Purity Balls: Promising Daddy to save your flower

Jennifer Baumgardner wrote a thorough piece for Glamour magazine, "Would you pledge your virginity to your father?" A world of ballrooms and tiaras, this event is sort of bat mitzvah meets sweet 16 meets chastity belt.

Typically, this black-tie events hosts a slew of father-daughter pairs...who spend the evening dancing, taking vows, and exchanging rings. Vows include chivalrous promises that daddy will guard his daughters hymen, and that dear daughter will promise to remain chaste until she weds. Baumgardner includes a quote from Pastor Randy Wilson, host of the event and cofounder of the ball:

“Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?”

Hardly an event from Hollywood, Purity Balls take place regularly in the south and Midwest. Although the entire get-up seems bizaare at least, sexist and antedulluvian at most...it has an incredible following, and daughters return with fathers every year, well up into mid-twenties (I suppose however long it takes for Prince Charming to arrive on his white horse). To cater to such crowds, Generations of Light (among other invitation and decorations services) explains and promotes the event, declaring:

"The Father Daughter Purity Ball is a memorable ceremony for fathers to sign commitments to be responsible men of integrity in all areas of purity. The commitment also includes their vow to protect their daughters in their choices for purity. The daughters silently commit to live pure lives before God through the symbol of laying down a white rose at the cross. Because we cherish our daughters as regal princesses—for 1 Peter 3:4 says they are “precious in the sight of God”—we want to treat them as royalty."

Baumgardner does the research and makes the critical points:

"Many experts strongly disagree. “Virginity pledges set girls up for failure,” contends Kindlon, who specializes in adolescent behavior. “I like the father-daughter bonding part of the balls, but it is unfortunate that it is around a pledge that is doomed. I always counsel parents to try to encourage teens to delay sex. But when you completely forbid teens to be sexual, it can do them more harm than good. It’s like telling kids not to eat candy, and then they want it more.”

“When you sign a pledge to your father to preserve your virginity, your sexuality is basically being taken away from you until you sign yet another contract, a marital one,” worries Eve Ensler, the writer and activist. “It makes you feel like you’re the least important person in the whole equation. It makes you feel invisible.”

It’s not hard to imagine the anxiety young women must feel about being a purity failure. Carol-Maureen, an acquaintance from my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, who got a purity ring in seventh grade and still wears it at 22, told me, “If I had sex before marriage and my parents found out, I’d be mortified. I’d feel like I failed in this promise to them, even though it’s really not their business.”

But the real challenge, in my mind, is for a father to remain loving toward his daughter and at the same time nurture her autonomy. The purity movement is, in essence, about refusing to let girls grow up: Daddy’s girls never have to be adults. “The balls are saying, I want you to be 11 forever,” says Kindlon. These are girls who may never find out what it means to make decisions without a man involved, to stand up for themselves, to own their sexuality.

I deeply wish that the lovely things I have seen tonight—the delighted young women, the caring, doting dads—might evolve into father-daughter events not tied to exhorting a promise from a girl that may hang over her head as she struggles to become a woman. When Lauren Wilson hit adolescence, her father gave her a purity ring and a charm necklace with a tiny lock and key. Randy Wilson took the key, which he will hand over to her husband on their wedding day. The image of a locked area behind which a girl stores all of her messy desires until one day a man comes along with the key haunts me. By the end of the ball, as I watch fathers carrying out sleepy little girls with drooping tiaras and enveloping older girls with wraps, I want to take every one of those girls aside and whisper to them the real secret of womanhood: The key to any treasure you’ve got is held by one person—you."

Other points circulate in the blogosphere:

"I can't fault what I see as the root impulse for the purity balls, but I'm glad that my expression of the desire to keep my daughter safe is not that one. Because if you really want to fetishize sex for a little girl, I really can't think of a more effective way to do it than something like a purity ball. And you know what? Fetishizing sex for little girls is so very much not what I want to be doing with my time."

While these points are valid and well-articulated, they do not touch on the real question of sexism. Where are the purity balls for sons? Why are they excluded? Is it because boys can protect themselves without daddy? Or does their purity not matter?

Although I find the entire get-up distasteful and against my beliefs, I can understand why one would value this idea of "saving it until you are married." But what I do not tolerate is demanding this of one child, and not the other.