Superior hymen protection, and ostentatious appearance to make sure everyone knows your intact status. The perfect gift for your own Purity Girl.
This Glamour article has been out for a while, but it’s worth reading, just in case previous posts about Purity Balls didn’t leave you sufficiently grossed out.
The man’s date? His 25-year-old daughter. Welcome to Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball, held at the five-star Broadmoor Hotel. The event’s purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls’ chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure. Pastor Randy Wilson, host of the event and cofounder of the ball, strides to the front of the room, takes the microphone and asks the men, “Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?”
The Christian Warrior schtick seems like a relatively new direction for the religious right. Instead of a touchy-feely, feed-the-poor, WWJD type of Christianity, they’ve developed an aggressive, hyper-masculine religion which blends seamlessly into the Republican war machine. This Christianity is blatantly misogynist, positioning women as items to be transferred from father to husband; it labels us tempting Jezebels when we don’t toe the line (and often even when we do), deserving of whatever ills befall us if we break out of their submissive female mold; it unapologetically considers women sub-human, and deserving of fewer human rights than all other people — fewer rights, even, than a fetus, upon which they confer super-human privileges that no born people are given. This Christianity is unconcerned with the bodies stacked up in its wake. This Christianity is not the Christianity that I know, where church-goers work in soup kitchens on the weekends, volunteer with local kids, recognize the value in all human beings, regardless of their faith or lack of it.
The Christianity that I know isn’t about going to war or coercing four-year-olds into signing purity pledges (no, I’m not being hyperbolic — read the Glamour article). It’s not about turning the female body into a commodity for men to pass from one to another. It doesn’t look like this:
The older girls at the Broadmoor tonight are themselves curvaceous and sexy in backless dresses and artful makeup; next to their fathers, some look disconcertingly like wives. In fact, in the parlance of the purity ball folks, one-on-one time with dad is a “date,” and the only sanctioned one a girl can have until she is “courted” by a man. The roles are clear: Dad is the only man in a girl’s life until her husband arrives, a lifestyle straight out of biblical times. “In patriarchy, a father owns a girl’s sexuality,” notes psychologist and feminist author Carol Gilligan, Ph.D. “And like any other property, he guards it, protects it, even loves it.”
When it’s time for dads and daughters to take the pledge (some informally exchange rings as well), the men stand over their seated daughters and read aloud from parchment imprinted with the covenant: “I, [father’s name], choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity….” The men inscribe their names and their daughters sign as witnesses. Then everyone returns to their meals and an excited buzz fills the room.
He stands over his seated daughter while he pledges to be her hymenial authority. Quite the image.
Fathers are important characters in the lives of their daughters. But not because they’re good guards of their daughters’ vaginas, or because they can use their “authority” to coerce their children into signing contracts they don’t understand, or because they’re uniquely positioned to instill in their daughters devastatingly fucked up views of sex and men:
I strike up a conversation with Christy Parcha, an 18-year-old brunette who’s here to perform a ballet later on; her 10-year-old sister is attending the ball with their dad, Mike, a math teacher at a local community college. Christy’s eyes are bright, her cheeks flushed, and a smile permanently animates her face. Although she just graduated from high school, she is not going to college but instead will be teaching ballet classes, continuing with piano lessons and writing a book about “emotional purity,” which Christy thinks is even more important than the physical kind. “I am just trying to reserve all those special feelings for my husband,” she says ardently.
As it turns out, not allowing herself to think sexual thoughts makes her nervous, too, because she wants to experience pleasure with her future husband: “I don’t want to be a burden to him in that I am not enjoying [sex].” Recently, a friend took her to see a movie about Queen Esther, One Night With the King—“a really romantic story,” according to Christy. “So I watched it and I had these huge feelings rise up inside me, and I was like, ‘OK, they are still there!’” she says, flopping back in her chair with relief. Still, Christy doesn’t want to date. She associates sex outside of marriage as a girl “getting used, betrayed, having guys deceive you, all that kind of thing.”
Other girls at the ball are far less eloquent about the pledge they’ve just made. To them, the excitement of the ball is buying fancy dresses and primping; one 14-year-old in the bathroom tells me she started getting ready at 9 A.M. When I ask Hannah Smith, 15, what purity means to her, she answers, “I actually don’t know.” Her older sister Emily jumps in: “Purity, it means…I don’t know how to explain it. It is important to us that we promise to ourselves and to our fathers and to God that we promise to stay pure until…. It is hard to explain.” I suspect that the girls’ lack of vocabulary has to do with a universal truth of girlhood: You don’t want to talk about sex with anyone older than 18, particularly your dad. At the same time, the girls seem so unsure of the reasons behind their vows that I can’t help but wonder if they’ve just signed a contract whose terms they didn’t fully understand.
Oh, and the purity pledges don’t work. So in “protecting” their daughters, the hymen-fetishists are actually putting them in physical danger:
Disturbingly, the adolescent health study also found that STD rates were significantly higher in communities with a high proportion of pledgers. “Pledgers are less likely than nonpledgers to use condoms, so if they do have sex it is less safe,” says Peter Bearman, Ph.D., a Columbia University sociologist who helped design the study. For these teens, he believes, it’s a mind game: If you have condoms, you were planning to have sex. If you don’t, sex wasn’t premeditated, which makes it more OK. The study also found that even pledgers who remained virgins were highly likely to have oral and anal sex—risky behavior given that most probably didn’t use condoms to cut their risk.
Curiously, the teen pregnancy rate is on the decline nationwide. Proponents of an abstinence-only philosophy point to this as evidence that pledges work. But a just-released study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University attributed 14 percent of this drop to teens holding off on sex—and 86 percent to teens using more effective forms of birth control, like the Pill. Says study author John Santelli, M.D., a specialist in adolescent medicine, “If most of the progress in reducing teen pregnancy rates is due to improved contraceptive use, national policy needs to catch up with those realities.”
The author of this piece, Jennifer Baumgardner, is sympathetic to these girls and their families, but even she can’t avoid quotes which highlight how creepy some of these dads are:
When I point out to Christy Parcha’s father, Mike, that experience with relationships, bumps and all, can help young women mature emotionally and become ready for sex and marriage, he warily concedes that’s true. “But there can be damage, too,” he says. “I guess we’d rather err on the side of avoiding these things. The girl can learn after marriage.”
(…)
But, he continues, “I am not worried about that. She is not even going to come close to those situations. She believes, and I do too, that her husband will come through our family connections or through me before her heart even gets involved.”
“The girl,” I assume, is his daughter. Referred to as if she’s an object.