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By now the public has heard about Jennifer Wilbanks who escaped from a wedding to be attended by 600 people at the end of April in Duluth, Georgia. The cost of the inter-state search was the initial news story and then the story took on an entertainment dynamic of its own. MIM had no comment, because it weighed the importance of supporting monogamy against the embarassment and expense of such weddings and the rare expenses of such an interstate search. Now, with police reporting that she claimed abduction and rape by a "Hispanic" man as her reason for not being in the wedding, we use Wilbanks as an illustration of Amerika. She joins a line of white wimmin involved in lynchings or lynching atmospheres that include the likes of people today such as Susan Smith.
Mao cracked down hard on elaborate weddings in China. In the old China, men exchanged wimmin like cattle and some sex slavery has returned now that Mao is gone. For that matter, what are we to say in reverse when the bride's family pays off the groom's: neither is good and neither could be afforded by a China that needed peasant villagers to save resources for other purposes. We believe Mao reflected a correct and modern attitude also because the pressure stemming from artificially created situations causes improper behavior. Today in capitalist China there is massive bidding for brides, an incredible demographic situation that raises up Chinese wimmin to be the highest "'ho'es" they can be under capitalism.
In the distant socialist future, a lavish wedding may not be decadent for economic reasons alone. So, MIM bit its tongue on Wilbanks, because some people consciously and unconsciously believe such weddings are pressure for monogamy. There is an element of the 'ho' question here too, because it's a form of bribery to have children give up their sexual escapades and "settle down." That's all the nature of capitalism and MIM's writing a story on it was not going to change it: add the fact that there are two alternative evils-- spending money on such searches or letting slide pressure for monogamy and MIM just did not have anything to say.
Now, MIM does not know Wilbanks or her groom-to- be. However, for the sake of argument we are going to assume that what the police are saying is true --that she told them a story about being abducted by a Hispanic man and raped. If so, Wilbanks serves as only a too typical illustration of what is going on in Amerika.
It seems that in whatever seemingly neutral context, we are always finding race or national conflict inside u.$. borders. We should understand MIM need not conspire to do this. For example, O.J. Simpson would be a near story of the century by himself for his football exploits. Then there was the murder. It was a racial conflict by itself since Nicole Brown Simpson was white when we learned of the detective Fuhrerman's fascinations with the KKK. Now we have Michael Jackson who has done so much to appear to be white in skin color contrary to his more youthful natural looks. MIM writers did not have to conspire: all that was there when the public fixed its attention long enough to find it in the stories of the century. (This writer only watched TV twice in the last month, and in both instances saw interviews with people from the Michael Jackson case filling up airtime.)
The Wilbanks story is now another example. It looked like just another uncontroversial but large wedding of two white people in Georgia, so how could there be a racial/national subtext to it one might wonder. Surely if MIM had said there was one, comfortable Liberals would have said MIM was guilty of "conspiracy theory." Now to deny the race dynamic is there the cop-lovers would have to say the police are lying. Yet it is evident that Amerikans "find a way" to bring race/nationality into everything incorrectly. It may take a rebellion as in Los Angeles in the Rodney King case to notice it, but it's there. It's not just that gays are not allowed to marry and those who marry do know that while they stand at the altar, but white-on-white marriage also comes with a subtext.
MIM can say it's there and others can deny it, but whenever we see the crackers under pressure, so that they are unable to come up with their usual coverups, it leaks out. Wilbanks averted a wedding under pressure, but it was more than the usual cracker routine could handle. Pressure for monogamy like that may seem like a good thing, but in society-at-large it plays a reactionary role. What was supposed to be a statement of stable love was instead a statement of hate. What Amerikkka and much of the world does not realize yet is that that hate is also a statement on their love.
To see this it may be more useful to look internationally. The illustration of the illustration is the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." For all the countless secular and religious cultures that do not like the sexual freedom they think of when they think of the u$a in the 1960s, the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a hit--letting Amerikans have their say while also at least depicting the "other side." Yet the tension of this movie, with its big family and "traditional ways" is interethnic distrust-- in this case, not even across races.
For many the family in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" minus the Amerikan happy ending is a statement on "family values," but in fact it is a statement of hatred. Even if the patriarchy everywhere "equally" set up huge lavish weddings and shook down the participants of the weddings for the bride/groom "equally" the result would be national consolidation, because friends and families will just naturally come from similar circumstances disproportionately from one ethnicity. Stupid Liberals will point out the one exception they know when what is important is the overall institution and its overall impact. Left to their child-like selves without pressure to settle down with the "right" people, perhaps even daughters would find their way to the "wrong" places more frequently. So bigger weddings with bigger emphases on bigger families undercut any "wrong" ideas about "wrong" mates. Consciously and unconsciously people are "comfortable" among their nationality and class-- individuals notwithstanding.
In any system a few individuals may seem to buck the trend, (and that is also impossible in reality) but the effect of big families and drawing 600 people to a wedding and elevating the importance of all that is to support the nation disproportionately. The good side is that this reactionary custom serves as a basis of opposition to u.$. imperialism. The bad side is that it is also a basis for lethal intra-proletarian conflict. Nations go to war armed with propaganda about the other sides' alleged sexual practices.
In Iran, the Islamic leaders tell the people that Amerikan wimmin are "sluts" and that Islam saves them from the same fate. This makes it clear that the "slut" question is a disguise for the national question, and here we speak of the best possible result, when the animosity points toward the united $tates. It's a result where the "slut" question stands on the precipice of dissolving itself as a lifestyle question and becoming truly political and hence an object of scientific study.
On the surface, the whole question of big weddings and people backing out of engagements looks to be just a question of persynal honor--what some unproductively call the "slut" question but what is really a tangled ball of intense emotions also surrounding race, nation and class. Islamic leaders in Iran attacking sluts and Amerikan conservatives and reactionaries attacking abortion and Amerikan pseudo-feminists all raise their lifestyle issues to the top as a disguise for nationalism. Listening to them, one might think gender is the principal contradiction, the thing that drives everything else. In reality what they are all doing is refining their nationalism, because gender as a question in its own right cannot be successfully elevated to the principal contradiction. The Wilbanks case is an illustration, because as the pressure increases to elevate the importance of gender questions, racism or national chauvinism spills out. Whatever subjective reasons Wilbanks had we do not really care. What is interesting is what society-as-a-whole could do, such as whether eliminating 600 persyn weddings would have prevented her behavior and those of others like her.
For some people, what happened in the trial of the century O.J. case and things like this Wilbanks case are just individual coincidences. People who see only individual cases and not a pattern are Liberals. The conservative Liberals at Fox News are a case in point. For them, the Wilbanks case is another question for the justice system, a supposedly rare liar who demonstrates that rape is even rarer than we all think. "A sea change is occurring in how our culture regards and deals with those who make false accusations and police reports. Five years ago, it was commonplace to hear in the media that victims -- especially women and children -- never lie. Skeptics who doubted a victim's story, even in the presence of questionable evidence, were accused by victims' rights advocates of re- victimizing the person and, so, silenced."(1) So there is a conservative Liberal response talking about a handful of liars needing prison time like Wilbanks who will subtract out from a handful of accusations about rape according to Fox News. What we need to understand is both the belief that lies are rare and rape rare are necessary for Liberalism and both are wrong.
Elevating the question up, Fox News says that a NOW leader in Florida herself is guilty of filing false rape charges. So we see how Liberalism plays itself out: lies are so rare that those who make them must be especially evil; hence NOW is evil.
On the opposite liberal Liberal side, we heard also that liars are rare, even rarer than what Fox News said. The gold standard for the liberal pseudo-feminists is FBI statistics which show that admitted rape lies are not anymore common than other admitted accuser lies. So, the liberal Liberals say there are a tad more rapists than what Fox News says. Here is what the National Organization of Women says: "Every year approximately 132,000 women report that they have been victims of rape or attempted rape, and more than half of them knew their attackers. It's estimated that two to six times that many women are raped, but do not report it. Every year 1.2 million women are forcibly raped by their current or former male partners, some more than once."(2) Missing from this discussion is what we think of police reports and statistics generally. According to the police, Wilbanks "sort of" apologized, so how shall they handle that statistically we can wonder. In any case, we should notice that the NOW Liberals believe rape involves a tiny percentage of the U$A's 290 million+ people, even if NOW believes it more prevalent than FOX News does.
We can easily shoot down both sides of this Liberal debate with a single figure--lies told in a sexual context. For example, BBC reported in January that as usual, the leading cause of divorce in England is extramarital affairs--with 27% of divorces citing the cause.(3) Since most or close to most marriages end in divorce in the imperialist countries, we know that just this divorce figure is huge relative to the rape question conceived incorrectly by Liberals.
Relevant to the Wilbanks case is the social pressure as people see it in their culture. Even in the supposedly loose united $tates, evidence continues to be found that wimmin lie to avoid being thought of as "sluts": an ages old question of how men report more sexual partners than wimmin do found resolution not in super-"fast" wimmin pleasing all the men, but in lies told by wimmin. A small study shows that sexual partners reported by young wimmin under (fake) lie-detector testing was 4.4 per womyn compared with other wimmin with no lie detector who reported 2.6.(4)
Not the most reliable source People Magazine reported that a friend of Wilbanks says that the devout Baptist couple did not have pre-marital sex for 18 months. So the interpretation of the wedding is huge pressure for Wilbanks as MIM said. Even if it is factually misreported in the Wilbanks case, with hundreds of millions of cases, it's bound to happen fairly often that men go into a marriage with a high pressure marriage and expectation of wimmin or vice-versa. Coercive exchange of wimmin or gift-giving practices may have given way, but perhaps the culture surrounding it has not entirely and this may result in problems like the Wilbanks case; however, there is no solution in the immediate future with a lifestyle change.
Lies about partners, cheating and divorce are all common among ordinary middle-class people. So the lumpen needs to ask the public about rape. Reformists are never going to succeed in teaching men "consent" while such widespread lying is going on. Both guns and lies can be violations of the right to consent as conceived by Liberals.
What unites Fox News and the NOW interpretation of rape is underreporting of both lies and rape in Amerika--nationalism, nationalism that predominantly benefits white people while victimizing a disproportionately oppressor nation lumpen. Rape should be about consent and not lying about lies, but instead it's about the national question. Likewise, marriage is supposed to be about love, but really it's about icing out other nations, as the Wilbanks case illustrates.
With the assumption that this whole story is not manufactured for entertainment profits, it still does not prove anything. The Wilbanks tale is an illustration of what people should learn from studying people in the hundreds or thousands--not some kind of freak exception like Fox News makes out. 63.3% of accusations of rape against Black men came from white wimmin in 1983,(5) so the Wilbanks story is pretty much on target for what we expect from looking at social statistics. It's another illustration for why MIM named the principal contradiction the same way as the rest of the real Maoists in the world--that between the oppressed nations and imperialism. That is the most dynamic causation or element underlying other problems.
Wilbanks and other white wimmin think little of oppressed nation men, but that proves the nature of what their love for white men is--how they arrived at picking one man. Nor can it be any other way within the oppressed at the moment. As long as there is class oppression, wimmin are "hoes" and as long as there is national oppression, the selections or "taste" of wimmin and men will be tainted. Weddings (and non-wedded couples) are not about love, but class, nation and gender oppression.
Notes:
1. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,156148,00.html
(In the category of good things are good, we do agree with
Fox News that treating the Wilbanks story as an entertainment
story was wrong.)
2. http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html
3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4198951.stm
4. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3936
http://www.fathersforlife.org/divorce/women_do_not_lie.htm
(It's intriguing that men wanting to uphold their role in parenting
brought this out.)
5. National Crime Survey, 1983. ASI 6066-3 Table 45.