphone or shooting off a tweet at Trump are preferable to taking a stand against real barbaric treatment of women.
Hillary Clinton hasn’t mentioned it, either, though her daughter Chelsea did.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2012 “that 513,000 women and girls in the United States were at risk of or had been subjected to female genital mutilation,” according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s “Report to the Honorable Harry Reid, Minority Leader, U.S. Senate” in June 2016.
The report went on to say, “CDC attributes this change primarily to increased immigration from countries where FGM/C is practiced, rather than an increase in the occurrence of FGM/C.”
“More than 3 million girls are estimated to be at risk for FGM annually,” the World Health Organization (WHO) website states. “The practice is most common in the western, eastern and north-eastern regions of Africa, in some countries the Middle East and Asia.”
Unicef provides a graphic showing where FGM is most predominately practiced. The top four include Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sudan. Most of those countries are Muslim-majority or have large Muslim populations. Obscure Christian sects also perform FGM, as do some Jewish ones.
Department of Homeland Security figures show thousands of people immigrate from these countries to the U.S. And as WHO explained, FGM is practiced “among migrants from these areas. FGM is therefore a global concern.”
There’s an obvious clash of narratives here: Liberals want more immigration, and since feminism has been absorbed into the amorphous social justice blob that is liberalism, so do they. If immigrants are cutting up little girls in the U.S., that’s bad for the narrative. Therefore, it’s not at the top of their priority list. FGM gets pushed even lower if the perpetrator happens to be Muslim. FGM isn’t a “sexy” political topic, it’s not going to win anyone any votes, and doesn’t affect the majority of the country. Focus only on Trump’s sexism and Republicans trying to defund Planned Parenthood and everything will be OK.
Liberals need to accept that if they want increased immigration and acceptance of refugees, there are serious cultural disparities that must be aggressively eradicated. Not every part of every non-white, non-Christian culture should be protected.
Feminists have to unleash their fury on FGM wherever it’s found — especially if it’s uncovered in the U.S.
Prove that feminism cares about more than superficial first-world problems. Prove that feminism is willing to focus its time and energy on topics that don’t get Twitter followers or airtime on CNN and MSNBC. Prove that feminism isn’t as shallow as it seems to be.