Macrame Award: Jennifer Wilbanks Hides Her Face
Honey, you run away from your wedding and get a whole town worried about you, and you cover face with THAT ugly old thing?
Runner-up nomination goes to CNN, Fox, and everyone else who covered this story as part of the hot "Hide the white women!" trend.
If a loved one of ours went missing, darn skippy we'd want media coverage in hopes of their safe return. But Jennifer Wilbanks's disappearance was not headline national news. Her disappearance did not trump, let's say, Iraq's new government, George II's Social Security shenanigans, or Tom DeLay's cretinism. Perhaps her disappearance merited a headline in Georgia newspapers, but we at the Pepper didn't need to see Jennifer Wilbanks's face staring at us at the top of every hour.
World O'Crap also mopped the floor with Bill O'Reilly's smug mug, as he was overconfident that Wilbanks didn't up and kidnap herself.
Either way, we at the Pepper this trend disturbing for a host of reasons. We're tired of hearing about white women in peril. The news media clearly hunts for these stories. They must boost ratings, which says something disturbing about society as a whole. They did it with Laci Peterson, they did it with Terri Schiavo, and they did it with Audrey Seiler, another self-obsessed bourgeois gal who didn't think she was getting enough attention or something.
Okay, okay, we at the Pepper shouldn't get personal, but this Jennifer Wilbanks character, Audrey Seiler, and those who overhyped their stories are all pitiful, not just for what they put their parents through but also for propping up the image of women - white women, in particular - as these helpless beings. They are also overshadowing the REAL problems women have, such as lack of support in raising children, lower wages than men, gee, should we go on?
If this keeps happening, we at the Pepper would not be shocked in the least if some cracker-jackin' wingnut suggested that white women be locked up in their homes for fear that someone would try to kidnap them. These stories make people scared. They enforce hysteria. Of course, women in that part of Georgia were loath to go outside. All the stories focused on how Wilbanks went out for a jog and then went missing. How many people advised women, "Honey, maybe you shouldn't go jogging tonight?"
One last personal note: For a 32-year-old to be such a chicken and not tell her family she didn't want to marry the guy is ridiculous. And it is bourgeois to let your family spend all that money on a wedding party with 600 guests (!!!) and then run off. That's what happens in the movies, not in real life. She should have learned to make distinctions between the two long ago.
Then again, if the treatment of society makes some women think so little of themselves that they feel the only option is to run away from an unwanted wedding, then that is sad in its own right.