All observers agree that fast track will soon become law, making it easier for President Barack Obama to pass the controversial trade pacts in the works with Pacific Rim nations and the European Union. That will be a serious setback to the movements for the environment, labor rights, and affordable pharmaceuticals, among others. But after observing painful trade votes for more than 20 years, this one left me feeling that opponents should be holding their heads higher than ever before as they regroup for the next phase of the fight. Here are a few reasons why.
There is a moment in the McKinney, Texas pool party video that’s both horrifying and absurd: when Cpl. Eric Casebolt manhandles, violently restrains, then sits on top of an unarmed, 15-year-old, bikini-clad black girl as she cries for her mother. The absurdity, of course, lies in how unnecessary and over-the-top Casebolt’s behavior is (earlier in the YouTube clip, he barrel rolls across a lawn for no reason in particular). But the horror emerges from the undertones of sexual violence in that instant. Casebolt pulls the girl by her hair, forces her face against the ground and presses his knee into her back — all while she pleads for him to stop. Here’s a grown man, forcing a young girl into submission against her will. The video acts as a prime example of the inherent reality of both physical and sexual harassment against black women and girls at the hands of cops.
Hundreds gathered on Monday evening outside a McKinney, Texas, elementary school to protest the treatment of black teenagers by one of the city’s police officers. The officer, David Eric Casebolt, has been suspended pending an investigation by the McKinney Police Department. Many of the protesters, all of whom have likely seen Casebolt on video drawing his gun on children at a pool party, say he needs to lose his job.
“This carceral variant of feminism continues to be the predominant form. While its adherents would likely reject the descriptor, carceral feminism describes an approach that sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women. This stance does not acknowledge that police are often purveyors of violence and that prisons are always sites of violence. Carceral feminism ignores the ways in which race, class, gender identity, and immigration status leave certain women more vulnerable to violence and that greater criminalization often places these same women at risk of state violence.”
Andrew Pollack writes for The New York Times: “About 10 percent of American women suffer from a lack of desire that causes distress, according to a survey conducted by an academic researcher but financed by Boehringer Ingelheim, the original developer of flibanserin. The drug, taken daily, would be for premenopausal women whose loss of desire was not from known causes like disease or the side effect of a drug. Dr. Goldstein said it was gender bias to categorize male sexual dysfunctionas a simple physical problem and women’s as complex, psychological and unamenable to drugs.”